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While Democrats dither over the virtues of ‘Medicare for All’, the Trump administration is about to embark on an all-out offensive to lower health-care costs in the US.

According to WSJ, Trump is preparing an executive order that would force health-care providers – hospitals, internists, specialists etc. – to disclose the discounted and negotiated rates for various procedures that they negotiate with insurance companies. The order would force more transparency among health-care pricing, an industry that is accustomed to transacting in private.

The idea is that more price transparency would improve consumer choice and stoke more competition, which could exert downward pressure on prices. However, previous attempts to introduce more transparency to the industry have been vehemently resisted by special interests. President Trump is also working on an initiative to lower the cost of prescription drugs.

For example, patients would be able to see the price of a routine scan – like a CAT scan – in advance. If one clinic wants to charge $5,000 for the procedure, the patient can check with another clinic and shop around for the best price. The stunning lack of transparency in this market has allowed for immense cost disparities to persist between various providers – prices that are often completely divorced from the actual cost of the procedure.

The White House is planning a meeting on Friday to iron out the last details of the order.

A bipartisan plan introduced in the Senate is seeking to accomplish something similar by mandating that providers disclose the price of a given procedure within 48 hours of the request.

As WSJ revealed in a blockbuster report published last summer, the opacity surrounding medical-services pricing has sometimes led hospitals to wildly inflate the costs of some of the most common procedures. After receiving complaints about the price of a $50,000 knee surgery from Medicare, the hospital set out to determine how much the surgery actually cost.

The answer? Just $10,550, including the surgeons and the anesthesiologist.

The Trump administration is also weighing whether to use the DoJ’s anti-trust authority to break up regional hospital monopolies and encourage more competition.

For years now, health-care costs have dramatically outpaced consumer-price inflation. One researcher who monitored health-care costs over a five-year period from  the beginning of 2012 to the end of 2016 found average costs nationally rose by 16%, roughly three times the rate of inflation.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2K1wGb0 Tyler Durden

Fighting off tears after rattling off her accomplishments and thanking the people of the UK for the ‘honor of a lifetime’, Theresa May said Friday that she will resign on Friday, June 7 – two weeks from now – after a rebellion within the conservative party finally forced her to step down.

May, the second – but certainly not the last – female prime minister in the UK, will abandon her supremely unpopular withdrawal agreement instead of trying to force it through the Commons for the fourth time.

Though May will stay on as caretaker until a new leader can be chosen, the race to succeed May begins now…odds are that a ‘Brexiteer’ will fill the role. Whatever happens, the contest should take a few weeks, and afterwards May will be on her way back to Maidenhead.

“It is and will always remain a deep regret for me that I was not able to deliver Brexit…I was not able to reach a consensus…that job will now fall to my successor,” May said.

Between now and May’s resignation, May still has work to do: President Trump will travel to the UK for a state visit, while Europe will also celebrate the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

The pound’s reaction was relatively muted, as May’s decision to step down had been telegraphed well in advance.

Watch May’s remarks below:

The discussion now turns to whom May’s successor might be. Here’s a list of likely candidates courtesy of the Independent.

• Boris Johnson, former foreign secretary
• Andrea Leadsom, former Commons leader
• Sajid Javid, home secretary
• Jeremy Hunt, foreign secretary
• Michael Gove, environment secretary
• Dominic Raab, former Brexit secretary
• Matt Hancock, health secretary

Boris Johnson, who resigned as May’s foreign secretary back in July over May’s “Chequers Deal” – the first outline of what would evolve into the withdrawal agreement. The leadership election process takes four-to-six weeks, which means we won’t know who will be the next PM until mid-summer. Ultimately, registered Tories from across the UK will choose the next PM in a UK-wide vote.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2YSxX8L Tyler Durden

Authored by Ferghane Azihari via The Mises Institute,

A certain nostalgic view of the Roman Empire has helped to push the idea the European Union is essential to the prosperity and success of Europe. But a closer look at the continent invalidates the link between prosperity and affiliation to Brussels’ Europe. Among the richest European countries are the countries outside the Union. This is the case in Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein.

