When I think of how much interest a person pays in a lifetime on debt of any kind…

We hope to be mortgage free in under 10 years and able to help our children be mortgage free when they buy their first homes so they can do the same for their children.

No economic downturn will take away my house and car!!!

So hopefully for me there will be no need for any credit market.

Surely you jest.

I don’t agree that it follows they get a better deal. I also don’t believe that infant mortality rate is a good place to look to measure care. When I was living in Canada there was a small crisis because all the moms were mad that they could not get an OB to see them without an emergency (there was a shortage of OB’s, you can figure out why). The only prenatal care available for many was through midwifes if they could find one. Still, they had lower infant mortality than the US.

There are lots of inputs into outcomes that get warped when you compare countries. The best solution for the US is not socialization, it’s doing what works best in the US, actual market forces (not contrived ones).

Lastly, what’s good for Toyota is not necessarily good for Japan. A weak yen means they pay more for imports, and they import a good deal of things. Most of us would not be happy living in an average Japanese home.

“Believe me, those boys are good!”

One of the biggest factors in Japan’s defeat in WWII was the US unrestricted submarine campaign. Much like the U-boat campaign against Britain, the US destroyed Japan’s merchant marine fleet, crippling the supply of raw materials to their indrustry. Japan was very late to employ the tactics that the British and Americans used against the U-boats (convoy system, destroyer escorts, maritime patrol aircraft) until too late to make a difference.

They have learned from their past mistakes and have one of the most effective if not the most effective anti-submarine technologies anywhere. I would not want to go up against them, even in an American sub. During the cold war the Soviets would have been at an extreme disadvantage if hostilities had broken out.

No, most of it comes from spending money on bureaucracy. The US spends more money deciding who, when, how much and why someone should see care, as well as should pay for it and who is to blame, and where all the paper goes, then on simply providing carte-blanche care.

The example above of the “simple’ bill from Japanese is apropos. Where the US (and now Canada, the UK, and to a lesser degree France) are suffering is due to administrative creep. Once you start nickel-and-diming healthcare, you fatally undermine the premise of the system.

Ideologues like to pardon the US system on the grounds that it’s users are morally “weak”, but the problem isn’t the users, it’s the system. What is killing the US system (and the people who use it) is overhead costs, not the net costs of service.

You see this in industry, as well. We do business with GM and Toyota, and the amount of administrative bullshit that you have to wade through in order to deal with GM is astonishing. With Toyota, it’s much, much easier.

“So when will someone give me the cost per country for the healthcare of the workers in those auto companies I asked about?

Or should I hold my breath on that?”

Keep holding your breath, because your premise is false. You can’t compare US auto companies healthcare with any other workers, foreign or domestic, because US auto workers (UAW) have healthcare like no other. No premiums, no deductibles, no co-pays. That is because of the contracts they negiotiated for, struck for, and got mgt to cave in for.

Instead compare it to my insurance. I pay a monthly premium for family coverage to participate in a PPO. I have an out of pocket deductible and a copay of 20% until my yearly charges reach a certain amount. Then it’s no copay (100% paid for) up to 1 million a year. I I go to a doctor out of the network it’s still covered but for less, which means more out of my pocket.

If you want to compare that to the Jpanese I will be happy to give you the numbers.

Two comments about US health care: You can’t get the cost down as long as the lawyers are allowed to sue everyone and everything AND make the “deep” pockets of the insurance companies pay for those lawsuits (which they pass on to us).
And comparing obesity rates to Asian countries is silly. You’re talking about two different racial makeups. And while I believe that all races and genders have equal rights, I do not believe we are exactly the same. Asians have an advantage over whites, blacks, and Hispanics when it comes to body fat. Some is diet, some is cultural, some is genetics. You should also note that it is invariably the poor in this country that are obese because cheaper food is usually fattening food. Fast food is cheaper than Ruth Crist’s, but it will also make you fatter.

Far more, far smarter, far more powerful people have vested interest in status quo, for healthcare.

It is killing the entire economy, far worse then Detroit could ever do.

We are the undisputed world leader is self poisonous healthcare system. Its pretty good at emergency intervention and at making new drugs, and not much else, while its killing the country’s economy with its stratospheric costs.

AND no fix I have seen suggested in last ten years will dial its costs down to world normal levels.

