The only thing I actually find disturbing about Mitt is his M.B.A from Harvard. The last president to have a Harvard M.B.A hasnt been working out so well.

doriangrey on January 6, 2008 at 12:53 PM

What was it Buckley once said about preferring to be led by the first 500 people in the Boston phonebook than by the faculty of Harvard?

(I say this as one whose first choices are Thompson & Romney and who’s applying to Harvard for my PhD…)

“HEALTH INSURANCE” is NOT “HEALTH CARE”!!!

landlines

I agree completely. But the problem with the Walmart solution is that the government doesn’t allow generics to come out until after the patent has expired. We have people who think that the patents need to be extended. Once generics are available, I agree, it is a no-brainer.

The FDA is trying to get involved in everything and it needs to be scrapped. The FDA is government run amuck.

You can’t say that health insurance is not health care enough. Most people think that health care means health insurance, but they are wrong.

“HEALTH INSURANCE” is NOT “HEALTH CARE”!!!

Hasn’t anybody noticed that the drug cost crisis has been largely solved? Walmart now offers a huge array of prescription drugs for $4: no paperwork, no discount cards, no Canadian imports, no BS!!! And the marketplace is responding to this: a local supermarket chain in our area is matching the Walmart deal with their own $4 prescriptions. And national providers are being forced to slash prices on their own formularies.

Once again, a problem government thinks is unsolvable…solved by private enterprise!!

We need more private enterprise and true competition to solve the rest of the health care problem: cost disclosure on all medical procedures and services, publication of performance reviews, and elimination of legal preferences for indirect providers (insurance companies).

Government needs to step away and let people use any drug they want as long as the consequences are accurately explained and the patient judges the risk to be acceptable. It is futile and unreasonably expensive to try to make each and every medicine “safe” for everyone: medication is always a tradeoff against something the patient believes is worse. So why saddle drug companies with a billion dollars in up-front costs for every new drug??

You want to cut health care costs by 1/3 to 1/2 overnight??
Fire everyone who sits behind a computer screen and never touches a patient!! Then pass tort reform!!! Insurance and government interference and out-of-control tort lawsuits are simply UNPRODUCTIVE OVERHEAD COSTS!!!

I wish the politicians would stop trying to make this harder than it needs to be.

Qzsusy on January 6, 2008 at 5:11 PM

ni-i-ice!

ThackerAgency on January 6, 2008 at 6:30 PM

The way you explain those issues it makes sense. But you’re right about pissing off the big boys. Health insurance companies not make a profit? That is one tough row to hoe.

Thanks for the explanations.

1. Pharma (I’m not against a company making a profit, but the FDA needs to be scrapped for a better system, and Pharma needs to be less influential in DC.

2. Insurance Companies – Insurance companies play a vital roll in negotiating prices to keep COSTS low. HOWEVER, they need to operate on a non-profit basis because they don’t actually provide anything of substance to health care. Insurance is important vehicle between patient and doctor for negotiating prices, but they HEALTH insurance companies shouldn’t make a profit. (bridge b/t public and private).

3. TORT reform. We must limit damages awarded to medical care gone wrong. By its definition, medical care is risky anyway. . . so accidents will happen. The patients should be compensated, but I don’t think they should bankrupt a hospital or doctor because of it. Reasonable restrictions on monetary awards from lawsuits need to be in place.

If you fix these three things, the health care ‘crisis’ in this country will be over. What is the problem with fixing these things? Nobody has incentive to fix them, and there is BIG BIG money with incentive to keep them from being fixed. But there’s your solution in a nutshell.

ThackerAgency on January 6, 2008 at 5:17 PM

There certainly are problems with the drug companies. I can’t say what the answer is, but when you’re dealing with the free market it’s harder to fix. But it is patently unfair for drug companies to cry free market when they are getting tax payer monies to help them compete. Now I have no idea what they get the subsidies for, so I cannot speak to that issue. But I think Mitt’s MA plan is not perfect, but it is a step in the right direction. He has stopped people from using emergency rooms as their primary care provider and given them choice. Subsequently, more people are in the free market even though the state helps them out. Hopefully, as people start to realize the benefit of providing ones own health care, I believe the push toward a true free market with no government help will be something people will support.

