US Prez Election 2012 Thread - Opinions and Discussions

[Coito ergo sum]

Many doctors have stopped taking Medicare patients because they don't like the reimbursement rates and the billing systems are expensive and overly complex. Odds are, if any doctor's office is audited, there will be many, many violations of Medicare regulations on billing.

Insurance, of course, raises costs. Anytime the user of a service is not the one who pays for it, or only pays a tiny fraction of the actual cost, the incentive is there to use it more. If health care were totally free, why wouldn't you go to the doctor at the first sign of a minor ailment? It is only rational behavior. So, when someone has insurance for something, any chance they get to use it, they will use it. That drives overall demand for services up, which puts upward pressure on prices.

[Warren Dew]

Sounds like you're stating facts. Please cite specific policies which constitute clear mishandlings of the economy.

"Clear" to whom? It's easy to make a clear case to someone who understand economics and is listening, impossible to convince a leftist market economics denier. For people in between it takes a lot of effort since I have to explain the relevant economics first. If you're willing to read some links I'll be happy to explain.

Well, I'm not a leftist market economics denier. I understand economics fairly well.

If you understand economics fairly well, you should understand how supply and demand curves interact, and how manipulation of the aggregate supply or demand curve underlies Keynesian economic theory. The next step is to understand why supply side Keynesian intervention is superior to demand side Keynesian intervention, which I explain here:

http://psychohist.livejournal.com/67326.html

Once you understand that, we can go on to specific policies. Feel free to ask questions if my writeup there isn't clear.

(Jeez, do you realize how arrogant you can sound?)

Hey, I have to be the real me some of the time!

It was an interesting rehash of basic supply-side economics, though the reasoning on why it is superior to demand-side is more than a bit debatable and I'm sure you realize that.

From the standpoint of the science of economics, they're not really debateable. The only reason basic supply side economics is controversial is because it's politically convenient for both the left and the right to be denialists about it: the left so that they can claim that Keynesian economics always justifies more government spending by ignoring supply side Keynesian stimulus, and the right so that they can claim that Keynesian economics doesn't work by ignoring supply side Keynesian stimulus.

The only scientific debate at all relating to supply side economics is about where the maximum of the Laffer curve occurs. While the Laffer curve has gotten a lot of press, it's really rather peripheral to basic supply side economics, and is irrelevant to the present discussion.

But, that's not the debate I was trying to have - I was asking for specific Obama policies which have hindered the economic recovery. That blog doesn't answer it

Correct; that reference was just the first step. The first step is understanding the underlying economic facts. Only once the facts are understood can we go on to factual statements about policy effects.

[amused]

Let's keep it simple.

If you don't vote for Obama then you're obviously aligned with the forces of evil.

I know who I'm voting for.

[Drewish]

Let's keep it simple.

If you don't vote for Obama then you're obviously aligned with the forces of evil.

I know who I'm voting for.

Have you seen the dark forces? Hot!

[amused]

Lucky for me we don't have a :schwing: smiley.

So, the forces of evil lose.

[Coito ergo sum]

New book "raises questions" about Obama's memoirs --- http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012 ... as-memoir/

[Gawdzilla Sama]

[trdsf]

It's not a right or a privilege. You're implicitly misdefining terms here. Having a cost or a price doesn't mean it's a privilege and not a right.

Sure it does. That's what the poll tax was about -- restricting the right to vote to only those who could afford to.

For example - freedom of the press is "reserved" for those who can afford printing presses. We don't have a government program to give people the equipment they want to exercise their right. The right to bear arms is not subsidized by the government to allow people who can't afford guns to get them. The right to be "secure in one's persons, houses, papers and effects" does not mean we get state subsidized burglar alarms, and freedom of religion does not mean that the state buys us a church or copies of a holy book to use in our preachments. Yet, these things are "rights."

Now you're deliberately muddying the issue.

Being published is not a life or death matter like receiving medical care is, no matter how much it would mean to me to sell a story. I might not like never being published, but that's vastly different from never receiving professional medical care, and has vastly different short- and long-term effects.

Owning a gun may or may not be a life quality issue, depending on any number of factors, but one does not in general need a gun to live -- for example, I've both never owned one, and I've also never been in a situation where I've had need of one.

And freedom of religion necessitates freedom from religion and is therefore self-nullifying from this argument. It's certainly not a requirement to the continued physical well-being of J. Random Citizen.

