Author: Vince Veneziani and Joe Weisenthal

We had a chance to reform healthcare in the US.

We didn’t.

What we did is tweak the way healthcare is funded, meaning all the core problems with the system will remain, though access may now be more equitable.

If we’d truly wanted to fix healthcare the system (not just funding it) we would have had to make a serious effort towards containing costs.

That’s the message from a 2008 presentation from Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorsen titled: A Practical Model to Achieve Health Reform.

His presentation is a bit long, and might have been better when delivered in public, but it’s very understandable, and though there’s a lot we find fault with (he’s really into taxing cigarettes, for example), there’s a lot to like.

See here for what healthcare reform could have been >

Let’s begin!

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Happy anniversary!

Today is the one-year anniversary of the day the Dow hit a low of 6547.

(It’s true the S&P 500 bottomed on March 6, but that was a Saturday this year, so we couldn’t celebrate the anniversary)

We’ve rounded up all the big numbers to put this amazing one-year run into perspective.

Let’s take a walk down memory lane >

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See Also:

• Indonesian Mob Wants Blood After Treasury Secretary Spends A Fortune Bailing Out Banks
• Here’s The Untold Story Of How AIG Destroyed Itself
• Charles Schwab: US Investors Are Still Worry-Wart Savers Who Avoid Risk And Spending

In the Internet age, betting has become more commonplace than ever, even with the government cracking down on it.

But it’s not just sports betting.

Websites like Intrade.com allow people to pretty much bet on any event in the world. You can bet on everything from Osama Bin Laden’s capture to the delivery date of a celebrity’s baby.

Here’s how it works. Each contract asks a simple question, like: “Will Obama be re-elected?” or “Will Israel bomb Iran?”

There’s always a pair of trades, so you can take the affirmative or negative. If you guess trade right, the contract ends at 100. If you’re wrong, the contract ends at 0. In the meantime, the price fluctuates based on supply and demand like any other futures contract.

If a contract is trading at, say, 23, it’s reasonable to say that the market is pricing in a 23% of the event happening.

So let’s see what the future holds ->

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See Also:

• Pennsylvania Governor Rendell: Without Table-Game Gambling, The State Budget Is Ruined
• Delaware Gearing Up To Allow Gambling on Football
• Saving Vegas: Lower The Gambling Age To 18?

The whole world felt the reverberations of China imposing leverage limits on its banks. Regulators there are clearly freaked out by the heat of its economy.

Meanwhile, Jim Chanos and Thomas Friedman are going back and forth about whether China is a bubble, and whether there’s money to be made shorting it.

So we thought we’d adjudicate the question.

Our answer is yes, China’s real estate is the most obvious bubble ever. More obvious than the Dubai bubble in fact.

Check out the evidence here — >

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See Also:

• China Sneezed And Brazil, Australia, The Commodities Industry, And The US Market All Just Caught A Cold
• Thomas Friedman Tries To Give Short-Selling Advice To Jim Chanos
• January 12, 2010: THE DAY BERNANKE GOT REPLACED