WTF are you talking about? The NHS has an amazingly high approval rating for such a large organisation, and is among the most cost-efficient healthcare providers in the world.
Even if we take this unpublished study at face value, there's no evidence that the cause is incompetence - the fact that the US has the lowest level of deaths in hospital despite having a very low life expectancy for industrialised countries should be a red flag for that kind of thinking. It's far more plausible that the US has better figures on that metric because it denies many people - especially the poorest and most vulnerable people - access to medical care, so they die outside of hospital instead.
If I read this article correctly then the author's point is that simply the passage of a bill to be enacted in the future is the cause of increased crime in the present, which seems like a shaky argument to me.
Also I'm noticing that the ABC7News article says
>More than $17 million will be diverted from the police to violence prevention and other services not involving police. Another $3.6 million will be put into the new MACRO program which will basically be a civilian crisis response program within the Oakland Fire Department addressing those in mental health crises.
This means that even assuming this is a net decrease of $20.6 million to budget, this is still giving back only ~half the net increase from this year's budget. So we should still be up $16 million or so vs. 2020
Sorry I don't seem to understand your argument. You're comparing the budgets in nominal terms without accounting for inflation. For example the $630 million this year won't be able to fund as many officers and services like the year prior due to inflation. Budgets are typically increased across the board to account for inflation.
Slight correction. The bill didn't redirect funds, it proposed redirection of funds. In reality, Oakland's police department is getting a larger budget [0].
The article you posted is dated July 1st. The author's citation for the "defunding" bill was approved on June 24 [1], in which funds were redirected from the police to "violence prevention programs." Obviously both articles are talking about different things.
If I read this article correctly then the author's point is that simply the passage of a bill to be enacted in the future is the cause of increased crime in the present, which seems like a shaky argument to me.
Also I'm noticing that the ABC7News article says
>More than $17 million will be diverted from the police to violence prevention and other services not involving police. Another $3.6 million will be put into the new MACRO program which will basically be a civilian crisis response program within the Oakland Fire Department addressing those in mental health crises.
This means that even assuming this is a net decrease of $20.6 million to budget, this is still giving back only ~half the net increase from this year's budget. So we should still be up $16 million or so vs. 2020
The budgets shouldn't be compared in nominal terms because of inflation (6.2%) and the increased costs of pensions (more police officers retiring). Your article also says that 18% of the budget is now allocated to the police as compared to prior year's 20% (not accounting for the $17 million redirection)
Sorry, I don't see why inflation and pensions should be removed from police budgets and not from other budgets. I'm very uninformed about city budgeting but this feels a little "lies, damn lies, and statistics"-y to me. The change in proportional allocation is more convincing, but I'm too ignorant to understand the implications and nuances.
