National Security Brief: Netanyahu Weakened In Surprising Election Results

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies “were sharply weakened” in national elections on Tuesday, forcing him to try to form a coalition government with his opponents. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports: In the past decades, the general understanding on the political scene was that Israeli elections are determined, above all, by voters’ sense of personal security. Apparently, however, the 2013 elections are different. Four years of relative calm did not help Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Neither did his implied threats that the Iranian bomb is approaching, and the Arab Spring is out there raging. Many voters took advantage of the calm to vote according to what really bothered them: their economic situation, the social gaps, the fact that some Israelis bear the burden of the military and taxation while others do not, or a sense of just being plain fed up with the existing regime.

In other news:

The Pentagon said that it will not demand payment to transport French troops to Mali in American planes, however the U.S. has not agreed to a French request to provide refueling tankers for its warplanes. Meanwhile, British special forces have arrived in Mali helping to co-ordinate and advise the French military effort against the jihadi groups in the north.

The Wall Street Journal reports: Afghan rural areas will be at greater risk of falling to the Taliban if the U.S. accedes to Kabul’s demands to speed up the withdrawal of special-operations teams working with Afghan village self-defense units, an internal report prepared for the U.S. military warned.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will appear before both House of Congress today to answer questions about the attack that killed American diplomats and other personnel in Benghazi, Libya last September. It will be one of her last duties as America’s top diplomat.

View the original article here

The Surprising Root Of The United States’ Wasteful Health Care Spending

Over the last several decades, U.S. national health expenditures have skyrocketed, increasing everything from the cost of treatment to the cost of coverage and the federal government’s entitlement obligations.

Experts have long held that anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of America’s $2.7 trillion annual health care spending is wasteful, either due to ineffective treatments, excess medical tests, hospital re-admissions, and medical billing fraud.

But there has been some debate over exactly how much each of these factors contributes to wasteful health expenditures. On Thursday, the nonprofit group New England Health Institute (NEHI) held a round table in which they explored exactly that, and their findings are striking: of the seven biggest factors contributing to waste, the largest by far is patients not adhering to their medication regimens. NEHI estimates that a staggering 50 percent of the 187 million Americans taking prescription drugs every year do not take them properly:

When Americans neglect to stick to their prescribed treatment regimens, they risk increasing the frequency of hospitalizations and preventable diseases and deaths. Other major factors in medical waste include the overuse of antibiotics leading to super resistant pathogen forms, as well as Americans’ woefully low rates of vaccinations.

Most of the policy solutions that NEHI explored to these problems are fairly standard for health reform advocates, including measures such as greater care coordination and case management, an emphasis on primary and preventative care, patient education, pay-for-performance for hospitals and doctors, and prospective rather than retrospective payments for patients’ care. Several of these measures — including extending access to preventative and primary care and pay-for-performance — are already slated to be implemented under Obamacare.

But another event speaker, Institute of Medicine scholar Dr. Michael McGinnis, emphasized that cost controls and expansions of access to care alone would not solve the underlying problem of wasteful spending — as evidenced by the study’s findings. Doctors and patients alike have to find incentives for effectively tracking and treating diseases, and get a handle on illnesses before they become more complex and expensive to treat. “We need to have a multi-faceted approach,” Dr. McGinnis said. “We need a change in prices, a change in culture, a change in health care delivery.”

View the original article here