Riddle me this Lib’s

[firespin]

If we could get people to eat healthy and exercise regularly and not smoke and wear seatbelts and work to reduce the stress in their lives and wash their hands more often, we'd be practicing true "preventative medicine."

That's all? There must be some other choices people make that you want to control in the interest of "helping them". Outlaw cars (dangerous), salt (hypertension), and alcohol (various things).

And while we're at it, let's just sterilize people who carry genetic markers for hereditary diseases like diabetes, Huntington's and Parkinson's diseases, epilepsy...the list grows daily.

Think of all the things we can prevent!

 

[Sonny Limatina]

That's all? There must be some other choices people make that you want to control in the interest of "helping them". Outlaw cars (dangerous), salt (hypertension), and alcohol (various things).

And while we're at it, let's just sterilize people who carry genetic markers for hereditary diseases like diabetes, Huntington's and Parkinson's diseases, epilepsy...the list grows daily.

Think of all the things we can prevent!

Does this mean you're against vaccines too?

 

[RobDownSouth]

Does this mean you're against vaccines too?

It all depends. If Obama supports vaccines, Firespin and the boyz will be against them. Hey, bein' in the "Party of No" ain't easy!!

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[Sonny Limatina]

It all depends. If Obama supports vaccines, Firespin and the boyz will be against them. Hey, bein' in the "Party of No" ain't easy!!

Yeah, I'd have a lot more patience for all this if we were talking about dueling health bills, each founded on different political philosophies. I'm open to the argument that there are cheaper, better, more efficient, more effective, more daring, less daring, etc., approaches out there.

Hell, I don't even care if there's no public option, as long as someone comes up with SOME guarantee of protection for those who can't afford their own insurance. Perhaps "public" health centers, like public radio and public television. No requirement to donate, but a strong fundraising mechanism intact to ensure that people do--and tax exempt status for the institutions.

...And as long as someone comes up with SOME way to control the corruption in the current system, instead of suddenly pretending to be shocked, shocked that anyone would suggest there is any.

These guys (Senators) are not stupid, whatever else they are. If they wanted a solution, they could find one. Hell, I just proposed one on the fly.

But they don't.

 

[firespin]

Does this mean you're against vaccines too?

I was suggesting things that would help people be healthier, so vaccines would be mandatory for everybody. Administered by blow-gun for efficiency.

 

[RightField]

I was suggesting things that would help people be healthier, so vaccines would be mandatory for everybody. Administered by blow-gun for efficiency.

They would be infinately more popular if they were administered by blow jobs.

mmmm....mmmm.....ouch....mmmmm....mmmmm.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Sure, it pays for them when they're in the emergency room. When they could've been treated for a whole lot less if they'd been seeing a doctor for preventive care. And guess who pays for that expensive care through higher premiums.

AJ, this isn't rocket science. Even you can do the math. Heh.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/health/21cancer.html?_r=1

Yeah, the math is there, too bad the logic never was...

It is quietly working on a message, to put on its Web site early next year, to emphasize that screening for breast and prostate cancer and certain other cancers can come with a real risk of overtreating many small cancers while missing cancers that are deadly.

“We don’t want people to panic,” said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the cancer society. “But I’m admitting that American medicine has overpromised when it comes to screening. The advantages to screening have been exaggerated.”

Prostate cancer screening has long been problematic. The cancer society, which with more than two million volunteers is one of the nation’s largest voluntary health agencies, does not advocate testing for all men. And many researchers point out that the PSA prostate cancer screening test has not been shown to prevent prostate cancer deaths.

There has been much less public debate about mammograms. Studies from the 1960s to the 1980s found that they reduced the death rate from breast cancer by up to 20 percent.

The cancer society’s decision to reconsider its message about the risks as well as potential benefits of screening was spurred in part by an analysis published Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Brawley said.

 

[RobDownSouth]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/health/21cancer.html?_r=1

Yeah, the math is there, too bad the logic never was...