Little steps into socialized health care and little steps into free market care.

The U.S. Senate passed the FDA “drug safety” bill today (S.1082) with a 93-1 vote. A key amendment that would have called for genuine drug safety protections for consumers — the Grassley amendment 1039 — was defeated by a single vote (47 to 46). The new law deepens financial ties between Big Pharma and the FDA, doubling the amount of money directly paid to the regulator by drug companies, but it fails to explicitly protect foods and nutritional supplements from overreaching FDA regulation efforts.

From August 1, 2007

The Food and Drug Administration voted overwhelmingly to keep the diabetes drug Avandia on the market, despite its known deadly effects. Two FDA committees met yesterday in Gaithersburg, Maryland, to consider whether the drug — which has led to the deaths of 80,000 people — should be pulled from the marketplace. The FDA does not deny that the drug is dangerous.

From April 2007 a survey:

More than four out of five Americans think drug companies have too much influence over the Food and Drug Administration, and 84 percent believe that advertisements for prescription drugs with safety concerns should be outlawed, reveals a striking new survey from Consumer Reports.

Article about ‘conflicts of interest’ in the FDA from Jan 2007:

Last year, Public Citizen, a national non-profit public interest organization, exposed that while conflicts of interest at the FDA’s drug advisory committees are common and often have serious dollars at stake, advisory committee members and voting consultants rarely step down because of them.

Sept. 2006 concerning the dangers of prescribing ADHD drugs to children while it is promoted by the FDA:

Since the Vioxx scandal broke in late 2004, most Americans are all too familiar with the idea that prescription drugs can be dangerous and even deadly. But how would America react if it were to discover that a class of drugs being primarily prescribed to children was also dangerous and sometimes deadly?

According to a May 2006 report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, side effects and “problems” with widely prescribed Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) drugs send 3,100 people to the ER every year — 80 percent of them children.

There are plenty of examples of FDA corruption because of $. But I’ll stop there. I’ll provide more on request.

Riehl World View

So, it turns out pharmaceutical companies, “the bad guys,” have given $70,000 to John McCain. McCain demagogues against them in last night’s debate. Given that McCain needs the money, could it be they’ll be more likely to pony up …

MA just took the money they were spending on very expensive emergency room visits and helped get people private insurance.

Look, I don’t dislike Mitt for any reason other than I question whether or not he’s genuine, but he has a solid family and that says a lot about a guy. I could certainly support him should he win the nomination. Having said that, read the sentence I just quoted.

They used government money to buy private health insurance. The problem here is that it doesn’t address the COST of health care and gives the insurance companies every incentive to charge MORE for insurance because the government is going to pay for it. I could give you a real world example in NC how that worked with the HCTC (Health Care Tax Credit) program through the IRS, but it would be easier to explain by using the example of the Medicare prescription drug program.

The government provided prescription drug benefits. That did not lower the cost of health care. The prescription drug companies raised their prices because the government was going to pay for it. That has nothing to do with patents, or being able to make enough money for R&D of new drugs. That’s simply the greed of the pharma and the government allowing them to do it because pharma has such a large lobby that gives Washington money.

I’m telling you I could fix the problem, but I’d make a lot of entrenched big money people mad (which none of the current candidates are willing to do). The problem is not insurance, the problem is the COST of health care. NONE of the plans that have been presented by the candidates attempt to do anything about the COST of health care – which is the fundamental problem with the health care system in America.

©☼☀∠ !

Fred: We already know, what ever mandate you propose…
Mitt looked like Charlie Brown missing the football.

right2bright on January 6, 2008 at 4:56 PM

That is just more snarky cranky constipated old man who can’t keep the kids off the lawn attitude from Fred. He has no clue what those mandates are and was just attacking the word because of it’s seemingly negative connotation.

How the hell is forcing someone to pay for something they might not want keeping the government out of it?

lowandslow on January 6, 2008 at 12:55 PM

Read up on the plan if you really care to know. MA just took the money they were spending on very expensive emergency room visits and helped get people private insurance. That’s less government, not more. It’s a step in the right direction to back us out of a socialized medicine culture.

Again, maybe I’m not understanding what he’s saying–but it’s also an issue if presidential candidates aren’t being clear.