america

[The picture above is from the New York Post, it makes false or misleading claims (highlighted) about propsed healthcare taxes. It is part of an alarmist trend in the reactionary press which makes what could be a bi-partisan issue appear necessarily polarized].
Having lived in America for 10 years, its a great place – but there are two things that feel broken, the legal system (with opportunistic litigation and judges who legislate (on both sides of the political spectrum)) and the healthcare system (with its bureaucracy, mercenary feel and lack of universal coverage).
In healthcare the culture of litigation compounds the problems of both medicine and the law, and its failings should anger those on the left for its patent social unfairness and the right for its obviously inefficient free market failings.
Solving this should be a bi-partisan call to arms, but it has become a polarizing force through lies and deception. A proposal to increases taxes by miniscule (1%) and overhaul the whole system is being spun by knee-jerk reactionaries as a huge tax hike on the middle classes.
As an outsider who has experience of multiple countries healthcare, I feel compelled to share my anecdotal experience of it in the US.
Despite having healthcare coverage here, it was cheaper for me to pay for a doctors visit in France where my wife is from and buy an antibiotic out of my own pocket than claim against my insurance and pay the co-payment. If I lived there or in another european country such as the UK, (but not Ireland), this would be free with a nominal fee for prescriptions (less than $20) – and contrary to perception I would pay about the same in taxes. In Switzerland, I would pay for the mandatory healthcare (about half of the US rate, but with better service and results) but in the end it would be a wash because of lower taxes.
But its not just about day to day coverage. A health insured friend in the US who had a heart attack received a $300,000 bill after finding that his insurance company only paid 90%. A friend of my wife is nearly bankrupted by her treatment for cancer. The worst part is that many people in the US do not seem to know that its only there that this happens. In every single other industrialized nation the threat of being bankrupted by medical bills does not exist.
And treatment in the US is vastly different from anywhere I’ve been (I have lived in 4 other countries). Nearly every time I go to the doctor I am sent for some kind of test – this seems like a good thing and who am I to argue, I am not a doctor? But when I asked a doctor in the UK (after having been sent for a brain scan for dizziness that was a drug side-affect) I was told that the risk of the scan was possibly higher than the chance of disease. What may have been happening is that the doctor had to minimize his risk of being sued by increasing my health risk.
This abrogation of responsibility which seems to me to contradict the hippocratic oath also manifests itself in the annoying habit of giving you a choice for every treatment. When there are two people in the room making a health decision, a fully qualified medic and a trained architect, apparently the architect (me) has to make the choice. If you wanted to have an operation in a creative and unusual, but life threatening, way, you might want want to ask me. But I’d recommend a doctor. Yet when I say to a doctor, ‘well you choose from your recommendations’ he says (me) the architect should.
The responsibility problem is often not the Doctor’s fault. My sister, who is a doctor in the UK was told not to offer to help Americans if they fell ill while flying. The reason was fear of being sued. Litigation is just one part of the reason why US healthcare is a massive rip-off costing 40% more than anywhere else in the world with no better results.
For the capitalists amongst us, US heathcare is a DMV-like Byzantine rats nest of paperwork, unnecessary ass-covering treatment and co-payment drug costs which exceed buying them directly off the Internet.
And that is if you have healthcare. If you are one of the 46 million Americans, the only people in any developed country that don’t, then your life expectancy is less than if you lived in Libya.
What the Obama administration is proposing is to replace inefficient Stalinist style corruption with something economically far less socialist than the US military. So what’s the problem?

Why is the darker woman on the left called white and the relatively similar featured lighter woman on the right called black?
One of the things that struck me about the controversy surrounding Michael Jackson’s bleached skin and thinned features (the latter co-incidence suggesting the former wasn’t just vitiligo) was how extremely stereotypical racial classification is and how much it has to do with history. Michael Jackson ended up looking like a cartoon of a white woman.
In the US if you are of partially African and partially European decent you are most likely to be called black, suggesting that there is a notion of being ‘tainted’. The very fact that the half white, half black, President Obama is called black is proof of this prejudice.
The reverse is not quite the same. A person is often not tainted white in Africa as we will see with Obama’s trip there this week. That is not to say that people from various African nations are less prejudiced, just that the prejudices tend not to apply to ‘American Africans’ a term which shows the arbitrariness of African American and that the groupings where prejudices apply depend on local history.
The grouping of an entire continent which contains the majority of the worlds racial diversity, under one umbrella term ‘African’ is also an absurdity arising from the cruel fact that many people’s origins have been erased beyond the ability to pick a continent.
A randomly picked person from Africa will be as genetically different from another African as a randomly picked non-African. Someone from Ethiopia will typically have thin features and a Bushman may have fairer skin that Victoria Beckham’s tan. At the very least what it is to be black or white is blurred.
Victoria Beckham is a good way to illustrate this absurdity as the picture above demonstrates adequately. Both her features and skin tone appearing no more or less African than Whitney Houston in the picture above. Yet one is ‘black’ woman and the other is a ‘white’ woman.

The MTA transit authority, which operates the New York subway is warning of drastic service cuts, price increases and staff reductions. People are up in arms, but this is one area where even if these unfortunate measures were taken, New Yorkers would be better off than places which offer many more benefits in things like healthcare and public services.

