I will lay out the indictment here in brief form.  It's aimed at the American public at large because this is what is tolerated on a daily basis and what it costs us.  I'll leave this open for comment for a couple of days, after which I'm locking the topic.

Let's see if anyone can make the case for what they intend to do both personally and collectively about any of this -- and I'll keep this one short.  Trust me, there may be more where this came from if I decide it's worth my while.  After all it's not like I don't have 11,000 articles written over the last decade to draw from..... oh wait....

Let's start with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  There is now incontrovertible evidence that several years before the Uranium One deal was signed off on by both Hillary and Obama, a deal that sold 20% of American uranium assets to Russia (and we all know what uranium is used for, right?), the FBI had an ongoing investigation into the Russian principals of that transaction for bribery and extortion.  There are only two possibilities, of course: Either the FBI (all of it) intentionally concealed the existence of the investigation from the administration or the administration knew damn well that the deal was coerced and went along with it despite having full knowledge of same.

Do I particularly care which it is?  No, because the FBI is the government.

What I do very much care about is that the Russian Government actively practiced extortion and bribery within our borders for years and exactly zero was done about it to this very day more than a decade later.  The FBI knew about it and did exactly nothing.  Not one person has been indicted, the acts themselves were covered up despite being known to the government and the "deal" that appears to have been procured through felony unlawful acts has not been forcibly unwound.  In other words the Russians have been allowed to keep what they stole; this is equally egregious to the FBI watching a mobster rob a bank, knowing who it is that robbed the bank and then not only refusing to prosecute them letting them keep the money.

I remind you that if the government merely suspects you have $10,001 in your briefcase due to selling a substance they don't like they will steal it from you at gunpoint even if they are unable to prove that you did anything illegal.  At the same time the millions of dollars that these people funneled to the Clinton Foundation remains there, it has not been seized and the deal has not been unwound, nor has one single indictment been leveled.

I further remind you that before you scream "Democrats!" that Donald J Trump has been President now for nearly 10 months and he and his attorney general Jeff Sessions have done exactly nothing about any of this.  Trump and his administration along with both sides of the aisle in Congress are therefore explicitly confirming on a literal daily basis that this is "acceptable behavior" and not worthy of criminal punishment.  Let me remind you that Trump, during the campaign, repeatedly cheered on the premise "Lock Her Up."  Well?  Whether you're a "MAGA" supporter, an "establishment" Republican or a Democrat of any stripe go fuck yourself with a rusty chainsaw because you are all explicitly supporting an administration that has intentionally refused to act on the "buying" of 20% of our nation's nuclear energy and weapons raw material by Russia through acts of bribery and extortion.

Considering that having our energy infrastructure strangled by a hostile government is arguably one of the greatest threats that we could face this activity is especially outrageous.  However, I can understand why you might stick you head in the sand on this; after all, the lights haven't so much as flickered in your house, right?

Ok, so maybe I'll let you slide on that one.

I won't let you slide on the $15,000 a year that is stolen from every family in this nation on an annual basis by the medical scam in the United States.

The means by which it happens are so varied and outrageous that they are almost beyond belief.  I have heard many people scoff at me when I point out that we overpay by five times in this country for medical care.  That is, if we stopped the scams I assert that your cost for medical care (and health insurance) would come down by 80% in a day.  I'm utterly confident in this number, however, and I would like to give you just a few reasons why.

One, for instance, is the fact that virtually every eye-drop medication is intentionally designed to waste half of the drug prescribed.  If that crap was to be stopped and the companies were prevented from simply doubling the price per-vial by competition the cost of said drops on a per-month basis would instantly fall by half.  Remember, this is without any other competitive pressures of any sort being brought to bear -- it would simply result from putting a stop to the intentional practice by the drug companies of designing a dispensing device that intentionally and unavoidably causes you to waste half the medication by having it run down your face.

Never mind the fact that such a practice also likely causes some percentage of users to suffer side effects that are harmful when the medicine goes in places it isn't intended (like your sinuses and throat), which you then must pay more money to counteract or treat.

