That’s the common gag, but ACTUALLY the difference is in whether the recipient of the comment was open to hearing it and whether the speaker intends merely those literal words or has other implications.

I carefully read through the article and did not find a link to the study. Would you be willing to share the link here?

This article starts off as a response to another article, but doesn’t link to the article it is talking about! I found that frustrating and poor form, community-wise.

He can appoint two new members to the Supreme Court and then have them rule that Trump, as President, is immune to being prosecuted or held responsible for any state or federal crime but like Bush v. Gore it isn’t a precedent and doesn’t apply to any other President.

Yes, that is exactly what he is saying. Yes, it is completely absurd and would undermine the bedrock principles of our legal system. However, apparently somewhere between 3 and 6 members of the US Supreme Court may be seriously considering it.

(To be fair, he does claim that this absolute immunity would go away if half of the House and 2/3 of the Senate decided to impeach the President.)

Great question – would someone ask that of my boss please? 😉

Yes. The average cost of cancer treatment is around $150,000 USD here and expensive cases can be much more.

Here is my perspective on the answer to your question:

Our government is not functional. It is not that it doesn’t “want” a healthy work force, but that it isn’t capable of setting any sort of a policy.

The last time the US made any meaningful change in healthcare policy was under Obama. My impression of what happened is that there was a brief (2 yr) moment when the Presidency, House, and Senate were all controlled by the same party. The Democrats passed “health reform” which was basically the Republican health care reform package from 4 years earlier.

In the 13 years since then, the only Republican position on health care has been that Obama’s “ACA” law is “bad”. There is literally no suggestion of what else would be better. (I’m not counting the anti-abortion laws as “health care” – they are seen here as a moral issue, not a health care one.) The Democrats’ position has been a mix of “we shouldn’t let the Republicans take us back to something WORSE!” and “the whole system is broken and needs to be replaced”.

We have two problems. First, our government is structured so that it cannot easily accomplish anything, at least without cooperation between the two opposed parties. Secondly, one of the two parties is insane and wants to destroy the government (and has enough electoral support to win almost half the time).

Thank you.