1115.org

Who would have thought Crazy Kucinich had it in him?

Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, said today that he plans to support the health care bill when it comes up for a vote this week. He becomes the first Democrat to publicly disclose his intention to switch from a “no” to a “yes” vote on the legislation.

“I’ve decided to cast a vote in favor of the legislation,” Mr. Kucinich said at a morning news conference in the Capitol. “If my vote is to be counted, let it count now for passage of the bill, hopefully in the direction of comprehensive health care reform.”
[...]
In an interview five days ago, Mr. Kucinich said he could not support the legislation and dismissed suggestions that his vote would derail the Democratic health care agenda. But since then, the congressman has come under under extraordinary pressure from groups across the Democratic spectrum, including Moveon.org, which encouraged him to support the bill.

He said he still did not think the legislation went far enough — he has long advocated a single-payer system — but said his objections should not stand in the way of the bill.

“In the past week it’s become clear that the vote on the final health bill will be very close,” Mr. Kucinich said. “I take this vote with the utmost seriousness. I’m quite aware of the historic fight, which has lasted the last century.”

Last night, The Hill presented Kucinich’s decision as possibly pivotal. Their headline read: “Kucinich’s Wednesday announcement could be defining moment for health reform“. Apparently, that’s because of all the “other skeptical progressives in the House” who will now view Kucinich’s announcement as providing them political cover to vote yes.

Take cover in a safe place, and watch the healthcare reform vote in the House turn into a landslide.

*** Update, 8:03 a.m. ***

Retail shopping alert: If anyone was planning to buy any champagne over the next week or ten days, you probably want to rush out and gets yours now, while you still can.

Any moment now, all those Republicans who have been fervently praying for Democrats to pass healthcare reform — because of how utterly it will destroy their chances in the upcoming midterm elections — are going to realize they need to start stocking up on champagne.

So that when President Obama signs the bill, they can properly toast the fact that their opponents are now toast.

I’m not sure I understand why poor J.D. Hayworth — who, because he is running in a Republican primary against John “Gramps” McCain, and running from the far-right, to boot, is required to speak at least twice as much nonsense as McCain does — is getting so much flak for warning the nation that the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s casual definition of marriage is inevitably going to lead to some man marrying his horse.

Everybody knows that if you talk about love and marriage, horses are always going to come up. There’s something about a horse that just goes together with love and marriage (yes, a carriage too, but not even right-wing extremists without any scruples who are running for the Senate against senile, unprincipled imbeciles are ready yet to start talking openly about men or women marrying their carriages; that day will come, no doubt, but it just isn’t here yet).

And I don’t rest my case just on how ubiquitous the lyrics of the Frank Sinatra song are in the American consciousness. There’s also the small matter of the word hitch. Just a coincidence, is it, that it’s used both for marriage and for horses?

Poor old J.D. is also being given a hard time because it seems that the Massachusetts Supreme Court has never actually defined marriage as “the establishment of intimacy”. And that matters why? Is anybody seriously denying that the Massachusetts Supreme Court has a cavalier attitude towards the definition of marriage? That, no matter how they do or don’t define marriage, they’re going to willy-nilly end up encouraging marriage between men and horses?

Besides, isn’t it ludicrously unfair to change rules in the middle of a legislative session, and start holding Republicans to the standard that their public pronouncements must be actually true? And what’s the threat, anyway? That, otherwise, we will mock them mercilessly, and not just on late night TV?

Yea, we will mock you mercilessly, even as your lies continue to serve the purpose they were intended to serve—whether it is taking us to war against the guy who did your Daddy bad, or telegraphing to the Republican base that you and only you share their world view, you do, or derailing healthcare reform, or obstructing financial reform, or smothering student-loan reform, or sabotaging climate change legislation, or stonewalling any and all attempts by Democrats to take arms against the sea of troubles that the country inherited from the last Republican president.

On the bright side, the way the Republican party is functioning right now — the fratricidal lurch to the lunatic right inspired by Tea-Partyism, the absolute lack of even any pretense of having any political agenda beyond nihilistic obstructionism and resurrecting the failed and discredited policies of George Bush — Georgie Porgie may very well be the last Republican president ever.

Yesterday, I wrote about Graham going crackers over healthcare reform being passed by reconciliation. According to him, that would “destroy the ability of this country to work together for a very long time.”