Basic health care, conceptually, cannot be a "right" because if it is a "right" then someone must be forced or compelled to provide that health care to the person who has the right. Obviously, the receipt of health care and the level of care is dependent on what care is available. Even in countries with "universal" healthcare system, some care is not provided. So, is the fact that some procedures will be denied going to arguably be a violation of "human rights?" Of course not.

That depends on where the denial of those procedures comes from. If the proper medical practitioner decides that a procedure is not medically necessary, or if a procedure is purely elective (there needs to be a clear differentiation between someone choosing to have a boob job, and someone requiring reconstructive facial surgery after suffering burns, for example), that's not denial of service and by extension a denial of a right to health care because no medically essential service was denied.

If a medical practitioner decides a procedure is medically necessary, and an insurer denies coverage and effectively overrules a medical decision with a business decision, that is denial of service and by extension a denial of a right to health care. That's substituting a corporate profit motive for a professional determination and directly impacting the life (and possibly the life expectancy) of the person under care.

The reality is that health care is something that is very important for people to have. It can improve quality of life, extend lives, reduce suffering, and save lives that would be lost without it. So, if a society has the means, then it should strive to adjust the legal system to foster the availability of health care. Best case scenario would be that everyone gets all the health care they need or want, whenever they want it, at zero cost. Since pretty much everyone knows that such a system, in the real world as it exists today, could never function, and in short order would result in less health care being available to fewer people.

Straw man. I never called for all the health care anyone wants. I have always explicitly stated 'basic' and 'medically necessary', so your conclusion is utterly meaningless.

So, the argument really becomes, "what can the government do to maximize the delivery and quality of as much needed health care as possible to as many people as possible?"

Sure, I'll agree with this formulation. What I'll continue to disagree with is the position that what the government should do is let "the marketplace" handle it and stay out of it entirely. The marketplace has no interest in delivering quality health care. The marketplace is only interested in one thing: maximizing income while minimizing outlays. This is not a formula for maximizing availability -- this is how we got the system we currently have. This report from Forbes is illustrative of what the profit motive costs in a larger way, and what happens when decisions are made administratively rather than medically.

There are a lot of options for directions we could go -- I would suggest first looking at the 36 nations ranked higher than us on the World Health Organization's ranking of overall health system performance by nation, all of whom pay less per capita and the vast majority of whom have some sort of nationalized coverage.

Some things jump out immediately. Here's a combined list of the ten nations that pay the most per capita for health care, and the ten nations that have the best overall health system performance, from the above-referenced WHO report:

Code: Select all

             Per Capita   Overall
USA               1         37
Switzerland       2         20
Germany           3         25
France            4          1
Luxembourg        5         16
Austria           6          9
Sweden            7         23
Denmark           8         34
Netherlands       9         17
Canada           10         30
Italy            11          2
Japan            13         10
San Marino       21          3
Andorra          23          4
Spain            24          7
Malta            37          5
Singapore        38          6
Oman             62          8

The meanings of this chart are clear. First: it's not how much you spend, but how you spend it. Second: We're clearly doing it wrong since every country in the world -- and especially all 36 countries which are determined to have a better overall health system than we -- pay less than us per capita to achieve that. While that's probably easy to explain with smaller countries like Malta and Andorra, that's less easy to explain with Canada and the larger European and Asian nations.

And the message is obvious: the marketplace--which is what drives our current system--has failed and is not the answer. Whether it's fixed through strong regulation (the German model) or through nationalization of health care (UK, Canada, France, etc.) is less relevant to me than that what we currently have simply does not work and needs to be repaired. I happen to think that Medicare for All is the simplest and easiest solution, but almost anything that divorces the profit motive from healthcare decision making will be an improvement. At the very least, what's been called 'Obamacare' should at least be given a chance. It would be difficult for it to work worse than our current situation.

[Warren Dew]

The WHO report ranking of health systems is not something most people would recognize as sane, because it values equality of results more strongly than quality of results.

For example, suppose you have a health care system where everyone dies of cancer within a month of contracting it at age 50. If your health care system saves half the people so they live to 60, the WHO methodology says it's worse - that it's better if everyone dies at the same age, even if that age is earlier.

If you actually look at the results of medical interventions, the U.S. system is better than the European socialized systems. Here are breast and prostate cancer survival rates, for example, showing that the U.S. is better than the supposedly #1 France:



More data here:

http://healthblog.ncpa.org/were-number- ... /#more-300

The fact is, the U.S. has the best health care system in the world.

