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The story of Al Thani Emir of Qatar and Qatar's impact on the Middle East using its LNG resources. He led the country from 1995 to 2013  when Qatar set up the state airline, a television network Al-Jazeera, and the US base Al-Udeid, gaining a presence in the Middle East through its LNG supplies.  North Dome is the huge gas field in Qatar. In contrast to Saudi policy and UAE policy Qatar supported the Muslim Brotherhood and the Arab Spring movements. When these movements lost momentum Qatar continued its own foreign policy in competition with the Saudis and UAE.  Native Arab Qataris are only 330,000 out of a population of 3.1 million in Qatar, the rest mostly South Asians. There are 25,000 Britishers in Qatar. The South Asians are underpaid workers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka who built the soccer stadiums during the World Cup 2022. The discovery of oil and gas has changed the region and created a region with this kind of population mix with wide disparities in income and wealth. As late as 1998 the GDP was only $10 billion growing to $115 billion by 2008 and $208 billion in 2025. ...

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US collapsed against Belgium. Brazil lost to Paraguay. Argentina trailed Egypt for most of the 90 minutes only to recover with 3 goals in the last 20 minutes and the winning goal in overtime. Messi almost in tears, moved by the near failure of Argentina till the last minutes of the game gave a miraculous reprieve. One by one the highly advertised on television in the US teams and stars, from US's Pulisic, Mexican soccer players, Messi, Brazil's Neymar and Vinicius Jr, are all in shock. Less advertised, less well known players are making their way, and this may be a good thing as the advertising has gone overboard. Companies were pouring money into these ads turning the  players into constant presence in ads and creating an atmosphere that is not healthy for soccer as a sport. One just hopes France's Mbappe with his humility and quiet demeanor doesn't get into one more noisy ad on television like the others. Is Christiano Ronaldo, the little kid from Madeira, Portugal, coming out of nowhere at that time, a billionaire? Is Messi also from remote town of Rosario, Santa Fe province, Argentina, a billionaire? This doesn't do much for the sport. Germany's best goal scorer in this World Cup only dreamed of not having to do two jobs, and having a steady career, after struggling for a long period. There is something in this World Cup that has brought previously unknown players from unknown places like Cabo Verde to the forefront on world television, including the Egyptian and Moroccan players, the players from other smaller countries. Even the English players in the Premier League playing for England look good by comparison. ...

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The European Union is about to ban social media platforms from accessing children under age 13. This is how Ursula Van Leyen puts it - it is not about children accessing social media, it is about social media platforms accessing our children, says Leyen. She will announce this in her address to the European Union in September. A new report by a psychologist Fegert and an epidemiologist Melchior comes to the conclusion that social media is harmful for children, not just under 13 years, restrictions should be placed on 13 to 18 year olds also to prevent infinite scrolling and other addictive features. Australia has announced a ban setting the age at 16 years. Britain is tightening its ban. France is planning to ban setting the age at 16. The following countries are about to do this- Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, India, Indonesia and Malaysia. When the EU announces a ban it will apply to all of Europe. In the US Florida passed a ban setting age at 14 years. Across Europe children spend 4 to 6 hours on social media a day and for 60% of children it is having harmful effects on emotional health and creating psychosocial problems for children. It also affects the education, the reading comprehension of children as less books are read, and a whole new generation of children is growing up in a way that was never before seen in the Modern period where books and reading were a key aspect of modern society for the last 200 years. ...