The second I've written on several times: Drugs (such as antivenoms for scorpion stings and snakebites) that are sold in Mexico OVER THE COUNTER for $100 or so, yet in the United States a few dozen miles north the exact same drug, made in the exact same factory by the exact same company is available only from a hospital under prescription and costs tens of thousands of dollars.  This crap is true for almost every drug with varying differences by nation, with the United States paying the most in essentially every case.  While the really crazy ripoff percentages come for drugs that are relatively rarely used (like snakebite antivenom) they often amount to 500% or more for "mainstream" pharmaceuticals, whether they be for Hepatitis-C, diabetes (insulin), high blood pressure or hundreds of other conditions including various forms of cancer. The only reason this situation persists is that it is a federal offense for you to cross the Mexican (or any other) border, fill a suitcase with said drug for cash and then bring it back to the US and sell it for whatever you can fetch.

The third is "CON" laws in many states that require before you open or close a medical facility you receive a "Certificate Of Need."  The board evaluating your application?  It's made up of the owners of the existing medical facilities in the area.  This, along with other aspects of price fixing, is largely why you can literally fly to Narita, Japan, have an MRI done (for cash) and then fly home while spending less than the local imaging center charges you for the exact same scan and reading of same.  You are literally bilked out of anywhere from 5-10 times the cost in that first-world, first-class nation for the exact same thing.

Then there's The Surgery Center of Oklahoma, which I've written on several times.  They're a cash-based surgery center that will give you a price, soup-to-nuts, for a procedure just like the corner grocer does.  Hospitals and doctors for years have said you "can't" do that with medicine; this organization has proved that's a lie.  They not only do it their business is thriving.  Because they have quoted you a price and that's what you pay they also have every incentive not to screw up and give you an infection while there.  A traditional hospital gets to and does bill you to treat an infection they gave you while you were in surgery.  That incentive for them to not screw up is reflected in outcomes: The Surgery Center posts their infection rate and on a typical year it's twenty-five times lower than the national average.

Most of this is "hidden" from you through employer-provided insurance, but the scam continues nonetheless. The average Florida family pays over $18,700 a year for "health insurance" irrespective of who writes the check and if it was a more-appropriate $4,000 you'd get the nearly $15,000 a year difference in your salary.

Cut the crap, America.  Not only does the medical scam in this country, all of which I remind you is illegal and has been for 100 years, which medical and insurance firms twice tried to claim exemptions from when sued, the cases went to the US Supreme Court and the medical and insurance firms lost both times, cost every single family in this nation $15,000 each and every year, or enough to make the mortgage payment on a middle class house it also results, if you wind up in the hospital, a risk of infection twenty five times greater than what a market system brings you.

If the robbery isn't enough is a twenty-five times greater risk of a bankruptcy due to infection caused by the hospital, or, in the extreme cases, your death enough to get you off your ass?  May I remind you that roughly 200,000 people die in this country every single year due to preventable medical screwups, and that's only counting the ones that aren't successfully hidden.  In fact this is the third leading cause of death in the United States!

That isn't enough to get you off your ass?  Go fuck yourself with a rusty chainsaw.

Think there are no answers to this rampant scam and the death it brings?  The hell there aren't.  There are remedies available at both state and federal levels.  I remind you that virtually every state (if not every) has an anti-trust law roughly parallel to the US Federal law (15 USC Chap 1.)  This means state prosecutors can bring these cases too, and state legislatures and executives could demand they do so.  Either the States or the Federal Government could start right here with a one-sentence law and follow it up here.

County and local governments could condition the issuance of business licenses (without which no medical facility or drug store can operate at all) on the posting of prices and non-discriminatory billing.  They could do that right now via city or county ordnance and if they did it would resolve their budget problems as well as fixing health care for you, their constituent.  Instead they rape you on property taxes and engage in financial shenanigans that ultimately will bankrupt both them and you.

They don't fix the problem instead of screwing you because you refuse to make this issue, which robs you of a fucking house every single year, the political point that they must face and resolve or be ejected from office and shunned to the point that they can't even walking the family dog without facing birds flown in their face by everyone they meet, with your treatment of such bastards extending from the lowliest cop on the beat to the Governor of every single state of the Union -- and every government employee in between.

Let me know when you stop consenting to being financially raped, along with accepting a twenty-five times greater risk than necessary of being severely injured or killed as a direct result of virtually every hospital in the United States having every reason to not give a damn if they give you an infection because they profit from it when it happens.