[trdsf]

The fact is, the U.S. has the best health care system in the world.

Unsupported by the data. All you showed was a report about cancer survival rates, not an overall study taking into account cost, accessibility, responsiveness, etc.

And the site you referred to is an opinion site. I prefer to just get data without the spin, thank you very much. So I went to the Lancet report that this nonsense was based on -- which is here for those who prefer their information without right-wing twaddle.

Here is exactly and only the findings of that report you trumpet:

Findings
Global variation in cancer survival was very wide. 5-year relative survival for breast, colorectal, and prostate cancer was generally higher in North America, Australia, Japan, and northern, western, and southern Europe, and lower in Algeria, Brazil, and eastern Europe. CONCORD has provided the first opportunity to estimate cancer survival in 11 states in USA covered by the National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR), and the study covers 42% of the US population, four-fold more than previously available. Cancer survival in black men and women was systematically and substantially lower than in white men and women in all 16 states and six metropolitan areas included. Relative survival for all ethnicities combined was 2—4% lower in states covered by NPCR than in areas covered by the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) Program. Age-standardised relative survival by use of the appropriate race-specific and state-specific life tables was up to 2% lower for breast cancer and up to 5% lower for prostate cancer than with the census-derived national life tables used by the SEER Program. These differences in population coverage and analytical method have both contributed to the survival deficit noted between Europe and the USA, from which only SEER data have been available until now.

This doesn't even rise to the level of comparing apples to oranges.

It has not one single thing to do with the WHO report. Offering this study is comparing apples to outboard motors, and quite frankly borders on dishonesty to present it as being in any way refutatory of the WHO report.

[Tyrannical]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/2 ... 1340234390

Possible floor fight over the Vice Presidential slot? Article mentions that "bound" Romney delegates are only "bound" to vote for President, and are free to vote for whom ever they want for VP slot.

[Coito ergo sum]

It's not a right or a privilege. You're implicitly misdefining terms here. Having a cost or a price doesn't mean it's a privilege and not a right.

Sure it does. That's what the poll tax was about -- restricting the right to vote to only those who could afford to.

Sure, a poll tax is the government imposing an arbitrary cost on voting for the purpose of keeping certain people from voting. That would be like the government imposing a speech tax, or a religion tax or require you to pay a fee in order to have a right to require the police to get a warrant before they search your home.

The fact that it costs money, however, to go to the polling place, whether by bus, car, train, or other means -- that's not a violation of anyone's rights.

See the difference?

For example - freedom of the press is "reserved" for those who can afford printing presses. We don't have a government program to give people the equipment they want to exercise their right. The right to bear arms is not subsidized by the government to allow people who can't afford guns to get them. The right to be "secure in one's persons, houses, papers and effects" does not mean we get state subsidized burglar alarms, and freedom of religion does not mean that the state buys us a church or copies of a holy book to use in our preachments. Yet, these things are "rights."

Now you're deliberately muddying the issue.

Being published is not a life or death matter like receiving medical care is,

So what? Food and water is a "life and death" matter, and you don't have a right to free food.

no matter how much it would mean to me to sell a story. I might not like never being published, but that's vastly different from never receiving professional medical care, and has vastly different short- and long-term effects.

Nevertheless, you have the right of free speech and of the press....

Owning a gun may or may not be a life quality issue, depending on any number of factors, but one does not in general need a gun to live -- for example, I've both never owned one, and I've also never been in a situation where I've had need of one.

One doesn't need health care to live. The human race existed for 100 to 200 thousand years without anything approaching health care like we're talking about. Health care may save your life, but so may a gun.

And freedom of religion necessitates freedom from religion and is therefore self-nullifying from this argument. It's certainly not a requirement to the continued physical well-being of J. Random Citizen.

Again so what? Since when is "right" defined as "anything that is a requirement to the continued physical well-being of a citizen?" As I said, you're misusing the terms privilege and right. Food is considered a requirement of continued well being -- so is air conditioning in hot places - so is transportation -- so is sex. Are we going to subsidize weekly Old Fashioned's and the odd Around the World to facilitate the continued well being of folks who can't find sex on their own?

