Second Short Quiz

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johnkarls
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Second Short Quiz

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Second Short Quiz


1. Have Dana Milbank (Washington Post OpEd Columnist 2000-present, syndicated in more than 200 newspapers) and Robert Kuttner (Business Week Columnist 1984-2005) been essential guides to our understanding of American politics since we studied for our 2/14/2008 meeting 9.5 years ago their newly-minted best-sellers “Homo Politicus: The Strange and Scary Tribes That Run Our Government” and “The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity” -- because the thesis of both Messrs. Milbank and Kuttner was that NOTHING is done (or NOT done) in the cesspool known as Washington DC except as the result of campaign contributions which comprise EITHER bribery of the pols OR extortion by the pols?

2. Does the way “the cesspool known as Washington DC” works mean that U.S. Governmental decisions COST only a few cents on the dollar of the value of those decisions -- IF, INDEED, THE COSTS ARE NOT A ROUNDING ERROR THAT ROUNDS DOWN TO ZERO???

3. Does our current author, Elisabeth Rosenthal, state (p. 198) that the Medical Industry “has become the country’s biggest lobbying force” listing 2015 lobbying expenditures as --

(A) Medical Industry - $500 million
(B) Oil & Gas Industry - $130 million
(C) Securities & Investment Firms - $100 million
(D) Defense/Aerospace Industry - $75 million

4. Does anyone think for a moment that the $500 million of lobbying expenses by the Medical Industry was NOT spent by lobbyists for doctors, hospitals, drug companies, medical-device manufacturers, insurance companies, etc.?

5. In other words, does anyone think for a moment that even a single dollar of the $500 million was spent on lobbying on behalf of patients/citizens???

6. So why is it any surprise that, as our author reports, hospital corporations have gobbled up all of their competitors in vast areas of the country (e.g., Sutter Health has a near monopoly in Northern California and charges 160% of the national average for its services) WITHOUT ANYONE BATTING AN EYELASH AT WHAT WOULD, WHEN YOURS TRULY ATTENDED LAW SCHOOL 50 YEARS AGO, HAVE BEEN A CLEAR-CUT VIOLATION OF THE NATION’S ANTI-TRUST LAWS???

7. And why do hospital corporations qualify for “non profit” tax-exempt status when virtually all of them lavish money on UNNEEDED EQUIPMENT and indeed on NON-MEDICAL ITEMS SUCH AS FINE ART TO ADORN OPULENT PUBLIC AREAS???

8. And even if the expenditures of “non profit” tax-exempt corporations were actually “ordinary and necessary” (the test of deductibility for commercial corporations), why are the corporations considered “non profit” simply because they call their profit “operating surplus”???

9. Who was Jimmy Ling?

10. Did Jimmy Ling assemble the commercial behemoth Ling-Tempco-Vought (“LTV”) during the 1960’s when Wall Street placed astronomical price-earnings ratios on the stock value of conglomerates because of the belief that stand-alone companies would have business cycles that would NOT permit steady growth in “earnings per share” from one quarter to the next -- but that the earnings cycles of the various components of a conglomerate would offset each other and produce a steady growth in quarterly EPS?

11. Was the acquisition strategy of LTV that since its stock commanded such a high price-earnings ratio, it could simply acquire for LTV stock, ordinary companies whose stock had, of course, average price-earnings ratios -- AND PRESTO, the market would suddenly value the earnings of the acquired company at LTV’s astronomical price-earnings ratio rather than its former pedestrian price-earnings ratio?

12. Did Jimmy Ling’s successful run of more than a decade come to a screeching halt when Wall Street discovered that NOT ONLY had Jimmy Ling failed to manage the companies he acquired, BUT THAT HE HAD NOT EVEN KEPT A LIST OF THEM!!!???

13. Are the acquisitions by today’s hospital behomoths reminiscent of Jimmy Ling because they can make EXHORBITANT PROFITS by simply gobbling up smaller hospitals and then causing them to charge BEHOMOTH FEES???

14. Do drug companies routinely practice “product hopping” which is described (p. 109) as making a small change in a drug with an about-to-expire patent (for example, changing to “chewable” form), patenting the new small/insignificant-change form, and discontinuing the old form?

