The Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago today. To mark the occasion, let's take a closer look at Angela Merkel, Germany's first female chancellor and its most popular leader since, well, Hitler.]]> The global recession has hit Germany hard; its economy will likely shrink by 6 percent this year alone. Why should you care? Because it has the biggest economy in Europe and it’s the biggest exporter in the world. More than that, you should care because an economic meltdown in Germany could change the course of history. That’s not an overstatement. In the 1920s, massive hyperinflation rendered the German currency worthless; at 1 trillion marks to the dollar, a wheelbarrow full of cash wouldn’t buy you a newspaper. In response to the dismal situation, the country turned to fascism, allowing the Nazi party to come to power, which in turn led to World War II.

So, at a time like the present, when the German economy stands on the verge of collapse, it would be comforting to know that the country has a calm, rational leader at its helm—one who listens well to others and believes in personal freedom. The good news is that it does, in the form of Angela Merkel, Germany’s first female chancellor and its most popular leader since, well, Hitler.

Behind the Iron Curtain

Born in 1954, Angela Merkel grew up poor in East Germany, where her father was a Protestant minister. Because it was a communist country, the government held him in constant suspicion for worshiping something other than the state. When Angela was a teenager, the Stasi—East Germany’s vicious secret police—interrogated everyone in the family. Young Merkel wasn’t tortured, just intimidated and asked to spy on her family. She refused.

Nearly 20 years later, the Berlin Wall came down. Angela, who’d earned her Ph.D. in chemistry, was working as a scientist in an East Berlin lab at the time. When officials announced that travel to West Berlin was no longer forbidden, she did what many East Berliners did that day: She walked to the other side. Standing on the streets of West Germany, Merkel was overwhelmed by the possibilities of freedom. In that moment, she decided to make politics her career.

Merkel wasn’t completely without experience. In her youth, she’d served as an officer of “Agitprop” (Agitation and Propaganda) for the state’s communist youth organization. Although her work had focused on promoting the sciences, she parlayed her previous experience into a new gig in the burgeoning democratic movement. Within months, she became East Germany’s press secretary. Next, after the country officially reunified with West Germany in October 1990, she ran for Parliament and won. The following year, Chancellor Helmut Kohl made her the youngest member of his cabinet.

Part of the reason for Merkel’s meteoric rise was that, after spending her childhood behind the Iron Curtain, she appreciated free markets and small government. That led her to join the Christian Democratic Union, a conservative, male-dominated party akin to the moderate wing of the Republican Party in the United States. The Christian Democrats enjoyed using Merkel as their poster child for diversity, which helped her move up the party ranks.

The other reason for Merkel’s rapid rise was simply her intelligence. Her experiences as a scientist taught her an analytical approach to problem solving that the popular press would later dub the “Merkel Method.” As Germany’s minister of the environment in the mid-1990s, she pushed for the creation of the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement to curb greenhouse gases. It’s not surprising that, as a scientist, she would lead the fight against global warming. But as a conservative, it was an unlikely move. By Merkel’s calculations, it was all about capitalism. “Unchecked climate change is likely to result in at least a 5 percent reduction—and even a 20 percent reduction—in global GDP,” Merkel said in 2007. “Effective action to protect the climate would cost a good deal less—around 1 percent of the global GDP.”

Under Merkel’s guidance—both as the minister of environment and, later, as chancellor—Germany has introduced an environmental agenda that puts other European nations to shame. For example, while England only produced 3 percent of its electricity from renewable resources in 2007, Germany managed 14 percent. Merkel’s goal is that by the year 2030, 45 percent of Germany’s electricity will be renewable.

The Rational Choice for Chancellor

Even with her party’s full support, getting Merkel elected chancellor in 2005 wasn’t easy. Many Germans disliked the idea of a woman governing the country. Others thought she wasn’t woman enough. They saw Merkel as a rational and clear-headed politician, but also a cold and calculating one. Despite being married (she’s been married twice, in fact), Merkel was roundly criticized for not having children and for her austere physical appearance, which is why in 2005, Angela Merkel started wearing make-up for the first time in her life.

