Salient to Investors: Americans lost more years of life to heart disease, lung cancer, pre-term birth complications, diabetes and at least 21 other conditions in 2010 than most other members of the 34-country OECD. The US failed to keep up with other nations in improving population health over the period 1990 to 2010 despite spending
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Evan Soltas writes: The delay until 2015 of the enforcement of the employer mandate to provide insurance to employees may create stress on the implementation of the individual insurance exchanges and the individual coverage mandate. Employers should not sponsor insurance as it masks the true cost of care
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Leemore Dafny’s examination of health-insurance markets is said to have helped mold the state and federal exchanges that are central to Obamacare’s 2010 health-care law. Her 2010 paper in the American Economic Review found that a lack of competition in insurance markets drives up premiums, that insurers charge more
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The Institute of Economic Affairs found that retirement for both men and women results in a small boost to health immediately, followed by a drastic decline in health in the medium and long-term, so people should work for longer for health as well as economic reasons. Edward
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The vast majority of older Americans face steep and rising health-care costs that threaten to bankrupt them and are doing little to protect themselves. Only 1 in 5 companies with at least 10 employees offers long-term care insurance. Medicare doesn’t cover long-term care. Millions face spending themselves into
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Simon Johnson at MIT writes: US rates on government debt are very low, the dollar is not depreciating rapidly, and inflation seems stable – no imaginable circumstance under which the US would need to borrow from the IMF. Thomas Jefferson was obsessed with the idea that debt was bad
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: A. Gary Shilling at A. Gary Shilling & Co writes: Investor zeal for yield and disregard for risk favors the junkiest of the junk. When the grand disconnect between investor focus on the immense liquidity created by central banks and weak and weakening global economies becomes unsustainable, probably
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Prof Dame Sally Davies said the rise in drug resistant infections is comparable to the threat of global warming – we are not using antibiotics effectively in countries. Davies said routine infections could become lethal because we’ve run out of antibiotics: there is only one useful antibiotic
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Shane Brett at AllAboutAlpha writes: The long-term outlook for the US economy is broadly positive with housing stabilized, consumer confidence slowly returning, political instability solved by Obama’s decisive win, and as health spending increases under Obamacare. Cheap domestic energy will continue and the US will seriously expand
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Exports from the US are set to pick up in 2013 as global growth strengthens. Gary Hufbauer at Peterson Institute for Intl Economics said competitive US industries include agriculture, medical supplies and aviation, and exports are a very high-paying sector of the US economy – jobs are more steady in export-oriented
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