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Satya Nadella - "we have to get society's permission" for what is done with AI. Nadella has an approach to AI to keep each company's human knowledge capital separate from AI, as its most valuable component of its operations. In the world he visualizes AI frontier models OpenAI, Gemini(Google) and Anthropic's Claude won't just keep saying they will use up all the resources they can use leaving little for education, healthcare and public services or infrastructure, and keep saying it will destroy all entry level and other white collar jobs, and the world will put up with that. His approach is to bring AI at a cost level that is much lower,including incorporating Chinese models for cost effectiveness. And at the same time making AI supplement each company's human capital working side by side so that jobs can be enhanced not destroyed willy nilly, in a careless random, disorganized way whether people like it or not because a few frontier AI models and their companies (Google, Anthropic and Open AI) have decided to do that. Nadella's thinking is worth listening to and reading about as it offers the first intelligent approach to making AI do what we want it to do for healthy societies. After all the destruction in world trade by shipping out supply chains by the US and Europe, after uncontrolled migration, after the loss of manufacturing and the good jobs that went with it, and the decision to reverse this and regain manufacturing and supply chains under both US presidents Biden and DJT, Nadella is right to conclude that society will not tolerate any more losses, and society is determined to retrieve losses from past mistakes. By preserving each company's human capital independent of AI Nadella is calling on individual leaders at all startup, midisized and large companies to have a clear idea of their precious human capital and set up AI independent of it at the company level to work alongside human capital. We at Lyrarc think this will give better results than no conscious approach that allows willy nilly the AI frontier models to shrivel the company's human capital and do what they are clearly incapable of doing in our view, which is to run companies or the principal functional areas of societies such as healthcare, transportation and public services. That even though Nadella does not say this is going to look good at first, then lead the company to catastrophic consequences of losing control of its own individual company's future and lead it to make huge mistakes that will be costly to correct and cause much damage to the Nation and its people. This is anew proposition that Nadella makes and should be grasped for a new approach, and constructive confrontations on this issue of how to incorporate AI at each company's level for hundreds of thousands of companies, alongside separate and supplementing the core strength of human capital, not displacing it to cause huge problems in future years. A company bereft of its human capital is a company bereft of what gives it life and vitality. ...

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Samuelson points to the risks to the American economic growth from excessive health care costs. This is hurting take home pay and shows up in consumer spending. It is hurting government spending in other areas such as needed infrastructure spending and efforts to reduce the deficit. This hurts private capital investment to create jobs because of lower demand from constricted consumer spending. The U.S. budget has as its largest single expense 27% on health care compared to 20% on defense the next largest expense, with growth in health care spending taking this to one third of the budget in coming years. Without addressing health care, says Samuelson, the Supercommitte in Congress even if successful at deficit reduction will basically have failed to do its job, and it did not have the time, resources or conviction to do this. According to a new study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), U.S. healthcare spending per person is $7,960 per person in 2009. This compares with Norway $5,352, Britain $3,487, France $3, 978, an OECD average of $3,233. Life expectancy in the U.S. is 78.2 years, compared to Japan 83 years, OECD average of 79.5 years. Chile and the Czech Republic have life expectancy equal to the U.S. Except for cancer care where the five year survival rate is 89.3% in the U.S. and the OECD average is 83.5%, the U.S. lags far behind in much needed critical areas such as diabetes and asthma. Rates of emergency hospitalization for asthma are 3 times that in France and 6 times that in Germany and Italy. The U.S. has fewer doctors per thousand population and higher cost per medical procedure- with more frequent use of the costliest procedures- creating a supply shortage that induces higher prices, and less preventive and early action care through physician visits. The number of practicing U.S. doctors is 2.4 per thousand population in the U.S. compared to 3.1 per thousand for the OECD average; and number of annual doctor consultations 3.9 per capita in the U.S. versus 6.5 for the OECD average. Appendectomy cost $7,962 in the U.S., $5,004 in Canada and $2,943 in Germany. Coronary angioplasty cost $14,378 in the U.S., compared to $9,296 in Sweden, and $7,027 in France. Knee replacement cost $14,946 in the U.S., $12,424 in France, and $9,910 in Canada. Knee replacements, angioplasties and MRI exams are twice as common in the U.S. compared to the OECD countries. ...