At the end of election season, her party, the Christian Democrats, won only 35.2 percent of the seats in parliament. The other major party, the Social Democrats, won 34.4 percent. Because neither party had a majority, German law dictated that they had to come together and broker a deal to select the next chancellor. The process was tantamount to getting all the moderate Republicans and Democrats in Congress to agree on the same person for president. In other words, it was a mess. After three weeks of debates and backroom negotiations, Merkel was named chancellor on November 22, 2005. However, pundits feared she would have no mandate to lead the country. Within a few short months, Merkel would prove them all wrong.

Almost immediately upon taking office, the new chancellor made her mark on the world stage. Merkel met with leaders from the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Russia, and China, and took charge of the European Union summit meeting in December. For much of the previous year, the European Union had operated without a budget, largely because the British and the French spent more time trading insults than working together. Using her studious, analytical mind, Merkel listened carefully to the needs of all 25 member nations and quickly crafted a compromise that appealed to both Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac. By the end, the European Union had a budget. The only real moment of tension during the summit came when the delegates were served cold cod soup, a British staple. All eyes were on Jacques Chirac, but to the relief of everyone in the room, he consumed it without saying a word. Soon, Merkel was enjoying an 80 percent approval rating, the highest of any German chancellor since WWII.

During the past four years, Merkel’s numbers haven’t stayed quite that high, but she’s had consistent support from the majority of her people. Germans respect her level-headed style. She supported the Iraq War (as a former resident of East Germany, she believes in ending despotism and protecting human rights), and then criticized President Bush for Guantánamo Bay (same reason). Her relationship with President Obama so far has been strained, mostly because they have fundamentally different philosophies on how to fix the global economic crisis. Obama believes Merkel hasn’t done enough to promote stimulus spending in Germany, and Merkel believes Obama underestimates the risks involved with making the economy flush with cash. Her biggest fear is inflation, something Germans know plenty about. No one wants to return to pre-World War II Germany, but thanks to Angela Merkel, that’s not really a concern.

This article originally appeared in mental_floss magazine as part of Jenny Drapkin’s look at “The 5 Gutsiest World Leaders.”

No matter what you think of the current political process, or Florida's chad debacle of years past, no election in American history is more shameful than the Hayes/Tilden election of 1876. Jenny Drapkin has the story. ]]> Editor’s Note: Yesterday, we put up a story from our archives about hero-worship of Rutherford B. Hayes in Paraguay. “Repost old articles about Rutherford B. Hayes” week continues with Jenny Drapkin’s look back at the election of 1876.

No matter what you think of the current political process, no election in American history is more shameful than the Hayes/Tilden election of 1876.

Hayes vs. Tilden

Even though the election of 1824 is known as the Corrupt Bargain, the most corrupt bargain of them all happened in 1876, when a fairly honest politician, Rutherford B. Hayes, compromised the fate of millions of freed slaves in a backroom deal to become president. How this came to pass after Hayes lost the popular vote by 3 percent and almost certainly lost the electoral vote was a categorical perversion of democracy.

But it was a strange time in America. The country was still healing from the Civil War, and Reconstruction had been going so poorly for so long that many Northerners no longer cared about rebuilding the South. The Republicans, a.k.a the Party of the Lincoln, had been in control of the White House for 16 years, thanks in part to the votes of black men below the Mason-Dixon line, who risked their lives by showing up at the polls. Lynching was on the rise, and only the presence of federal troops in the South kept the violence under control.

But the Republicans weren’t just a party of saints. They also stayed in power through a well-organized, corrupt party machine, which readily made cash and ballot boxes disappear. After a series of scandals, many voters wanted them out of office. And so in 1876, both the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, and his opponent Samuel Tilden expected that Tilden—the Democrat—would win. In fact, as the sun set on the eve of the election, both men went to bed believing that Tilden had carried the day.