For example, for the New York Subway to be like the London Underground:

Service cuts: The Subway runs 24 hours. The Underground shuts down around 1am replaced by a horrid fleet of scorchingly lit night buses full of kebab-eating binge drinkers. In addition, the Subway system is almost fully redundant with express and local lines, so the effects of cuts to service from non-overtime maintenance are much reduced.

Fares: The Subway costs $2 per ride. The Underground costs $5.60 per ride. It would take a mammoth increase to match that.

While its true that the overall level of disrepair in the Subway makes it look like a dilapidated open sewer in comparison with London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo etc., it is efficient and relatively cheap, just not pretty to look at.

Here are some unpleasant truths that most American’s don’t acknowledge or know, now that they are worse off than France in unemployment percentage terms and without the upside:

In the US being fired means no notice and being escorted off the premises with two months severance if you are lucky. If you are an executive with a history of litigation you normally get more from a board, because there is a risk the company will incur costs (I have been in board meeting this spineless immoral stance has been the attitude). It means that for a year or so you can pay to keep your healthcare. After that, you are pretty much screwed.

In France you will get 3 months warning, and 2 years (23 months) at 60 – 70 % of your salary up to $90K. Your pension will continue to be paid and you will get free healthcare. And after 2 years the healthcare will continue and you will not starve. You will not have mortgage payments which are more than 3 times your previous salary, because that is illegal and you will be in a minority if you use a credit rather than a debit card. You will not need to get into debt to get a credit score, and you won’t have much of a student loan. The very best schools (Henry IV) are free and so is university (although the universities are sub par compared to the Grand Ecoles or places like INSEAD).

Lastly – personal taxes are about the same and the productivity of French workers is the same as the US.

There are downsides to this of course, business taxes are higher, people exploit the system and there is a deluded and hypocritical sense of self-entitlement in France from its, ultimately Bourgeois, left who are living off the tax revenues from principal exports such as luxury goods for the rich and weapons for the oppressive. The culture is less dynamic, and there are plenty of socio-economic problems, but there is plenty to enjoy anyhow.

France has less boom and less bust, booms are smaller and longer and so are recoveries. There is, of course a happy medium in between France and America, but in the current environment it pretty clear where is a better place to be for most people. America is on the side of the extreme that will create extraordinary hardship for a large number of ordinary people that will be more familiar in Mexico City than Paris. The upside is that the US may recover quicker, but what would you rather have a three week flu or cyanide?

Link

America’s unemployment rate is now similar to France, which registered 7.5% in 2007 but the implications are very, very different. In France, unemployment benefits run at 57 to 75 percent of previous salary for up to 3 years and sometimes longer, if close to retirement.

Added to this are the huge costs of healthcare insurance in the US, which typically run at 30% of a salary, for an employer. To put it in perspective, my family self-employed healthcare costs ($12,000 plus $4000 excess), are the same as my sister’s 80% mortgage for a 2 bedroom house on the South Coast of England.

In short, America will be a terrifying place to be for those who are going to be unemployed, as this article in today’s New York Times suggests.

America’s financial system has taken a beating, all of the top brokerage firms and banks went bust or were partially nationalized in a panic that caused US banks to be rated below Namibia.

For an ordinary retail bank customer from another country, I have always found US banks surprisingly primitive. Could that really have anything to say about an endemic problem from over the counter to prime brokerage like Goldman Sachs? Why is the service at American retail banks so bad when the service at American retail outlets is so good? Why can’t a bank work like PayPal? And most of all, why is this the case in the global epicenter of capitalism?

I’ve been in America ten years now, and still use my UK retail bank because it allows me to do things by phone, that my American bank down the street won’t allow in person (such as transferring money without endless forms and pieces of paper).

There is almost nothing in europe that requires the arcane process of writing a paper check and mailing it. When I found out that my online automatic bill payment system actually resulted in a paper check being printed out placed in an envelope and mailed, I nearly fell off my chair. This is technological equivalent of finding out that there are little people inside the TV.

After moving from San Francisco to New York, I kept my Wells Fargo account, then found out that there were no branches in NY and no reciprocal agreements, no way of arranging a wire transfer without a weeks delay in sending bits of paper back and forth, no free interbank exchange and ATM withdrawals charged more than the money I made in Interest, for an entire year.

American banks do not allow credit ratings to be imported, so you have to build a new score when you move from abroad. Unfortunately, if you pay your bills on time and don’t borrow money you cannot get a credit score. In order to do so you have to borrow money. In other words to get a credit score you have to get into debt. I have a credit card that is linked to my cellphone bill and is used for nothing else. The sole purpose is to enable my credit score. This is farcical.

Today, a friend tried to transfer money to our US account from Europe only to be told that the US bank had been blacklisted. Although I find it hard to believe that this is true, my level of credulity is changing.

I could go on, but the point is that the anecdotal experiences mean that something is rotten. But we all know that now.

“Soaring Oil Prices”

Oil futures rose as high as $30.40 before falling back slightly in trading in London.

US President Bill Clinton said the rise was “deeply troubling” and refused to rule out any US action to deal with the situation.

Source

I am in London at the moment. For the first time ever, Britain feels noticeably wealthier than America, and most of the extreme wealth seems not to be banking but oil related. I suspect the only truth in the term peak oil in the medium term will be the price which will surely come crashing down.