[Peace] Notes

Thu Feb 27 23:40:59 UTC 2020

Have a good show, guys. I've sent you some other pointers and my own views on things, 
and there are other older notes you can draw on if needed. So this will be a short 
set of notes to inspire some discussion for you.

-J

Health care: Study shows that universal health care saves Americans $500 billion; 
Obamacare (aka "The Affordable Health Care Act of 2010") is not helping.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeW2eFaldSY -- "Redacted Tonight" is one of the few 
sources pointing to this study (no doubt because the study's conclusions simply do 
not echo establishment talking points).

The Economist in 
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2018/04/26/america-is-a-health-care-outlier-in-the-developed-world 
tells us:

> Despite the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, America remains an outlier
> in health-care provision. It has some of the best hospitals in the world, but it
> is also the only large rich country without universal health coverage. And
> health-care costs can be financially ruinous.

And we spend money on bad outcomes and do so for eminently understandable reasons 
which are directly tied to rampant poverty, as the Washington Post told us in an 
article titled "American babies are 76 percent more likely to die in their first year 
than babies in other rich countries" 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/01/09/american-babies-are-76-percent-more-likely-to-die-in-their-first-year-than-babies-in-other-rich-countries/ 

> American babies are 76 percent more likely to die before they turn a year old than
> babies in other rich countries, and American children who survive infancy are 57
> percent more likely to die before adulthood, according to a sobering new study
> published in the journal Health Affairs.
> 
> Comparing the United States to 19 other wealthy democracies in the Organization
> for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the study found if the United
> States had simply kept pace with average childhood mortality rates in those
> countries, 600,000 young lives could have been saved since 1961. That amounts to
> roughly 20,000 dead children and teens each year.
> 
> As the charts above show, in the 1960s the United States had significantly lower
> child mortality rates than the other rich countries included in the study. But
> starting in the 1970s, that changed.
> 
> Among infants, that shift was driven primarily by changes in our premature
> birthrate (babies born before full gestational age), which is the highest in the
> developed world. Our rate of “extreme” prematurity — babies born before 25 weeks —
> is three times higher than the OECD average.
> 
> Among older children, the United Stands stands out on our rate of deaths by
> injury. In particular, Americans teens age 15 to 19 are 82 times more likely than
> teens in other rich countries to die of a gun homicide. Among black American
> adolescents, gun homicides are the leading cause of death in the United States.
> 
> The root cause of all these problems is well understood: “Persistently high
> poverty rates, poor educational outcomes, and a relatively weak social safety net
> have made the U.S. the most dangerous of wealthy nations for a child to be born
> into,” the study, led by Ashish Thakrar, an internal medicine resident at the
> Johns Hopkins Hospital, concludes.

[...]

> Those 600,000 deaths, in other words, are largely the result of deliberate policy
> choices made by American voters and their elected representatives.
> 
> A 2010 study found governing decisions about welfare policies explained up to 47
> percent of the observed differences in life expectancy between countries. An
> earlier study found about 20 percent of country-level differences in infant
> mortality rates could be explained by a nation's governing style.

CNN reports comparably -- "Among 20 wealthy nations, US child mortality ranks worst, 
study finds" in 
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/08/health/child-mortality-rates-by-country-study-intl/

And the money we spend is not well-used: A 2017 article titled "Public health and the 
economy could be served by reallocating medical expenditures to social programs" says

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827316300970

> As much as 30% of US health care spending in the United States does not improve
> individual or population health. To a large extent this excess spending results
> from prices that are too high and from administrative waste. In the public sector,
> and particularly at the state level, where budget constraints are severe and
> reluctance to raise taxes high, this spending crowds out social, educational, and
> public-health investments. Over time, as spending on medical care increases,
> spending on improvements to the social determinants of health are starved.

Which brings us to the study from February 15, 2020 in The Lancet which says:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)33019-3/fulltext

> Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that
> would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a
> single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in
> national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually
> (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with
> less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households paying for
> health-care premiums combined with existing government allocations. This shift to
> single-payer health care would provide the greatest relief to lower-income
> households. Furthermore, we estimate that ensuring health-care access for all
> Americans would save more than 68 000 lives and 1·73 million life-years every year
> compared with the status quo.

Assange hearing: Most media won't cover this or they repeat US talking points. RT 
covers the pro-Assange protests, the reports from people who were at each day of the 
ongoing hearings, reports from experts on the legal and health implications for 
Assange, and raising important questions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxNgQI6kzgs -- "Imperialism on Trial" talks from 
Craig Murray, George Galloway, Joti Brar, Joe Lauria, Peter Lavelle, Alexander 
Mercouris, Eva Bartlett, and more. 3 hours 12 minutes. Highly recommended viewing and 
Mercouris in particular does not leave out Chelsea Manning who continues to suffer in 
indefinite detention for not giving evidence against Assange or WikiLeaks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cge5cEhZhQ -- interview with George Galloway 
regarding the US plot to murder or kidnap Julian Assange.

https://www.rt.com/uk/481657-wikileaks-barred-extradition-assange-abuse/ -- "UK 
inexplicably bars WikiLeaks editor from extradition hearing day after Assange 
handcuffed 11 times & STRIPPED twice", interview with WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief 
Kristinn Hrafnsson asking "Why aren't we talking about U.S. war crimes in court?".

Essays on Assange's imprisonment, hearing, and related establishment repeaters 
published by RT:

https://on.rt.com/absu -- Nebojsa Malic on "Freedom for me but not for Assange (or 
thee): The breathtaking hypocrisy of CNN’s Christiane Amanpour". See the attached 
screenshot for an interesting response to Christiane Amanpour's tweet claiming "Let’s 
have our own “NATO Article 5”: an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us." 
which shows all of her tweets about the journalist most severely threatened by the 
Trump administration:

> Assange should not be given any credibility, say America's Director of National
> Intelligence and NSA Director.
> 
> Wikileaks founder Julian Assange motivated by personal grievances, @alexgibneyfilm
> tells me
> 
> Wikileaks founder Julian Assange speaks to #ABCNews Watch it here [...]

https://on.rt.com/abrz -- RT on "‘Fair trial threatened’ as judge rejects Assange 
request to sit with lawyers: Day 4 of US extradition hearing as it played out"

https://on.rt.com/abrn -- "Julian Assange is the victim of a power struggle in the US 
between Donald Trump and the deep state"

https://on.rt.com/abpy -- "Assange extradition hearing is Damocles sword over 
journalists’ heads. But UK mainstream media participate in his crucifixion"

https://www.rt.com/search?q=assange+extradition -- reload this page to keep up with 
more stories from RT as they're published.

-J
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