Health Care: Better, Faster, Cheaper!

In a much discussed post, Ezra Klein produced a series of graphs showing that Americans pay more for office visits, scans and imaging, drugs, and other aspects of health care -- often, far more -- than is the case in Canada or Western Europe. There is a simple explanation for why American health care costs so much more than health care ...

Why We Drive on the Right – And Others Don’t

Monday, Samoa will switch to driving on the left side of the road in order to benefit from cheap used cars from Australia and New Zealand.  This gave Time's Randy James to explain, "Why Don't We All Drive on the Same Side of the Road?"  It's especially odd that two-thirds of the world drives on the right, since most of ...

Health Reform: What Liberals Want

Kevin Drum seconds Alex Massie that a British-style nationalized health system is not a politically feasible option in the United States.  Indeed, even Democrats don't want that: [W]ith the exception of a few outliers, the liberal community really, truly doesn't want a fully government owned and operated healthcare system like the NHS.  We want a government-funded healthcare system like Medicare or ...

Quote of the Day – One World Edition

“I just purchased a Routan. I really like it. My friends tell me it’s a Chrysler. I firmly say ‘No!’ to them. I proudly point to my Routan and announce that it’s an American engineered German branded Fiat, manufactured in Canada, using some Japanese parts, by a company that is majority owned by American taxpayers. They stare.” - an AutoBlog ...

Health Care Outcomes

I’ve argued in the past that health care outcomes like infant mortality and life expectancies are not really very good measures of a country’s health care services since such outcomes are also a function of variables that are outside the control of health care services. A person who is morbidly obese and refuses to change their behavior irrespective of ...

Memorial Day – Canuck Edition

Richard Florida passes along this snippet from The illustrated History of Canada: American draft dodgers in Canada were far outnumbered by the young Canadians who joined U.S. forces to fight in Vietnam. This factoid may be in that category Stephen Colbert would call "truthy" and Dan Rather would call "false but true." Canada did not participate in the Vietnam War for a ...

Will Wilkinson – Canadian

Will Wilkinson became a Canadian at midnight.  Canadian Press' Bruce Cheadle reports: Wilkinson, to use the breezy term used by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, will be "waking up Canadian" on Friday morning as new and controversial changes to the Citizenship Act become law. "It's a strange thing to all-of-a-sudden one day gain a citizenship to a new country," the 36-year-old journalist from ...

What is NATO’s Future?

Canadian defense minister Peter MacKay argues that NATO faces an existential crisis in Afghanistan and it's time for "a frank discussion" about the future of the alliance. In my New Atlanticist essay, "Canada: Time for 'Frank Discussion' About NATO Future," I challenge his premise while agreeing with his conclusion: Countries routinely go to war, fail to achieve the objectives they sought, and ...

Foreign Policy Blogging

I've posted several items today over at New Atlanticist. In "Europe Helping Iran Get Nuclear Weapons, I discuss Benjamin Weinthal's charges in WSJ Europe that European firms and governments, particularly those in Germany and Austria, are actively supporting the regime in Teheran and are at best indifferent to Iran's nuclear program. In "Canada's MacKay Unlikely NATO Secretary General," I note that while ...

True North

From the Toronto Star: OTTAWA–Canada stood alone before a United Nations human rights council yesterday, the only one among 47 nations to oppose a motion condemning the Israeli military offensive in Gaza. The vote before the Geneva-based body shows the Stephen Harper government has abandoned a more even-handed approach to the Middle East in favour of unalloyed support of Israel, according to ...

Health Care Tradeoffs (Updated)

Ezra Klein wrote an interesting post Wednesday arguing that extending life through medical intervention is expensive and that tradeoffs and rationing have to be made.  The only question, then, is how much value is placed on that extra unit of health care and who's making the valuation. The inverse of the American health care system is the British health care system. ...

Clear Card Security Breached

The company that's contracted to provide Clear Card, the TSA's handy-dandy system for screening out terrorists (or, at least, providing people willing to shell out 150 bucks slightly shorter lines) has managed to lose its customers' sensitive data and compromise the entire system. The company that runs the Clear system, which speeds customers through airport screenings, has been prevented from enrolling new ...

Support Canada’s Troops

I saw this gigantic "Support Our Troops" poster hanging from a building in downtown Montreal over the weekend: It's interesting to see given Canada's image as less martial than the United States, a reputation presumably earned by their sheltering of our Vietnam draft dodgers. It's useful to recall that, Mark Steyn notwithstanding, America isn't alone in sending troops into harm's ...

Canada: American Military Deserters Not Welcome

If you've volunteered for service in the U.S. Armed Forces but don't actually want to go to war, don't count on hiding in Canada. The Canadian government’s effort to remove [U.S. Army deserter James Corey] Glass contrasts with the warm reception given to deserters and draft avoiders from the United States during the war in Vietnam. And although the war in ...

G8 and EU Growing Pains

Two articles cited in today's Small Wars Journal roundup have almost nothing to do with wars, small or otherwise, but are nonetheless interesting in showing the state of flux of some key international institutions. Steven Erlanger reports on a bold attempt to forge a "Union of the Mediterranean" which would be something of a minor league for the European Union. Perhaps the ...