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e323807
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The Universal Laws of Health Care Systems: 1. "No matter how good the health care in a particular country, people will complain about it" 2. "No matter how much money is spent on health care, the doctors and hospitas will argue that it is not enough" 3. "The last reform always failed" --
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T.R. Reid |
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3b49fa5
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A lot of what we "know" about other nations' approach to health care is simply myth."
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T.R. Reid |
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1173483
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Believe me," Dr. Tamalet summed up, "if you wanted that operation in France, you could get it" Which is, of course, the boon and the bane of France's health care system. It offers a maximum of free choice among skillful doctors and well-equipped hospitals, with little or not waiting, at bargain-basement prices [in out-of-pocket terms to the consumer]. It's a system that enables the French to live longer and healthier lives, with zero risk o..
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T.R. Reid |
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a501993
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One reason (though not the main one) is that American health care "providers"--doctors, nurses, hospitals, drug companies--make more money for what they do than their counterparts overseas do."
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T.R. Reid |
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05e0777
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When Americans fill a prescription, the price is routinely twice as much--sometimes ten times as much--as a Briton or a German would pay for precisely the same pills made in the same factory.
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T.R. Reid |
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01b68f4
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Von Kockritz's entire higher education was free. She considers that perfectly normal--and in Europe, it is.
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T.R. Reid |
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788b732
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special preference to "an automobile manufacturer incorporated in Delaware on October 13, 1916." That would be General Motors, although the name of the firm does not appear."
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T.R. Reid |
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8440a7b
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The goal in Japan is not to isolate the criminal from society, but precisely the opposite. A convict is sent back to his neighborhood, family, and job so that the social pressure to fit in and the pain of being shamed before the group will lead him to go straight.
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T.R. Reid |
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df0648f
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But Nikki White was a citizen of the world's richest country, the United States of America.
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T.R. Reid |
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5a17ec4
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The warmth and the soft glow of the tubes also attracted moths, which would fly through ENIAC's innards and cause short circuits. Ever since, the process of fixing computer problems has been known as debugging.
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T.R. Reid |
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5e82d21
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It's one of the finest highway networks in the world--and nobody seems to care that the basic idea was copied from the Nazis.6 EISENHOWER,
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T.R. Reid |
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4051735
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It's classic: Congress decides to reduce the complexity of our tax code by making it even more complex.
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T.R. Reid |
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d68ea74
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When I was traveling the world on my quest, I asked the health ministry of each country how many citizens had declared bankruptcy in the past year because of medical bills. Generally, the officials responded to this question with a look of astonishment, as if I had asked how many flying saucers from Mars landed in the ministry's parking lot last week. How many people go bankrupt because of medical bills? In Britain, zero. In France, zero. I..
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T.R. Reid |
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f2ae037
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All the watchmaker needs is a mechanism to count the back-and-forth oscillations--and counting is one of the simple tasks that binary logic gates can perform. In the digital watch a logic gate called a JK flip-flop counts the vibrations of the crystal.
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T.R. Reid |
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1bf4ae1
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Beveridge] was a driven man, right to the end; his last words, enunciated clearly from his death bed at the age of eighty-four, showed that the aging social reformer was still haunted by the memory of those sick men on the East London streets. 'I have a thousand things to do,' he said, and died.
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medical
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T.R. Reid |
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6e145a1
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For the mass prevention of disease, mass education is a key weapon.
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T.R. Reid |
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2c881e0
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Switzerland, and the Netherlands, any resident can choose any insurance plan on the market--and change to a new plan on short notice. That's a wider choice of health insurance than any American has.
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T.R. Reid |
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1c0c47d
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We've wasted our shining medical assets because of a health care payment system--or, more precisely, a crazy quilt of several overlapping and often conflicting systems--that prevents millions from receiving the treatment they need and that undermines the quality of care for millions more.
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T.R. Reid |
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db60846
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The shortcomings of our system can be grouped into three basic problems: coverage, quality, and cost.
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T.R. Reid |
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b390f90
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But out of twenty-three wealthy countries, the American health care system ranks dead last when it comes to keeping newborns alive.
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T.R. Reid |
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8af59b4
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Some are rich and some are poor. Some are beautiful, some aren't. Some are brilliant, some aren't. But when we get sick--then, everybody is equal. Everybody must have equal right to the best medical treatment we can provide.
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T.R. Reid |
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69f7c9f
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The "Tax Complexity Lobby," as Forbes magazine called it, includes tax-preparation firms like H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt, as well as companies that make tax-preparation software"
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T.R. Reid |
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2bd878e
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Internal Revenue Service: "If you determined your tax in the earlier year by using the Schedule D Tax Worksheet, or the Qualified Dividends and Capital Gain Tax Worksheet, and you receive a refund in 2016 of a deduction claimed in that year, you will have to recompute your tax for the earlier year to determine if the recovery must be included in your income."
