Why is medical so much cheaper in Mexico than in the US?

A redditor answers:

Having lived in San Diego for awhile, and having done medicine on both sides of the border I can tell you exactly why.

First, with dentistry, some dentists are really cheap and bad, but others are really good, but it appears that competition is based off of reputation and service, and not on regulations. On the US side, dentists do not get to their position by service, reputation, or competition but by regulatory capture. The number of people who can practice dentistry and who can get the proper schooling is very restricted. However, in Mexico I found that many dentists provide far better services at a far lower price. The poor people go to the lower quality dentists, and the rich people go to the higher quality ones, but in the end everyone gets care at a price they can deal with, and the rich dentists are still cheaper than then ones in the USA by several orders of magnitude.

Also, if I have an ear ache in the USA, first I must go to my primary, then I will likely be made to go see a specialist, they will probably run some tests, and then they will give me a prescription, which will almost always be to some patented overpriced drug, that I must wait several hours to fill, cost, at least $230 between the medicine and the doctors. In Mexico, you just walk into the pharmacy, say you have an ear ache, and they hand you a bottle of generic antibiotics, cost $25 max, within 10 minutes.

Even though the government does pay for health care and dentistry, medicine in Mexico is far less regulated than in the USA. They can't pull off the crap that we do in the USA, because if they did people would start to die all over the place.

The art of taxation

Alex at Marginal Revolution:

In Mexico, visual artists can pay their taxes with art works.

That's the deal Mexico has offered to artists since 1957, quietly amassing a modern art collection that would make most museum curators swoon. As the 2009 tax deadline approaches, tax collectors are getting ready to receive a whole new crop of masterworks...

There's a sliding scale: If you sell five artworks in a year, you must give the government one. Sell 21 pieces, the government gets six. A 10-member jury of artists ensures that no one tries to unload junk.

Under the program, the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit now owns 4,248 paintings, sculptures, engravings and photographs by Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Leonora Carrington and other masters.

Click on "Colecciones Pago en Especie" at apartados.hacienda.gob.mx/cultura/index.html to see the art works which have been used to pay taxes since the program began.

The Mexican government accepts all styles of painting for the program so, unlike in America, in Mexico you can have taxation without representation.

Groan.

Line in the sand: San Diego–Tijuana border

One of my favorite photos...

Of towards the left is San Diego, USA. Right side is Tijuana, Mexico. (wiki entry)

Here's to hoping the next big topic after the health care craze will be immigration reform. I'm pretty excited about a Democratic majority finally having a crack at it.

I support wide open borders, with restrictions solely for known criminals/enemies and those with communicable diseases. Obviously our political system and xenophobic conservatives/southerners won't stand for borders that open, but any nudge in this direction (including amnesty) will be a useful improvement for the economy, social justice, our fabulous melting pot effect, and general prosperity. As any student of history knows, high immigration rates made the USA what it's been in years past. We've always been a nation of immigrants.

Immigration is enormously wonderful for development. Yet roughly since 1914/WWI, nationalists in more-developed nations have become so obsessed with protecting their relative power over less fortunate people, they've lost sight of how labor mobility benefits everyone in the long run.

One thing I also keep hearing from nationalists is that them darn immigrants oughta be required to learn English—that it should be a national language. Um, not really (xkcd). Let immigrants and future generations pick up the dominant language on their own. It's worked fine in the past, it will work fine in the future.

Besides, English's role as our globalized world's lingua franca is only going to increase. Too much intellectual capital has been invested for it to be otherwise: vast amounts of business, information, science, and other research and works of art have been produced in English. What does every odd person in Europe speak? English. On an international flight from China to Japan with a South Korean flight crew, want to guess what language "This is your captain speaking, ..." is in? English!

(Cross posted. For a bit more on the inanity of political barriers to labor and trade, a previous post.)

Link blag

ShadowGov: Is Obama getting rolled by the U.S. military? Not really, he's taking into account their advice but also postponing dealing with them.

Greg Mankiw: Long-term fiscal strategy at the White House is based on wishful thinking.  In sum, we traded a wishful thinking foreign policy for a wishful thinking economic one.  What joy.  At least we're catching up with the 20th century on social issues and associated science.

OpenMarket: Stimulus starts trade war.

NYT, Dept. of lagging indicators: Mexican emigration is down.

WSJ: British Parliament pay scandal.

Bald dollars. Lots of garbage.

Ten reasons to not fuck with a libertarian. 'Tis good to laugh at oneself, I say.

(incidentally, though, as should be obvious the reason most skeptic dudes trend libertarian is because we apply the same skepticism to gov't.  And given how badly the state tends to foul things up, that makes us want less of it.)

Link blag

Jim Manzi makes the most compelling argument against torture.