Nor is there a link between the wealth of a country and its membership in large political groups at the global level. In addition to the regions already mentioned, many places combine smallness and wealth, as shown by Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and New Zealand.

Unfortunately for the proponents of a political Europe, the historical rise of the European civilization also illustrates the opposite of the imperial narrative. The American historian David Landes recalled in 1998 that the fall of the Roman Empire was a happy event for the Old Continent. These affirmations support the work of the sociologist Jean Baechler, who, three decades earlier, wrote that the expansion of European trade was favored by the anarchy inherited from the feudal order.

Coupled with the relative cultural unity forged by the Catholic Church, the feudal anarchy inaugurated by the Middle Ages liberated the economy and the spirit of enterprise. This specificity of the West explains what the British historian Eric Jones called “the miracle” or “the exceptionalism” of Europe. Unlike oriental and Asian tyrants capable of killing the creativity of an empire, European monarchs, by the smallness of their territories, knew some limits to their predation.

It was therefore easier for the industrious Western classes to escape oppression by punishing bad governments through emigration. Consider the revocation of the Edict of Nantes under Louis XIV and the impoverishment of the Kingdom of France induced by the exodus of Protestants to more favorable havens like Switzerland, the Netherlands, or England.

The absence of political unity allowed the continent to be ruled by many small, sovereign, and competing territorial divisions. From this competition was born a race for talent and capital, conducive to the diffusion of a certain political discipline. It was in these conditions that freedom, commerce, and science flourished.

That Macron invokes the “Renaissance” in his election campaign to sell membership in this new Empire, shows his historical misunderstanding.

The Renaissance itself was born from the bowels of an Italy divided into a multitude of city-states. It is this division that the Scottish philosopher David Hume considered favorable to the progress of the arts and sciences.

Also in Italy, Shakespeare, in the Merchant of Venice, leads Antonio to recall that the prosperity of the city depends on the securities and freedoms granted to all traders. From Benjamin Constant to Montesquieu to Alexis de Tocqueville, many thinkers were convinced that these freedoms are more likely to be safeguarded in small states than in vast empires.

From this point of view, the European Union is a cartel of governments eager to resuscitate imperial ambitions foreign to the conditions of the rise of our civilization. Its authoritarian projects of political, regulatory and fiscal standardization are betrayals of the spirit of innovation that requires the highest degree of decentralization and possible institutional competition.

Finally, it is the intellectuals Nathan Rosenberg and Luther Earle Birdzell who best summarize the historical factors behind the blossoming of the West. In a book published in 1986, they write that the prosperity of a civilization implies the expansion of an open trade on a politically fragmented territory. Applied to our region, this prescription leads us to prefer the dream of a Europe with a hundred thousand Liechtensteins to the dystopia of a continent-spanning empire.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2QiOq2M Tyler Durden

Adem Duygu, a military analyst from Turkey, posted commercial satellite imagery of Russia’s new combat stealth drone on a flight line around the date President Vladimir Putin inspected the country’s latest warplanes at the 929th Chkalov State Flight-Test Center in Russia’s Astrakhan region.

Commenting on the latest satellite imagery, The National Interest said the new drone, dubbed the Sukhoi Okhotnik-B, or Hunter-B, a stealth heavy unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) being developed by Sukhoi as a sixth-generation aircraft, was first spotted by land-based cameras earlier this year at an airfield in Novosibirsk in southern Russia.

Duygu didn’t provide a date on when the satellite imagery was taken, but it’s likely the photo was snapped within the first two weeks of May. This is because, on May 14, Putin was escorted by six Sukhoi Su-57 stealth jets to Chkalov, for an immediate inspection of the flight line.

The satellite image of the flight line at the Chkalov State Flight-Test Center shows the Hunter-B, Su-57, Su-34, a MiG-29, and multiple Sukhoi Flanker variants.

In a planned statement surrounding the trip, Putin hardly mentioned the stealth drone: “In addition to the modern and advanced military aircraft and helicopters that were shown to us, unmanned aerial vehicles were presented,” Putin said. “I emphasize that all the activities in preparation for the serial production of this technology were performed on time.”

The National Interest doesn’t believe the Hunter-B will be ready for series production anytime soon.

