I live in the US. I have talked to my doctors, and they have all told me that if I paid cash, I could get a 1/3 discount because they wouldn't have to deal with the insurance companies. They also told me that 1/3 to 1/2 their staff is there only to deal with insurance companies.

I despise the inefficiency involved.

Yet I have worked with Brits, for example, who despair of the quality of dental care they got in Britain. (They mention that because it's a common medical treatment, not something that only happens when you get sick or hurt). One of the first things they do when they come here is get all sorts of dental work fixed because the British variant was so shoddy.

I have also heard stories of waiting lists for common procedures which are unavailable in other countries, and people who come to the US because they can pay to get it immediately.

I don't doubt that the US system sucks and could be much better. I'd love to be able to choose my own doctor, not have to carry that damned insurance card with me, and just get on with taking care of business. I'd love to have insuarnce companies leave my doctor to choose the doctoring, not their rules and regs and incompetent clerks. I'd think it just grand if everyone got some basic medical care and didn't have to put things off and avoid checkups because they don't have insurance, and end up in emergency rooms with bills which everyone knows will end up being paid for by taxpayers.

But from all I have heard from people who lived elsewhere and now live here, they hate the medical system they left.

So when I read articles like this which talk only of the bad of the US syetem and make all the others seem so wonderful, I really wonder if the auther has any clue as to the subject, and I wonder what the hidden agenda is. They come off sounding like Rush, spouting slogans and regurgitating talking points but with no hint of understanding to glue it all together.

I find it amazing that Asterisk is only mentioned en passant. That would be just about the first step I would take.

You complained about putting "windshear" in quotes in this:

low-level turbulence or 'wind shear,'

then wrote this just a few paragraphs later:

that helps control a plane's nose-up, nose-down motion, or "pitch."

Tsk tsk ...

Google for national debt, and among the first ten results you will find numerous links showing the same thing: National debt decreased following WW II under all presidents, but as oon as Regan replaced Carter, it shot up, ditto under Bush 41, sort of leveled off under Clinton, and shot up again under Bush 43.

Don't peddle that "Reagan slashed spending" crap here.

Yeah he's a nut. Anyone who kills except in self-defense is nuts by definition.

And yeah, the GOP is fomenting all the nasty attitude they can, contrary to their bleatings about personal responsibility,

But Democrats would love to take guns away if they could get away with it, quite contrary to the constitution. Change "guns" to "printing presses" (they are both integral to the constitution) in all the Democratic rhetoric over the last 50 years and see how scary that sounds. If printing presses had the same restrictions as guns, we wouldn't have freedom of the press in any real practical sense.

If Democrats would come out in defense of the second amendment as much as they defend the first, they'd take the wind right out of the sails of the right wing nutjobs.

Most murders are bad guys by bad guys. But they are only bad guys by definition of the war on some drugs.

You know, prohibition didn't work. The war on some drugs doesn't work. What makes anyone think outlawing guns will work?

The gun haters love to confuse people about assault weapons. The legal definition is so hokey and ridiculous as to be fraud anywhere else. They talk about machine guns and grenades and say we must ban assault weaposn, which turn out to be just ordinary rifles, not machine guns, completely aside from the fact that machine guns and grenades are not exactly common criminal tools. The list of guns banned by the current and previous bans has banned models that differ from legal models only by name, by meaningless features (bayonet lug? When was the last time ANYBODY was hurt by a criminal wielding a bayonet?), or by contorted logic (I have a rifle that is illegal if I put a 30 round magazine in it which is hard to swap, but legal if I make that 30 round magazine easy to swap). That wacko New York widow now in Congress had a press conference announcing her new bill which banned barrel shrouds, and when pressed by reporters to explain what that is, she finally admitted she didn't know, but they had to be banned as evil. Look it up on Youtube, it's quite pathetic. Fact: there is no such device. It's not even a made up term like "assault weapon", which didn't exist until made up by gun haters. It's a complete phony term. How can anyone introduce legislation banning something which doesn't exist?

There's gun haters' logic for you. A perfectly anti-cromulent word enbiggened for no reason yet treated seriously.

M. Reader du Proofs at your service

If that figure is true, it's more of an argument that government regulation isn't the major mover.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.