Health care reform is getting interesting. If this was a movie, over the titles we'd hear the sound of thousands of boots marching, swords clanging on shields in the darkness. It's war, baby! Foley editors to your drums and weaponry!Today's posts include more reports of ramped-up lobbying efforts, closeted and outed; "centrist" Senators' delay tactics; the closed-door committee wrangling to get stuff stuffed into the House and Senate versions of this screenplay.
Will health care reform be derailed by delaying a vote? No. Government hurried to bail out the "too big to fail" banks. Goldman Sachs did OK with the rush, but did we?
Jason Linkins reports that AP made up the $1.5 trillion price tag tied to the cost of health care reform. It's a fake number. It's a scary fake number. Salon.com grabbed the same fake number. How far will it spread? The plot thickens!
We can't get the right information to find out who the players are, and who's being paid to play, and who has taken their balls and left the building.
And we're counting on Congress to get it right?
Big Pharma is battling to make the 5-year moratorium for generics on patented pharmaceuticals become a 12-year grace period. Big Pharma is the only actor in this drama that I know is absolutely not on the side of the American people. Big Pharma is in its own pocket, jiggling its pieces of silver.
Big Pharma is undoubtedly fond of a man named Dr. Robert Spitzer, who, after applying the same
"camel = race car designed by committee"mindset that is overtaking health care debate, added "disorder" to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Thus was created the obscenely profitable realm of new medications for new disorders, at an enormous price to the American people - both in the costs of medications for undiagnosed, but medicated disorders - and to the women and seniors who have undiagnosed complaints that are prescribed one medication after another, and then the resultant side effects drugged as well. We're not curing diseases with all this pharmacology. We're lining the pockets of the firms who are treating restless legs, bladder issues, flaccidus, stomach upsets, and allergies.
Hey AP: got any numbers of women over 55 who are being medicated for bipolar disorder?
In our health care reform movie, Big Pharma is the villain.
Any idea who the heroes are?
The heroes will be "us" for insisting that it gets done, we need to make our own noise to be heard over the right wing howlers who drank the Corporate Kool-aid that Big Pharma and the Insurance Companies are pushing (they just get my goat).
ReplyDeleteI have Fibromyalgia...I refuse to take the pharmacutical bandaid offered by my doctor (I like her, she means well.) I'll be damned if I go about life feeling like a zombie (that stuff just makes me care less about how crappy I feel.) I told her that stuff is for people without anything left, I have too much to do, I need to keep my head together. For all the years that I went around being told "It's all in your head." I went to work on my head to make me better. I still have pain, I still have fatigue, but I get up every morning and give a damn. I make art, I write books, and I work a full time job at an art collection, I have my family, my house, my garden, my dog Max, and five cats...these things matter to me. I think there's a whole lot of people out there who have nothing left to feel good about and it stinks.
Anyway...I like your blog, thanks for the Follow on Goodreads!