1-800-[GET OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY]... Cato's David Boaz bemoans.

Speaking of tax-and-spend, the Leftopia of Washington, D.C. is now charging residents for parking in their own driveway.

Mexican Senate passes bill decriminalizing drug possession for personal use.

Megan examines why general practitioners are underpaid.

Giving up on politics, a libertarian brainstorms new frontiers of freedom.

Hathos alert: Sarah Palin is a twitter.

An environmentally-friendly pizza box.

Masturbation has fatal consequences (Le livre sans titre, 1844)

Link blag

Steve Benen: The confirmation wars never end...

Wendy Long, head of the Judicial Confirmation Network, which ironically no longer wants to see judicial conformations, is one of the leading far-right activists on nomination fights. She said yesterday that Republicans should approach nominees with "a presumption that they're not going to be able to uphold their oath."
Got that? Republican senators, who argued during Bush's presidency that failing to confirm judicial nominees tears at the fabric of our democracy, should now reflexively assume that every Obama nominee, including those who haven't even been named, is incapable of serving on the federal bench.

Forbes protests the postal service's mail monopoly. In-depth analysis here.

FactCheck.org: President Obama says 90 percent of Mexico's recovered crime guns come the U.S. Not true.

There were procedural roadblocks to McCain-Lieberman.

KSM was waterboarded 183 times in one month.

NYT: Good news from Iraq... Baghdad is getting back to its old secular self.

NRO: Mark Steyn makes an unusually sane post about micro-regulation.

Mike Halperin: Sixteen reasons why Obama is exceptionally good at his job.

Mental (un)health break: Deutsche Häschenparty! .... (UK version not as amusing)

Monday night link blag

Andrew:

Mexico's ambassador urges the decriminalization of marijuana as a way to weaken the cartels. Domestic production is way up. Mexico's Congress is considering decriminalization. Cultural mainstreaming, especially in the thirteen states that allow for medical use, is gaining pace. Any day now, sanity threatens to break out.

A TMV columnist likes Rachel Maddow.

Another gathers reactions to Captain Phillips' rescue from Somali pirates.

Another gathers even more reactions. (Hey, they're useful summaries of what people are thinking.)

Politico: Obama boosts anti-abortion efforts, but not the way you think.

The Post: Rahm Emanuel knows how to deal.

Civil liberty watchdogs are pissed at Obama's continuation of Bush policies.

Wikipedia is voting to migrate from the clunky GNU Free Documentation License to a Creative Commons license. Yay!

John McCain's daughter wants a gayer GOP.

Some geezers talk about their work at Area 51 during the 60's.

China has really bad air quality.

Various politicians seek to promote software piracy protect the children by taxing violent videogames. No word yet on whether they'll invest the resulting revenue in abstinence-only miseducation.

Gracias amigos

Joaquín Guzmán

HuffPost:

Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, reported head of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, ranked 701st on Forbes' yearly report of the wealthiest men alive, and worth an estimated $1 billion, today officially thanked United States politicians for making sure that drugs remain illegal. According to one of his closest confidants, he said, "I couldn't have gotten so stinking rich without George Bush, George Bush Jr., Ronald Reagan, even El Presidente Obama, none of them have the cajones to stand up to all the big money that wants to keep this stuff illegal. From the bottom of my heart, I want to say, Gracias amigos, I owe my whole empire to you."

This is hearsay and suspiciously timely, but the sentiment makes sense. If you were the sort of ruthless person who ran a drug empire, wouldn't you be thankful for prohibition?

Recall "If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns".... well if you outlaw a drug, only outlaws will deal that drug. And as we've seen they'll make enormous profits and cause a great deal of misery while doing so.

Even though I am such a strong believer in individual freedom that I am ideologically opposed to all prohibition -- and would legalize every single hard drug on the planet if everyone agreed to defer to my opinion -- I understand there are opposing views:

"The Drunkard's Progress", an iconic lithograph by Nathaniel Currier, exhibits the beliefs of the Temperance movement in the United States.

Such ideas are nobly intentioned, but misguided when enforced by the state.  Proposals for government bans would need to be carefully engaged and counterargued if prohibition worked. But it never has. It's a net failure on every front and has caused people to opt for much more dangerous alternatives like garage meth -- just as people were once poisoned by bad moonshine.

This is not difficult to understand. All you have to do is read some history about the consequences and aftermath of alcohol prohibition from 1919-1933 and compare it with the status quo.  It becomes even easier once you realize that marijuana is less dangerous than tobacco and alcohol.  There is simply no comparison between marijuana use and the amount of death, pain, and suffering the later two can cause when they get abused.

But the U.S. could no longer afford prohibition during the Great Depression, and it can ill afford it now.  Over the years the legal war on drugs has been very much like a real war in at least one sense: the world has paid a heavy price in blood and treasure for no net gain.