What is Vetteman's and your fascination with prostates?

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

This idea that Obama and the Democrats can save us money by managing medicine is no different than the profit we were going to make in bailing out the auto industry...

Just as the Obama administration prepares to announce a new TARP-like program for small community banks, Inspector General Neil Barofsky said he believes that "it's unrealistic to think we're going to get all of that money back."

The Treasury Department has spent more than $454 billion through TARP programs. Forty-seven recipients have paid back nearly $73 billion. That means more than $317 billion remains outstanding with the program set to expire Dec. 31.

Later Wednesday, President Barack Obama is expected to announce the community bank assistance effort. The American Bankers' Association has asked for $5 billion in rescue-fund money to help small banks extend more loans.

Asked on a nationally broadcast interview how he would grade the program, Barofsky said, "I think right now it would have to be an incomplete." Barofsky did say the program was successful in "pulling us back" from a financial collapse, however. At the same time, he told CBS's "The Early Show" that the resumption of huge executive bonus payments by some of the same institutions that benefited from the government bailout has sown distrust and cynicism among many taxpayers.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/10/21/bailout-watchdog-early-say-money-repaid-taxpayers/

So note, that while on one hand, Obama is ordering 90% pay cuts to the institutions that took bailout money, on the other hand, he's trying to get smaller banks to take bailout money too. Then he can set their pay and doctor's pay.

It's not about health care, it's not about the economy, it's about Marxist/Fascist control of the nation for its own good.
__________________
The Executive power in our government is not the only, perhaps not even the principle, object of my solicitude. The Tyranny of the Legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come. The Tyranny of the Executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant time.
Thomas Jefferson

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

How best to cause a revolution other than to destroy the value of the dollar and steal away our standard of living?




Any id, uhs...?

Chairman Mao?
__________________
"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
John Maynard Keynes

 

[Pookie]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/health/21cancer.html?_r=1

Yeah, the math is there, too bad the logic never was...

Your logic is just ... precious.

Dude, too much of anything is rarely a good thing. Lets take you as an example ... reading too many wingnut articles make you sound like a lunatic. It doesn't mean everyone should completely stop reading though.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Nice to know you ignore the facts to blindly support your party and your "right" to an abortion and to protect the "rights" of your sexual orientation...




Very sad. Very sad indeed to see you lash out like a spoiled child.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Gardasil Shows Why Government Health Care is Dangerous

Duncan Maxwell Anderson
American Thinker

Gardasil has to be the perfect drug for the brave new world of ObamaCare, in a 1984 kind of way. Made by Merck & Co., it was approved in 2006 for use against venereal disease in young girls. Here's why it's so culturally suited for hope and change -- and such a perfect example of why you don't want the government in your medicine chest:

1) Gardasil has owed most of its success to the fact that government agencies have been subsidizing its sales, recommending its use, and even talking about requiring it.

2) Administered to girls as young as nine, it seems likely to help them grow up feeling ever so much safer about "safe sex." They'll be freer to rebel against bad old, religion-based morality, and more inclined to bond (as it were) with peers, school, the state and charismatic politicians who are always repeating themselves.

3) Best of all, it now appears that Gardasil doesn't work.

Gardasil was promoted as the first vaccine against cancer, since it works against human papilloma virus (HPV), which is believed to instigate the growth of cancerous cells in a woman's cervix. But since it was first hurriedly approved by the Food and Drug Administration, Gardasil has been dogged by criticism that it hasn't been adequately tested, and by persistent reports of side effects, including deaths. So has a similar drug, Cervarix, made by GlaxoSmith-Kline.

As news of the risks has come out, the reply from Gardasil's pharma-industry supporters has been to denounce "fear-mongering," and to reiterate that the drug will reduce the cervical cancer rate in America. Alas, a presentation at a conference by one of Merck's top researchers on October 2 appears to show otherwise. Here is a link to an article by Steven W. Mosher and Joan Robinson of the Population Research Institute (PRI), commenting on the talk by Merck consultant Dr. Diane Harper, who helped develop both Gardasil and Cervarix.

