“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Dean Baker: The Latest Assault on Science (and It’s Not From Donald Trump)
It looks like we are going to get a lesson later this month on how politics interferes with science at the annual meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA), the decision-making body of the World Health Organization (WHO). The Indian government has proposed a motion, which would have the WHO prepare a report on the research into the efficiency of patents as a financing mechanism for prescription drugs and vaccines compared with alternative financing mechanisms. The latter would include government sponsored prize funds and directly funded research.
The reason why this is an important and interesting question is that the current method of financing research by granting patent monopolies leads to situations where drugs often cost several hundred times their free market price. For example, the Hepatitis C drug Sovaldi has a list price in the United States of $84,000. A high quality generic version is available in India for $300.
The result of these monopolies is that people struggle to cover the cost of drugs which would be cheap if sold in a free market. Even in cases where governments or insurers are supposed to cover drugs, many balk when the price runs into the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, as is the case with many new cancer drugs. While the monopoly prices are a serious burden even in rich countries, they are altogether unaffordable in the developing world.
Michael Bloomberg: Trump’s promise to bring back coal jobs is worse than a con
“We need to keep it open so we have jobs.” Those are the words of a retired miner, explaining why the local mining operation is so important to his community. But he wasn’t talking about a coal mine in Appalachia. He was referring to a local asbestos mine — in Russia.
Through the 1970s, the United States was one of the world’s top producers of asbestos, which is a set of naturally occurring silicate minerals. As evidence mounted that exposure to asbestos fibers can be deadly, the federal government began limiting its use in consumer and commercial products. Demand for asbestos declined, legal liabilities soared, and the last U.S. asbestos mine closed in 2002. Those jobs have gone overseas, to places such as Russia, China and Kazakhstan, where asbestos mining and production face few restrictions. Yet there has been no political clamor to put American asbestos miners back to work.
Now consider the coal industry. Pollution from coal-fired power plants kills about 7,500 Americans each year, according to the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group. That number is down from 13,000 in 2010 for a simple reason: Two hundred and fifty-one of the nation’s 523 coal plants have since closed or are being phased out. This decline has been driven by a combination of two powerful forces: cheaper alternative fuels (such as natural gas and renewable energy) and rising consumer demand for cleaner energy that won’t pollute the air and water that communities breathe and drink
Richard Wolffe: Congratulations, Mr President, on your wild romp through all norms and rules
Donald Trump has notched up some truly impressive achievements in the first 100 days of his presidency. We’re not talking about the humdrum stuff of other presidents. All those pesky to-do lists are far too conventional for this out-of-the-box thinker.
How unconventional is his thinking? It’s best if we leave it to the great man to explain this, as he described to the Associated Press the awesome nature of his presidency.
“Well the one thing I would say – and I say this to people – I never realized how big it was,” he said, when asked how the office has changed him. “You know the orders are so massive … Number one, there’s great responsibility. When it came time to, as an example, send out the 59 missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria, I’m saying to myself, ‘You know, this is more than just like 79 [sic] missiles. This is death that’s involved.’ Because people could have been killed.”
Jonathan Cohn: Obamacare Repeal Is Really Just A Giant $1 Trillion Cut To Health Care Programs
Republicans are trying very hard to disguise what the American Health Care Act would actually do.
They keep insisting their bill, which would repeal the Affordable Care Act, would “lower premiums and improve access to quality, affordable care,” as House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) put it last month.
Any time analysts point out the ways in which those promises are misleading or false ― or cite the Congressional Budget Office prediction that the AHCA would leave about 24 million people without health insurance ― Republicans insist that a combination of new tax credits, state innovation, and so-called high-risk pools will take care of people better than the current system does.
This is not true. And perhaps the clearest evidence is in those CBO numbers.
Richard Eskow: Who’s Behind the Billionaire PAC Targeting Elizabeth Warren?
America Rising, a billionaire-backed conservative group, is targeting Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as she tours the country in support of her new book, according to a memo obtained by Politico.
“We view (the) book launch as the soft launch of her presidential campaign,” said executive director Colin Reed. “We’ll do the same to her as we did with Hillary Clinton in 2014,” Reed added.
America Rising’s backers would stand to lose some cushy tax breaks and regulatory favors if the progressive policies advocated by Sen. Warren were enacted. For her part, Warren denies that she’s running for the presidency and notes that this is her 11th book.
America Rising is tracking a number of potential contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, and Sen. Kamala Harris of California.
The group appears to be taking special interest in Warren, however. Reed’s memo cites her “enormous sway” over the party and describes her – inaccurately – as its “titular head.” (Reed does not appear to know what the word “titular” means.)
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