You don't want to do it?  You don't care that you're robbed out of a house every year?

Fine.

I don't want to hear your complaints when the economy collapses as this scam exceeds the ability to extract any more money from the people, or at least as bad or maybe worse forced rationing comes into play, you need medical care of some kind and you're simply told "Nope", leaving you die in agony after bankrupting you.

There's a meme flying around the last few days that has managed to "snag" a few people I know on Zuckerpig's site related to vaccinations.

I've seen two variations of it.  One "features" a kid (but not an infant) who cannot be vaccinated because she's immunocompromised and a "attenuated" live vaccine could kill her.  The other features an infant too young to have been vaccinated against the evil (in this case, whooping cough.)

Both are attempts to shame people who are "anti-vaxxers", and take a shot at the autism claims.

Let's start there.

There is no evidence that vaccines in fact cause autism. Zero.  There are a lot of claims that said occurs, but there's no scientific evidence for it.

The "meme" is basically a my kid got screwed because of you evil bastards who didn't vaccinate your kids.

The problem is that the meme is false.

Let's deconstruct it because down this road lies a dangerous and false set of beliefs.

First, there's the explicit claim that "if your kid was vaccinated mine would not have gotten sick."

This is false unless every single kid is vaccinated with vaccines that are 100% effective.

But most of these memes include a kid who can't be vaccinated either due to age (too young) or immune compromised.  Therefore if exposed they are likely to get ill.

Second, no vaccine is 100% effective.

Behind the dangerous falsity of these memes is a blatantly false claim about how "herd immunity" works.  It does not prevent disease from being transmitted, in short.

What herd immunity does is attempt to prevent transmission from turning into epidemic.

That is, let's say you have measles.  It doesn't matter why you have measles.  Maybe you didn't get vaccinated whether for "conscious objection" reasons or not (e.g. you're a refugee) or maybe the vaccine failed (and yes, they do!)  It doesn't matter why you have measles, all that matters is that you do have measles.

Measles happens to be extremely contagious.  That is, if you have it and come close enough to someone to transmit it, and they are not immune (either from vaccination or previous exposure) the odds are extremely high they will get it.  Different diseases have different efficiency of transmission; some like chicken pox and measles are very easy to transmit, others like HPV or HIV require direct intimate (bodily fluid) exchange.

Herd immunity has exactly nothing to do with the singular event of someone who has a disease coming into contact with the unprotected person.  If that happens and the vector is completed then the odds of infectious transmission are extremely high.

What herd immunity does is make the percentage of people who are immune high enough that the probability of the infected person contacting a susceptible person and transmitting the disease falls below the infectious percentage (that is, what percent of those who come into contact will get it.)  So long as that number is <1.0 for anyone who has the disease then you have what is called "herd immunity" because the infection cannot reproduce at a rate sufficient to nail everyone who is susceptible.

You'd think that herd immunity would make a disease eradicated because with an insufficient transmission rate it would quite-quickly wind up disappearing.  You'd be right about that except for one problem: For it to work you must reach that level for all populations that can serve as both reservoirs and impacted entities (which may include species other than humans.)  If you do that the disease literally disappears.

So why do Whooping Cough, Chicken Pox and Measles still exist?

Because there are populations where that level of immunity was never achieved.

Who are those people?

Do you really want the bad news?

They're largely illegal immigrants and refugees -- that is, people from third-world shitholes where there is no vaccination and thus those diseases are still common.

So if you actually want to reduce the risk of your little kid getting Whooping Cough then you want to kick out every single illegal immigrant and every refugee, and prevent any from coming into the country until they are both vaccinated and quarantined for a sufficient time to know their immunity is good.

The fact is that we have "herd immunity" for most common diseases for which vaccines are available today in the Untied States and other western nations, despite the few "objectors."  The exceptions are nearly all traceable to not those scared of autism but rather to refugees and illegal immigrants, both of whom come in without any documentation as to their immunization status and in many cases with not only no immunizations but latent disease as well!

That's where the problem is but what you have to understand is that the random risk of someone, even if we kick all those people out, getting past the screening or simply having a vaccination failure -- and it does happen -- still exists.