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Report from Smart Ageing Summit at Oxford 2026. It rejects the notion common in society that physical decline is inevitable with age. It puts the responsibility of good health on healthy living which means about 80% of the responsibility is on each one of us to maintain good health. Things that are important says this report are completely abstain from alcohol, avoid processed foods (what RFK Jr is telling us as Health Secretary), prioritize sleep, cultivating a "not-meat" mindset, not eating after 6.30 pm. Other studies such as the Oxford Population Health with half a million UK participants show environmental exposures and healthy living habits have far greater importance than biological ageing and inherited genetics. Which also supports this conclusion that it is upto each one of us to build a better quality of life as we age. We assume here that the society we live in is healthy and there are no natural disasters such as climate change or human made disasters such as wars and conflicts, human exacerbation disasters such as not investing in healthcare, education and infrastructure for good public services such as transportation, parks and recreation. Yet that cannot be taken for granted and it is also important for our own healthy living and our spiritual health to invest some of our time and put our money into making sure that this investment takes place in building a healthy society and environment to live in. We do this in our civic life, as parents at parent teacher meetings, as custodians of the environment, being active in our neighborhoods, in business practices, and in supporting and monitoring investments in education and healthcare for our communities. ...

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GE is selling three of its healthcare units in India to its venture with Wipro, third largest Indian software and IT company. The idea is to develop products faster. The units are Medical Systems India, Life Sciences and Medical Diagnostics.

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Flat payment rates for Medicare Advantage to Insurers by the DJT administration which is questioning how health care needs of the country remain unmet and US healthcare comparing very unfavorably with other advanced countries in Europe and Japan and also in India. Some of this is because of the behaviour and practices of the health and pharmaceutical industries in the US. The 2027 payment by government for Medicare Advantage is 0.09 percent. In 2026 it was about 5%. In 2025 it was -0.16 percent and in 2024 it was -1.12% under the Biden administration showing a great deal of dissatisfaction with funding Medicare Advantage. Medicare Advantage was set up by the Bush Republicans in 2003 who set it up with the nice sounding name Medicare Modernization Act. It was an effort to help the insurance companies with government money. Today in the second term of DJT in 2026 affordability is what American people care about most and the DJT administration is unhappy with the insurance companies. Dr. Mehmet Oz is in charge of Medicare and Medicaid Services Agency of the federal government and he says about Medicare Advantage and new policy to save “taxpayers from unnecessary spending (on Medicare Advantage) that is not oriented towards addressing real health needs.” The DJT Kennedy-Oz approach is for comprehensive digital information linking all medical providers, making America healthy again, cutting through the dense fog created over the last 2 decades, making pharmaceutical costs as affordable as the best in European nations, and refusing to subisidize if delivery is poor and health results are poor.   ...

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The Dec. 2013 CBS/NYT poll showed only 39% overall support the Obama health care law, a majority say it increases their health care costs. 57% of the uninsured without health coverage say it increases their costs and only 20% say it decreases their costs, for the very group it was designed to help. For the uninsured a third say they will not sign up for the law and pay the penalty. Annie Lowrey of the NYT looks at these numbers and says part of the reason for the lack of enthusiasm for the law is the sharp increase in deductible costs of insurance coverage- the percentage of Americans in health insurance plans with deductibles over $1000 has jumped to 38% in 2013 from 18% in 2008, according to a survey by the Henry Kaiser Family Foundation. During these 5 years the average deductible has increased to $1097 from $735. This is happening as incomes are stagnant or declining in inflation adjusted terms for many working Americans.

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Issues of cost of living and higher taxes in states in the northeastern US and California vs the lower taxes and lower cost of living in the Southern States of the US. Whose side each of the two main parties are on in the US has switched in the period since Harry Truman and FDR in the 1940's. The Republicans represent small business and the less educated in society, the Democrats represent the more educated, affluent sections, and women, the black minority, with Hispanics divided between the two parties. Unions are now neutral and workers in factories lean more towards Republicans. On health care there is a failure for both parties. Both parties have failed miserably with all the lobbying creating obstacles-- to provide cost of living in healthcare. In comparing healthcare and the wealth of societies, it can now be noted that a well funded healthcare system with medicine within reach of the entire population of 1.4 billion people in a poor country like India does better than that of a rich society like the US with 350 million people. This makes a huge difference in the quality of life. Infrastructure investments in relatively far less affluent countries like China and now India make it possible to have better conditions of living relative to the US with infrastructure and transportation from the 19th century still awaiting rebuilding. ...

