Posted on 05/27/2005 7:51:18 PM PDT by blam
Chirac ready to turn his anger on Blair if France votes Non
By Toby Helm, Chief Political Correspondent
(Filed: 28/05/2005)
Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac will be pitched into a furious six-month dispute over the future direction of the European Union if the French people vote No to the EU constitution tomorrow.
Government sources are braced for the French president to round on the Prime Minister and blame him for making the constitution too "Anglo-Saxon" on economic issues and for plunging Europe into crisis as a result.
The French people go to the polls on Sunday
They also expect Mr Chirac to launch a fresh assault on Britain's £3 billion rebate from the EU budget.
British diplomats believe that Mr Chirac will call for France, Germany and other nations to form a "core Europe" in which they can push ahead with integration without being held back by laggards such as Britain.
However, Mr Blair and Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, want to use Britain's six-month EU presidency, which begins on July 1, to argue that eurozone economies need flexible British and American-style economies rather than heavy regulation and tax harmonisation.
Speaking in Rome yesterday after talks with Silvio Berlusconi, his Italian counterpart, before the G8 summit in July, Mr Blair described economic reform as "essential".
He said: "The big issue that faces our citizens now in Europe is how do we increase our prosperity in an era of globalisation, in an era of intense competition - not just within Europe but outside Europe."
Mr Blair is spending the bank holiday in a Tuscan villa with his wife, Cherie, and son, Leo, five. Downing Street would not confirm that the Blairs were staying as guests of Prince Girolomo Strozzi near Sienna.
Government officials say Mr Blair will give no quick response about the implication for a British referendum of a French No. Ministers are expected to hold emergency discussions with their EU counterparts and the European Commission before any decisions are taken.
A YouGov poll for The Daily Telegraph today finds that 42 per cent of voters believe that, even if the French say No, a referendum should go ahead here because relations with the EU are so important.
I would make a good used car salesman, no? Cheers!
French - The biggest joke on the planet
At least it looks like the French citizens are going to get this one right, for now.
More choice?
In France you can go to any doctor you want.
There is not greater choice in the US than in France on health care. In the US, many people are restricted to their HMO network of doctors or must pay more or are not insured. In France, you see the doctor of your choice.
US health care, at the top end, is very fine indeed. At the bottom end, it is not. The most expensive health care in the US is towards the end of life, and is almost entirely borne in the American system by Medicare, the national health insurance. There is free choice of doctors on American Medicare. France has the American Medicare system but it does not start at retirement but at birth. America also has Medicaid for the poor. There is no Medicaid in France, because there is only Medicare, for everybody.
French health care is also very fine indeed. It is also very expensive, just like American Medicare. Indeed, how does one compare two systems' health care? Life expectancies? Infant mortality rates?
One can observe that when English people of means have medical emergencies, they come to Paris for care because the English health care system has terrible waits and spotty coverage of certain things. In France, one gets what one pays for, and the government pays a lot of money for everyone to get care.
It is true, nothing in life is free.
France and America both pay a lot of their GDP for health care. Who is covered and how is a matter of national choice, of policy.
American health care is approximately the same as French health care, with similar results, but it is far, far more expensive per capita. But this is not because of the health care system. It is because of the capricious casino of the American legal system, which seems to be positively out of control. Things that American courts do shocks the conscience in France. Indeed, laws have been passed in France to make it criminal offense to obey an American "discovery" order. One cannot, on principle, sue a man and then demand that he prove your case against him by providing you all of his personal papers. This is utterly and completely insane. A reversal of the concept that the accuser must prove the culpability of the accused.
But nothing is free, and Americans seem to like their legal system. Certainly it makes American health care very, very expensive.
You make a lot of assertions, all of which may be true (medical care for the uninsured in the US is certainly inefficient and done trough emergency rooms and other inefficient means). One other thing though. The US subsidizes drug research for the planet including France. That is why Americans pay so much more for the same drugs. That must end. The US needs to pass a law that drug campanies can't charge more to US consumers than to the French government, volume discounts for volume cost savings aside. That will end the French free ride, and to the extent your numbers are true, they will erode as France is weaned from the American drug tit.
I agree with you on the tort lawyer thing, although when it comes to suing docs, tort lawyers are rather rapidly being castrated, state by state. So that is a self correcting problem. (Senator John Edwards got rich that way, by the way, and caused the percentage of babes delivered by C section to substantially increase as a tort lawyer prophylactic, thereby increasing the medical costs and medical risks to the mother.)
Since the head of the group that wrote the EU Constitution was a former FRENCH President (Valerie Giscard d'Estaing), it will be difficult for Chiraq to convince anyone that it's Tony Blair's fault.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Perhaps this is true.
On the other hand, perhaps it will simply drive Pfizer down from first place, and smaller American pharmaceutical companies out of business. Glaxo, a British pharmaceutical firm, is in second place, and the complicated Aventis/Sanofi-Synthelabo merger of French pharma giants creates the third place company.
The French drug makers have a larger market share in France, Europe, Asia and Latin America than in the US. Pfizer, of course, most profits in the US market.
So, if the US government passes such a law, it will cut most deeply into Pfizer, and least deeply into Aventis/Sanofi among the top manufacturers. The law of unintended consequences is likely to be to reduce the Anglo-Saxon pharma companies' profit margins on their chief turf, America, while harming the French pharma companies proportionately less, thereby levelling the competitive playing field a bit for the French contender.
Aventis will not be hurt in the home market by the Americans harming their own pharmaceutical flagship in their home market.