Maher on the marijuana question

As I said a few posts down:

Some people simply can't understand that if drugs were legal, our enemies wouldn't have a monopoly on them and be out of their lucrative business. So when you tell them enemies are financed by opium, they think we need to double down on the task of eradicating drug trade. They have no perspective on how intractable that is, or how badly we've been failing at it for decades.

Salmon Rushdie here is an example of a smart guy who doesn't get it. Good of Hitchens to set things straight.

Those imaginary lines called borders

Photo: USA-Mexico border at San Diego-Tijuana

Don Boudreaux:

Practically speaking, there is free trade throughout the United States. My family and I (in VA) routinely buy wine from California and Oregon, oranges and lemons from Florida, computer software from Washington state, maple syrup from Vermont, peaches from South Carolina, television newscasts from New York and Atlanta, lumber from Alabama, spicy sauces from Louisiana, crabs from Maryland. The list is long.

And yet no one, not even Lou Dobbs, insists that the Boudreaux family would be richer if only the government in Richmond could find a successful way around the U.S. Constitution and managed to slap stiff tariffs on California wine, Florida citrus fruits, cajun seasoning from Louisiana, and you name it.

Surely the burden of persuasion is on those who would insist that each American would be more prosperous if only his or her state were better able to restrict trade with citizens of other states. If this burden of persuasion cannot be met, then the case for free international trade is pretty solidly established.

Anyone skeptical of free trade must explain why political borders are economically relevant. With the exception of pointing to (mostly rather vague and poorly considered) national-defense issues, protectionists have never managed -- and I dare say never will manage -- to impart genuine economic relevance to political borders.

Because all reasonably prosperous countries today impose no, or only very few, internal restrictions on trade, two facts stand: (1) free trade is in fact quite common, and (2) free trade is beneficial.

Perry adds:

another way to look at it: Since there is no economic reason to restrict goods from crossing imaginary lines called "city limits," "county lines" or "state borders," and we allow free trade among the 50 U.S. states and their counites and cities, there is also no economic reason to restrict goods from crossing imaginary lines called "national borders."

Indeed our current world's pax americana allows the free flow of most goods and capital across international borders, yet not the flow of people.

But why is that? (Harvard Kennedy School presentation)

It's funny how Democrats are anti-trade but pro-migration.

Republicans are pro-trade but anti-migration.

Neither group seems to grasp the incoherence of these stances or why both such arbitrary political barriers harm our economy.

Prohibition's piñata

It's the black market economy, stupid.

Cannabis vs. alcohol

Arizona Republic:

"Marijuana is the (Mexican cartels') cash crop, the cash cow," says Brittany Brown of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's Washington office, which does not advocate legalizing pot.

Marijuana is cheap to grow and requires no processing. More than a million pounds of it was seized in Arizona in each of the past two years, according to figures provided by Ramona Sanchez of the DEA's Phoenix office. But those seizures were just a cost of doing business for multibillion-dollar drug lords. Marijuana continued to be widely available - and not just to adults.

Teens tell researchers that buying pot is easier than getting cigarettes or booze, says Bill Piper, director of National Affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, which does advocate legalizing marijuana.

Some argue that if you legalize marijuana there would still be a black market. They say that because the product is so cheap to produce, the black market could underprice legal pot and sell to kids. But consider what we know about alcohol.

• First, Prohibition didn't work.

• Second, even though alcohol sales are regulated, back-alley or school-yard sales of moonshine is not a billion-dollar problem.

• Third, alcohol, like its addictive killer-cousin tobacco, is taxed, which helps cover its costs to society.

Not so with marijuana.

After decades of anti-pot campaigns, from Reefer Madness to zero tolerance, so many Americans choose to smoke marijuana that the Mexican cartels have become an international threat to law and order.

Instead of paying taxes on their vice, pot smokers are enriching thugs and murderers.

"People who smoke pot in the United States don't think they are connected to the cartels," Brown says. "Actually, they are very connected."

American drug users help sharpen the knives that cartel henchmen use to behead their enemies and terrorize Mexican border towns.

Even marijuana grown in the United States, increasingly in national parks and on other public lands, is often connected to Mexican cartels, Brown says.

According to the Justice Department's 2009 assessment, cartels have "established varied transportation routes, advanced communications capabilities and strong affiliations with gangs in the United States" and "maintain drug-distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors in at least 230 U.S. cities." Including Phoenix and Tucson.

The DEA says cartels are "poly-drug organizations" that routinely smuggle cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and precursor chemicals through our state.

"(But) marijuana generates the most profit," Sanchez says

Stem the violence: re-legalize it.

Line in the sand

It's the Mexico-USA border...at Tijuana-San Diego, I think.