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T.R. Reid |
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3c5f901
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seventy-three thousand pages of IRS regulations, he laughed at the very suggestion.
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T.R. Reid |
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ced613f
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47% problem--that is, the significant number of people who don't pay income tax.
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T.R. Reid |
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939f46c
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A consumption tax like the VAT is paid by everybody, including those who pay no income tax and those who are in the country illegally.
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T.R. Reid |
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0592f93
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Recently, there has been considerable public concern about the fact that 47% of Americans pay no income tax; the presidential candidate Mitt Romney opined that these are people "who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them. . . . These are people who pay no income tax."
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T.R. Reid |
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b5c310f
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A Congress that produces something like Section 7803(c)(2)(B)(ii)(IX) in the name of reducing complexity hardly seems likely to agree on any serious changes that would improve the system.
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T.R. Reid |
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688bb92
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We pour more money into national defense than anybody else; our defense budgets, in fact, are bigger than those in the next eleven countries combined
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T.R. Reid |
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3fa851d
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The argument for a lower tax rate on capital income--an argument supported by many economists--runs as follows: (1) economies need capital investment to grow and create new jobs; (2) capital investment by definition is risky (you could lose it all); and (3) therefore, a lower rate of tax on potential gains is necessary to encourage people to make those essential, but risky, investments.
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T.R. Reid |
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47e113b
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Only the richest smidgen of the population had to file a return, and even for them the top tax rate was just 7%.
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T.R. Reid |
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2f6f2a0
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broker or banker who invests other people's money can count his own salary as "capital gains" and thus pay tax on it at the reduced, capital gains rate."
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T.R. Reid |
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a057ca8
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Go to Part IV of Schedule I to figure line 52 if the estate or trust has qualified dividends or has a gain on lines 18a and 19 of column (2) of Schedule D (Form 1041) (as refigured for the AMT, if necessary).
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T.R. Reid |
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b0ae18f
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Would ancient Tibetan medicine recognize the value of X-rays? "Absolutely!" the doctor said. "When patients bring me their X-rays from the clinic up at Khunde, this is extremely helpful in my treatment." On the other hand, Dr. Tenzin was mystified by other diagnostic practices in Western medicine. "When they do urinalysis up at Khunde, all they do is stick a slip of paper into the sample," he said. "But that can't be enough. I just don't th..
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T.R. Reid |
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894bd63
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The widest definition of "wealthy" is in India, where a 1% wealth tax kicks in for anybody whose net worth is more than 3 million rupees, which comes to about $45,000. (In India, that still means a small percentage of the population.)"
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T.R. Reid |
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f7eb29d
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Most of them ran counter to the ethos of BBLR. Virtually all of them made the tax code more complicated--including that bizarre "anti-complexity clause," Section 7803(c)(2)(B)(ii)(IX). Three decades after the passage of the 1986 reforms, the U.S. tax code is a mockery of the BBLR principle."
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T.R. Reid |
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844f69e
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IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, a voluminous and hugely complex new law, which included the laughable "anti-complexity clause"--that is, Section 7803(c)(2)(B)(ii)(IX)."
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T.R. Reid |
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adced13
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the number one most serious problem facing American taxpayers. That problem is the complexity of the tax code.
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T.R. Reid |
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e61840e
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2012 tax-reform act stipulated that members of the national parliament and the prime minister's cabinet would pay 5% higher rates than anybody else in the country. "We did it as a gesture of solidarity," Kazimir said. "The message was, okay, if the parliament is going to raise taxes, we'll see to it that members of parliament pay more than anybody else. "It's the same kind of political bullshit you probably have in your Congress," Kazimir t..
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T.R. Reid |
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7e16db9
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BBLR means that if the tax base--that is, the total amount of income, or sales, or property that can be taxed--is kept as large as possible, then the tax rate--that is, the percentage that people have to give to the government--can be kept low. Virtually all economists and tax experts agree that this is the best way to run a tax regime.
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T.R. Reid |
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233985c
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If there's no deduction for contributions, charities don't have to produce a certified receipt for each donation, and the contributor doesn't have to track down the nine-digit Tax ID Number of each charity she wants to support.
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T.R. Reid |
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eef6e19
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ALL THOSE ISSUES SHOULD be enough to demonstrate that the deduction for charitable contributions is costly, unfair, and easy to abuse. But there's actually a more fundamental problem with this particular deduction: It doesn't work.
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T.R. Reid |
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7754bbc
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The big gorilla of homeowner tax breaks is the deduction for mortgage interest, which reduces income tax revenues by about $100 billion each year. That is, this one tax deduction costs more than the budgets of the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, the Interior, and the Treasury combined.
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T.R. Reid |
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b2c9a51
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anybody buying a qualified plug-in electric car--the list of approved vehicles includes sleek, sporty cars like the $105,000 Tesla Model S P85D and the $138,000 BMW i8--can subtract up to $7,500 from the income tax he or she owes Uncle Sam.
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T.R. Reid |