Elizabeth Warren’s new book is A Fighting Chance. She made a book tour stop at Worcester State University today.

The room was overflowing even after accounting for the standing room only crowd.

The crowd gave her a beginning and ending standing ovation. There was quite a bit of applause at many of the things she had to say.

She didn’t have the time to answer all the questions, so it was no surprise that she didn’t get to either of my two questions.  The questions she did answer were great questions as were her answers.  Sorry I didn’t take notes for this blog.

Contrary to  what The Boston Globe wrote today, I think that when she is finished with this tour, her national reputation will be greatly enhanced.  I don’t know what she may be running for, but I would vote for her in a heartbeat.

At the very least, she is calling us to action to turn this country around.  She showed us what this country used to be and how it has deteriorated from that singular  time after WWII and up to 1980.  We made this country prosper for most of its citizens before, and we can do it again.

Oh, by the way, why are public colleges so expensive?  The state used to pay 3/4 of the cost, but now it pays 1/4 of the cost.  Conversely, tuition used to cover 1/4 of the cost, but now must cover 3/4 of the cost.  This last factoid I derived from her first one, so it may not be exact.  However, it does explain why the cost has risen so fast.  It is not from high salaries for professors.  It is from tax cuts for the wealthy which depleted state resources for supporting our public colleges.  In fact, the increased use of adjunct professors at very low pay has kept the costs from rising even faster.  Everyone is taking it in the shorts but the wealthy.

And, as a final “oh by the way”, if you had been reading this blog you could have been among the few people to raise their hands when Elizabeth Warren asked the audience who had read the Piketty book. See my previous posts Corrupting Piketty in the 21st Century and Philip Pilkington: Misdirection – Galbraith on Thomas Piketty’s New Book on Capital. It gives me added confidence in Elizabeth Warren to know that she knows the book so soon after it has been published. If she had taken on one of my questions, she could have given further proof that she really understands some important economic principles.

Naked Capitalism has the article The Stealthy, Ugly Growth of Corporatized Medicine.

Yves here. We’ve written a great deal about Obamacare, since it epitomizes so much about what is wrong with contemporary America: the use of complexity to mask looting, the creation of two-tier systems, the crapification of the underlying service, which in this case is vitally important to society as a whole.

But Obamacare also needs to be recognized as a big step forward …

As I started to read this, I thought that at last this progressive web site would finally admit that the ACA wasn’t as bad as they had been complaining.  Then I finished reading the paragraph.

in a process that was already well underway, which is to convert the practice of medicine from a patient-oriented to a profit-driven exercise. This is perverse because medicine is so highly valued that medical practitioners almost always enjoy high status and at least decent incomes in most societies. And in societies undergoing breakdown, being a doctor is about the safest place to be, provided you can manage to avoid becoming aligned with the wrong warring faction.

The article does go on to describe many of the ills of the current system in some detail that I had not been completely aware of.  I commented on the article as follows:

I am glad to see this article.  Until reading this, I could not understand why a progressive set of contributors had such dim view of the ACA.  I still think it is a case of somewhat displaced anger.  The issues that so anger you, existed before ACA.  I am not sure that blocking ACA and remaining with the old situation would have addressed any of the issues that you rightfully complain about.

It does not hurt to cover the aspects of what is wrong with the system so that we don’t get lulled into a sense of complacency.

After a while, though, I’d like the conversation to move on to the topic of fixing the broken system.  I know that this is entangled in the larger problem of wealth, income, and power inequality.  We all know that we aren’t going to fix this overnight.  Can anybody even think of small steps that we could take to start to turn the tide?

Maybe with the understanding this article provides about how badly the system has deteriorated, the voice of Don Berwick, candidate for Massachusetts Governor would resonate with the voters more. Although, from the tone of this article, I am not sure that “Medicare for All” is exactly what the author is looking for.