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A health care practitioner says the real problem is the high cost of medical care in the U.S. when compared to other countries. She points out that the Obama bill in 2008 did not take effective steps to bring down the cost of health care before enacting legislation to cover the uninsured, leading to higher premiums for the middle class. The link between healthcare and profits is seen as the main problem. 

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The Washington Post survey of 1200 readers on how the Republican healthcare plan of Speaker Ryan and the House of Representatives looks to them, how it affects them in their lives. Here Somasekhar of the Post gives the stories of 5 Americans. Some see the prospect of losing their insurance under the Republican plan even as they reach an older age, others a smaller segment says the Post, whose premiums jumped under the Affordable Care Act say they faced high premiums and high deductibles. The Post says the large majority of opinions have expressed anxiety over the proposed Republican Ryan House plan for healthcare. One of them is an uninsured poor farmer, Mr. Woosley,  income about $18000 who gained benefit from expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act,  one Mr. Smith, 32 years, a personal injury attorney who faces paying $10,000 if he did not take insurance and $10,000 if he took insurance because of high premiums so a wash either way deciding to do without it, one a tech worker Mrs. Powers, 62 years, income $22,000 on year and $4000 the next, from middle class during the tech boom but facing fewer opportunities and uncertain income from part time work, hit by the deep recession facing fewer opportunities as she gets older and now the prospect of losing insurance without government subsidies, one who is from the middle class who sees little benefit from the Affordable Care Act and is forgoing insurance because of the high premiums yet faces a penalty for not being insured under the ACA, another Mr. Blanchard, 52 years, is from the middle class, a computer programmer who lost his job in downsizing, earns $100,000 as a consultant self-employed, pays $767 in premium a month and relies on the Affordable Care Act which helps him gain freedom from working at a company that could downsize,  another is a middle class programmer Mr Riffle,age 44, and his wife, who does not qualify for a subsidy with a $71,000 family salary from working 4 jobs between himself and his wife- this person finds it too expensive for his salary to buy insurance $900 a month and $14,000 deductible under the Affordable Care Act. His views are worth listening to as they go to the crux of the problem- he says he may not be any better with the Republican plan. He sees the real problem as the high cost of health care in the U.S. and the only way this can be fixed is for members of Congress to be asked to use the insurance exchanges they create. If this sample is representative it shows that there are real problems with both the Affordable Care Act and the Republican plan, that the high cost of health care the problem lurking behind every plan that does not squarely address this, and till that happens and members of Congress experience what ordinary people face, this problem can never by fully solved.   Woosley, Smith, Powers, Blanchard, Riffle, and their personal experience is at the crux of what is right and wrong  with the Affordable Care Act, and also with the new Republican plan of Speaker Ryan and the House of Representatives. For every Woosley, Powers and Blanchard who benefit, there is a Smith and a Riffle who are indifferent or are affected by the high cost under Affordable Care Act and the current system of medical care with its high cost. The Affordable Care Act does not  tackle high cost, for that to happen the culture in America that makes it possible and acceptable to charge high prices must change. Another problem apart from bringing health care costs is that any solution needs to have the whole country behind it. If the notion that all people are entitled to basic health care is to stand, the whole country needs to believe it as they do in countries like France, Britain, Germany and Japan. If this has to be made a workable proposition health care has to be offered at a price that makes this possible to achieve, and that idea also needs the deep and broad sense of support from the culture in America similar to that in these other countries. Until that happens politicians in America will get elected and turned out of office in turns on issues such as health care, based on which side they take and which problems they choose not to face squarely and responsibly. ...

