Henk

American is a healthy 28 year old, he decided to skip paying for health insurance this year because the cheapest plan was $900 per month with a high deductible He had to spend 2 nights in the ER without insurance, he breaks down the bill “This is my receipt from spending 2 days in the hospital: - It totaled about $24,000 - My CT scan alone was $8,300 - Laboratory, 6,000 - IV therapy, $1,020, $4,000 in total And while $24,000 seems like a lot of money, let me show you something. This is what I'm actually paying, $2,478 because when you don't have insurance, these hospitals give you a discount. They discounted $22,000 off of this bill” “But if I had insurance, I wouldn't have gotten that discount. So it would've been a $24,000 bill billed to my insurance, and then my insurance would've said, ‘Hey, you have a $5,000 deductible. You need to pay $5,000 for this last emergency room visit.’ Then you tack on the $900 a month that I'd be paying for that insurance. I'd be paying $20K this year for healthcare. So the craziest part about this is even if I have another hospital visit, by the end of this year, I'm still gonna be paying less than I would if I had insurance. At minimum, my cost for healthcare this year would've been $20,000 with insurance. Right now I'm at $2,400.” US Health Insurance is a scam

COVID was a live-action replay of the Milgram experiment. No walls. No laboratory. No electrodes. Just a television, a daily briefing, and an authority figure in a suit telling people what to do. And the results were exactly the same. For those unfamiliar, Stanley Milgram’s landmark experiments in the 1960s demonstrated that ordinary people, when placed under institutional authority and given clear instructions, would administer what they believed to be severe electric shocks to innocent strangers simply because someone in a position of authority told them to continue. The conclusion was uncomfortable and definitive. Obedience to authority, in the presence of sufficient social pressure, overrides individual conscience in the vast majority of people. COVID proved it again. At global scale. In real time. But the truly devastating part the part that I find most difficult to reconcile , was the medical profession. Doctors. Physicians. People who spent years “studying” human biology, pharmacology, immunology, and medical ethics. People who took an oath. People who knew or had every professional obligation to know that mandating an experimental intervention, suppressing early treatment, isolating the dying from their families, and dismissing adverse events without investigation was a profound violation of everything their training stood for. And so many of them did it anyway. Not reluctantly. Enthusiastically. Do as you’re told was not a private capitulation for most of them. It was performed publicly, proudly, wrapped in the language of science and responsibility and care by people who had abandoned all three the moment the institutional authority spoke. Follow the science became the most cynical slogan of the era. Deployed not by people following evidence but by people following orders and using the language of reason to avoid the discomfort of exercising it. Milgram’s most haunting finding was not that monsters do terrible things. It was that ordinary people do when the structure around them makes it easy enough. We just watched it happen again. And the lesson, as always, is the same. An obedient population is only as safe as the integrity of whoever is giving the orders. Think for yourself. Question everything. And never under any pressure, from any authority switch off your conscience because someone told you to.

De oorlog in Iran raakt ook de Nederlandse economie. DNB-president Olaf Sleijpen waarschuwt in Nieuwsuur voor een oplopende inflatie en adviseert het kabinet om terughoudend te zijn met brede compensatiemaatregelen voor de hoge energieprijzen.