The healthcare debate -- some stats

Some interesting stats on health care:

The UK in 2006 spent 8.2% GDP on health of which 80.9% was government spending (incidentally putting pay to the lie that a) there is no private healthcare in the UK and b) if there is that it cannot compete with a monopoly provider). Finally as a proportion of the total government spending (the budget) the UK government spent 16.3% on healthcare.

The US by contrast in 2006 spent 13.2% GDP on health of which 45.8 % was government spending. As a proportion of the total budget the US government spent 19.3% on healthcare!

Ergo the US which has does not have a public healthcare system spent more taxpayers dollars on health than the UK government where we do have a public free-for-all health service.

Make of those stats what you want given the current debate on health care in the US.

(Stats are from the latest World Health Organisation report which some people will claim is a communist organization funded by the UN which itself wants to repress the rights and freedoms of the American public -- especially the ones who carry assault rifles to healthcare debates).

Meetings

Why was I absolutely exhausted after 7 hours of inactivity in our annual Departmental away day today? I say 'away' when in actual fact we had it at the University on the 2nd floor of our building, as opposed to the 5th floor my Department occupies.

Am I the only one who finds such meetings as counter-productive as they are productive? Sure everyone gets the time to air their views and thoughts but little concrete invariably emerges from these things.

At one point today when I was beginning to lose the will to live I started wondering just how many millions of people were sat in meetings at that very moment all around the world? All those minutes and hours where productive workforces actually cease to be productive so they can, in most cases have discussions about how to be more productive!! I also began to think about all the coffee, tea, biscuits, finger food etc that such meetings and committees themselves generate.

Finally I began to wonder whether animals had meetings!! Dogs definitely not, monkeys? Possibly. Cats? for certain... plotting every night how they will take over the world come the Armageddon. But for the most part meetings are unlikely to be part of the animal kingdom's experience nor was primitive man in his cave worried about whether he needed to establish a criteria for selecting which animal he was going to kill for dinner tomorrow.


Clearly I spent too much time thinking about anything other than what I was supposed to be thinking about! Which is why when right-wing and left-wing nut jobs start spreading conspiracy theories about secret cabals meeting to plot the takeover of the world financial system/US government (insert as appropriate) they clearly have no experience of how they work. If there was a secret cabal plotting to bring about World Socialism they would still be on agenda item 1 -- minutes of the last meeting.

Burma and Tourism

Always been a tough call whether to travel to Burma, one of Southeast Asia's last unspoilt destinations or not given the detention of Suu Kyi and given the odious nature of the military Junta and its brutal suppression both of dissent and the country's ethnic minorities. On the one hand since much of the country's up-market tourist infrastructure is owned by the junta either directly or indirectly foreign currency would be going directly to the regime. On the other hand small-scale tourism puts the same resources into the hands of an impoverished people and provides vectors for the transmission of ideas and information.

For years Suu Kyi called for a tourism boycott on the country but in a week that has been full of political theatre Suu Kyi now appears to have softened her stance as I reported earlier. Quite who the 'close acquaintance' through who she has made this announcement is remains unknown, most likely her doctor, but it marks another move on the complex chess board that is Burmese politics.

For more detail see the story in The Telegraph below.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/asia/burma/6026879/Burma-opposition-leader-Suu-Kyi-Tourism-might-help.html

Progress on Burma?

A chink of light perhaps?

Senator Jim Webb today won the release of John Yettaw, the American whose intrusion on Aung San Suu Kyi led to her recent sentence, and an unexpected meeting with the detained Burmese opposition leader. This is a significant development. Only a few weeks ago the country's leader, Gen Than Shwe, refused to allow UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon a similar visit to Suu Kyi.


http://tiny.cc/yp1w4

Another reason why this may mark the beginnings of a new approach towards Burma is that Senator Webb, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, has been a strong proponent of moving to a new policy of engagement with the generals.

This also comes a day after there were reports that Suu Kyi has softened her stance towards tourism to Burma. Whereas previosuly she had called on a complete boycott, unsubstantiated reports yesterday suggested she was now calling for people to visit the country but to avoid tourist companies and hotels that were owned by, or linked to the Junta.

To early to say where this goes next but this could mark the start of the new approach Hiliary Clinton hinted at several months ago when she made a speech in which she said that neither sanctions nor the ASEAN policy of constructive engagement had worked and that a new approach was needed.