Estimates show the Hunter-B is similar in size to China’s Tian Ying drone, the US Air Force’s RQ-170 Sentinel, and the US Navy’s X-47B UAV.

Tom Cooper, an independent expert on Russian military aviation, said the Hunter-B entering squadron service with the Russian Air Force is “big.”

“The Russian military is running multiple UAV-related projects,” Cooper said. “Thus the emergence of this project is perfectly normal.”

Samuel Bendett, an independent expert on the Russian military, said the Hunter-B could begin flight-testing in 2H19 if it hasn’t already done so.

“At this point, it is going to be heaviest and fastest UAV [in Russian service] if and when fielded, but additional testing and evaluation will have to take place in order for this unmanned system to be fully functional,” Bendett said. “Its speed [up to 620 miles per hour] and weight — up to 20 tons — means that a host of aerodynamic, electronic and high-tech issues need to be worked out.”

Besides the nuclear arms race between Russia and the US, both countries have been modernizing their militaries with new technologies, including developing new fifth-generation fighter jets, UCAVs, and hypersonic weapons. The world is on the cusp of a significant conflict, once global trade crashes and the world is thrown into a trade recession or even a depression, the probabilities of conflict will soar. According to the chart below, maybe that time is now.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2VLznQh Tyler Durden

Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

Brexit has been a long, drawn-out saga. But finally, Theresa May’s indecision appears to be coming to an end. She has finally been cornered in a tragic opera with more twists and turns than Wagner’s Ring Cycle. May’s Götterdämmerung is reaching its conclusion. Brünnhilde is riding Grane, her trusty steed, into immolation on the funeral pyre of her heavily-amended withdrawal agreement.

Mrs May’s initial error was to seek consensus between Remainers and Brexiteers. In the words of one of her sacked advisers, Nick Timothy, she viewed Brexit as a damage-limitation exercise. Her mission statement evolved from her Lancaster House speech, when she declared she would deliver Brexit in terms which were clear, complying with the referendum and applauded by ardent Brexiteers. It became a fatally flawed compromise, which has failed to be ratified by MPs on three occasions so far, and a proposed fourth in the next week or so is likely to suffer the same fate.

Her problems started in earnest when she over-ruled her first Brexit secretary, David Davis. Unknown to her Brexit ministers, with her own civil service advisors she began negotiating behind her Brexit secretary’s back. Davis was informed of May’s Chequers proposal only a few days before that fateful Checkers meeting, following which Davis and Boris Johnson (Foreign Secretary) resigned from the Cabinet, while five other ministers and Parliamentary Private Secretaries also resigned.

If ever there was evidence that in politics you should keep your enemies close and your friends closer still, this was it. It has allowed those that have resigned to expose May’s duplicity to their fellow MPs and to organise the opposition to May’s Chequers proposal and the subsequent Withdrawal Agreement she cooked up with the EU.

Mrs May was always a Remainer, and her presence as Prime Minister has encouraged leading Europhiles to overturn the Brexit referendum. That is why she sees it as a damage limitation exercise: produce something that can be said to be Brexit, but still leaves the UK tied to Brussels. It is Hotel California, with Britain only leaving if both sides agree to it, or alternatively, Northern Ireland remains in the EU’s customs union. That cannot happen, not least because the DUP would end its vital support for May’s minority government.

Putting the Northern Ireland issue to one side, in order to get the agreement of the other EU nations for a full and final exit, the UK relies on “The duty of good faith which prohibits the deliberateexploitation of the implementation period to damage British interests” (Barclay’s emphasis). This was written in a letter by Steve Barclay, the current Brexit Secretary, to John Redwood, a senior Conservative backbench MP, in response to his concerns over the Withdrawal Agreement.

Good faith in politics? Barclay must be joking. Spain has a political interest in securing Gibraltar: won’t a future Spanish politician not be tempted to only agree to opening the door to Hotel California if Gibraltar is signed over? French fisherman enjoy free access to British fishing grounds. What French politician has the resolve to stand up to striking fisherman on a good-faith commitment? We haven’t seen one yet.

In short, May’s attempt to limit Brexit damage is a stitch-up, pleasing neither side of the House.

