Fwd: Great Locations For High Quality, Inexpensive Medical Care

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On Oct 14, 2022, at 11:08 AM, Simon Black <admin@sovereignman.com> wrote:

When you have a global view of the world, you give yourself many more options to solve problems — including medical issues...

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October 14, 2022 This week I had the incredible joy of welcoming my son into the world. He's healthy, happy, and at nearly 9 pounds, quite strong. As soon as we found out she was pregnant, my wife and I made a very deliberate decision to have the baby in Cancun, Mexico. We live in Puerto Rico, but we found with our last child that the healthcare experience here in Mexico is really top quality… yet incredibly inexpensive. By comparison, I recently read a story about a 30-year old man who got into a car accident in Modesto, California. Luckily, he was not critically injured. But since the crash did cause some shoulder and back pain, he went to the hospital to make sure it was nothing serious. His three-hour hospital visit consisted of a quick chat with an ER doctor who wrote that the patient "looks good". He also received a prescription for pain medication. And his bill came to $44,914. Sadly, his story is not unique. It's easy to find cases, for example, of a surprise $8,000 bill for a colonoscopy at an "out-of-network" provider; i.e. a medical center that doesn't accept certain insurance. Or an extra $1,600 tacked onto the bill for a birth, just for the epidural. Spending on healthcare in the US was about $2,000 per person in 1970, adjusted for inflation in 2022 dollars. Today, it is over $12,000 per capita. During that time, we have seen plenty of new regulation in the healthcare system, including HIPPA and even a regulatory overhaul with the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare". Somehow that has made care less affordable, and hasn't improved the quality. And while the healthcare workforce has increased in the US by 75% since 1990, 95% of the new workers are administrative staff. The solution, however, is not "free" healthcare — "free" ends up being the most expensive of all. The UK's socialized medical system is short-staffed by about 100,000 positions. And as a result, millions of UK patients are sitting on wait-lists; paying with their time and deteriorating health. Canada's socialized healthcare system is similar. Despite having one of the highest per capita spending on healthcare of any country, Canadians wait a median of over 25 weeks to see a specialist. In 1993, the median wait time was about 9 weeks. But head down to Mexico City, and you'll find the clinics packed with Canadians, happy to pay out of pocket for immediate, quality healthcare. If you are willing to look outside of your home country's borders, you'll find a thriving medical tourism industry around the world. And if you think that means sacrificing quality, you will be surprised. My own experience here in Mexico has been stellar. What we found was amazing personalized care, accommodation, and comfort, for a fraction of the price we would have paid in the US. (The added benefit is that a baby born in Mexico is automatically a Mexican citizen, and the parents are fast tracked to citizenship in just two years. If you want to hear all about it, you can listen to the podcast here.) Often, medical tourism destinations will have a particular specialty. Mexico, for example, captures a lot of Americans going south for dental work, because Mexican care costs about 65% less. While it can cost nearly $4,000 for a single dental implant in the US, one of Cancun's most popular dental clinics charges $900 each. Mexico is also a great location for check-ups. For example, an "executive" exam is a thorough work-up of your blood, organ functions and more which costs about $5,000 in the United States. At various hospitals from Cancun to Mexico City, the range for this type of exam is between $850-$1,500. Are Mexican doctors as well trained and qualified as US doctors? At many facilities, yes. For example, Medica Sur in Mexico City partners with the prestigious Mayo Clinic Care Network. With such easy access to quality healthcare, the low cost of living, and an easy path to permanent residency for retirees, Mexico is a great option to consider for retirement. Colombia has some of Latin America's highest rated hospitals and clinics. According to a 2019 study by América Economia, 24 of the top 58 Latin American clinics and hospitals are in Colombia. And you'll pay about a 40% discount from American prices. Several of these hospitals are JCI-accredited (Joint Commission International (JCI) — an independent nonprofit hospital rating agency), and capable of delivering essentially any medical procedures you might require. Panama's specialty could be considered stem cell treatment. First off, stem cells don't have to come from aborted embryos. Rather, scientists can extract stem cells from a cadaver and use this material for knee injections, for example. But the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not allow this type of stem cell treatment. Panama is a convenient destination in the Americas to take advantage of stem cell injections. For example, operating since 2006, Dr. Neil Riordan (Ph.D in Health Sciences) and his Stem Cell Institute have treated thousands of patients, including some prominent ones like Home Depot's founder Bernie Marcus. Moving away from Latin America… What countries are best for high quality, reasonably priced medical tourism in Asia? Thailand's medical tourism hospitals, for example, may feel more like going to a luxury hotel. Bumrungrad offers exquisite lobbies, concierge service, gourmet restaurants, luxury accommodations and nurses that are more like butlers. Bumrungrad International Hospital in Bangkok was the first in Asia to obtain JCI accreditation. Browsing the doctor profiles on its website, I found that the majority had received training in the US. This hospital can handle your most serious surgeries. For example, heart bypass surgery generally costs about one fifth of the $100,000 US price tag. And that price includes seven nights' accommodation, including two in the post-surgical Coronary Care Unit. Malaysia offers similar prices for quality care at JCI-accredited hospitals. But for an even cheaper medical tourism option in Asia, consider this up and coming country in the medical field… Vietnam is relatively new to the medical tourism scene, which could be why its prices tend to be lower than Thailand and Malaysia. But once again, you won't sacrifice quality. In 2015, Vinmec International, which has locations throughout the country, was the first hospital in Vietnam to receive JCI accreditation. What does open heart surgery cost in Vietnam? The most expensive type of open heart surgery listed on Vinmec International's website costs only about $5,000. Lithuania is a medical tourism destination you might consider in Europe. The first JCI-accredited hospital in the Baltic states and eastern Europe, Kardiolita Hospital in Vilnius lists cardiac aortocoronary bypass starting around 10,000 euro. UK patients will be glad to know the hospital promises no wait times for procedures. When you have a global view of the world, you give yourself many more options to solve problems — including medical issues. Paying out of pocket allows you to skip lines, and often save money even including the cost of travel. And you don't have to sacrifice quality. For more details on these medical tourism destinations, Sovereign Confidential members can access our report on medical tourism destinations in Latin America here, or Asian and European medical tourism destinations here. To your freedom and prosperity,

