This quote from Warren Buffet’s annual meeting with investors in his company Berkshire Hathaway, sums it all up as reported by the NYT:
He also said rising health care costs, rather than high taxes, were the biggest drag on American businesses.
“Medical costs are the tapeworm of American economic competitiveness,” he said.
What he means is that American business is less competitive than in other countries because health care costs in the US are twice as high as in other industrialized countries. Costs are too high because of the excessive power and political influence of insurance companies and drug companies, and to some extent the American Medical Association and hospital associations. Insurance companies add 30% to costs simply by dividing people up and determining who is eligible for what coverage– a cost that universal health care systems simply don’t have to pay. Brand-name drug companies push prices up by their stranglehold on the generic drug industry. And so on.
In his meeting, which he held as usual in Omaha and which attracted thousands of investors as usual, he condemned the Republican health insurance bill as a “giveaway to wealthy individuals like himself.” Buffet is, of course, a Democrat, and he was a major supporter of Barack Obama.
It’s likely that Warren Buffet dispensed other, equally valuable advice, but his talk (with his partner Charles Munger) lasted 6-1/2 hours, so it would be difficult to digest the entire transcript. Since Buffet is 86 and Munger is 93, they have designated successors to carry on after them, but Buffet says he plans to keep going as long as he can.
By now, everyone has heard that Don the Con has celebrated a great victory: passing a bill in the House that will destroy the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare. This bill simultaneously eliminates the 3.8% tax on the wealthy that pays for the insurance subsidies of poor people, eliminates the requirement to buy insurance, destroys the minimum coverage requirements, and defunds Planned Parenthood (the program upon which 2.4 million poor women depend for gynecological care, not for abortions (for which they have to pay cash.))
Don’s supporters (the wealthy) are happy because it eliminates a small tax which annoyed them. Don’s supporters (poor and foolish people) are happy because it eliminates the requirement to buy insurance, which sounded to them like government coercion (it is, but in a good way.) Don’s supporters (religious fanatics) are happy because it defunds Planned Parenthood’s gyne care for poor people.
The majority of people, who are not Don supporters, will be deeply hurt by this bill if it passes the Senate. The pressure on a few wavering Republican senators will be intense, relentless, and possibly unstoppable. Anyone who, in his heart of hearts, thinks that taking health insurance away from 24 million (or more) Americans is a bad idea because it hurts people, shouldn’t be a Republican anyway.
Don the Con has been lying his face off to cover up the truly misanthropic contents of this bill. He keeps saying that it will lower premiums and provide insurance to more people for less money. Obviously he has not read the bill nor has he read any of the studies already done by the General Accounting Office of the previous bill. The new bill, which was pushed through too fast to allow the GAO to examine, doubles down on the hypocrisy of the Republican Party. The Republicans repeatedly claimed that the Affordable Care Act was “rushed” through Congress before they had a chance to destroy it; now they are moving so fast on “repealing Obamacare” that the GAO hasn’t even had time to look at it.
The last hope of the 24 million poor people who are going to lose their health care is that the Senate will reject this bill.
Here’s a comment, with a critical point on the definition of “insurance”, on the New York Times editorial about the bill:
Doctor A
Canada
People will continue to be confused as long as every part of this is referred to as “insurance”
Insurance involves risk: a certain probability of getting a problem (disease, house fire, car accident, premature death etc) multiplied by the price of getting it. The sum of all those risks multiplied by price is what you pay in premiums for insurance (plus a bit extra for administration and profit).
But in the case of many pre-existing conditions, it is a near certainty that expenses will exceed premiums. And for healthy people, the reverse is true: premiums will almost always exceed benefits. In these circumstance, one should refer not to insurance, but to publicly funded health care.
Failing to understand this distinction causes many people to intuitively oppose so-called mandatory “insurance”.
According to a post in yesterday’s Guardian, Don the Con has invited Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines for a visit to the White House. Duterte is notorious for the 7,000-plus killings committed by vigilantes and police since he took office ten months ago. Most of those killed were claimed to be drug dealers and users. Duterte has also called for the public to kill drug users.
Other new friends of Don’s include Recep Erdogan of Turkey, who just pushed through a referendum giving himself dictatorial powers and abrogating portions of the Constitution. Erdogan is also notorious for his crackdown after a failed coup last year, in which hundreds of thousands of people were jailed or lost their government positions.