Apparently, there’s lot of this going around. The latest to display symptoms of the infection is Brian Darling, of the conservative Heritage Foundation:

If they pull off this crazy scenario they are putting together, they are going to destroy a lot of the comity in the House.

It’s not yet clear how the disease is spreading, but investigators suspect it has something to do with oral intercourse between consenting conservatives. (No, we haven’t stopped being a family blog. Look it up. Dictionary.com, definition 1 or 2.)

The L.A. Times has an interesting story about the assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud Mabhouh in Dubai in January.

One of the most striking aspects of the affair was how quickly the Dubai police pieced together a fairly detailed narrative of how it all went down. Striking, because this was after all (allegedly) the handiwork of the rightly feared and respected Mossad. Who did such a sloppy job that they left clumsy fingerprints all over the place.

More than anything else, what enabled the Dubai police to crack the case was the Big Brother society they have constructed:

Dubai’s cameras never blink. The security system allows law enforcement to track anyone, from the moment they get off an airplane, to the immigration counter where their passport is scanned, through the baggage claim area to the taxi stand where cameras record who gets into what cars, which log their locations through the city’s automated highway toll system, all the way to their hotels, which also have cameras.

Which brings us to the Bustan Rotana hotel on the night of Jan. 19, and an assassination made to look like a run-of-the-mill heart attack.

The dead man, as the world now knows, was a 50-year-old Hamas commander named Mahmoud Mabhouh, wanted by Israel in the killing of two Israeli soldiers. Once Dubai investigators narrowed the time of death to 8 to 8:30 p.m., they quickly found that seven people in the Bustan Rotana had no business being there.

Using facial recognition software, a source familiar with the investigation said, a team of 20 investigators pored over hours of security camera videos to sketch out a picture of the suspects’ movements and accomplices, a group that has grown to at least 27 people.

They tracked down taxi drivers and grilled them about the suspects. They even traced the trip of a female suspect to a shopping center and discovered what she bought.

For years, the United Arab Emirates has been using its considerable oil wealth to build up its defense and security infrastructure, including the National Security Agency, the secret police, which is playing a key role in the investigation.

“They buy the best,” said Kamal Awar, a retired Lebanese army officer and editor of Beirut-based Defense 21, a regional military magazine. “They bought the latest technology in satellite and communications.”

The other big factor, apparently, was Mossad hubris. Knowing that you are rightly feared and respected, it turns out, can make you cocky and, therefore, sloppy. The whole plan seems to have been predicated on the assumption that murder wouldn’t even be suspected. The assassination was scripted to look like a heart attack; they seem to have assumed that there wouldn’t even be an investigation. So why even bother to cover your tracks?

Of course, the dirty unwashed Arabs not only quickly figured out that there were suspicious circumstances, they went on to pretty effortlessly crack the whole case wide open PDQ.

Here’s the script, as it was written:

The middle-aged man was splayed out dead in his hotel room as if he’d gone into cardiac arrest. The door was chained from the inside. Coroners surmised that he’d died of natural causes.
[...]
The assailants apparently entered the hotel room without any struggle, suggesting that someone on the team knew Mabhouh. A fatal dose of the powerful muscle relaxant succinylcholine quickly paralyzes its recipient and ultimately mimics the effects of a heart attack. It should have killed Mabhouh within 15 minutes.

But something must have gone wrong, said the source with knowledge of the investigation, because the assassins pressed a pillow against Mabhouh’s face for one or two minutes until he suffocated. “They were panicking for one reason or another,” said the source.

The hit team tidied up the room and laid Mabhouh out as though he’d suffered a massive heart attack and dropped dead.

And this is all it took for it to come unraveled:

But one doctor noticed an abnormality in the blood. He later spotted strange puncture marks on a leg and behind an ear. And after the Palestinian militant group Hamas informed Dubai authorities that the dead man was Mahmoud Mabhouh, they decided it couldn’t hurt to double-check. Blood samples were sent abroad. Days passed.

When the toxicology reports showed that he’d been given a lethal dose of a powerful anesthetic, Dubai authorities knew they had a high-profile homicide on their hands. Though Mabhouh was no friend of the Emirates, authorities were furious about the killing.