Basic health care, conceptually, cannot be a "right" because if it is a "right" then someone must be forced or compelled to provide that health care to the person who has the right. Obviously, the receipt of health care and the level of care is dependent on what care is available. Even in countries with "universal" healthcare system, some care is not provided. So, is the fact that some procedures will be denied going to arguably be a violation of "human rights?" Of course not.

That depends on where the denial of those procedures comes from. If the proper medical practitioner decides that a procedure is not medically necessary, or if a procedure is purely elective (there needs to be a clear differentiation between someone choosing to have a boob job, and someone requiring reconstructive facial surgery after suffering burns, for example), that's not denial of service and by extension a denial of a right to health care because no medically essential service was denied.

First of all, that's more arbitrary distinctions that you're making up in your own mind. In many medical cases what is "medically necessary" is a matter of opinion and there are second, third and fourth opinions that will each have doctors saying different things are necessary and different outcomes expected. Is your definition of "right" to be determined by whether a person can find a doctor to say something is medically necessary? Really?

Second, you missed my actual point which was that even in universal health care systems NOT ALL "medically necessary" procedures are offered to everyone who needs them. The governments will always eliminate some procedures by legislating them out of the available medical procedures.

If a medical practitioner decides a procedure is medically necessary, and an insurer denies coverage and effectively overrules a medical decision with a business decision, that is denial of service and by extension a denial of a right to health care. That's substituting a corporate profit motive for a professional determination and directly impacting the life (and possibly the life expectancy) of the person under care.

Insurers are legally bound to cover what is covered under the policy. Whether a denial of coverage is proper or improper can't be dealt with in generalities. One needs to know what the policy covers. The policies are in writing, so it's generally not a mystery.

The reality is that health care is something that is very important for people to have. It can improve quality of life, extend lives, reduce suffering, and save lives that would be lost without it. So, if a society has the means, then it should strive to adjust the legal system to foster the availability of health care. Best case scenario would be that everyone gets all the health care they need or want, whenever they want it, at zero cost. Since pretty much everyone knows that such a system, in the real world as it exists today, could never function, and in short order would result in less health care being available to fewer people.

Straw man. I never called for all the health care anyone wants. I have always explicitly stated 'basic' and 'medically necessary', so your conclusion is utterly meaningless.

No, it means your "right" is utterly meaningless, because -- opinions being like assholes, everyone having one -- there are as many views on what is "basic" and "medically necessary" as their are doctors, and even patients.

What you're saying, really, is that people should get healthcare, and the government should provide it, to the extent it can, fairly. You're talking about an entitlement, like social security, or welfare. I think what you're doing is what a lot of people do -- mix the word "right" with "really reallly important."

So, the argument really becomes, "what can the government do to maximize the delivery and quality of as much needed health care as possible to as many people as possible?"

Sure, I'll agree with this formulation. What I'll continue to disagree with is the position that what the government should do is let "the marketplace" handle it and stay out of it entirely. The marketplace has no interest in delivering quality health care.

That's wrong. In a marketplace, each provider of services has an incentive to provide better service than its competitors so more customers go to it.

In a universal or centralized system, the providers don't stand to lose anything if they provide shoddy service, as long as they meet bare minimum requirements.

It's why I ALWAYS prefer dealing with a private company as opposed to a government agency. The government agency has no sense of urgency. They don't care if what they do costs you money or upsets you. Get upset at the motor vehicle department? What are you going to do? Get a drivers license from somewhere else?

The marketplace is only interested in one thing: maximizing income while minimizing outlays. This is not a formula for maximizing availability -- this is how we got the system we currently have. This report from Forbes is illustrative of what the profit motive costs in a larger way, and what happens when decisions are made administratively rather than medically.

Our system provides more quality care to more people, quicker than most any system in use today. And, the best medical schools are in the US, the newest medical procedures are available in the US and when great medical breakthroughs come out, like the MRI a few years back, the private medical practitioners rush to get it out in use, which is why when I needed an MRI once, I was able to make an appointment within two days --- DAYS -- of having the non-emergency MRI prescribed. Any idea of the what the waiting list was in Canada?

There are a lot of options for directions we could go -- I would suggest first looking at the 36 nations ranked higher than us on the World Health Organization's ranking of overall health system performance by nation, all of whom pay less per capita and the vast majority of whom have some sort of nationalized coverage.