“The average North American colonist, it has been claimed, had a standard of living not significantly superior to that of the average Chinese peasant cultivator. Indeed, in many ways the Chinese civilization of the Ming era was more sophisticated than that of early Massachusetts … Yet, between 1700 and 1950 there was ‘a great divergence’ of living standards between East and West. While China may have suffered an absolute decline in per capita income in that period, the societies of the North West – in particular Britain and its colonial offshoots – experienced unprecedented growth thanks, in large part, to the impact of the industrial revolution. By 1820 per capita income in the United States was roughly twice that of China; by 1870, nearly five times higher; by 1913 nearly ten times; by 1950 nearly twenty-two times.
The average annual growth rate of per capita GDP in the Unites States was 1.57 per cent between 1820 and 1950. The equivalent figure for China was -0.24 per cent. In 1973, the average Chinese income was at best one twentieth of the average American … as recently as 2006, the ratio of US to Chinese per capita income (calculated in terms of international dollars at market exchange rates) was still 22.9:1.”

We’re now in the process of dialing back on what’s been achieved in the West, in a desperate attempt to remain competitive with emerging markets.
According to one researcher, we should look at what life was like in the industrialized West in the 1890-1920 period – ignoring WWI, for what kind of sustainable living level the planet can support, if everyone is going to have the same lifestyle. For billions of people around the world, this represents a great leap ahead, for which they are willing to work for less money than we spend on chewing gum per day.

Interesting times ahead, and people really should be trying to find common ground, instead of rallying around trite polemic.

Japan as you see it today was engineered by two American men: Douglas MacArthur and Edward Deming. And MacArthur was entirely engineered by his mother, who rented an apartment with a view of “Dugout Doug”’s West Point room so she could verify that he was actually studying every night.

So, if you have any problems with Japan, talk to MacArthur’s mom. It’s her fault. Those panty-vending machines? Definitely her fault, although the streamlined system for getting panties directly from the naughty bits of putative schoolgirls to the hermetically sealed packages comes straight from the Deming playbook.

These Japanese submarines sound very kawaii but once the Chinese reduce the major islands to radioactive rubble, they won’t have anywhere to refuel, which somewhat limits their effectiveness.

You’re right about the Japanese Navy – vastly underrated.

Problem with AIP technology is that sooner or later, the sub HAS to come up. And when it does, it makes noise, regardless of the propulsion system.

The way to defeat them would be to drop a lot of active-sonar buoys, I’d think.

Your powers of analysis are overcoming your argument. Even talking points, when seen together, should make sense.
The predilection for making opaque claims, that are badly researched and founded in irreality, is one of the reasons why the US car industry is in deep dodo. You rarely solve your own problems by complaining about something that is both unconnected and misperceived.

As to Toyota.

Toyota scaled for a more car hungry world – they now have excess capacity, and have a variety of long term contracts for parts and commodities entered into when the world was hungry.
It’s sucking into their bottom line.

While the media show headlines about “the banking crisis being over,” we haven’t even seen the beginning of the financial crisis about to strike business activity in general and households in toto.
And yes, the entire world has been happily shipping products to a US only too willing to finance credit with credit with credit.

It’s been an age of irresponsibility all around.

My wife takes a certain medication that costs $700 without insurance. Our copay used to be $60 before we went on self employed insurance. She has been taking it for four years. We asked whether there was a generic equivalent, but were told by the pharmacist there was none.

As a result of the change in insurance, our copays for medicine went through the roof. So I googled the medication to see if there was a generic.

As it turns out, the $700-a-month medication she was taking – the one that our pharmacist said there there couldn’t possibly be a generic for – is a time-release form of a generic drug that costs $10 – WITHOUT INSURANCE – for a three month supply. The only difference was that instead of taking the medication once a cay, she’d take the medication three times a day, with the same effect.

Again, my wife has been taking this medication for FOUR YEARS. Running the numbers:

Our copay ($60 * 48) = $2,880
Cost to the insurance company: ($700 * 48 – $2,880) = $31,320.
Total cost for four years: $33,600

Total cost for the supposedly non-existent generic for the same four years: $159.84

Does it take a nobel laureate in economics to comment on what’s wrong with that picture, or deduce why health care costs are so high? If there are 1,000 people taking that same medication with no knowledge of a generic, that’s tens of millions of dollars literally burned up. And insurance companies pay for it all, which drives up our premiums.

In the meantime, I switched pharmacies after a VERY nasty conversation with the pharmacy manager for shaking us down for four years. She assured me that she had no idea that there was another way of taking that medication that would have saved us and the insurance company all that money, and became rather annoyed when I told her that it was me who found the generic, after a whole four minutes on the Internet. At that point, her statements took on a distinct “my legal department says to tell you this and that” tone.

If I were you, I’d make a list of EVERY medication you take and look up the generic equivalent. Your pharmacist has NO motivation whatsoever to save you money.

Believe me, those boys are good!