The established legal position

The EU Withdrawal Act 2018 (not to be confused with May’s proposed Withdrawal Agreement) sets the terms for the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. Its first clause is the repeal on Exit Day of the EU Communities Act 1972, by which the UK joined the then Common Market. It is primary legislation and cannot be overturned. As Stewart Jackson, who was involved with its drafting put it, you cannot wish away the EU Referendum Act 2015, the EU (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 and EU Withdrawal Act 2018 on a whim.

You wouldn’t think so, judging by the back-tracking of the Remainers in Parliament. David Davis and Stewart Jackson knew that “Remainer refuseniks would use every low and disreputable trick in the book to disavow the settled will of the electorate in 2016”. They drafted the legislation with this in mind. The fact of the matter is no one can block No Deal.

Press reporting has skated over this fact. The BBC and other media outlets take most of their briefing from those who are wishing away the law. It has confined Mrs May in her attempts to get her withdrawal agreement through the House: all she has been able to do is postpone Exit Day with the EU’s agreement, the date when legislation comes into force. In the absence of any agreement the UK will leave on WTO terms on Exit Day, currently 31 October.

Labour’s role in all this

In desperation, Mrs May has turned to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party to gain sufficient support to push her Withdrawal Agreement through the House against the wishes of her own MPs. Corbyn is a Marxist, as is his Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell. Both of them have promoted far-left activists, who now have a high degree of control over both party policy and the selection of Labour MPs, meaning that moderates are being side-lined and expunged.

This creates Labour’s own crisis, with Marxist activists alienating moderate Labour voters in the constituencies. Furthermore, the Parliamentary Labour Party has its own split between Remainers and Brexiteers. The whole Brexit issue is a hot potato with which the Labour leadership would rather not be involved. It was with this in mind the Labour leadership held talks with Mrs May’s government, at her invitation, to try to find common ground.

Labour’s tactics were simple, only an increasingly desperate Prime Minister seemed unable to see them. Labour took and kept the moral high ground, appearing reasonable by accepting the invitation to talks. They ensured they would go nowhere (not difficult, given Mrs May’s stubbornness), then withdraw blaming her for the breakdown. Their hope is to force a general election following a No Confidence Motion only after Brexit has been resolved, capitalising on Mrs May’s disastrous handling of the Brexit issue. And if Mrs May brings her proposed withdrawal agreement to the House for a fourth time, they almost certainly won’t support it, again blaming Mrs May for her “failure to listen”.

The Labour leadership will be observing with interest the battle to succeed her, and it will be clear to them that either No Deal or a compromise in that direction will be the result. This is unlikely to worry them on two counts. Firstly, Labour will not want to alienate voters in their northern constituencies any further by compromising on Mrs May’s deal or anything close to it. And secondly, the leadership, being committed Marxists, will probably take the view that a “right-wing” Prime Minister will improve their own prospects in a general election.

It all points to a continuing strategy of not supporting Mrs May, avoiding any deal with the Conservatives, and hoping the Conservatives will elect a leader that will destroy the Conservatives’ electoral prospects.

The EU elections

This article will be published on the day Britain votes in the EU elections. Britain will be returning 73 Members of the European Parliament in a vote that was never meant to take place.

By extending Exit Day to 31 October, Mrs May has forced this election upon herself. She has made herself extremely unpopular with Brexiteers, and anyone who expected Brexit to be delivered in accordance with the 2016 referendum result. In effect, she has stood in the way of a democratic vote. It is a stance which has exposed the British Parliament as being dominated by career politicians who have become divorced from their electors and undemocratic in their outlook. This behaviour from the Conservatives and prevarication by Labour has seriously undermined electoral support for both parties.

Consequently, Nigel Farage, who can claim much of the original credit for Brexit, has re-entered the fray. He has positioned himself with a new party (the Brexit Party), sanitised of perceived extremism, but combining candidates from all backgrounds. It is politically neutral but with a simple message: get democracy back. From a standing start in about a month, the Brexit Party has gone up in the polls ahead of all the other parties by a substantial margin. Meanwhile, in the polls the Conservatives have slumped into single percentage figures. The election may turn out to be close to a whitewash for them.