I agree. We should also look at apples to apples, and when you dig into those numbers you find that the private system in the US has more costs attributed to it, while in the universal systems you refer to they don't count those same costs -- the costs still exist -- they just aren't counted as part of the system. And, they forget that the free market US system subsidizes the world through research and development, which the US system spends more on than pretty much all the rest of the world combined. Further, countries with larger government sectors tend to have smaller GDP growth, and that represents a "cost" which is not taken into account, etc.

But, all this, in the end, has nothing to do with whether it's a right. Even if the US adopted universal healthcare, it wouldn't be a "right." It would only be an entitlement insofar as the government had the money to pay for it, and there were doctors willing to provide the service. If it's a "right" then doctors are slaves, and the taxpayer must foot the bill even if there wasn't money to pay it.

Some things jump out immediately. Here's a combined list of the ten nations that pay the most per capita for health care, and the ten nations that have the best overall health system performance, from the above-referenced WHO report:

Code: Select all

             Per Capita   Overall
USA               1         37
Switzerland       2         20
Germany           3         25
France            4          1
Luxembourg        5         16
Austria           6          9
Sweden            7         23
Denmark           8         34
Netherlands       9         17
Canada           10         30
Italy            11          2
Japan            13         10
San Marino       21          3
Andorra          23          4
Spain            24          7
Malta            37          5
Singapore        38          6
Oman             62          8

The meanings of this chart are clear. First: it's not how much you spend, but how you spend it.

It's also that the countries that have the universal health care systems dispensed by the government simply don't include all the costs that are included in the US numbers, despite the fact that those costs don't go away. And, the test used by the WHO to judge "quality" is skewed to prefer universal health care systems.

Second: We're clearly doing it wrong since every country in the world -- and especially all 36 countries which are determined to have a better overall health system than we -- pay less than us per capita to achieve that. While that's probably easy to explain with smaller countries like Malta and Andorra, that's less easy to explain with Canada and the larger European and Asian nations.

See -- they don't. You have to look at the criteria used by the WHO to measure which systems are better. It ain't about the quality of the actual care. But, this isn't the thread for that. We can go through the healthcare debate again on some other thread.

And the message is obvious: the marketplace--which is what drives our current system--has failed and is not the answer. Whether it's fixed through strong regulation (the German model) or through nationalization of health care (UK, Canada, France, etc.) is less relevant to me than that what we currently have simply does not work and needs to be repaired. I happen to think that Medicare for All is the simplest and easiest solution, but almost anything that divorces the profit motive from healthcare decision making will be an improvement. At the very least, what's been called 'Obamacare' should at least be given a chance. It would be difficult for it to work worse than our current situation.

Again, this isn't the thread for whether there needs to be changes. The original issue we were discussing was whether it's a "right." Even if we agree that changes need to be made, that doesn't make health care a right. And, you've not established any basis for calling it one. You've merely established that it is important and that the government should do the best it can to make sure it's of the best quality and most widely available it can. Sure, I don't disagree. But, it's not a right, because it's only available to the extent there are providers willing to provide the service and money to pay for it. If those things dried up, then the people would be denied their "rights." Right?

[Coito ergo sum]

It has not one single thing to do with the WHO report. Offering this study is comparing apples to outboard motors, and quite frankly borders on dishonesty to present it as being in any way refutatory of the WHO report.

The WHO report is not an objective ranking. The rankings depend crucially on a number of underlying assumption, some of which are logically incoherent, some characterized by substantial uncertainty, and some rooted in ideological beliefs and valuesthat not everyone shares. They include factors that are arguably unrelated to actual health performance, some of which could even improve in response to worse health performance. The rankings are highly sensitive to both measurement error and assumptions about the relative importance ofthe components, and the WHO rankings reflect implicit value judgments and lifestyle preferences that differ among individuals and across countries.

You also make the same mistake that a lot of left wingers make, which is to think that there is only one WHO report on the topic, when there are two, and/or you conflate the two.

I think you mentioned the US being 37th -- that's in the "Overall Performance" report -- now listen carefully - that report isn't a ranking of country by country alone. That ranking ranks a country based on its performance AS COMPARED TO HOW WELL THE WHO ESTIMATED IT THEORETICALLY COULD PERFORM. Think about that. The US is ranked 37th because its performance is lower than the WHO thinks the US theoretically could have performed. I.e. we didn't meet expectations. Note, that this allows a country who has worse overall healthcare QUALITY than the US to be ranked higher than the US because it's actual performance compared more closely to the theoretical "could have performed" estimate. I.e. a country that didn't do so hot on quality, but did as good as they could be expected to do with the resources they had is ranked very high on the OP, and a country that provided outstanding quality but is so "rich" that the WHO estimates it could do so much better would rank very low.