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Shocking decline in reading in UK- NLT Surveys research of 80,000 young people  in UK shows  of 8-11 years old children girls 36% and boys 26% read actively, 14-16 years girls down to 17% and boys down to 10%. Is a similar pattern evident in the US? This is the root of many of our problems. Reading competes with other activities and screen time leads to a severe loss in reading. Teenage reading is especially fragile. Reading ability and wide knowledge helps build working skills and income generation so that it means more people in this generation are poor than previous generations, a general increase in poverty and lower incomes across neighborhoods and families in the UK and US. This also has correlation with health and mental health so that this means the children and growing young adults are in a fragile group in advanced countries of US and Europe, especially fragile when it comes to knowledge, learning skills, health and incomes. A reverse situation in some Asian advanced countries with a hunger for knowledge means the gap is opening up between the US and Europe and these Asian countries. ...

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NYT reports show the Republican health care bill AHCA 33 votes short of passing the House and likely to fail. Conservative Republicans were looking to whittle down the safety net in the Affordable Care Act, and moderate Republicans could not stomach the whittled down bill removing guarantees of essential benefits for instance. The basic problem- no real consensus among Americans about providing health care to all Americans, and no real solutions possible as long as there is acceptance of disproportionately high levels of medical care costs for treating each disease in the U.S. compared to Europe and other countries.

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How marijuana in schools poses a problem in US schools- pot in class reduces diligent work in classrooms. Costly policy errors that are producing ill effects in states hitting health, education and the American spirit- poor performance in schools and deficits in attention, says this report in WSJ.

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Frances tax system places 40% tax on single earner family with 2 children compared to 20% in the US. France debates how to pass the budget and how to meet budget shortfalls in revenue, where to tax. France's top tax bracket is already at 55%, the second highest in Europe, which does not make the job of setting taxes easier. Additional 1.9 billion euros was to be raised by raising the tax rate for families that had tax liability of 20% if they made over 250,000 euros. This has raised 400 million euros only in 2025. This editorial in the Washington Post is critical of the French tax structure and says it is not just the rich who end up with higher taxes. It says that the average French single worker gets to keep only 53% of income after taxes, whereas American average single worker who gets to keep 70%. The extra 20% could be what the American worker pays for health care if as in some cases health care has become so costly in the US as to cost more than a mortgage, as reported in the WSJ in January 2026. Can government buy healthcare more efficiently and distribute it than families on their own. In the case of pharmacy products would removing the power to negotiate  prices with pharmaceutical companies conducted in government run by special interest groups as happened under US president Bush make it so expensive to buy pharmaceutical products that the advantage of smaller taxes is destroyed by a perverse healthcare system run by special interest groups with help of lobbyists. This is just to show that yes the US tax system with lower taxes can fail when other things go wrong in managing crtical costs such as healthcare and housing.   ...

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Added sugar is the big culprit in the way we age, and in our general health, the diseases we get. This is not just about obesity, its about metabolic health- getting only the amount of sugar that is good for us. Unknowingly if we are not careful, not checking labels and without any advantage we end up taking added sugar when we eat packaged foods. About 70% of packaged foods contain this added sugar. Most adults in the U.S. and other countries get 17 teaspoons of added sugar a day or twice the 9 teaspoons that is recommended for men and three times the 6 teaspoons a day recommended for women. For children the recommended limit is 3 teaspoons. Just by being a bit careful and removing this added sugar from our diet we can enjoy much better health. It is not giving us much because we can still have some sugar in healthy natural foods, in fruits and vegetables, and a smaller amount of plain sugar. After the first couple of days of a change one may not even notice this. By so much has our sugar intake grown particularly with packaged foods, that a small change can bring big results in health and healthy living style. ...