“The whole operation was based on one key assumption: that the death will be recorded as a natural death,” Mustafa Alani, an analyst at the Gulf Research Center, a Dubai think tank, said of the assassins. “And that was the downfall. The reason why they were so careless was because they thought there would be no investigation.”

At least half of the passports used by the 27 suspects bore the names and registration numbers of Israeli dual citizens who held British, Irish, Australian, French or German passports, leading many experts to believe that Israel’s spy outfit, Mossad, had forged the identities.

Israeli officials have been tight-lipped about the case and refused to confirm or deny the nation’s involvement.

The hubris that led to swift unraveling may be based on having successfully pulled the same stunt before, without arousing any suspicion:

Authorities are now reexamining the death of Faisal Husseini, a charismatic Palestinian leader who died in his Kuwait hotel room in 2001.

“Now we know their tradecraft,” said Alani. “We know how they operate.”

If Kuwait is as Big Brother-y as Dubai, this may not count as a cold case.

Senator Lindsey Graham, on ABC’s “This Week“:

When it comes to health care, he’s been tone-deaf, he’s been arrogant and they’re pushing a legislative proposal and a way to that legislative proposal that’s going to destroy the ability of this country to work together for a very long time.

The “he”, of course, is President Obama. Everyone knows that he’s the tone-deaf, arrogant one.

The “way to that legislative proposal”, equally clearly, is reconciliation. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, the proper dictionary definition at this point in political time would be: “What binds our wounds and brings us together when used as intended (i.e., by Republicans); what tears us asunder and destroys our ability when perverted (i.e., used by Democrats).”

What’s more puzzling is which “ability of this country to work together” Lindsey could be referring to. Surely he couldn’t mean the ability that was ceremoniously killed off by the Republican party just as soon as the tone-deaf, arrogant one assumed the presidency? The ability that was very publicly ripped to shreds by Senate Republicans when they a) insisted on filibustering every single significant piece of legislation that came up, triggering an unprecedented number of cloture votes, and b) marched in lockstep to vote unanimously against cloture in an almost unending series of cloture votes (with many Republican Senators voting down ideas and proposals they themselves had come up with or unambiguously supported in the past).

No, wait, now I get it! Obama’s going to exhume that dead body and put it to death again? What kind of man does that? No respect even for the dead? Words like “truly arrogant” and “tone-deaf” are too mild, aren’t they? But that’s just the southern gentleman in Lindsey Graham. He just can’t bring himself to call even his enemies what they truly deserve to be called.

On Wednesday, House Democrats announced they were declaring a unilateral ban on earmarks for for-profit organizations:

House Democratic leaders banned Wednesday the practice of doling out multimillion-dollar, no-bid contracts to private contractors, a move that will shake up the lobbying industry that has come to rely on securing these so-called earmarks for their corporate clients.

At a meeting of the Democratic caucus, leaders unveiled the new rule that forbids private contractors from receiving earmarks, part of the party’s effort to reclaim the reform mantle that it used successfully in its 2006 midterm campaign to reclaim the majority.

House Appropriations Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., whose panel issues thousands of these line-item grants each year, estimated that the fiscal 2010 budget included more than 1,000 earmarks to private companies, through which businesses reaped billions of dollars. Most of those earmarks were culled from the Pentagon’s annual budget.

Republicans weren’t going to just sit there, and let Democrats snatch the reform mantle away from them. Not when they are the true party of reform. They struck back swiftly and surely the very same day:

House Democratic leaders on Wednesday banned budget earmarks to private industry, ending a practice that has steered billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to companies and set off corruption scandals.

The ban is the most forceful step yet in a three-year effort in Congress to curb abuses in the use of earmarks, which allow individual lawmakers to award financing for pet projects to groups and businesses, many of them campaign donors.

But House Republicans, in a quick round of political one-upmanship, tried to outmaneuver Democrats by calling for a ban on earmarks across the board, not just to for-profit companies. Republicans, who expect an intra-party vote on the issue Thursday, called earmarks “a symbol of a broken Washington.”

How’s that for oneupmanship? The funny thing, though, was that the Republican leaders who had spontaneously erupted in that anti-earmark fervor had blood on their hands. Enough blood to bring to mind Lady Macbeth’s wonderful turn of phrase about turning the multitudinous seas incarnadine.

