For a seemingly reasonable and articulate man - one who regurgitates much, but I digress - Mr. Dalal has taken a very lopsided view of healthcare costs issues.

Assuming his premise is true about doctors having a monopoly on health care, which is not exactly accurate, whom does he suggest should be in charge ? Does he suggest that insurance companies play a bigger role than they the one they have already hijacked ? Perhaps a random sampling of people with no specific scientific or medical training should be empowered to make medical decisions for everyone ?

As for the more condemning accusations of doctor-prescribed tests being the etiology of hyper costs, perhaps he's simply not aware of the the litigious nature in which health care providers find themselves or of the thoroughness that each individual patient expects from their treating provider (even if they don't want to pay for it) ? Not that the profit motive isn't a factor, but his conclusions in this regard lack any perspective or nuance.

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"you cannot compete against China because land is free, water is free, electricity is sold far below production cost, there are no environmental restrictions, capital is freely available, and they can (and do) copy anyone's technology."

This statement paints a very incomplete picture of China's investment climate. Mainly, it attempts to disguise the deep flaws in said climate as foil-proof advantages. If, on the one hand, the US is indeed in a "death spiral" because of some industrial layoffs (even as its overall industrial production is at an all-time high), then China's cavalier approach to investment is something even worse.

1. "land is free" - it is for SOEs and other well-connected enterprises who are riding the investment boom. It certainly is not for smaller enterprises, or for individual citizens who have long since been priced out of the land market.

2. "water is free" - yes, China treats water as a disposable good, which is baffling considering that it has a relative paucity of water, resulting in projects such as the recent attempt to divert water from the southwest toward Beijing: the equivalent of trying to siphon off the Mississippi to quench the thirst of NYC. Even perennial China bull Jim Rogers has fretted over China's water policy as a potential destructor of its growth trajectory.

3. "electricity is sold far below production cost" - it is; the result has been woeful energy efficiency that makes China the world leader in energy consumption even as its output is 1/3rd of the US. It is also by far the leader in CO2 emissions and pollution of its territory. Which leads to...

4. "there are no environmental restrictions" - this seems like a "good" thing in the view of this article, but environmental damage does long-lasting damage to an economy. It did so to the USSR, Japan, and even the US in the years leading up to the Great Depression. Failure to account for how such damage lowers both agricultural and industrial production over the long run then results in massive overstatement of GDP:

http://mpettis.com/2011/06/small-companies-feel-the-pain-in-china-2/

5. "capital is freely available" - overly cheap nature of capital is a classic trait of an investment bubble. I could cite Patrick Chovanec, Michael Pettis, or Edward Chancellor on how artificially low interest rates have the result of taking too much wealth away from households, giving it to the state, and fueling misallocated investment, but instead I'll just quote Clyde himself here, who was righter than he knew when he said "cheap is expensive."

6. "they can (and do) copy anyone's technology" - how is this a positive trait for developing a technologically innovative society? I think you overestimate what this theft has accomplished, too. For example, the theft of HSR tech from France and Japan has resulted in costly, debt-inducing HSR corridors being built in a country with a very low value of labor, low per capita income, and a geographical character that is not conducive to what HSR should provide: namely, the saving of time in transporting high-value labor across a small distance of travel (as is the case in France, Germany, Spain, and Japan).

The comparison of the US to Britain is beyond cliché. Britain was always a small country that punched way above its weight and which, even during the peak of its power, never truly dominated industry. The quip about no one buying anything made in Britain stems from the naive notion that, if you can't find something made in [x country] it at Wal-Mart or any other big box store, then that country does not make anything.

Another complication is rarely taken into account by economists. They tend to focus on the efficiency of moving production to the low-cost producer, but that makes the United States dependent on a long and vulnerable supply chain. What happens if, say, a war breaks out in East Asia--even if we somehow manage to stay out of it ourselves?

I do think that this is too much important.

Read this series of six chapters: http://goo.gl/7CsZw

The difficulty America has is accentuated by the fact that Congress and the Senate make it difficult to pass radical reform, so the President's policies become stuck in the legislature. We won't see country wide health insurance for the working poor so long as there is a ideological division between the major parties. Now, more than ever, it is time for bipartisanship. Let's put aside party politics and fix this country as Americans.

The US is a country with serious problems. Getting on for one in six depend on government food stamps to ensure they have enough to eat. The budget, which was Stávkové kancelárie in surplus little more than a decade ago, now has a deficit of Greek-style proportions. MMORPG There is policy paralysis in Washington.The assumption is that the problems can be easily solved because the US is the biggest economy on the planet, the only country with global military reach, the lucky possessor of the world's reserve currency, and a nation with a proud record of re-inventing itself once in every generation or so.