Little did they know that in middle of the night, party operatives would be busy making sure that every vote did not count. To be fair, the Democrats had henchmen of their own, but the Republicans were much more effective. In the weeks to come, fraud, bribery, and intimidation left the results of three states in question—Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida. If Hayes somehow managed to take all three states, he would win the presidency by one electoral vote.

Since there was no provision in the Constitution for a completely botched election, both state and federal governments started making up new rules as they went along. Eventually, Congress agreed that the election would be resolved in a 15-man committee, consisting of five Senators, five members of the House, and five Supreme Court Justices. At first, the deadlocked committee got nowhere, but then a backroom deal was struck: Southern Democrats would support Hayes for president if he agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction and leaving African Americans to fend for themselves. Although Hayes acquiesced, he didn’t really win. He was a lame duck for his entire presidency and became known as “His Fraudulency” and Rutherfraud B. Hayes.”

But the biggest losers were ultimately African Americans in the South. The aftermath of the election gave rise to the Jim Crow laws, and so in a bitter twist of fate, Southern blacks became second-class citizens in order to keep the Party of Lincoln in power.  It would take 90 years and one Civil Rights Movement to undo the events of 1876.

[This probably marks the end of "Repost old articles about Rutherford B. Hayes week." It's a short week.]

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Does thinking about the American health care system give you a headache? Let our easy-to-swallow guide give your brain some relief.]]> Two things in life are inevitable—birth and death—and they both fall in the domain of the health care system. Although health care is one of the most basic services a government can provide, it’s also one of the most ominous and convoluted. Every industrialized nation offers its citizens some form of free health care, but the balance between public and private funding differs from country to country and from administration to administration. 

At one extreme is the United Kingdom, in which universal health care is funded directly from taxes and there are no insurance companies. At the other extreme is the United States, with its dazzling array of public and private services designed to both protect the poorest Americans and let the free market determine the best possible care. But at both ends—and everywhere in between—the systems are messy. To better understand our system and our options, we’re fielding your questions about health care around the world.

Are there really no health insurance companies in the United Kingdom?

Pretty much. A few of the wealthiest citizens have private insurance for private hospitals, but for the most part, the Brits use the National Health Service (NHS)—the largest employer in Britain, with more than 1 million workers. The brainchild of the Labour government after World War II, the NHS was created to provide “cradle to grave” service for all members of the realm. Because it was funded entirely by taxes, there were no hospital fees, no hassles with insurance companies, minimal administrative costs, and little paperwork. Patients simply paid taxes, went to a doctor, and received free health care. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Not entirely. Soon after the establishment of the NHS, citizens began complaining that customer service was shoddy. The system required specialists to spend half their days working for the NHS, and the rest for private practice. But no matter how hard physicians worked for the government, their salaries stayed the same. Why would an orthopedic surgeon perform 20 hip replacements a week, when he could perform three for the same money? Specialists dragged their feet, which created long waiting lists for treatment. If a patient couldn’t wait for a procedure from an NHS surgeon, he could go down the street to the same doctor’s private practice and receive treatment right away—for a price. In that way, health care costs for some citizens actually increased.

Things began to change in 1990, when Margaret Thatcher’s administration experimented with letting hospitals compete with one another for government funding. In theory, this should have cut costs and promoted self-regulation, but in practice, each hospital had a fairly strong monopoly in its local area. These days, the NHS relies on general practitioners to act as gatekeepers for the whole system. They’re the first doctors patients see, and their services are free. They perform routine checkups and recommend specialists. If a patient needs to go to a hospital, the general practitioner helps decide whether it should be a free NHS hospital or a private one. Ultimately, general practitioners help control costs by guiding money towards NHS specialists, hospitals, diagnostic tests, and medications. However, long waits and poor care are still concerns. It’s not a perfect system, but everyone gets to use it.

Is the United Kingdom the only nation with universal health care?

