World

Congressional Quarterly looks at Taiwan's system of single-payer healthcare, which was put into place in 1995:

"In Taiwan, we have no waiting lists," says Hou [Sheng-Mou]. "In Taiwan, the doctor works on Saturday. They operate on Saturday afternoon." Moreover, the government does not tell its citizens where they must go for care, he said. Sophisticated information technology is a part of the health system. Each resident of the country carries a "smart card" to entitles them to health care.

"With the smart card you can go to any clinic at any time without an appointment," Hou said. And there is no "gatekeeper" denying access to specialists, a frequent complaint among Americans about U.S. managed care companies. [...]

The smart card also contributes to the quality and efficiency of the system by giving doctors a medical profile of the patient and by automating payment. When a provider swipes the card, the patient's medical history and medications show up on the computer screen and the government is billed for the provider's services.

Taiwan's single-payer system isn't perfect; for example, its expenditures are slightly above its revenues, and there is less money available for R&D than in the U.S. On the plus side, Taiwan's system has far lower administrative costs: 1.6% of healthcare spending vs. 15% (as a low estimate) in the U.S. Also, Taiwan insures all its citizens while spending only 6% of its GDP on healthcare, while we spend 16% of our GDP on healthcare and still have 47 million Americans without coverage.

From Rand Beers, U.S. counterterrorism adviser and current president of the National Security Network. Beers quit the NSC in protest in March 2003 five days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Progressives have a tremendous opportunity — and a real challenge — on national security this cycle. The public has decisively rejected the Bush administration's national security framework. But nothing in the public discourse gives non-expert Americans a clear understanding of what the alternatives might look like. [...]

One way to fill that gap is for progressives to begin setting out the core ideas that underlie our theory of national security — and then share specific policy positions and critiques that show what those core ideas would mean, and how they would produce results different from what we have seen in recent years. The thinking behind this two-part approach is simple: there's a crying need for sophisticated, pragmatic, deep policy thinking that returns serious, non-hyped discussions of security issues to the public eye.

The challenges we face — Afghanistan, Pakistan, energy, to name just three — have no magic solutions and will be with us for years to come. Yet there's also a need for clear-sighted, unadorned talk about why we make the choices we do and what kind of nation we want to be. That is a debate that is much less technical, but no less important, than the details of our policy in Pakistan's borderlands or how many gallons of alternative fuels we can produce by 2015. Everybody, however much or little time their lives give them to think about national security, can join a debate about what kind of country we want to be.

Read more at www.nsnetwork.org.

Ezra Klein reviews the new book The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria:

In short, Zakaria makes two arguments, one descriptive, one normative. The first argument, the descriptive one, is that moment of unipolarity is ending. This odd interregnum between the fall of the Soviet Union and the maturation of other world powers (ranging from developing behemoths like India and China to major alliances like the EU) is coming to an inevitable, and entirely predictable, end. America will neither rule nor run the world alone. India, China, Brazil, Russia, and Europe are simply too big to let us have the globe to ourselves. [...]

The question, then, is not whether a multipolar world will arise, but how we will react to it. We can, as many of the neoconservatives advocate, react with fear and suspicion, viewing the power of others as a threat to ourselves. [...] We can, in other words, create a zero-sum international competition with all the attendant risks and consequences.

Or we can see the arrival of other powers as a positive-sum development. We can realize that just as Japan benefits from the internet created in America, so too can we benefit from advances discovered in China, Brazil, and Germany. A cancer cure developed in Singapore can save lives in South Dakota, an energy technology discovered in Germany can cut emissions in Georgia. And on a global political level, we can see these emergent powers as protectors and guarantors of regional stability and progress who will do much to better their own regions and reduce the sort of chaos that could spin beyond borders and across continents.

Liberals see opportunities for cooperation, while conservatives see nothing but competition.

See Newsweek for an excerpt from the book.

Ezra Klein discusses the French presidential election and that country's love of leisure time:

The apparent popularity of the 35-hour workweek, though, deserves some attention — as does the French mandate of 5 weeks of vacation. The French like not working incessantly. They are consciously sacrificing a bit of economic growth in order to devote more time to leisure. It's a perfectly legitimate choice for a society to make. But it's never represented that way in domestic punditry, as we exclusively evaluate policy decisions based on their effects on measurable economic indicators. [...]

I'd give up a lot for a guaranteed five weeks of vacation. That's time enough to vacation with friends, and regularly see my family, and take the occasional long weekend. Indeed, I'd love to see an economist model what that would cost us. It would have to be an almost unimaginably high number to dissuade me from taking the deal.

It's rare that I read an opinion piece in the mainstream media anymore that's startlingly creative and original. But TIME Magazine's Person of the Year is someone that nobody ever would have guessed.

America loves its solitary geniuses — its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses — but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

AP:

Americans question the ability of the United States to create democracy in other countries, and are divided on whether successful efforts could even make the U.S. safer, according to a poll released Thursday.

Only 36 percent of those surveyed by the Public Agenda Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index believe the U.S. can help spread democracy — a major objective for the Bush administration in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.

"People do regard it as a desirable goal," Public Agenda Chairman Daniel Yankelovich said. "But from a common sense point of view, both Democrats and Republicans have concluded that democracy is something that countries come to on their own."