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John C. Goodman

Five Financial Secrets to Surviving the Greatest Depression

Five Financial Secrets to Surviving the Greatest Depression

Here is the most important: Cut Your Spending and Tap Your Retirement Account Assets. Suppose you expect to be furloughed or laid off for the next two years. Using Prof. Laurence Kotlikoff’s one-of-its-kind life time financial planning software, you can adjust your annual spending downward by an appropriate amount and make two withdrawals from your IRA to tide you over. The CARES act lets you do this without penalty.

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Barry Asmus, RIP

Barry Asmus, RIP

Barry Asmus, who died March 30, 2020, studied at Montana State University, where he was mentored by economists at PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center. He picked up his appreciation of the free market from them (Richard Stroup was his thesis adviser). While Barry didn’t enter the environmental field, he became an advocate for the free market.

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Gorman: US Hospitals are Safer

Gorman: US Hospitals are Safer

A frequent criticism of US hospitals is the charge of excessive adverse medical events,  sometimes leading to avoidable deaths. How do our hospitals compare to hospitals in national health care systems? Quite well. The percent of patients who experience an adverse event is twice as high in Canada, three times as high in Britain and four times as high in New Zealand. 

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America will Become a Nation of Savers

America will Become a Nation of Savers

The effect of the coronavirus pandemic on our sense of economic confidence will have everything to do with how long we are stuck inside, how long we are out of work, and what safety nets fail us in the interim. Even if stay-at-home orders are mostly “over” by this summer, how many of us would risk our lives to frequent restaurants or go shopping?

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Where Did the Paycheck Protection Money Go?

Where Did the Paycheck Protection Money Go?

Bank of America has been giving priority to large corporations who have connections to officials at the Bank who will process their loans in front of the line. Those large corporations are in far better shape to weather this, the Greatest Depression, than virtually all truly small companies for whom the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funding and forgiveness represents the difference between economic life and death.

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Study: Liberate Prescription Drugs

Study: Liberate Prescription Drugs

The mainstream media had a field day condemning Donald Trump for promoting off-label uses of prescription drugs to treat the coronavirus. So what do you expect to happen when a drug is “proven”? Did you know that “approved” drugs work only half the time? What about “unproven” drugs? Did you know that as many as one in five drugs in use in the United States has been prescribed for an off-label purpose? Roughly one-half of all cancer patients are relying on off-label prescriptions. Much of what doctors know they learn by trial and error – outside of FDA tests.

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Herrick: Could Free-Market Medicine Respond Better to Pandemics?

Herrick: Could Free-Market Medicine Respond Better to Pandemics?

Many people have come to believe that the only way to protect Americans against future pandemics is to turn over control of our health care system to the government. The folly of this view was apparent when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) utterly failed as the monopoly supplier of COVID-19 diagnostic testing kits. When the first cases appeared, about half of the test kits failed and replacements were slow in coming.

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How COVID-19 Is Changing The Debate Over Health Reform

How COVID-19 Is Changing The Debate Over Health Reform

A revolution is occurring in the way medical care is being delivered in the United States. It is happening almost overnight. People have stopped going to hospital emergency rooms. They have stopped going to doctors’ offices. Most of the nation is self-isolating. Doctors and patients are no exception. They are communicating by means of phone, email, Skype, Zoom and other devices. Last December, Zoom was the host of 10 million video conferences a day. Last week, the company was hosting 200 million a day. Many of those were patient/doctor communications.

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How Do We Ration Health Care When We Really Have To Do It?

How Do We Ration Health Care When We Really Have To Do It?

I suspect that behind a veil of ignorance, you would choose rationing rules that favor people who are doing the most to improve the lives of other people. And I think this is what the health professionals do as well. Prospects for survival are important because the better the prospects, the more likely the patient is to contribute to social welfare as a whole. Age is important, because the more years of life the patient has left, the more opportunities there will be to make such contributions.

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