You can tell the establishment is worried, when they send the Electoral Commission around to look at the Brexit Party’s books in the hope that some impropriety can be identified. Furthermore, the EU has all of a sudden decided to examine Farage’s finances. These moves by biased establishments are so obviously muck-raking, they could end up strengthening support for Farage and his Brexit Party even more.

The likely effect on the more supine Tory MPs should be to wake them up to the fact that Mrs May must go as soon as possible and be replaced by someone who will not only deliver a proper Brexit but neutralise Farage’s Brexit party. Nothing less will suffice, and the announcement of her amended withdrawal agreement on Tuesday undermines her position even further.

The selection process, in theory anyway, starts with Conservative MPs voting for any candidate who cares to stand. If necessary, a second round of voting takes place, those that have dropped out lending their support, along with many of the votes of their supporters to one of the remaining candidates. The two leading candidates in a final ballot are then put forward to the constituency members for a final selection. It should be completed by end-June.

Mrs May’s likely replacement

At the time of writing, it appears that Mrs May will fail disastrously if she puts her amended withdrawal agreement to a Commons vote for a fourth time. She has tried to appeal to the Remainers with a fourth vote by offering a possible second referendum if MPs back her bill. She has now broken every red line she previously set out. She may not even get the chance for it to be voted.

In the coming days, her position will surely become untenable, though we have all said that before. But this time, she will have exhausted every possibility and have nowhere else to go. And if the Conservative vote collapses in today’s European elections, the fence-sitters in Parliament will be galvanised into getting rid of her.

In the last few days, leadership contenders have been lining up their bids for the premiership. Those jostling for position are talking of everything but Brexit. The Remainers, such as Philip Hammond (the Chancellor) do not appear to be in the race and have become so unpopular outside Parliament that they wouldn’t get a mandate from the constituencies anyway. The next leader is very likely to be a staunch Brexiteer.

It would bore an international audience to list and analyse the runners, other than to concentrate on the clear favourite, Boris Johnson, who currently shows as 7/4-on. His nearest rival, Dominic Raab is 9/2-against. The news on Boris is for him both good and tricky. The good is that he is clearly the favourite with the constituency members, and if he can be one of the two names put forward, he should be home and dry. The tricky bit is Remainer MPs and fence-sitters in the parliamentary party, who claim to be one-nation Tories, would rather not support Boris.

He is regarded as right-wing, when in fact he favours freer markets, less regulation, and free trade. He is a classic Tory. It is the party’s middle ground that has become socialistic. In an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph he wrote the following:

“What we cannot now know – as the great French economist Bastiat observed in the 19th century – is the unseen opportunity cost of the way the UK economic structure has evolved to fit the EU over the last four and a half decades, and the productive ways in which it might now evolve.”

The reference to Frédéric Bastiat is important. He is referring to Bastiat’s parable of the broken window, which points out that the state’s intervention (the boy who broke the window) denies the more productive use of the baker’s money to his desired ends. The fact that Johnson knows the parable and understands the message is good evidence of his libertarian credentials.

That being the case, it is the socialistic element of the Conservative parliamentary party, masquerading as one-nation Tories, that he has to overcome. Reportedly, he has been having one-to-one meetings with his fellow MPs to do just that. Sometime ago, there was a well-founded belief that if Johnson became leader of the Conservative Party at least five MPs would resign the whip. Since then, Change UK, a dustbin of disillusioned Remainers has been formed with eleven MPs, three of which were Conservatives. It has been a complete failure and a sharp lesson to other would-be jumpers, so there are likely to be no more defections on a Johnson leadership.

Johnson has also been taking the advice of Lynton Crosby, probably the most successful political strategist today. It was Crosby who advised Scott Morrison in last weekend’s Australian election, when the expected Labour opposition victory was successfully overturned. He also advised Johnson in his successful elections as Mayor of London in 2008 and 2012.

This is interesting, because Johnson appears to be working to a carefully constructed plan. He avoids press comment over Brexit and writes about anything else in his Monday column at the Daily Telegraph. His contributions in Parliament have been brief, the few on Brexit generally confined to democracy rather than trade. He has positioned himself to rescue the party from electoral destruction if called upon, rather than appear to be an overtly ambitious politician, unlike all the other contenders. It is quite Churchillian, in the sense there is a parallel with Churchill’s election by his peers to lead the nation in its darkest hour. He even wrote about it in a recent bestseller, The Churchill Factor, and understands intimately what it took for Churchill to gain the support of the House.