In short if your kid is either incapable of taking the vaccines or is too young to have done so herd immunity does not protect them from the singular infection that could hose them.  If someone who has failed immunity to said disease for whatever reason, including not of their own fault, is shedding the virus (or whatever) and manages to meet the transmission requirements to your kid they're going to get sick -- period.

Vaccines are also not without risk.  The HPV vaccine, for example, has a record of occasionally causing Guillian-Barre syndrome.  Some cases of this "side effect" are fatal and many cases that are not fatal produce permanent partial paralysis.  Since HPV is a sexually-transmitted disease and cannot be transmitted by casual contact to claim that everyone "must" have said vaccine is an outrage -- that is a matter of personal choice where one must weigh the risk (very small, but real) of a severe adverse event against the risk of transmission of the condition through voluntary or violent sexual encounter.

Frankly, I don't think anyone has the right to make that decision for someone else and thus it's a decision that should be made by adults at the time of turning 18.  That's my view and others may differ; one of the pleasures (and pains) of being a parent is that you get to choose in that regard for your kids -- but not for mine.

There are, however, some states that have tried to mandate it for anyone in schools and from my perspective what that amounts to is an admission that the school cannot manage to keep kids from fucking one another in the buildings and on the school grounds, which says a lot about their level of competence in running said school!

So let's not conflate "vaccines" into one bucket, because they're not.  There are those that I believe you can make a very clean argument for -- DTaP, MMR and Polio being the poster children for that group.  Why?  It has nothing to do with "herd immunity" but everything to do with the fact that if you contract these conditions they are dangerous and can kill or permanently and severely harm you and the vaccines, while not 100% effective, are extremely good at providing lifetime protection against the disease in question.  Here the balance of risks and benefits are clearly on the side of choosing the vaccination.  If you draw the "short straw" and get harmed by the vaccine that's awful but you are far more-likely to get injured or killed by the disease itself and remember -- herd immunity does not prevent you from getting sick -- it only prevents your illness from turning into an epidemic!

Then there are those vaccines that have a less compelling argument: Varicella (Chicken Pox) is in that category.  That's a live (attenuated) vaccine.  Further, in up to a third of the people vaccinated it fails to provide complete protection -- that is, if exposed you will get the chicken pox and can transmit it anyway, although it will likely be a milder case!  Whether that one's worth the risk (and there are some risks, but not terribly severe ones) is an open question.  Chicken Pox almost never produces any permanent harm in someone who gets it, which makes the balance much harder to accurately estimate -- but since the vaccine itself is an attenuated virus the risk of taking the vaccine is rather low too.  Note that one of the "memes" circulating relates specifically to Chicken Pox exposure to an immunocompromised person and the vaccine has a 30% failure rate.  So much for the claim in the meme that the transmission was "preventable" -- the truth is that it probably was not as the odds are much higher that the person who gave the kid the pox was vaccinated but had a partial failure than someone who wasn't vaccinated at all.  (Note that the zoester vaccine, given to older adults for shingles, is even harder to evaluate -- shingles sucks but since the vaccine for it too is attenuated the risk of it giving you shingles if you have an un-diagnosed immune problem is quite real and, if it happens, you're hosed.)

Finally, in the next (and last) bucket we have the HPV vaccine (and others that are similar and undoubtedly will be developed in the future.)  That vaccine only protects against some strains of HPV, not all and thus might lead someone to engage in riskier behavior than they would otherwise believing they are immune from that condition.  Since virtually all cases of HPV transmission are a result of voluntary intimate contact anything that causes people to believe they're immune from a potential bad outcome but is less than 100% effective might actually increase, rather than decrease, the risk of disease.  In addition there is a small but non-zero risk of a severe or even deadly side effect.

In short you cannot take all of these different immunizations as a "package"; they each have individual risks and benefits and must be evaluated on that basis.

Finally, the bottom line when it comes to vaccination is that, to nearly a 100% degree, they are all about personal benefit in the form of immunity (partial or complete) conferred in the person vaccinated.  The side effect of "herd immunity", if achieved, prevents transmission of the disease in question from turning into an epidemic but does not, in any case, prevent one infected person from infecting a second susceptible person.

Price (Trump's pick for HHS, which I remind you oversees Medicare and Medicaid) has given zero indication that he has any intention of reforming any of the monopolist practices in the health care industry.

