A key point made by Levy, which even some economists don't appear to grasp, is regarding the utter irrelevance of bilateral trade data:
"...related source of confusion comes from trying to interpret bilateral trade balances in an integrated, multilateral world economy. In recent years, this has focused public attention on the U.S. trade relationship with the People's Republic of China. I will return to the policy questions surrounding that relationship later, but the large and persistent U.S. trade deficit with China has been held responsible for significant U.S. manufacturing job loss by organizations such as the Alliance for American Manufacturing and the Economic Policy Institute. While there are certainly serious issues with China's economic policies, the bilateral trade balance can be a deeply misleading measure. It evokes a two-country world, in which any job not undertaken in China would be done in the United States. In fact, one key to China's emergence as a global trading power was that it enmeshed itself in an East Asian trading network, often taking in nearly-finished goods and providing the final touches. What's more, just because China may be the low-cost producer of a particular good does not mean that the United States is the next lowest-cost producer. This misconception helped prompt the misguided U.S. Section 421 action against Chinese tires in 2009, which seems to have served mostly to reshuffle the sourcing of U.S. tire imports to other countries, while doing little or nothing to spur U.S. domestic tire production."
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How to reduce US healthcare costs?
Open the sector to international trade.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/16/news/economy/debt_committee_health_costs/