On March 10, 2010, ten Republican congressional leaders released a joint statement announcing their intention to ban earmarks because they have “become a symbol of a broken Washington.” Yet despite their new found disdain for the earmarking process, those same ten Republican leaders have requested over $240 million in earmarks since 2008.

And then an even funnier thing transpired. Turns out there was also some imperfectly disclosed fine print attached to the Republican resolution. Fine print that has the effect of turning the Republicans’ lovely sounding across-the-board ban on all earmarks into the equivalent of a diet till dinnertime.

The AP gave it the kind of headline the Republicans wanted to see: “House GOP adopts earmark moratorium“. But that’s when professional scruples kicked in. They burst the bubble in the lede itself:

In an election-year appeal to voters frustrated with Washington, House Republicans promised Thursday not to stuff any of this year’s spending bills with pet projects for their districts.

And the article later amplifies:

House Republicans promised a one-year pause in earmarks instead of a permanent ban. Boehner said Thursday that suspending earmarks shows Republicans are serious about fixing Washington.

Boehner’s chief qualification for the job is his ability to say, with a perfectly straight face, things that even his own mother wouldn’t credit.

And even that “one-year” ban is only for the rest of 2010. For all practical purposes, what the GOP is saying is: “Only till the midterms, baby! Only till the midterms!”

Democrats have just had a great idea. Healthcare reform is so precariously poised that reasonable people can’t even agree whether it’s a coin flip at this point or a long shot. It’s a complicated, messy situation, fragile in the extreme.

So, hey, why not just go ahead and complicate it further?

Democratic leaders said Thursday that they were increasingly inclined to release a final health-care bill that could accomplish two of President Obama’s top domestic priorities: guaranteeing coverage to 30 million uninsured Americans and vastly expanding federal aid for college students.

Both proposals, stuck in Congress for nearly a year, are gaining new momentum as Democrats contemplate facing voters in November without having delivered on any of Obama’s major policy objectives.

Key Senate Democrats initially balked at combining the health-reform bill with a measure that overhauls the nation’s student-loan program, but on Thursday they had warmed to the idea.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) had been one of the chief opponents because he feared the education proposal — which would free up billions in federal subsidies to private lenders as it increases funds for Pell Grants — would provoke procedural challenges from Republicans. But Conrad said the Senate parliamentarian suggested in a preliminary ruling that combining the bills could work, provided that the right balance on cost was found. “I’d say yes, we’re leaning toward it,” Conrad said.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who supports pairing the measures, said Thursday night that lawmakers had made “a lot of decisions” but were still addressing several concerns related to the education bill. “We’re getting close,” Emanuel said after meeting at the Capitol with Democratic leaders.

The easy part is to understand why they’re thinking about combing the two measures. There can only be one reconciliation package per budget resolution. If reconciliation is used for healthcare alone, it can’t be used for the student-loan program (or not till a new budget resolution is passed). And the student-loan bill, like healthcare reform, doesn’t have close to 60 votes in the Senate.

So that’s where they’re coming from. What’s discouraging is what they’re thinking of, as they consider the decision, or rather — and this seems to fit Democrats a lot better, doesn’t it? — what they’re not thinking of. Conrad is worrying about procedural challenges from Republicans. Emanuel is focused on concerns that lawmakers have about the education bill. And no one, naturally, is talking about whether adding the student-loan program into the mix might jeopardize the already fragile and unpredictable legislative prospects for healthcare reform.

Four days ago, The Hill reported that combining the two was already a done deal:

Senate Democratic leaders have decided to pair an overhaul of federal student lending with healthcare reform, according to a Democratic official familiar with negotiations.

“It’s going in,” said the Democratic source, in reference to the student lending measure.

The Washington Post article quoted above suggests that may not quite be true. But Democratic leaders saying yesterday that “they were increasingly inclined” to combine the two measures could just be their way of putting up a trial balloon for a decision that’s essentially been made.

Let’s hope not, though. Because, on Monday night, The Hill also addressed the question of whether adding the student-loan program to the reconciliation bill might affect the prospects of the combined measure passing in the Senate:

Several of the Democrats who are expected to oppose the student loan legislation are centrists who could reconsider their support for healthcare reform if the two issues are joined.
[...]
An analysis from Height Analytics, an investment research firm, projected that seven Senate Democrats would vote against the student lending bill.