I attribute this to much of Toyota’s growth in the USA. The quality was great, but then promotions, product overlap and brand corrosive decisions (BOF trucks and SUVs?) got them where they are today.

Still, this is Toyota we are talking about. I expect they will prune models (brands?), factories, etc faster than anyone else in the coming months. Well maybe not GM during CH11, but you get my point.

Yet despite the spending, we don’t get much bang for the buck. We should be getting results well above everyone else, when you consider how much money that we dump into that rathole, yet we don’t.

And yet Medicare and Medicaid also spend a lot more than national health care plans in other countries. Medicare spends similar amounts to private health care plans for the elderly. So regardless of how true your statement is, I have no reason to expect that a US national health system would be any different from Medicare in its spending.

Much of the extra US spending comes from a tendency to prescribe the latest medicines and use the latest technology. Much of the rest comes from engaging in heroic efforts either at the end of life or at the beginning (for premature babies), or for rare diseases. None of those things are particularly efficient in terms of bang for the buck, but neither do I expect that the political process would be able to restrain them, either. Indeed, the political realities in this country are much more likely to force hospitals to use the latest and greatest treatments and to force insurance companies to cover them.

A smattering of the rest comes from issues like higher rates of obesity and poor diet (and low birth weight infants) that are only tangentially related the what we consider the health system, and wouldn’t be affected by a national health care plan.

Yet despite the spending, we don’t get much bang for the buck. We should be getting results well above everyone else, when you consider how much money that we dump into that rathole, yet we don’t.

Americans seem to have some sort of pathological denial about how poorly our system performs. On a micro level, we have some great physicians and some of the world’s best schools, but on a macro level, many people are left behind and receive no or a deeply rationed form of care. We already have the sort of rationing that people allegedly fear. When people are dying for lack of treatment while so much money gets spent, that’s rationing in its worst form.

In ‘05, Japan spent 8.2% of GDP on health care, or $2908 per person.

In ‘07, US spent 15.2% of GDP on health care, or $7439 per person.

US spends about double or more of what other developed countries spend (Europe, Japan).

Wonder if that will be America’s downfall, at least in certain areas???

No. Absolute bunk.

In most of Asia, the group is more important than the individual.

In Japan, sekentei, or reputation, is very strong. It is like a religion. Failure is bad for your sekentai, success enhances it. You want to be part of a group that is reputable. If your company makes a famous product, you get some of the fame. If your company fails, you share the shame. The old system of the lifelong employment with one company, which is your family, is broken. People get fired. Which is a shock, both economically as well as to ones reputation. Suicide after getting fired is high.

All of this has nothing to do with nationalistic pride or the lack of a military. That “glorified police force” has Aegis destroyers and Patriot missiles. It’s a formidable 200K force, an army in police clothing.

That’s kind of hard to answer…. in the militaristic ‘conquering’ sense, I’d say “No”.World War II pretty well burned that out of them. In terms of wanting their businesses to ‘defeat’ other countries, I’d say “No” again…
I don’t think the idea of selling more cars than GM is a huge motivator for Toyota. They’re happy they did it, but it’s not an overwhelming goal that I’m aware of anyhow.

But the Japanese are a group culture, and have a strong sense of pride in their history – “Yamato-damashii” (The soul of old Japan) in the same sort of way Americans are proud of their wild-west history. So in terms of preferring to be Japanese rather than any other nationality, Yes.

In business, historically, there has been lifetime employment, so your fate really is linked to your company’s fate. A lot of your pay is in the form of bonuses and you only get the bonus in years when business has been good. There’s also a sense of pride and comfort in belonging to a good company. In status terms, I’ve heard it said that, “It’s better to be a janitor for Toyota than president of your own company”.

This has been changing though, as Japan Inc. has started to adopt ‘American’ business practices. To avoid hiring employees for life, there’s been a practice for a decade or so of hiring part-timers or ‘Freeters’ so that the companies don’t have to give benefits or permanent employment. In some ways, the culture has adapted, and the lone-wolf ronin (Samuri without a master)
has become an OK thing to be among the young.

I don’t think this bodes well, in the long run, for Japan, but they have other problems anyhow. Among them, is the fall of the marriage rate, and the fall of the population replacement rate (no kids!).

Japan as a country is sort of slowly going out of bisiness, as the population gets old.

Not to flame with a rather dumb question but would you say there is a still a sense of nationalistic pride mover in Japan? Since they were destroyed militarily, do the workers put their pride into their companies rather than into the military or something political? Obviously, their military is basically a glorified police force, maybe by serving in an international company such as Toyota they are bringing Japan’s might to foreign shores???