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Sick Transit

One-third of U.S. patients with health problems reported experiencing medical mistakes, medication errors, or inaccurate or delayed lab results—the highest rate of any of the six nations surveyed [Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, UK, USA]. While sicker patients in all countries reported safety risks, poor care coordination, and inadequate chronic care treatment, with no country deemed best or worst overall, the United States stood out for high error rates, inefficient coordination of care, and high out-of-pocket costs resulting in forgone care.

The United States also stands out for its patient cost burdens, with consequences for access. U.S. physician visit rates are already low by OECD standards … Contrasts between the United States and Germany, in particular, indicate that it is possible to organize care and insurance to achieve timely access without queues, while ensuring that care is affordable at the point of service. There are clear opportunities for the United States to learn from other countries’ insurance systems.

Tags: Uncategorized by mike
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Lies, Damn Lies

The latest [US] BLS employment situation report states 4.5% unemployment, and 167,000 jobs created in December … the headline “unemployment” number we see every month isn’t the unemployment number — it’s one of many, in a creative hierarchy introduced circa 1995.

Headline unemployment 4.5%
Unemployed+discouraged 4.7%
The above+marginal 5.3%
Above+part time 8.0%

What if we were to actually count [criminal justice inductees] as unemployed?

Headline unemployment 4.5%
Headline+prison population 5.8%
Headline+all corrections 9.2%
All-unempl.+prison pop. 9.3%
All-unempl.+all corr. 12.7%

Tags: Uncategorized by mike
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All Things Are Lights

It will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here … They could still find a few hints of our presence. For a start, the fossil record would show a mass extinction centred on the present day, including the sudden disappearance of large mammals across North America at the end of the last ice age. A little digging might also turn up intriguing signs of a long-lost intelligent civilisation, such as dense concentrations of skeletons of a large bipedal ape, clearly deliberately buried, some with gold teeth or grave goods such as jewellery.

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