“We consider Democrats with the most [Sallie Mae/Nelnet Inc.] jobs in their states to be the strongest ‘no’ votes (7 Dems from PA, IN, FL, NE, VA, DE). The student lending industry is lobbying them hard and we expect to see additional expressions of concern about the [Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act],” the company wrote in a report to investors.
[...]
Centrist Democrats such as Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.) have signaled in recent days that they would support passing healthcare adjustments with special budget rules. A spokesman for Nelson declined to say how adding the student lending provision would affect his vote.

Other centrist Democrats who could reconsider support include Sens. Bill Nelson (Fla.), Evan Bayh (Ind.) and Jim Webb (Va.).

In fact, six Senate Democrats have already written to Harry Reid, expressing their opposition to the student-loan legislation:

But the education bill is strongly opposed by some Senate Democrats, particularly those in states where for-profit student lenders are major employers. In a letter to the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, six Democrats said they disliked the president’s proposal.

“We write to make you aware of our concern with provisions of contemplated student lending reform that could put jobs at risk,” the senators wrote. “Increase our nation’s commitment to higher education funding is a priority, but we must proceed toward this objective in a thoughtful manner that considers potential alternative legislative proposals, while still delivering an equivalent amount of savings over the next ten years.

The letter was signed by Senators Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Bill Nelson of Florida, Mark Warner of Virginia and Jim Webb of Virginia.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all six senators would actually vote against a combined reconciliation bill. And even if they did, there might still be enough votes to pass it (50, with Vice-President Biden voting to break the tie).

But then you get to the House, where the healthcare reform math is much more fragile. And thoroughly uncertain. No one seems to be at all clear how many votes there are in the House for just the healthcare package. Without any clear idea whether there is even a safety margin, are Democratic leaders really going to risk messing things up by tossing in student-loan reform into the mix?

Put like that, it sounds like a no-brainer, right? So here’s the really depressing part—Democrats may not have any option. Enter stage left, the most murky character in American politics, arcane Senate rules:

The Senate parliamentarian notified Democratic leaders that, in order to meet the reconciliation requirements, both the Senate health and finance committees would need to produce $1 billion in deficit savings each over the next 10 years, Conrad said.

With health care alone, the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee would not be able to show the items within its jurisdiction save at least $1 billion. By inserting the education package, the committee would satisfy the reconciliation instructions, Conrad said.

Isn’t that just dandy? It might not even be possible to do a reconciliation bill for just healthcare reform. Democrats may have no choice but to make a healthcare and student-loan stew.

(This, apparently, is what the Washington Post story finessed when they said, in the first excerpt above, “provided that the right balance on cost was found.” I’m not sure if I find that mor e incredible or more irresponsible.)

***Update, 11:34 a.m.***

I was alerted by my friend SB that not many Democrats had opposed SAFRA when it was passed by the House in September, so that folding student loan reform into the healthcare reconciliation bill may not jeopardize its passage in the House.

In fact, it looks like only one Democrat healthcare “yea” might be turned into a “nay”:

Democrats voted overwhelmingly for SAFRA when the bill passed the House in September by a vote of 253 to 171, with just nine Democrats opposing the bill or not voting at all. But at least one of the Democrats who opposed the bill — Rep. Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania — was among the Democrats in the narrow majority of 220 who supported the House version of the health care legislation in November. In explaining his opposition to the student loan bill, Kanjorski argued that the legislation would take away jobs that Sallie Mae had created in his district. (Critics note that Kanjorski is also among the leading recipients of Sallie Mae’s campaign contributions.)

David Dayen argues in FDL that “If Kanjorski is the deciding vote on health care, and he says to toss the student loan piece out, out it goes, not to return until at least next year.”

It may not be quite so simple, though.

By all accounts, House Democrats are having a devil of a time figuring out how many votes they actually have in the House for the current healthcare reform proposal. It may turn out that they do not have a very accurate count at the point when the decision has to be made whether to fold student loan reform into the healthcare reconciliation bill, or not.

In that case, would they gamble that Kanjorski isn’t the deciding vote on health care, only to find later that unfortunately he is? Or would they play safe and not fold it in? In which case, what happens to the requirement that the HELP Committee needs to show that items within its jurisdiction save at least $1 billion?