It is therefore hardly surprising Johnson is the favourite to succeed Mrs May. His appreciation of free markets means he is not frightened by trading with the EU on WTO terms. Furthermore, President Trump admires him, and would be likely to fast-track a US trade deal with the UK. However, Johnson is likely to pursue a deal on radically different terms on a take-it-or-leave-it basis with no further extensions to Exit Day.

As soon as the 31 October deadline has passed, Remainers will no longer have a cause. They have yet to appreciate the fact, and they may vote for him in the hope that after restoring the party’s fortunes, they can get rid of him and mend relations with the EU. But the Brexit debate would effectively end after Exit Day and its divisiveness with it. Farage’s Brexit party will wither on the vine, its purpose of restoring democratic accountability to Parliament and delivering Brexit being restored.

Johnson would then have the task of rebuilding the party for the next general election, set for 5 May 2022.

In the coming days, having seen Mrs May’s last roll of the dice, all these factors will be uppermost in the minds of both backbenchers and of government ministers in their private capacity. If there is one thing that is certain, the Conservative Party is a survivor. If Boris Johnson is the best option, MPs will swallow their prejudices and elect him.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2JDk9uW Tyler Durden

Even with the 90 day delay, the Trump administration’s decision to blacklist Huawei and other foreign telecoms suspected of threatening national security has already prompted a handful of suppliers to cut ties with the Chinese telecoms giant, for fear that continuing to do business with Huawei would subject them to retaliation from the US.

Three British companies, mobile network operators EE and Vodafone, as well as semiconductor maker ARM, have already said they would end their business relationships with Huawei (EE and Vodafone said they wouldn’t offer Huawei phones on its 5G network, and ARM told employees to tear up all contracts with Huawei). 

With all of the pressure on Huawei, Beijing is again resorting to threats to try and preserve Huawei’s business. The UK reviews its telecoms policy to determine whether Huawei will be allowed to supply ‘non-core’ 5G components, like antenna masts, Beijing would like UK bureaucrats to know that there will be consequences if they shun Huawei.

Top Chinese diplomat Chen Wen, the Charge D’affairs in London, told the BBC that China would scale back its investments in the UK if Huawei is excluded from its 5G network, according to the BBC.

Though she kept her comments vague, Wen told the BBC that the backlash would be “quite substantial.” This at a time when Brexit-related uncertainty is already complicating decisions relating to capex and FDI.

Speaking to the BBC’s World at One programme, Ms Chen, who is the Chinese Charge D’affairs in London, said the UK economy would be damaged by the message any ban on Huawei sent out to international and Chinese companies.

“The message is not going to be very positive,” she said.

“Is UK still open? Is UK still extending a welcoming arm to other Chinese investors?”

When asked how large the repercussions would be, the embassy official said: “It’s hard to predict at the moment, but I think it’s going to be quite substantial.”

Chen added that the Chinese government would never ask a domestic company to spy on its customers, before accusing President Trump of stoking ”hysteria”.

Ms Chen insisted that her government would never force a Chinese firm operating abroad to provide information to its intelligence agencies.

She went on to claim that there was a bit of “hysteria” in the United States about the rise of Chinese influence and the UK should make decisions based on its own national interest.

She called Huawei’s investment in the UK “a vote of confidence in the UK economy.”

As convincing as Beijing’s “no spying” pledge might sound, the notion that Huawei won’t spy on its customers isn’t just specious – it’s demonstrably false. Who can forget the suspicious ‘back doors’ discovered in Huawei’s networking equipment, or the suspicious ‘back doors’ discovered in its consumer-tech products. 

With this in mind, it looks like the UK is facing a choice: Either grant Beijing ingress to its communications networks, or risk losing that China money.

Whatever they decide, the world will be watching closely to see if this is the start of a trend of European countries finally coming around to Washington’s line on Huawei.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2HOvODW Tyler Durden