Not at all. Most industrialized nations, such as Japan, France, Sweden, and Australia, have universal health care. And in Canada, the government has been doling out free medical services to its citizens since 1962. Its system, called Medicare (not to be confused with America’s Medicare, which is totally different), is based on the five principals of the Canada Health Act: It’s universal, comprehensive, accessible to all citizens regardless of income, portable inside and outside of the country, and publicly administered. Also, to make the distribution of goods more efficient, the system is managed individually by province.

Unlike the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, the Canada Health Act doesn’t permit citizens to seek out private doctors to cover services provided by the government. If you want a hip replacement in Canada, there’s no running down the street to a private surgeon—you’ve got to get in line. This prevents physicians from concentrating more on private practice than on public medicine, which has helped keep the system cost-effective and egalitarian.

Of course, this system has its problems, too. To fund Medicare solely with taxes, the federal government matches whatever each province spends on its own system. Unfortunately, that has resulted in wealthier provinces receiving more money from the federal government, because they spent more on health care. Despite efforts to even out funding, large disparities in the quality of services have emerged throughout the country. As a result, many poor, rural communities are still in bad shape.

It sounds like both the United Kingdom and Canada rely solely on taxes to fund health care. Are there other ways to finance the system?

Yes. Some countries, such as Germany and Japan, insist that all citizens own health insurance, the same way that most U.S. states require all drivers to purchase auto insurance.

Germany’s health care system began in 1883, when Chancellor Otto von Bismarck set up insurance structures for workers called “sickness funds.” Today, German law mandates that all citizens belong to them, unless their income is above a certain level. (Currently, that’s about $5,500 US per month.) Sickness funds work like private insurance in the United States, with employers and employees splitting the cost of membership. Germans can choose from more than 1,000 different funds, which offer medical, dental, and drug coverage. Retirees pay with their pensions, while the government supports the poor and unemployed.

While 90 percent of Germans belong to sickness funds, the remaining 10 percent opt for private insurance, which tends to have higher fees. Although people with private insurance go to the same doctors and hospitals as people with sickness funds, private insurance usually means better care. To some, the German system has two tiers—one for the rich and one for the poor. The differences aren’t huge, but people with private insurance have beds reserved for them in hospitals and don’t have to wait as long to see a doctor. But unlike Canada and the United Kingdom, the waiting lists for treatment in Germany are short. On the downside, the quality of diagnostic testing and palliative care (treating the symptoms associated with serious illness) lag behind the rest of Europe, even though Germany spends more on health care than any other country on the continent. According to a 2000 study by the World Health Organization (WHO), in terms of distribution of goods and services across the population, Germany has one of the most fair and equitable systems of any industrialized nation.

How does the U.S. health care system hold up in comparison to other countries?

In terms of fair and equitable distribution of goods and services, the same 2000 WHO study ranked the United States close to the bottom of the list. But that’s because America not only has some of the worst health care on the planet, but also some of the best. The problem is that we don’t have a system of health care so much as a mix of independent, overlapping, bureaucratic monstrosities. The United States is the only industrialized nation, except for South Africa, that doesn’t guarantee health care to all its citizens. Currently, about 47 million Americans (15 percent of the population) have no health insurance, and about 20 million Americans can’t afford the health services they need, even with insurance.

But the United States also has some of the finest doctors, most advanced technology, and best medical facilities in the world. Our diagnostic screening is excellent, and it’s helped America become a world leader at fighting certain diseases, such as breast cancer. Of course, we also spend far more money on health care than any other country. (America spends more than $6,000 per capita on health care—about twice as much as most European nations.) This is partially due to ungainly administrative costs, but it’s also because of the abundance of expensive, high-quality services.

Most people in the United States have private health insurance, which simply means they pay an insurance company a monthly premium in exchange for health services. However, U.S. insurance companies aren’t obligated to cover everyone who’s willing to pay. They can deny coverage if they feel the patient would be too costly. From the insurer’s perspective, covering someone who costs $100,000 per year in medical expenses isn’t worth the $10,000 premium. In other words, some of the country’s sickest people are often also the ones getting pushed out of the system.