Price insisted that Republicans can keep the protections for those with existing medical conditions without mandating that all individuals carry coverage or pay a penalty to support an expanded insurance pool. Price said Republicans want to address "the real cost drivers" of health care price spikes, which he said were not necessarily sicker patients, but a heavy regulatory burden, taxes and lawsuits against medical professionals.

Not one word about monopolist pricing structures.  Not one word about CON laws.  Not one word about drugs that are 10, 20 or even 100x as expensive here as in other OECD nations and laws banning the arbitrage of those prices which would instantly collapse said price structure.  Not one word about a system that has expanded "administrators" at 5x the rate of care-givers, all of whom you pay for.  Not one word about a so-called "insurance" system that demands you pay continuing deductible amounts after the insured event happens should a calendar boundary be crossed, which is an out-and-out fraud.  Not one word about a refusal to post prices and presenting you with a document demanding that you accept any bill for anything done, with no cap and no binding estimate.  Not one word about charging different prices after the fact based on how you pay rather than what is done, which is not only improper it quite-arguably is felonious on its face as it constitutes a kickback (which are in many cases illegal and in all cases are taxable yet are not reported as such nor are the taxes paid.) Not one word about forcing you pay to correct errors made by the physician or, even worse, to treat infections and diseases contracted as a result of being in said hospital and inadequate sanitation.

Yes, lawsuits add cost. If you got rid of all of them you'd cut cost by.... a single-digit percentage. But, not all medically-related lawsuits are baseless or harmful; some are both reasonable and necessary. In other words while the issue of lawsuit abuse is real it's worthless and would do exactly nothing in terms of actually addressing the problem of medical cost -- and Price knows this.

Look to the right, click the topic entitled The CERTAIN Destruction of our Nation, and read it.

Then go get a drink.

Or three.

Or fuck it, just drink the whole bottle.

The good news is that if you have no need for health care because several years ago when I started raising hell about this and writing about how you can change outcomes, and you did it, the "mandate" will almost-certainly disappear and you can stick up the middle finger and spend zero - for real.

The bad news is that if you do need health care you're going to be bankrupted, dead, or both unless you can manage to employ medical tourism. But for any given situation that might work and.... it might not.  If this becomes a matter of a chronic condition rather than something that is acute, and especially if it takes you out of the job market then you're flat-out hosed.

You might also want to contemplate, if the bad happens to you personally and you discover that your hourglass will run dry absent that which you can't afford or obtain whether you are afraid of consequences in an afterlife or not.

I'll leave the rest up to you to think about on your own because the fact is that as a nation it appears we are truly and completely fucked.  Enjoy the next couple of years as we're now odds-on that they'll be the last good ones.

That's math, not politics.

Compare these two pages:

First, Candidate Trump:

5. Require price transparency from all healthcare providers, especially doctors and healthcare organizations like clinics and hospitals. Individuals should be able to shop to find the best prices for procedures, exams or any other medical-related procedure.

.....

7. Remove barriers to entry into free markets for drug providers that offer safe, reliable and cheaper products. Congress will need the courage to step away from the special interests and do what is right for America. Though the pharmaceutical industry is in the private sector, drug companies provide a public service. Allowing consumers access to imported, safe and dependable drugs from overseas will bring more options to consumers.

Now read what President-Elect Trump has said.

Where did #5 and #7 go?

The rest is pretty much there, with a few (expected "red meat") additions.

Where is any hint of any sort, now that Trump has won and no longer can be claimed to be "shoving Granny down the stairs" as a campaign tactic, of breaking up medical monopolies?

This, and only this, is why health care costs are so high.  Between prescription drug importation bans (a monopolistic practice Congress created out of whole cloth, and thus Congress can repeal) to CON laws to refusal to post and quote prices to practices such as a differential billing (which is responsible for Michigan having car insurance that's 3x as expensive as states without it for starters) this has utterly disappeared.  This is the issue that must be addressed and this act must take place NOW or our nation dies fiscally within the next four to five years.

This is not a maybe, it is not a possibility, it is not political rhetoric it is immutable mathematical fact.