Simon Black, Founder Sovereign Research & Advisory

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Fwd: Venture Capital Speaker Series by U First Capital (Zoom too): W 9/28/2022 How to Raise Pre-Seed/Seed Startup Funds 5 pm to 6 pm Pacific Time (Online)

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From: Rob (Meetup) <UFirstCapital-list@email.meetup.com>
Date: Wed, Sep 28, 2022 at 3:53 PM
Subject: Venture Capital Speaker Series by U First Capital (Zoom too): W 9/28/2022 How to Raise Pre-Seed/Seed Startup Funds 5 pm to 6 pm Pacific Time (Online)
To: <stevescott@techacq.com>

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Rob (Organizer) sent a message to the Venture Capital Speaker Series by U First Capital (Zoom too) mailing list W 9/28/2022 How to Raise Pre-Seed/Seed Startup Funds 5 pm to 6 pm Pacific Time (Online) Organizational Sponsors: KEAP Close more leads consistently! Create a repeatable sales process for your team by making it easy to set-up appointments, track leads, and send quotes, all from your CRM. Get a FREE trial here: https://keap.com/lp/get-the-business?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=i2ipo&utm_campaign=i2ipoweb&utm_content= Create Your App in Minutes! Visit: https://passion.io/?_go=idea-to-ipo Email marketing for FREE! Visit: https://www.aweber.com/easy-email.htm?id=533058 Grow Your Instagram Fam Base with InstaChamp by Mobile Monkey! Visit: https://app.mobilemonkey.com/instachampIPO This is an online event. Participation is 100% online. Participants can be located anywhere in the world. This event is FREE to attend! In order to participate, you must register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-to-raise-pre-seed-and-seed-startup-funds-tickets-417062173187 Hurry! Slots are limited! (The login link will be emailed to Eventbrite registrants right before the start of the event.)   Less than 1% of startup pitches result in funding. While most entrepreneurs over-emphasize pitch decks, smart founders focus on fundability. Successful founders follow a proven five-step process to efficiently raise pre-seed and seed funds for their early stage startup. This class dives into important keys to raise early-stage funds, including: Fundability Due diligence and legal pitfalls Financial projections and models Funding strategy Inflection points and funding milestones Idea validation Traction metrics Pitch effectiveness and tracking Negotiating term sheets Attendees will learn the Prepare, Plan, Execute, Sell, and Close (PPESC) process to effectively build a fundable startup and then close Pre-Seed and Seed funding. Fundable Startups provides coaching, training, and tools that helps founders build healthy, fundable companies. As a published author and a CEO, CTO or tech vice president of five startups with three exits, Sam Wong leads Fundable Startups in creating premium, deep-dive, visual training and tools to help founders with great execution. For more info on Idea to IPO events, visit: www.idea-to-ipo.com   You received this message because you are a registered member of Meetup. Unsubscribe from this type of email. Manage your settings for all types of email updates. Visit your account page to change your contact details, privacy settings, and other settings. Report this message. Block message sender. Meetup LLC, POB 4668 #37895 NY NY USA 10163 Read our Privacy Policy.