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Dr. Nancy Krieger of the Harvard School of Public Health says data on health risk -including which counties have high rates of health conditions such as obesity and other diseases- should inform targeted interventions and public messaging. This is important for administrators and health authorites in each county and state as they deal with a surge in coronavirus in parts of the U.S. which have so far been only slightly affected such as rural southern and western states. More recently places such as North Dakoa which the virus missed in the early stages are now seeing a jump in cases. This report shows counties in states such as Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, particularly susceptible because of high rates of obesity and other health conditions. In all almost half of the U.S. population has one of these health conditions- obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, lung disease and heart disease.  The high prevalence of obesity which worsens all other health conditions is a result of the lack of healthy food and nutrition, exercize and healthy living habits, that were neglected in the closing decades of the twentieth and early twenty first century. The shift to processed foods is only one of many bad practices that happened in these years. The lack of attention to healthy eating and nutrition, and outdoor exercize has marked this period and created conditions in which the virus could damage health. ...

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The knowledge that the virus  caused human to human transmission and that it spreads to wide parts of the population very quickly were critical pieces of information that remained with Chinese epidemiologists, doctors and medical researchers, and were suppressed by local authorites in Wuhan.  Yet China's version of the U.S. CDC, China's Centre of Disease Control and Prevention, modeled on the U.S. control efforts worked effectively to identify the problem. Virologist Gao Fu, heads China's CDC. This report in Germany's Der Spiegel says Mr. Fu made it a habit to scan China's internet before bedtime for any signs of possible disease outbreaks. On the night of December 30 he came across rumors of an internal memo from the Wuhan Health Commission of an outbreak of a vaguely worded lung disease. When he called the Wuhan health authority he found their answers to be evasive which alarmed him. The next morning December 31 Mr. Fu sent the first of three teams to Wuhan which is how China was able to identify the problem, in the sense that Chinese authorites in Beijing were to rely on Dr Gao Fu to overcome the problem of Wuhan provincial authorites. He informed the World Health Organization Beijing office on that day. The Der Spiegel report says "shortly afterward," the Seattle Times in its report says this was about New Years Day 2020- Mr Fu made a call to Dr. Redfield, head of the U.S. Centre for Disease Control, who was on vacation. Redfield is deeply disturbed on hearing this from Fu and they have conversations over the next few days to the point that Dr. Gao Fu is in tears about what has happened. On January 1 Taiwanese public health authorites shared the information with WHO that the cornonavirus was a human to human transmission, would the Taiwanese authorites not have shared it with the U.S. the same week during calls from the U.S. CDC or other public health authorites alarmed about the situation. (The WHO was proving useless by Jan 14 when it contradicted Taiwan's more reliable assessment  on Jan 14 going by the letter from president Trump to WHO). On January 6 a few days later Dr Redfield and Dr. Azar head of Health and Human Services ask China for permission to send a team of CDC U.S. experts to China. This is cited in the U.S. letter to the World Health organization- the lack of human to human transmission information being given to the U.S. officially early by China. A risk that could have been a topic of conversation between the U.S. and China heads of CDC. That letter from president Trump also points out that the team of experts the U.S. planned to send was not accepted by China till Feb 16, one and half months after that series of conversations between Dr. Gao Fu of China CDC and Dr. Redfield of U.S. CDC in an alert message.  In effect removing one of the key defences for the U.S. and Europe in making their own defensive actions and plans, laying the basis of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic affecting millions of people. Dr Redfield is a AIDS researcher at the University of Maryland who spent most of his life trying to control spread of HIV and was appointed by president Trump to head CDC agency in 2018. He set a goal of eliminating AIDS by 2030 and is more comfortable with aids patients and research than the bureaucratic nature of agencies- CDC has about 11,000 employees. Once it was clear that a team of U.S. experts was not given permission to make its own assessment in Wuhan in the few days after January 6 offer to sent the team to China by Redfield of U.S. CDC and Dr. Azar, would it have alerted the U.S. that something was seriously heading the wrong way for a epidemic risk. That letter of president Trump cites how the head of WHO during the first SARS crisis in 2003, Dr. Harlem Brundtland acted when she faced China's lack of cooperation during that crisis by saying openly that this was a danger to world public health and millions. Could CDC in the U.S. and the other connected health authorites have taken the responsibility and filled Dr Brundtland's role in this crisis, that the WHO failed to perform?    ...