Then there’s military dictator al-Sisi of Egypt, who took power in a coup and ousted the first democratically elected leader of Egypt. He is said to have ordered the massacre of over eight hundred Islamist protesters when he gained power. al-Sisi decimated the Muslim Brotherhood, which had won a plurality of Egyptian voters.
Don the Con has reached out to the military dictator of Thailand, prime minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha; this man is little known in the West. He took power in a coup in 2014; he has promised elections “soon” but they have been repeatedly delayed. The prime minister is a royalist who has used the country’s laws against criticism of the king to suppress dissent. The police regularly orders the press not to discuss issues it deems inappropriate for “national security” reasons.
In the case of the Philippines, Don the Con has a conflict of interest because his “family brand” is opening a skyscraper in Manila. There are likely to be government considerations that need to be dealt with in the operation of a large building, and favors to the Trump administration are likely to be forthcoming from the Duterte administration. Silence about the human rights record of the Philippines will be rewarded by good deals for Don the Con’s companies.
Yale Psychiatrists Announce Don the Con has a “Dangerous Mental Illness”– US News Media Ignore It.
Here’s another news item that has not been reported in the US: a group of psychiatrists held a conference at Yale and announced that Don the Con is “paranoid and delusional” and not fit to be president. Oddly, this announcement was not covered in any US papers, at least not according to a Google search. Only the Independent and the Daily Mail, British newspapers, reported this on April 21. The absence of any US newspaper’s reporting on this conference is suggestive of “self-censorship” by American news media.
Perhaps the title of the Daily Mail piece explains the lack of American coverage:
“Republicans hit out at ‘unethical’ psychiatrists who claim Donald Trump has a ‘dangerous mental illness'”
Of course, “ethical standards” prohibit a psychiatrist (or any doctor) from making a diagnosis without first having a face-to-face consultation with the patient, but this situation demands more outreach because the “patient” is unlikely to submit to examination. This “ethical standard” is known as the “Goldwater Rule” after psychiatrists came out with a remote diagnosis of presidential candidate Goldwater during the 1964 election season.
However, in this case the psychiatrists involved say that the “Duty to Warn” trumps the “Goldwater Rule”– no pun intended. The “Duty to Warn” states that whenever a doctor perceives a patient to be dangerous to others, he or she is required to warn the potential or actual victims. It seems that Don the Con is extremely dangerous to many people, and the “Duty to Warn” plainly makes it imperative for those who know what is going on with him to tell people.
The Daily Mail article goes into some detail with regard to the ethical issues. One doctor who advocates warning others states that a one-on-one personal interview would be deceptive in this case because Don the Con is very good at hiding his dangerousness when interacting with individuals in person. It is primarily when he speaks to large groups or makes Twitter statements that he reveals his true nature.
So we have an individual who displays certain signs typical of paranoid, delusional, anti-social, and narcissistic personalities– he is not necessarily mentally ill but he is extremely dangerous nonetheless.
Don the Con’s Little-Noticed Appointments
I know I said yesterday that this stuff is making me sick, but when there is no news media coverage, I feel compelled to try to spread the sad tidings. There has been no mainstream news coverage of one of Don the Con’s appointments to a government position created by the 21st Century Cures Act (passed in 2015 with wording here), but I found this in a blog run by mental health activists:
The White House announced this past Friday, April 21st, 2017, that President Donald Trump has, for a pivotal mental health position, appointed a psychiatrist who openly speaks out for involuntary psychiatric drugging of people living outside of institutions, even in their own homes.
. . .
President Trump has appointed Dr. Ellie McCance-Katz for a high-level position created by the 21st Century Cures Act. Dr. McCance-Katz would become the first Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Abuse (SAMHSA) inside the federal Department of Health and Human Services.
In an essay published last year by the Psychiatric Times, Dr. McCance-Katz was highly critical of SAMHSA, especially its sub-agency Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS), headed by Paolo Delvecchio, who has long identified himself as an individual who has used psychiatric treatment. Many mental health consumers and psychiatric survivors know Paolo because of his work in this field for decades.
In her essay in Psychiatric Times, Dr. McCance-Katz:
- Endorses federal funding of AOT (or IOC).
- Criticizes SAMHSA for allegedly being critical of psychiatric drugs.
- Challenges the support for “recovery” in mental health, a term used by many consumer/survivors as a rallying point for hope and empowerment.
- Calls for mental health care, which appears to be led by psychiatric drugs, for more than three million Americans.