Most Americans can’t afford private health insurance unless they go through their employers, who shop around for the best insurance deal they can find. The bigger the company and the more employees, the more clout they have when haggling with insurance companies. While employers pay most of the premiums and employees pay the rest, the major benefit of this arrangement is that the entire premium is tax-deductible. The major drawback is that small businesses and the self-employed don’t have much pull with insurance companies, which can force them to forego health care altogether.

To rein in expenses, many businesses require their employees to join health maintenance organizations, or HMOs. Like traditional insurance companies, HMOs limit the patient’s choice of doctors and hospitals to a restricted “network,” but they also review doctors’ decisions and can refuse payment for services they deem unnecessary. In addition, HMOs tend to insist that doctors prescribe generic medications instead of name-brand ones. These measures save money, but many doctors feel second-guessed by HMOs, believing they promote the cheapest medicine rather than the best.

Is there public insurance in the United States?

Yes. Federal and state governments fund health insurance for the elderly, the military, the poor, the disabled, veterans, and some children. Many different agencies play a role in this, but the two biggest are Medicare, which covers adults 65 and older, and Medicaid, which covers the 55 million poorest Americans. Unfortunately, the bulk of uninsured Americans are people who either aren’t old enough for Medicare or aren’t poor enough for Medicaid.

Medicare started in 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson issued the first Medicare card to former President Harry Truman. Medicare automatically covers hospital stays for seniors, and if they’re willing to pay extra premiums, it subsidizes outpatient services and prescription drugs. Right now, Medicare costs the federal government nearly $400 billion per year, and that number may escalate rapidly in a decade or so, as Baby Boomers turn 65.

Medicaid is designed to help the poor, but it’s run at the state level, so regulations and services change from state to state. And that’s part of the problem; you may qualify for Medicaid in one state but not another. The rules keep changing. Most states have a difficult time balancing Medicaid into their budgets, so they tend to cut benefits or add copayments, depending on the fiscal year. This doesn’t make life simpler for our nation’s poorest Americans.

What are the plans being considered for cleaning up the health care system?

They basically come in three varieties: expanding existing programs to fill in the cracks, using competition to improve efficiency, or creating a new comprehensive plan. The beauty behind expanding the current program is that it won’t scrap a system that works well for at least two-thirds of Americans. Most of us already have access to the best medicine in the world, so why not just try to reach out to the rest? Advocates propose raising the salary caps on Medicaid to cover the working poor and lowering the age requirement for Medicare to 55. This would plug up most of the holes, but unfortunately, it would do nothing to increase efficiency. Some studies estimate that 20 percent of our health care costs go to administrative fees.

To make the American health care system more efficient, some people have proposed ways to encourage competition. One alternative is to create tax-free savings accounts to be used specifically for health reasons, which will help lower- and middle-class Americans finance their medical needs. Once people have the means to make choices, health care providers will compete with each other for their business, which will lead to lower prices. Others advocate letting people buy prescription drugs from Europe and Canada. If American drug manufacturers have to compete with foreign companies, it might stop the escalating cost of prescription drugs. On the other hand, it might also lower the incentive for investing money into research for developing new, better drugs.

The biggest problem with trying to create a free market for health care is that it doesn’t guarantee medical coverage for everyone, which some people view as a fundamental human right, like freedom of speech. These people believe that we need a comprehensive new plan, akin to the health care system of Canada or Germany. In the long term, administrative costs would drop because our system would be simpler, and the government could allocate resources to the people who need them the most. It would be costly, but, then again, so is our current system. In the short term, however, overhauling the system and replacing it with a new one would be massively expensive. And, as we know from other countries, universal health care programs have problems of their own.

Editor’s Note: This article came from the “No Politics Allowed” series that appears in mental_floss magazine, in which we attempt to answer your questions about some of the most complex issues facing Americans today. Learn more about the magazine here.