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The new Dutch Health system that went into effect on Jan1, 2006, and is based on Stanford university prof Eindhoven's idea of "managed competition." What the Dutch experience holds for the USA as states like massachusetts look at mandatory universal health coverage on a private basis and for the US as a whole as the present system appears to be coming to a close.

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Baked goods salty snacks and other ultraprocessed foods made up 55% of calories of all Americans in 2021-2023. 62% for children and adolescents, says CDC in 2025. It is an astonishing figure and shows the neglect of health nutrition by business and previous administrations in the US, in an alarming and dangerous way. RFK Jr. at Health and Human Services department, and Rollins at Agriculture department, have made it their life's mission to get America healthy again. And fight the battles, conduct the policy changes that have to be made to do this. Education of the public and making healthy choices available and affordable, are a big part of the challenge today. Individual states such as Iowa and West Virginia, Texas and Florida are already taking it up at the state level in a concerted effort.

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A federal committee in the U.S. now recommends no more than 6% of calories come from daily sugar intake not the 10% that is is the current guideline. It is smart to be wary of guidelines set in a different period when Americans and people in other parts of the world were not enough health conscious as they should have been. Artificially high limits set in guidelines serve as a danger to health, particularly as experts say obesity is like pouring gasoline on fire in fighting the coronavirus. Take a look at mean consumption today and it is not even the 10%, it is 13% double of what it should be. Nearly two thirds of Americans aged 1 years or older consumed more than 10% of daily calories in added sugar. And 70% of U.S. adults over 20 years are obese or overweight according to 2015-2016 figures from CDC. Today the figures from Europe and Asia, Latin America are also alarmingly high for obesity rates. Added sugar comes from processed foods from soda and pasta sauce to cereal and yogurt, and honey, sugar itself. Sugar sweetened beverages are common and dangerous. A 16 ounce grande pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks has 50 grams of sugar or 10% of a 2000 calories diet. The committee in the U.S. wants to see people eat healthy diets and does not want to discourage healthy foods like fruit and milk which people are not eating enough. It wants to see a shift away from processed foods to foods that have good health outcomes such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean meat and poultry. The beverage producers such as Coca Cola and Pepsi are a major source of resistance , as are Confectioners association, and other producers that benefit from setting the guidelines at 10%. It is not that for 3 decades as the obesity levels rose to the shocking and dismal health levels of today that the ideas of what constitutes a healthy diet were not known. It was just that we as a people did not care enough to fight for what is safe and healthy against whatever resistance was put up by producers with their vested interests, just as we as a people did not care enough to to fight to keep local manufacturing in place and the jobs and healthy communities across our land. A gram of sugar equals 4 calories. For a 2000 calories a day diet that is 120 calories to stay within the 6% that we should not exceed. Make a habit of looking at each packaged product and add up the added sugar grams and calories. ...

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The Medicare for All movement in the U.S. gathers momentum after the U.S. midterm elections with states. Governor Newsom of California says he will seek federal authority to setup a state single payer plan for health insurance. An expert at Georgetown University says there is a new burst of energy for broader coverage or universal health coverage. States with new governors or seeing this momentum are California, Washington, New Mexico, Maine, Nevada, Delaware, Oregon, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois. Polls show a large majority of Americans now support Medicare for All as a form of universal health coverage for all Americans, a system that prevalent in Canada for the last 50 years. Two hearings will be held in Congress on Medicare for All in 2019.

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The U.S. House of Representatives votes to repeal and replace the Affordable care Act 217-213. Moderates were won over by an addition of $8 billion  to add coverage for a popular feature of the ACA that covered people for pre-existing conditions.  The bill that passed gives credits of $2000 to $4000 a year, depending mostly on age, upto $14,000 for a family. Credits are reduced for individuals making over $75,000 a year or families making over $150,000. There is no mandated insurance coverage. This trims the federal budget deficit, yet also is expected to keep 24 million more Americans without health coverage after 10 years. The bill now goes to the Senate where moderate Republicans are worried that this may increase premiums for older people, one of the drawbacks of the earlier version of the House Republican bill.