Stephan: I wish for each of you a lovely and joyous holiday. Let's all work to make 2023 a better year for everyone in every way we can.
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Stephan: One of the main things 2022 and the pandemic should have taught politicians is that American healthcare sucks compared with that of other developed nations, as reported in dozens of social outcome studies in the professional academic literature. If you read SR regularly you know this from the many papers, articles and reports I have published. It's not the personnel, the doctors, nurses, and technicians; it is the way the system is economically structured so that its only priority is profit. Wellbeing is hardly a factor.
Join me in making this New Year's resolution: However, and whenever you can smile and lean in the direction of universal, birthright, single-payer health with fostering wellbeing as its top priority you will do so. The illness profit system will not change until Americans make it clear that creating a system that promotes wellbeing will determine how that vote.
Credit: Mark Felix / AFP / Getty
Though the pandemic and all its attendant health care crises remained the major health care story of 2022, churning all the while in the background has been the critical work of academic scholars, operating on longer timelines, who are still trying to make sense of US health care and of medicine itself, to get a better idea of what’s wrong and how to make it better.
To wrap up this year, I asked a couple dozen health policy experts what research released this year (though, as one of them reminded me, these papers are often years in the making) had surprised them, changed their thinking, or struck them as especially notable.
Here are five particularly interesting papers, at least in my view. Because many more than that warrant mention, I have tried to cram in as many references to other work as I could. One of my lessons from this exercise was that there are […]
Stephan: We have seen both our electric bill, and our water bill increase this year, and perhaps you have as well. I think it will happen again in 2023. And the price of groceries has become unlike anything I have ever seen, $11 for a head of lettuce. Thank God my wife grows our food biodynamically organic except for non-mammal proteins, oils, citrus, and certain spices. But I know most people are not that lucky, and I am very concerned that the trend on food costs is headed up in a big way for the reasons I have already outlined, and it is going to inflict real suffering on many not only in America but around the world.
It is urgently important, in my view, that those of us who have wellbeing at every level as our first social priority, get involved in our democracy -- which will also preserve it. We need to make it clear that we are not interested in the MAGAt world's culture wars. What we want are social policies that foster wellbeing, and prepare us for what climate change is doing.
Inflation dominated news headlines and American psyches in 2022. Overall, consumer prices jumped an average 7.1 percent this year, with the cost of just about everything going up, from cars to coffee and gas to groceries. The trend triggered a bitter midterm election campaign, prompted a series of aggressive interest-rate hikes from the Federal Reserve, and fears about an impending recession.
The causes were numerous, from the war in Ukraine to the post-pandemic economic recovery. But in many sectors, the specter of climate change was also lurking behind these higher costs. Extreme swings in temperature and precipitation caused shortages and soaring prices for essential utilities like electricity, heat, and water. A series of catastrophic weather disasters scrambled the supply chains for vegetables and staple grains.
Many of us tend to think that we’re still immune to the direct effects of the climate crisis, but make no mistake — those effects are already here, and they’re hitting our wallets. Here is a look at some of the ways warming came back to bite us at the […]
Stephan: Representative Adam Schiff, makes what I consider to be an essential and important point. Something has to be done about the Republican Senate and House members who participated in the Donald Trump orchestrated attempted coup to overthrow American democracy. I do not see how insurrectionists like Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, or Jim Jordan can be allowed to continue to serve in the government they tried to overthrow. The only thing that will hold them accountable is us. Write or call your Representative and your Senators, and tell them you want these people thrown out of Congress. Personally, I think they should be indicted, convicted, and sent to prison for a long term of years.
Credit:Andrew Harrer / Getty
On Dec. 27, 2020, more than six weeks after losing re-election, an infuriated President Donald Trump telephoned his acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen. Mr. Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, had announced his resignation less than two weeks earlier, after telling the president that the claims of election fraud Mr. Trump had been trumpeting were — as Mr. Barr later bluntly put it in testimony — “bullshit” and publicly affirming that there was no fraud on a scale that would affect the outcome of the election.
With Mr. Rosen’s deputy, Richard Donoghue, also on the line, Mr. Trump launched into the same tired, disproved and discredited allegations he had propagated so often at rallies, during news conferences and on social media. None of it was true, and Mr. Donoghue told him so. According to Mr. Donoghue, Mr. Trump, exasperated that his own handpicked top appointees at the Justice Department would not affirm his baseless allegations, responded: […]
Stephan: Under the dark circus of the Republican cultural war which dominates the news, the Biden administration is getting some serious and desperately needed work done. This report is an example of what I mean.
More than a dozen century-old bridges and tunnels, the creaky backbone of the nation’s most important railroad corridor, are set to receive nearly $9 billion in new infrastructure grants, U.S. Department of Transportation officials said this week, marking the biggest step yet to begin overhauling the busy-but-antiquated line running from Washington to Boston.
The projects include the Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel, which opened in 1873, when Ulysses S. Grant was president. The 1.4-mile tunnel is now beset with crumbling brick and sinking floor slabs, leaving Amtrak trains creeping beneath West Baltimore at 30 mph on their way up and down the East Coast.
The list of “major backlog” projects federal officials say they are finally preparing to fund reads like a history of American infrastructure greatness frozen in amber, among them Connecticut’s Walk Bridge over the Norwalk River (Grover […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