The blog is called “Mad in America” and the writer of this post was David W. Oaks on April 27, 2017. Mr. Oaks identifies himself as one who was treated for mental illness: “After the mental health system abused David with forced psychiatric drugs and labels of schizophrenia and bipolar, David worked as a psychiatric survivor activist for decades.”
Thus Mr. Oaks has a point of view, and he doesn’t like the idea of forced medication– which frequently involves injections of long-acting neuroleptics that cause weight gain and involuntary twitching. He presents evidence that forced outpatient treatment has failed in a Cochrane efficacy study, as well as other comprehensive analyses. Apparently, this Dr. McCance-Katz favors non-evidence based treatments such as coerced long-term medication– not a pretty sight.
There was a mention of this appointment in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, with the headline “Representative Murphy blasts Trump’s pick for Mental Health Post”– Murphy being a Republican Congressman, who uncharacteristically criticized Don the Con’s appointment. There are also a few mentions of her appointment in blogs such as pscyhnews.org, peteearly.com, and psychiatry.org.
Here’s another mention of the appointment, this time positive, from mentalillnesspolicy.org.
What we have here is an unheralded act by the master of the con– who is distracting everyone with his outrageous tweets and odd behavior when meeting world leaders. Don the Con is doing so many outrageous things that no-one notices the really dangerous changes that he is making.
In case you missed it, refer to this article in New York magazine for a rundown on Don the Con’s outrageous behavior during the last month. I’m sick and tired of scanning the news every day to see what ugly, vicious, racist, nationalist, or just plain stupid thing Don the Con has done today. I tried it for a couple of weeks, and it really made me ill. There are professional journalists who are paid to do this. I don’t see why I should do it for free and get sick into the bargain.
Occupy Democrats on April 25 published a piece in which it quoted Carl Bernstein (one of the people who exposed the Watergate coverup) as saying that the continuing behavior of such figures as Michael Flynn and the repeated denials by administration figures of any contact with Russia smell of coverup:
There is serious belief in the FBI, in the Congressional committees in the House and the Senate, that there is an active cover-up going on, involving trying to keep investigators from finding out what happened in terms of the Trump Campaign, and what happened in their associations with Russians.
The active cover-up attempts by administration figures amount to impeachable offenses, more so in many cases than the acts covered up. Remember that Bill Clinton was impeached for supposedly lying (“it depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is”) about a consensual affair (adultery is no longer illegal and is thus not a “high crime or misdemeanor”, although it is a capital offense for a politician’s career– a fate that Clinton averted by the skin of his teeth. The fact that he only had a couple of years left in office and that a Republican fanatic, a mole in the White House, engineered the whole affair with Monica and saved the evidence– the infamous “blue dress”– helped him.)
The Syrian nerve gas attack provided Don the Con with a perfect opportunity to launch a few missiles, mostly for domestic consumption, that made it appear as if he had gone counter to Russian interests in Syria. It is not likely that Vladimir really cared about a Syrian air force base, as shown by the fact that he did finally meet with US State Department head Rex Tillerson in Moscow not long after the cruise missile attack. (Compare this with the government of Mexico, which cancelled meetings with US representatives after Don the Con made more inflammatory remarks and threats.)
Flynn and several other figures in the administration denied relatively innocuous contacts with Russians that later turned out to be real. Flynn may have broken the law related to registration of foreign agents. Supposedly Flynn informed his superiors that he would be visiting Moscow in 2015 and was debriefed afterwards, but he forgot to mention the payments he received from the Russian government and never registered as a foreign agent– until last week, around the time he offered to testify in exchange for immunity. Don the Con himself has thrown cold water on the rumors of Russian collusion and has pursued the leakers of documents that corroborate the rumors. If he had nothing to hide, he should not be so strenuous about denying it.
The White House has refused to release documents requested by the Senate committee related to Flynn’s foreign contacts while he was national security adviser for three weeks. Spokesman Sean Spicer dismissed the request for detailed records as “outlandish.”
There is concrete evidence of a secret back channel (a dedicated computer server in Trump Tower that communicated by email with Alfa) between Trump and the Russian bank Alfa, the one favored by modern Russian oligarchs. There are individuals hired by the Trump campaign such as Carter Page, who was an unindicted co-conspirator in a Russian espionage case. Then there is the direct effort by Don the Con to soften the Republican platform on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And then there are the discussions that Michael Flynn had with Ambassador Kislyach about reducing the sanctions on Russia after the new administration came to power. Finally, there is the Exxon deal with Russian oil interests that will provide them with new technology; Exxon has already applied for a waiver on the sanctions voted by Congress after Ukraine. The Exxon deal is reported to be worth $500 billion to $1 trillion in profits.