The Federal government spent 37% of every dollar it spent in total on Medicare and Medicaid last fiscal year.  This rate of spending is increasing by roughly 9% a year.  Within four years that will result in roughly $2 trillion a year of spending on these two programs alone and blow an additional $600 billion a year hole in the federal budget. For scale $600 billion is roughly the size of all defense spending and that's the additional amount we will try to tack onto to what is already being spent today. This is not due to people getting older, it is due to medical monopolies that in any other line of work would land everyone involved in federal prison under 100+ year old law found in 15 United States Code.

Remember that socialist medicine in most of the developed world manages to deliver better health care outcomes than we have at half the cost per person.  Capitalism always outperforms socialism for the simple reason that a capitalist system adds an incentive to bash your competitors over the head with price right up to the limit of excess margin.  That is it adds price discovery as an incredibly powerful cudgel and drives incentives to remove inefficiencies and improve productivity, thereby allowing competitors to undercut one another on price even further.  This means that a capitalist system minus the existing monopolies would wind up delivering health care at one fifth to one tenth of today's cost and also deliver superior outcomes!  If you think this is impossible then explain the $95 MRI you can buy today in Japan (which is not a third-world country) .vs. the same scan that costs $1,000 or more here.

My concern as expressed during the campaign in multiple Tickers was that without a firm commitment to break up the medical monopolies we had no standard by which to judge.  The push-back was that Trump would be accused of throwing Granny off the mountain if he took such a position and the army of health lobbyists would band together to try to destroy his campaign with lies and innuendo (which in reality was all about protecting their jobs and not your health), and would likely succeed.  Ok.  Fair enough.

But now the campaign is over and there is utterly no reason to not put forward said intentions if he ever had them.

As I pointed out at the time I was skeptical that any such intention was ever present.

It appears on the weight of the evidence thus far that I was right.

The evidence for that light you saw a few days ago being, in fact, the sun rising is fading fast.  The manifest weight of the evidence appears to be that it in fact was a fireworks display and, while perhaps some light will leak in around the edges in various ways the most-serious issue the nation faces, and the one that will destroy us during the next President's term is being intentionally ignored yet again.  Yes, it's good that President-Elect Trump will roll back many regulations including those on guns, because you're probably going to need them to protect yourself and your family. Prepare for the darkness, in short, because the odds are rising, not falling, that it is coming.

We're about to find out.

First, read Donald Trump's Contract With The American Voter, which he just released in a bid to convert undecided voters.

There's a lot of good stuff in there.  In fact, I can't find anything in there I disagree with, and I bet you can't either if you're honest about actually improving the nation (leaving aside the red-meat pie-in-the sky stuff, such as "repeal and replace."  If you don't understand why that's a topic for another column.)

Nonetheless, one thing is missing, and it simply can't be missing if we are going to ever have America be great, whether you believe it is now, will be again, or for that matter can ever be in the future.

That's indictments and prison for the health care monopoly abusers violating 15 United States Code Chapter 1 -- a class of individuals and firms that, in my opinion, include virtually the entire health-care industry in this nation.  They have taken health care as a percentage of our economy from about 3% to nearly 20% in 30 years and if we do not only stop but reverse this now the federal government, state governments, pensions, all asset types and the American way of life will all collapse.

There are a number of ways to get there.  We could do it via the means outlined in a post I entitled "How to Fix The Budget" from 2012.  Or we could do it some other way.  I'm not married to the means, but due to the certain outcome if we do not act to resolve this issue now, I am forced to politically demand the ends in return for my vote.

The method by which we accomplish this goal will matter to many, but it matters little to me.  That we get there and do this now, however, is of primary imporance because if we fail to do so during the next President's term the American way of life in this country ends, and it does not matter who is elected President.

That's math, not politics.

On Monday, two days from now, Florida begins early voting.

I would like to vote for Donald Trump.

But if he does not, prior to my voting, publicly take the position from the above "How To Fix The Budget" post or something substantially the same that will plausibly lead to the same outcome, including specifically the enforcement both now and on a forward basis the existing anti-trust regulations against all health-related firms -- a power the Executive Branch already has and thus does not require any form of Congressional approval -- I will be forced to vote for Cthulhu exactly as I did four years ago.

I will not vote for the destruction of this nation irrespective of who will be President when it happens.

Yes, I'm a single-issue voter, and I'm not compromising on the issue that we must resolve in order to keep our nation.  We either act to save this nation or we do not.

To quote Yoda: "There is no try."