It’s funny to me that people are speaking about the 2010 mid-terms as if the result wasn’t already baked in:

“I think that there is a real shot we are going to get slaughtered in elections this fall if we aren’t leading the efforts to reform Washington. We campaigned in ‘06 and ‘08, and if voters don’t see that change, we haven’t lived up to that promise.”

– Steve Hildebrand, deputy campaign manager for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, in an interview on CNN.

Welcome aboard, chief!

Obama’s liberal base ‘disengaged’ – USAToday (3/10/10):

“The energized base which transformed the nation and elected our first black president (is) now disengaged,” Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile says. “If this was September, I would hit the panic button.”
[...]
Still, signs of trouble for the Democratic majority in Congress are springing up in:

Virginia, where a host of liberal groups are rallying supporters and students to protest the upcoming University of Virginia appearance of former Bush administration top Justice Department official John Yoo.

Yoo, who wrote the legal memos authorizing the use of controversial interrogation techniques against terror suspects, is scheduled to speak at the school in Charlottesville on March 19. He will be greeted by protesters, from groups such as Veterans for Peace and the National Accountability Network, who are angry that the Obama administration has declined to prosecute him for the so-called “torture memos.”

Organizer David Swanson calls the administration’s positions on protecting state secrets and war crimes “a disaster.”

The American Civil Liberties Union concurs. The group recently warned the White House not to reverse its decision to try terror suspects in civilian courts.

If Obama has suspects tried before military commissions “he will betray his campaign promise to restore the rule of law, demonstrate that his principles are up for grabs and lose all credibility with Americans who care about justice and the rule of law,” ACLU Director Anthony Romero says.

• Georgia and South Carolina, where the environmental group Friends of the Earth (FOE) this month ran TV ads denouncing the Obama administration’s decision to approve $55 billion in private industry loan guarantees for what would be the first nuclear reactors built in the United States in three decades.

The group also was alarmed when Obama talked in his State of the Union Address about investing in “clean coal” and opening new offshore oil drilling, spokesman Nick Berning says.

FOE’s political arm endorsed candidate Obama but “we’ve been disappointed so far with President Obama,” Berning says.

• Arkansas, where liberal groups are backing Lt. Gov. Bill Halter in a primary challenge to two-term incumbent Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln, who is backed by Obama.

In three days earlier this month, the liberal group MoveOn.org raised $1 million for Halter, in average donations of $30. He also nabbed the endorsement of the Arkansas AFL-CIO. “This overwhelming response to Bill Halter’s candidacy shows the depth of voters’ anger towards corporate politicians,” MoveOn Director Justin Ruben says.

A chief complaint against Lincoln: She opposed including a government-run health care program, known as the public option, in legislation that passed the Senate in December.

She’s unapologetic. “I don’t answer to my party,” she says in TV ads now airing in the state. “I answer to Arkansas.”

This has got to be embarrassing. On ThinkProgress yesterday, Zaid Jilani wrote:

Costa Rica’s system of universal coverage is so effective that it actually ranks one slot above the United States in the World Health Organization’s ranking of health systems worldwide while actually spending less per capita than we do.

When you click on that second link, it takes you to a table titled: “Health Statistics > Spending > Per person (most recent) by country”. That “most recent” is very reassuring. Till you scroll down to the very bottom of the very long table and see this: “Spending per capita (PPP) in $US 1998.”

By a cosmic coincidence, I had a post yesterday in which I trotted out per capita healthcare spending numbers by country. My numbers were from 2007.

So how did I beat ThinkProgress’s statistics by a good nine years? By the thoroughly unorthodox expedient of googling “per capita healthcare costs by country”. The infoplease link I used comes up as the first hit.

How might one come up with the 1998 statistics? If you add the phrase “most recent” to the search terms (within quotes), the ancient table shows up on the first page, as item #6. The little google blurb accompanying the link reads “May 17, 2005 … Search for: health care spending per capita; money a person spends on … Health Statistics > Spending > Per person (most recent) by country …”

So if you went by that “May 17, 2005″ (which presumably refers to the date nationmaster.com put the table up on their site), and never actually looked at the table to see which year the numbers are from — which is not exactly from the best practices handbook — you could easily put yourself in the position of having to wipe egg off your face.