15. Would such a small/insignificant change in form such as a “chewable” version be considered a “patentable” idea WHEN YOURS TRULY ATTENDED LAW SCHOOL 50 YEARS AGO???

16. Do drug companies routinely make “pay for delay” contracts with generic manufacturers (p. 113) WHICH WOULD HAVE BEEN CLEAR-CUT VIOLATIONS OF THE NATION’S ANTI-TRUST LAWS WHEN YOURS TRULY ATTENDED LAW SCHOOL 50 YEARS AGO???

17. According to our author (p. 120), do drug companies routinely acquire manufacturers of their generic-drug competitors and shut them down IN WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN CLEAR-CUT VIOLATIONS OF THE NATION’S ANTI-TRUST LAWS WHEN YOURS TRULY ATTENDED LAW SCHOOL 50 YEARS AGO???

18. Is a major theme of Chapter 5 – Medical Devices (pp. 128-147) which is echoed throughout the remainder of the book that NO FDA TRIALS AND APPROVAL are required [per a notorious “Sec. 510(k)” introduced, per our author (p. 132), by 1976 Amendments to the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act] so long as they are “substantially equivalent” to a device already sold in the United States for the same purpose?

19. Does Sec. 510(k) HAVE NO POLICING so that virtually all devices come to market WITHOUT FDA TRIALS OR APPROVAL even though they might be implanted in the human body (e.g., a pacemaker) or even though their impact might be “life-threatening or life-sustaining”!!!???

20. Does our author claim that medical-device manufacturers play all of the same anti-competitive games that are played by the pharmaceutical companies?

21. Does our author report (pp. 190-192) that virtually all doctors buy each year The Physician’s Desk Reference (“PDR”) which is their “Bible” which lists doses, side effects, half-lives, chemical structures, and results of clinical trials of all approved medicines?

22. Does our author report that in 2012, Medical Economics (the publisher of the PDR) decided to add for each drug’s listing, a list of similar drugs and the price for each?

23. Did this result in an acquisition of Medical Economics by LDM Group (“a leading pharmaceutical marketing company” per our author) which immediately killed the new plan for listing similar drugs and the price for each -- AND INSTEAD MADE THE PDR A LUCRATIVE REPOSITORY OF DRUG ADVERTISING (the PDR previously having been a catalogue without any advertising)?

24. Does our author report (p. 23) that the income of doctors has increased 55% between 1997 and 2012 while the average income of the rest of America was declining?

25. Does our author report (p. 57) that 27.2% of all doctors are in the top 1% of wealthiest Americans?

26. Does she also report that this has nothing to do with the cost of medical education because those costs can be liquidated quickly on a typical doctor’s income?

27. Indeed, does she report that the original purpose of the American Medical Association (AMA) had been to limit the size of the nation’s medical schools in order to maintain high incomes for doctors?

28. So is it surprising that, courtesy of the monopoly practices of the AMA as permitted by “the cesspool known as Washington DC,” medicine is such a lucrative profession -- when, as noted in Q&A-8 and Q&A-9 of the First Short Quiz, being a doctor was considered “women’s work” in the Old Soviet Union, as a result of which Soviet doctors were paid LESS THAN grade-school teachers?

29. So based on the way “the cesspool known as Washington DC” works, is anyone surprised that --

(A) The percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that America spends on healthcare “is more than twice the average of developed countries” (p. 2 of our focus book)???

(B) The United Nation’s World Health Organization ranks “the health system performance” of the U.S. as 37th in the world even though the world has only 35 developed countries -- WHICH MEANS THAT THERE ARE AT LEAST TWO THIRD-WORLD COUNTRIES WHOSE HEALTH SYSTEM PERFORMANCE IS BETTER THAN THE U.S. (p. 247)???

30. Isn’t it time for America to oppose “the cesspool known as Washington DC” in order to obtain a single-payer (“Medicare for all”) system in order to call a halt to all these travesties?

31. And if wealthy Americans refuse to “love their neighbors as themselves” and permit such a system to be funded by a progressive income tax like many developed countries, then isn’t it time to have a single-payer (Medicare for all) system financed by a regressive gasoline tax like the remaining developed countries of the civilized world?

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