And all of that assumes that the capricious US court system will not simply strike down such a law as being unconstitutional, for some reason. It does not seem to require a discernible reason for American judges to act as they do.
No, you don't get it. All drug companies world wide fleece American consumers with higher prices, because the other places with money to buy drugs are monopsonistic government buyers. It is an imperfection in the market, which works to subsidize inter alia the French. It is wrong to subsidize the French.
You should be so lucky. Nope. SCOTUS is quite comfortable with economic regulation, particularly when it strikes out at monopolistic or monopsonistic practices. If and when this law is passed, or becomes law by decree when Torie becomes the benevolent dictator, SCOTUS will just send out a bouquet.
In France it is true you can go to any doctor you want, but only if you can pay for it. Many of the best doctors do not go along with the very low rates reimbursed by the Securité Sociale, and the patient is on his own.
Same for dentists.
The will pull your teeth for free, but will not do preventive dentistry or save the tooth, like root canal surgery and implants.
I do understand this, and although I don't think there is any particular reason to oppose "subsidizing" the "French" when we are speaking of dollars available to all corporations operating in a given market, my point was that the French pharmaceuticals have less of a presence in the US market than the other big competitors. Avantis et al have much greater market shares in Latin America, Asia and Europe than they do in the United States.
So, if the Americans pass a law that forces down pharmaceutical company profits in America (and if a judge finds this constitutional) the law will impact every company that operates in America, to be sure. But it will impact those companies that have a greater portion of their business in America more. French pharma will be hurt, but Pfizer and Glaxo will be hurt much MORE.
This was my point:
American government can impose costs on all pharmaceutical companies doing business in America. But those costs and damages will fall most heavily on those who do the most business in America. And that would be American and British pharma, moreso than the French (although the French would certainly be hurt too).
Hurt all the pharmaceutical companies, and there will be fewer innovations, but the companies that are hurt less, because less exposed to the US market, will do better in the shake-up.
Of course, imposing a law like that would not be much in the American spirit of the free market, and at any rate it is quite impossible for an American Republican Congress to consider passing or a Republican American President from signing such a bill, because it would severely hurt their own major donors.
Yes. As in America there is gap insurance which people buy to cover the difference in reimbursement between the state insurance system and the fees of some private doctors.
I guess no-one has informed my dentist that he does not perform careful reconstruction of teeth to prevent their loss after trauma. I think I will not tell him, for fear that if he were to discover that dentists in France only extract teeth but do nothing else more sophisticated, he will stop.
And Kyoto doesn't go into effect until 2006 ...
Go to a dental surgeon for a single or double root canal and crown, which takes 4-7 hours of work, and see how much you get back from the Sécu...it will be miniscule, as if he had worked on your tooth for 1/2 hour.
On the other hand, private dentists in Paris, many of whom have received post-graduate training in the US, charge about the same amount as dentists in any large American city.
My numbers were pulled from published government expenditure sources for the US and France on the web.
I did some arithmetic, for example subtracting out 4.6% of GDP government expenditure on health care from the 15.3% total health care expenditure in the US, in order to arrive at the 10.7% that must come from the private economy.
Yours is a good point that there is a gap in French insurance coverage which is borne by the individual or paid for by private insurance. There are some private schools and creches, mostly for religious people or for problem children who are expelled from the public system for rowdy behavior. The most elite schools in France are, of course, public.
Of course when trying to assess the different health care systems qualitatively, it is difficult to find comparisons. Longevity and infant mortality seem the most objective to me.
Likewise when attempting to assess the overall quality and utility of public education fulfilling its primary role to socialise children and impart proper rules of conduct and knowledge into them, it is difficult to measure. To me, murder and violent crime rates seem the most objective number. If young men are properly socialized, they will not kill or attack people. However, I expect that there will be objections to whatever criteria are used.
The thing which disturbs me most about the American approach is the extent to which it is driven by debt. American business and individuals are taxed less, but approximately the same level of social services are offered for most (certainly not all) people in the US economy. France taxes more. Both countries spend in the ballpark on government and services. There is no question that the US taxes less...but then it funds these services that it pays for with interest-bearing debt. The low taxes "juice" the American economy - the power of leverage - but leverage only works until the payments catch up with you. I do not worry about the sustainibility of the French model, although obviously it would be better were employment to be improved by making the workplace and capital availability more supple. But I do worry that the American government itself, and industry, and even foreign trade, produce the higher returns that they do because of this insidious debt leveraging, which eventually creeps up in interest due until you cannot do it anymore...and then there is massive debt with slow growth for a long, long time to pay it.
"One can still prefer the American system if one chooses, but the simplistic mashing of numbers comparing government to government expenditures paints a very false impression. The realistic comparison of services to services paints a very different picture.
The French pay 4.9% more of their GDP to have universal security. That Americans spend 4.9% less, and have universal anxiety. It is a judgment call. Simply put, France will never choose the American model. The difference in cost is marginal, but the difference in stress level is enormous."
It is all about freedom.. freedom of choice about how and where to spend your hard earned money. Whether you decide for yourself or some bureaucrats living the high life in palaces in Paris get to decide for you.
The US has the best Universities in the world bar none .
Ditto for medical care. The finest doctors and hospitals in the world are in the US. When French people of means need a specialist or specialized surgery, they high tail it over here. I know personally, because I translate for French and Italian patients visiting American doctors here.
As in everything else, you get what you pay for.
The price for the "security" you so blindly cherish is complacency, lack of initiative, ambition, innovation,personal responsibility and acceptance of the status quo.
Anxiety? The French are the largest consumers in the entire world of anti-depressants and tranquilizers. They also have an extremely high suicide rate.
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