Here’s How Broken the U.S. Healthcare System Is

From skyrocketing drug prices to skimpy health insurance, this infographic shows how broken the current U.S. healthcare system is in four simple charts.

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Harvard Business School: The U.S. Political System Has Been ‘Hijacked’ – The Intellectualist

A new case study by Harvard Business School asserts that U.S. politicians have rigged the system to such a degree that the U.S. is becoming a failed democracy. The authors of the case-study use the word ‘hijacked’ to describe what the political parties have done to governance in the United States.

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Jimmy Kimmel: Senator Bill Cassidy “Lied Right to My Face”

The continuing radicalization of Jimmy Kimmel proceeded apace on Tuesday night, as the former Man Show host used his Jimmy Kimmel Live! monologue to call Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy a liar. Kimmel’s realization that Republicans might not be entirely sincere when they say they want to improve American health care is the conclusion of a story arc that began in April with the birth of Kimmel’s son William.

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—”Absent a war or an epidemic, it’s unusual and alarming for life expectancies in developed countries to stop improving, let alone to worsen.”—

Neoliberalism’s “Die Faster” Is Helping Pension Funds…But Not Doing Enough for Young Homebuyers | naked capitalism

Cognitive dissonance at Bloomberg in the contrast between a story on pension funds and one on the dearth of homes for sale.

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…socializing healthcare is the only demonstrably effective way to control costs and cover everyone. It results in a healthier country and it saves a ton of money.

The Conservative Case for Universal Healthcare

Yes, that’s a bold claim given that a GOP-controlled Congress and President are poised to un-socialize a great deal of healthcare, and may even pull it off. But within five years, plenty of Republicans will be loudly supporting or quietly assenting to universal Medicare.

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Why Republicans Cannot Replace the ACA, Or Accomplish Anything Else

Edgar Welch walked courageously into a DC pizza parlor on a mission to rescue abused children. Armed with an AR-15, he had driven from North Carolina to the restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, to break up a pedophile kidnapping ring. After a few confusing minutes in the restaurant and a couple of shots fired, Welch was baffled.

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Trumpcare Is Dead. “Single Payer Is the Only Real Answer,” Says Medicare Architect.

Thanks to a pair of defections from more GOP senators late yesterday, the Republican plan to repeal and replace or simply repeal the Affordable Care Act is dead – for now. But the health care status quo is far from popular, with 57 percent of Americans telling Gallup pollsters in March that they “personally worry” a “great deal” about health care costs.

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BUT we (the people of the United States) should provide more generous subsidies to older Americans to make insurance more affordable to them.

You can’t do that if you are going to use this new Republican healthcare law to provide a tax break to the nation’s richest Americans who got there by work provided by all these older people working producing GDP when they were younger. It’s payback.

AND as Brill points out…

Those increased subsidies could be paid for by new controls on the price of prescription drugs, either by allowing Medicare to negotiate prices or by other mechanisms used by every other developed country, where prices are 30 to 60 percent lower than here. Taking just 15 percent off the price of prescription drugs would produce more than $600 billion in health-care savings over the next decade, which would lower private premiums while saving taxpayers billions on Medicare costs.

Opinion | Nine ways to really fix Obamacare

Steven Brill is the author of “America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, And The Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System.” He has received consulting fees for work on a consumer information and ombudsman program for New York-based Oscar Health Insurance.

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Five Percent of Americans Account For 50 Percent of U.S. Medical Bills

Each year, 1 in every 20 Americans racks up just as much in medical bills as another 19 combined. This critical five percent of the U.S. population is key to solving the nation’s health care spending crisis.Read the rest of our coverage. The Five Percent accounts for the same total expenditures as the rest of the population combined.

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How health insurance changed from protecting patients to seeking profit

Transformative technologies rapidly spread across the developed world. Abbott Laboratories made and patented the first intravenous anesthetic, thiopental, in the 1930s. Massachusetts General Hospital started the first anesthesia department in the United States in 1936. The first intensive care unit armed with ventilators opened during a polio epidemic in Copenhagen in the early 1940s.

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Opinion | How the G.O.P. Sabotaged Obamacare

Even worse, these lawsuits helped make the A.C.A. the salient partisan issue of the Obama administration, turning the law into the ultimate Republican litmus test: Implementing a state insurance exchange or expanding Medicaid, even when it seemed in a state’s interest, became treasonous for the party.

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American health care can be free market or cheap. It can’t be both.

Republicans need to decide if a conservative health care system is worth the cost.

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Obamacare repeal was never about health or insurance, it was 100% about cutting taxes for the ultra-wealthy. — Bruce Bartlett

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What liberals get wrong about single payer

Michael Moore greeted the introduction of Obamacare with an admission many liberals will cheer. “Obamacare is awful,” he wrote. Its awfulness, Moore said, stems from “one fatal flaw: The Affordable Care Act is a pro-insurance-industry plan implemented by a president who knew in his heart that a single-payer, Medicare-for-all model was the true way to go.”

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