There is also concrete evidence that the Russians have been cultivating Don the Con since at least 2007, around the time Don started making somewhat hyperbolic statements lauding Vladimir and his government. A perfect opportunity for the Russians to gather kompromat (compromising intelligence for blackmail) occurred when Don the Con hosted a beauty pageant in Moscow in 2013. That was when Don the Con reportedly paid two prostitutes to urinate on a bed that the Clintons had slept in– a contention backed by eyewitnesses on the hotel staff.
If that were not enough, there are rumors of a 19.5% stake in Rosneft, the Russian oil giant, being transferred to certain US parties.
Clearly, Don the Con is preparing to make a number of policy changes that would greatly benefit the Russian government– but why? Because Vladimir is a friend of Don the Con? Or because the Russians have loaned Don the Con so much money that they have leverage over his presidential actions?
Today’s New York Times reports that Don the Con has removed his demand for specific funding for his wall on the Mexican border. With estimates of costs ranging from $21 billion to more than $70 billion, Don the Con has decided that discretion is the better part of valor and announced that wall funding can wait until next fiscal year. Nevertheless, increased funding for assorted technological advances in border security will be included.
Ironically, estimates of illegal border crossings have shown a 75 percent drop since Don the Con won the Electoral College by a narrow margin. Apparently Mexicans are less interested in emigrating to the US under a Don the Con government administration. Perhaps a wall will not be necessary if Don the Con makes living in the US unattractive enough.
It is not unlikely that Don the Con has gotten his way on some other, unspecified aspect of the budget. Subsidies paid to make health insurance affordable for six million people are apparently safe after the Democrats refused an offer to bargain over them; Don the Con apparently has no leverage over them. Payments to extend health insurance for disabled coal miners are also likely to be granted.
In an unrelated development, former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said in an interview that Republicans think the economy is booming since the election, while Democrats see a looming recession on the horizon. Neither partisan assessment is particularly accurate.
Kakistocracy or Kleptocracy?
The State Department put up a travelog-style description of Mar-a-Lago, Don the Con’s privately owned weekend retreat in Florida, on its ShareAmerica website a couple of weeks ago, but the page was taken down today. There has been unwelcome publicity about the conflict of interest involved in advertising a 114-room mansion and golf course, for which Don the Con recently doubled the membership fee (from $100K to $200K).
Last week, records of the money donated by businesses and individuals to Don the Con to put on his inauguration festival were released. More than $107 million was raised, with billionaire Sheldon Adelson giving $5 million. Businesses were capped at $1 million each, and ATT, Pfizer, several coal companies, and many others donated the maximum. Don the Con has turned around and granted favors to these businesses and individuals, from gutting the EPA to repealing rules against dumping coal waste in streams. There is no doubt Donald is offering pay-to-play to all comers.
According to today’s Guardian, the budget bill that must be passed by April 28 to keep the US government running is threatened by Don the Con’s insistence that it include funding for a wall on our border with Mexico. White House sources were uncertain whether Don the Con would sign a budget bill unless it includes money for his wall.
The border wall has become an obsession with Don the Con, and he is in such a hurry to build it that he can’t wait for Mexico to come around and provide the funding. He is insisting that the wall be built with American funds, claiming that he will figure out later how to make Mexico pay. US government estimates put the cost of the wall at $21 billion, but some say it could cost as much as $75 billion.
Don the Con still claims that a wall will prevent drug smuggling and the entrance of members of the notorious Central American gang MS 13. Never mind that Mexican drug smugglers are sophisticated enough to send drugs in by airplane or boat, or even to tunnel under the border routinely. Never mind that gang members can easily fly in on six-month tourist visas and then overstay their visas– the method used by half of all illegal aliens. Never mind all that.
A “big, beautiful wall” will reward Don the Con’s cronies who are into concrete. As a matter of fact, Don the Con’s New York construction connections run to mafia contractors who control the concrete business. That is why his favorite building, Trump Tower, is built with concrete instead of the structural steel recommended by architects.
So far, none of Don the Con’s much vaunted campaign promises not supported by an overwhelming majority of Republican lawmakers has come true. We shall see if the opposition to the wall by Republican border-state legislators will trip up another of Don the Con’s promises.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 