Fwd: Debatable: Is liberal democracy dying?

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From: The New York Times <nytdirect@nytimes.com>
Date: Wed, Sep 28, 2022 at 3:20 PM
Subject: Debatable: Is liberal democracy dying?
To: <stevescott@techacq.com>

Voters around the world are electing leaders with authoritarian tendencies.

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story September 28, 2022 Illustration by The New York Times; images by Alberto Pizzoli and Yuichi Yamazaki via Getty Images By Spencer Bokat-Lindell Staff Editor, Opinion Last weekend, voters in Italy handed the reins of government to a coalition led by a party directly descended from Benito Mussolini's fascist dictatorship, delivering one of the biggest victories to the far right in Europe since World War II. "Today is a sad day for Italy," said the leader of Italy's center-left Democratic Party, who during the campaign had cast the contest as nothing less than a fight to save the country's democracy. If such language sounds familiar to American ears, it's because countries around the world, including the United States, are confronting what experts say is a worldwide wave of democratic backsliding. According to data from V-Dem, a monitoring institute based in Sweden — where, as it happens, a far-right party with roots in neo-Nazism made a strong electoral showing two weeks ago — more democracies were deteriorating, and even slipping into autocracy, in 2021 than at any point in the past 50 years. What explains the global resurgence of authoritarian politics, and what does it portend for the future of democracy? Here's what people are saying. Liberal democracy, in retreat Democracy's spread over the past few centuries has rarely been linear, instead ebbing and flowing with the competing forces of autocracy. Some political scientists divide democracy's progression into three waves: the first beginning in the 19th century; the second beginning in the aftermath of World War II; and the third beginning in the mid-1970s, which crested with 42 liberal democracies, a record high, in 2012. Today, only 34 liberal democracies exist, down to the same number as in 1995, according to V-Dem. (The share of the world population living in liberal democracies also fell in the last decade, to 13 percent from 18 percent.) Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT As The Times's Amanda Taub has explained, this recent democratic decline — which some scholars say constitutes "a third wave of autocratization," the first having begun in the 1920s and the second in the 1960s — has been primarily driven not by coups or revolutions, but by the actions of legitimately elected officials: "Once in power, unscrupulous leaders can sometimes manipulate the political environment to their own benefit, making it more likely that they will be victorious in future contests. By winning those elections, they gain the stamp of democratic legitimacy — even for actions that ultimately undermine democratic norms." In Europe, the most prominent practitioner of this kind of "soft autocracy" by election is Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. After being voted into power in 2010, he has worked to build what he calls an "illiberal democracy" by eroding civil liberties and media freedom, subjugating the judiciary, and restructuring his country's electoral system. In the process, he has become a model to the far right around the world, including in the United States. To varying degrees, the decline of liberal democratic norms and institutions is visible in almost every region: In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, elected in 2014, has presided over a sharp rise in Hindu nationalism — with violent, frequently deadly consequences for the country's Muslim minority — and a stifled speech environment. In the Philippines, voters recently elected the son of a former dictator to succeed Rodrigo Duterte, who during his six years as president cracked down on the news media and launched a war on drugs that led to thousands of killings. In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, elected in 2019, has deployed the army in Congress to pressure legislators, defied the Supreme Court's attempts to restrain his use of military force and jailed thousands with little due process under a state of emergency over gang violence. And then, of course, there is the United States: Political scientists have warned that, in a trend that predated Donald Trump but accelerated under his presidency, the Republican Party's commitment to liberal democratic norms has diminished, its messaging now resembling that of authoritarian parties like Orban's. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Unlike ruling parties in many other backsliding democracies, though, the Republican Party has been able to win control of government without commanding popular majorities. As The Times's David Leonhardt wrote recently, because of a confluence of geographic sorting trends and the small-state bias of Congress and the Electoral College, every branch of American government now favors one party (Republican) over another (Democratic) in a way they did not for much of the country's history. "We are far and away the most countermajoritarian democracy in the world," Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, told Leonhardt. What drives democracies toward autocracy? No two democracies backslide for identical reasons, but political scientists and others have posited some common themes. One is backlash to threats, real or perceived, to the majority's sense of national identity. "First, society polarizes, often over a backlash to social change, to demographic change, to strengthening political power by racial, ethnic or religious minorities, and generally amid rising social distrust," The Times's Max Fisher, who has reported widely on global democratic decline, recently explained. "This leads to a bottom-up desire for populist outsiders who will promise to confront the supposed threat within, which means suppressing the other side of that social or partisan or racial divide, asserting a vision of democracy that grants special status for 'my' side, and smashing the democratic institutions or norms that prevent that side from asserting what is perceived to be its rightful dominance." Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT How does class come into the picture? Some scholars have theorized a link between democratic backsliding and the Great Recession, if not global free-market capitalism itself. In India, for example, Debasish Roy Chowdhury argued last month in The Times that "neoliberal policies have compounded inequality, with the state retreating from fundamental responsibilities such as health and education." He continued: "This breeds a life of indignity and powerlessness for millions who take refuge in group identity, gravitate toward strong leaders promising to defend them against other groups and easily become hooked on the mass opioid of religious hatred now being used to redefine secular India as a Hindu state." Taking another materialist view, Richard Pildes, a constitutional law scholar at New York University School of Law, attributes the rise of illiberal forces to the dispersal of political power among a growing number of political parties, which he argues limits the ability of democratic governments to function effectively. "When democratic governments seem incapable of delivering on their promises, this failure can lead to alienation, resignation, distrust and withdrawal among many citizens," he wrote in The Times last year. "It can also trigger demands for authoritarian leaders who promise to cut through messy politics. At an even greater extreme, it can lead people to question democracy itself and become open to anti-democratic systems of government." Can democratic backsliding be stopped? History has shown that the arc of human civilization does not inevitably bend toward liberal democracy. But its tendency toward autocracy is also highly contingent. In The Washington Post, Miguel Angel Lara Otaola noted this year that since 2000, even as democratic backsliding became the predominant global trend, nine countries managed to transition back to democracy after a period of authoritarianism. "These countries show us that democracy is resilient and that countries can and do return to democracy," he wrote. The organization Otaola works for, the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, has proposed numerous ideas for halting and reversing democratic backsliding, including investing in civic education, reforming campaign finance laws, and strengthening coordination between international organizations with peacekeeping initiatives like the United Nations, the European Union and the African Union. Other experts have argued for abolishing two-party systems, more heavily regulating tech giants and imposing financial penalties on backsliding governments. Yet there are also those who believe technocratic fixes are unequal to the problem. In a 2016 essay, the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra presented the declining health of democracy around the world as a crisis for the ideology of modern market-based liberalism itself: A "religion of technology and G.D.P. and the crude 19th-century calculus of self-interest," it can neither account for nor provide an answer to the anger of those who feel left behind by the disruptions and inequalities wrought by globalized capitalism. To chart a path forward, those who believe in the ideals of liberal democracy will "require, above all, a richer and more varied picture of human experience and needs than the prevailing image of Homo economicus," Mishra argued. "Otherwise, in our sterile infatuation with rational motivations and outcomes, we risk resembling those helpless navigators who, De Tocqueville wrote, 'stare obstinately at some ruins that can still be seen on the shore we have left, even as the current pulls us along and drags us backward toward the abyss.'" Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter. Subscribe Today New York Times Opinion curates a wide range of views, inviting rich discussion and debate that helps readers analyze the world. This work is made possible with the support of subscribers. Please consider subscribing to The Times with this special offer. READ MORE "Is There Something Wrong With Democracy?" [The New York Times] "Can't We Come Up with Something Better Than Liberal Democracy?" [The New Yorker] "What Does the 'Post-Liberal Right' Actually Want?" [The New York Times] "The Republican Party Is Succeeding Because We Are Not a True Democracy" [The New York Times] "Giorgia Meloni Is Extreme, but She's No Tyrant" [The New York Times] 💌Did a friend send you this? Get your own newsletter by signing up here. Continue reading the main story Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. You received this email because you signed up for the Debatable newsletter from The New York Times. To stop receiving these emails, unsubscribe or manage your email preferences. Subscribe to The TimesGet The New York Times app Connect with us on: Change Your EmailPrivacy PolicyContact UsCalifornia Notices The New York Times Company. 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018