Lyndon Johnson was born 100 years ago today. Here's a piece from our magazine on some of LBJ's favorite things, including his Amphicar—the only amphibious passenger automobile ever mass-produced for civilians.]]> Lyndon Johnson was born 100 years ago today. Here’s a piece from mental_floss magazine on some of LBJ’s favorite things, including his Amphicar—the only amphibious passenger automobile ever mass-produced for civilians.

Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted to be remembered as the greatest president who ever lived. With that grand ambition in mind (and an ego to match), he launched such sweeping social programs as Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, public radio, public television, and food stamps. Regardless, Johnson will probably be best remembered for his blinding arrogance, and what many would point to as the result of it—the Vietnam War. But here, we’re choosing to remember Johnson not by the many political wheels he set into motion, but by the stuff he kept by his side—and close to his heart.

1. His Toilet

Johnson lived to dominate, and he used crass behavior to bend people to his will. At 6-ft., 3-in. tall and 210 lbs., he liked to lean over people, spitting, swearing, belching, or laughing in their faces. Once, he even relieved himself on a Secret Serviceman who was shielding him from public view. When the man looked horrified, Johnson simply said, “That’s all right, son. It’s my prerogative.” His favorite power ploy, however, seemed to be dragging people into the bathroom with him—forcing them to continue their conversations with the president as he used the toilet. [Image: LBJ and Senator Richard Russell, courtesy of the National Archives.]

2. His Amphicar

When President Johnson was visiting his ranch in Texas, he’d invite friends down and take them for a joyride in his car. He’d drive down a steep incline toward the lake, pretend to lose control, and then yell, “The brakes don’t work! We’re going in! We’re going under!” The car would splash into the lake, and as everyone else was screaming, Johnson would be doubled over laughing. Turns out, Johnson was the proud owner of an Amphicar, the only amphibious passenger automobile ever mass-produced for civilians.

3. His Presidential Buzzer

When people told stories about John F. Kennedy’s great female conquests (and they often did), it made Johnson furious. He’d pound his fists on the desk and scream, “Why, I had more women on accident than he ever had on purpose!” And that may very well have been true. Johnson brought a lot of pretty young things back from Texas to work in the White House, even if they couldn’t type. He even had a buzzer installed in the Oval Office so that the Secret Service could warn him when his wife was on her way.

4. His Helicopter Chair

LBJ loved riding in helicopters. He loved it so much, in fact, that his desk chair in the Oval Office was actually a vinyl helicopter seat—green with a built-in ashtray. In the event of a flood or an emergency water landing, the cushion could have doubled as a flotation device. No joke.

5. His Wife’s Pecan Pie Recipe

Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson was her husband’s most vital political ally. In the early days of their marriage, he could boss her into picking up his socks or shining his shoes, but by the time they moved into the White House, he couldn’t give a speech without consulting her first. During the 1960 election, she traveled 30,000 miles campaigning for the Kennedy/Johnson ticket; and after they won, Bobby Kennedy said they couldn’t have gotten Texas without her.

She played an even bigger role in the 1964 election. That July, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which barred racial and religious discrimination in public places and the workforce. In doing so, Johnson betrayed many good ol’ boys in the South, where he desperately needed votes. Enter Lady Bird. Armed with big hair and big makeup, the Texas native spewed Southern charm from Louisiana to South Carolina. And everywhere she went, she handed out her recipe for pecan pie. The hospitality worked. In 1965, Mrs. Johnson held the Bible as her husband was sworn into office.

6. His Monogrammed Towels

Everyone in the Johnson family had the same initials—Lyndon Baines, Lady Bird, and their daughters, Lynda Bird and Luci Baines. Don’t think for a moment that it was a coincidence, either. They named the family dog Little Beagle Johnson.

Jenny Drapkin is the Senior Editor of mental_floss magazine. You can read more of her presidential knowledge here.
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