More on Burma

Links to a couple of media interviews I did recently on Burma.

Background was that there was a conference/convention planned in Jakarta this week of Burmese exile groups including the so-called government in exile headed by Sein Win, the cousin of Aung San Suu Kyi. At the last moment it was cancelled by the Indonesian government following a complaint by the Burmese foreign ministry. The Indonesian government balked lest it look like they were sanctioning the government in exile. The only real significance of this meeting (which took place effetively in private anyway) was that previously the groups participating were deeply divided over strategy and vision, so the fact that came together to forge a common front is noteworthy since the last time there was a common position among the ethnic and pro-democracy groups was in 1947 on the verge of independence. However the Junta certainly and most of Burma's neighbours in ASEAN take such exile groups seriously as events today have visibly demonstrated.

Anyway two reports:

http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/connectasia/stories/200908/s2655929.htm

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-08-13-voa57.cfm





P.S. Having problems posting hypertext links the app does not seem to be working? Anyone help?

What Next for Burma -- more?

Found this interesting blog comment from BBC Radio 4 presenter Robin Lustig.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/worldtonight/2009/07/what_next_in_burma.html

Very interesting and unpalatable as it may be to consider perhaps it does represent the only way we actually can move forward? After all what we have is an unstoppable force (Suu Kyi) encountering an immovable object (the Junta).

Interntational Politics are very unpleasant at times and another reminder of how odious this regime is in Burma came to day when news broke of the Burmese military gang raping a young girl in the Shan state.

http://tiny.cc/SLSpw

While the butchers that run Burma should in an ideal world face the International Criminal Court for the crimes they have committed, the stark reality is they won't, nor will there be a UN Security Council sanctioned Global Arms embargo. If we are to avoid another decade of suffering for Burma, and another decade of house arrest for Suu Kyi we need some fresh ideas

Burma -- what next?

Well no surprise the military found Aung San Suu Kyi guilty. However there were two things that subsequently followed that did surprise me:

1) 5 minutes after the verdict was read out Burma's Home minister entered the court room and commuted the 3 year sentence to 18 months and indicated that Suu Kyi would be able to serve this from her home in Rangoon. (In other words an effective return to the status quo that has persisted for the past 20 years).

2) The UK government condemned the decision within minutes of it being announced on the wire with a statement which was in all likelihood drawn up in anticipation of a stiffer sentence.

The fact that the Burmese government intervened so publicly (in front of the invited foreign press and diplomats) to commute the sentence clearly was a piece of political theatre, but an act nevertheless that at least perhaps demonstrates some inkling of a willingness to compromise.

Certainly the act was sufficient to divide international opinion. While the UK, EU and the US united to condemn the verdict, which will shut Suu Kyi out of the country's scheduled election next year, it was received far less unfavourably by Burma's Asian neighbours, most notably in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), China and India. Indeed in Southeast Asia while there was 'disappointment' at the verdict there was praise for the decision to commute the sentence.

Yes the trial was a farce, and yes the verdict conveniently allows the Junta to remove Suu Kyi from participation in the 2010 elections. However in my humble opinion the West is missing a possible shift in the Junta's approach by dismissing the commutation of the sentence. To date the Junta has not balked from simply ignoring the international community, most visibly in the immediate aftermath of Cyclone Nargis last year, when it initially refused to allow Western aid agencies into the country. Clearly the Junta would have preferred to have imprisoned Suu Kyi for the maximum five years and to have dispatched her to a prison in the far North of the country away from her Rangoon support base and far from the eyes of the Western media. That is what we feared might have happened this morning. That they Junta did not do this IS significant.

So what next -- well there are already calls for further sanctions but herein lies a problem. While there is much more that Britain and the EU can do in particular, the fact remains that there is a 2600 mile hole in the already not particularly tight sanctions 'net' -- Burma's respective borders with China and Thailand. Without their participation in any sanctions regime the impact of Western punitive action is going to be militated against. And what is very clear is that neither China nor Thailand are going to join that regime. Similarly attempts to impose a global arms embargo or indict the Junta before the ICC will face the likely veto of either China or Russia on the UN Security Council.

So where next... well I don't profess to have the answers but clearly what is needed is first and foremost a concerted international approach and to achieve that will require some new thinking.