Nobody bothers to cite the "Overall Attainment" report from the WHO, which even under the WHO analysis has the US 15th, not 37th. France and Canada are 6th and 7th on the Overall Attainment report, and the difference between 1 and 15 in the Overall Attainment report isn't that great, and given the subjectivity of the WHO's process, one must factor in a large margin for difference of that subjective opinion.

Now, the factors used by the WHO to measure the success of the healthcare system are also a bit flawed -- one factor is "health level" which accounts for 25% of a countries score. This is measured by the Disability Adjusted Life Expectancy, and while this is an okay measure as far as it goes, it clearly takes into account factors other than the quality and delivery of health care in that number -- homicide rates, for example, will reduce life expectancy. So, the US, with 5.4 or thereabout homicide deaths per hundred thousand, is going to see a bigger impact than, say, England which has like a 1 or 2% per hundred thousand homicide rate. So, that alone is going to impact the number significantly, and that has nothing to do with the delivery of health care.

Another 25% of the number relates to "financial fairness." Basically the WHO claims it is an objective measure, when it is clearly -- by defnition - favoring a system which shifts health care costs in the manner a universal health care system would do (by making it part of the tax code). The WHO financial fairness factor is not about quality or delivery of care, but reflects a value judgment that rich people should pay more for health care, even if they consume the same amount. This is a value judgment not applied to most other goods, even those regarded as necessities such as food and housing. Most people understand and accept that the poor will tend to spend a larger percentage of their income on these items. Now, the key point there is that it is not a measure of the delivery of and responsiveness of health care. And, it puts 25% of a countries' ranking completely dependent on whether the country has adopted the political view favored by the WHO --- socialized medicine. The factor NECESSARILY and DIRECTLY makes a market economy rank inferior to a socialized economy.

The remaining factors -- health distribution and responsiveness - are more related to a health care system, but the WHO, again, doesn't measure the actual quality of the distribution and responsiveness overall. It measures only "inequality." So, a country with overall worse health distribution and responsiveness could be ranked higher than the US if all the people share equal misery in that regard. And, the US can be ranked lower, even if "the poor" in the US receive better care and faster care than in another country, just because the US also has a market economy allowing rich people to buy even better care than that.

Of course, there is good reason to account for the quality of care received by a country’s worst-off or poorest citizens. Yet the WHO doesn't do that. Instead,they measure relative differences in quality, without regard to the absolute level of quality. To account for the quality of care received by the worst-off, the index could include a factor that measures health among the poor, or a health care system’s responsiveness to the poor. This would give greater weight to the well-being of the worst off.

And, then there is the uncertainty level and margin of error. The WHO report itself states that there is an 80% uncertainty interval for each country. That means that the US could be ranked as high as 7 on the overall attainment report, or as low as 24, and France could be 3 to 11, and Canada 4 to 14. With the massive overlap in those margins for error, can we say with any real degree of certainty that the US is lower (much less significantly lower) than France and Canada? Especially, given that 25% of the countries' rankings INHERENTLY favor France and Canada (which have universal health care and therefore will automatically get a boost on "financial fairness")?

How you can POSSIBLY claim that this is somehow a fair measure of the "quality" of health care is beyond me. Maybe you can explain it.

The WHO clearly does NOT show that health care quality in the US is lower, or that the health care provided to "the poor" is worse, or that they don't get it. Yet, that's the shite that the WHO report is misrepresented for.

[Tyrannical]

There is no right to vote, we are a Republic, not a Democracy.
A Democracy is mob rule where the foolish simply out number the productive members of society. There should be voting standards of both economic and intellectual levels, otherwise you might as well let pets vote. It's no surprise that the Democrats are always eager to give voting rights to the retarded, criminals, and the unproductive; they are easily controlled and manipulated.

[Warren Dew]

Here is exactly and only the findings of that report you trumpet:

Sorry, but what you are quoting there is called an "abstract" - it's just a short summary of the paper, not the whole paper.

The data from my link are directly from the Lancet paper. That's why I talked about the data from the link, and not the verbiage.

As for the WHO analysis, it hasn't been updated in over a decade because even the UN admits the methodology is questionable.