Dr. Harper has on several occasions criticized the rush to market of both HPV drugs. But her October 2 talk at the Fourth International Public Conference on Vaccination in Reston, Va., was framed as emphasizing the benefits of Gardasil. Nevertheless, according to PRI, her presentation openly stated that, 26 million vaccinations after its debut, Gardasil will have no effect on the rate of cervical cancer in the U.S. HPV, the infection that Gardasil can prevent, is rare, usually heals itself, and testing and treatment in the U.S. are very effective in keeping cervical cancer a rare event.

Okay, you say, Gardasil may not be effective. Neither is brushing your teeth with mayonnaise. But can it hurt? All the girls in my daughter's class are getting their shots, and I don't want her to feel left out.

Yes, it can hurt, according to Dr. Harper herself, who spoke out for better disclosure about the drug's risks earlier this year. PRI's Joan Lewis adds: "To date, 15,037 girls have officially reported adverse side effects from Gardasil to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). These adverse effects include Guilliane Barre, lupus, seizures, paralysis, blood clots, brain inflammation and many others. The CDC acknowledges that there have been 44 reported deaths."

Merck's Dr. Harper told CBS News that a girl is more likely to die from an adverse reaction to Gardasil than from cervical cancer.

...

[BAD REPUBLICANS LISTED HERE! A_J, I know we love to find evil Republicans advocating death for cash!]

One thing we know about Gardasil is that each three-dose treatment costs $360, which has helped Merck a lot. It's been one of the company's top-selling drugs. That has led to political contributions by Merck PACs, which helped certain politicians. After FDA approval in 2006, the company lobbied state governments all over the country to promote mandated Gardasil vaccination for 12-year-old girls. Governor Richard Perry of Texas got into trouble when it was revealed that, right before he issued an Executive Order requiring all of Texas's 6th-grade girls to get doses of Gardasil, he and his political allies had been lobbied by Merck. In the uproar, the legislature passed a measure countermanding his order, and Merck announced it was canceling its 18-state "Gardasil mandate" campaign. But sales of the drug are down this year, so the company gamely mounted a "Back to School" ad campaign. (Why? To coincide with the Fall Scholastic Sex Season?)

...

Groups like Planned Parenthood eagerly promote Gardasil. They urge you to bring in your daughter for her shots. That represents a sale right now, of course. But it could help bring your daughter back as a customer for contraceptives or abortion. You wouldn't approve, and you don't let your daughter carry around that kind of pocket change on her own? No matter. You don't have to know, or be consulted. Planned Parenthood can give away those services "free," but get reimbursed in full by America's taxpayers through federal and state grants. Everybody wins, except the patient and her family.

...

Pook... got your thinking cap on yet, or just wadded panties over my racist, anti-Obama views on health care?

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Guillermo Denis Gonzalez was released from prison in Florida in 2004 after serving 12 years for murder. By the end of 2006, he owned a health care business officially licensed by Medicare.
This August, the Miami Herald reported that Gonzalez pled guilty to filing $586,953 in phony Medicare claims for supplies that were never given to any actual patients -- but this was only after he was arrested for murdering and dismembering another victim, to which he also confessed.

While it's shocking that government policing efforts are so lax for Medicare that even a convicted murderer can be granted a license to sell equipment and file claims, Gonzalez is actually a small player compared to other cheats. Last June, for instance, the Washington Post ran a story about a high school dropout who scammed $105 million from the federal government by filing 140,000 fraudulent Medicare claims, buying herself a Mercedes-Benz and two condominiums with a portion of the proceeds.

The rampant fraud in existing government health care programs is nothing new, but the problem warrants increased attention given recent reports of growing momentum behind Democrats' push to create a new government-run program modeled after Medicare.

...

Proponents of creating a new government plan argue that Medicare is much more efficient than private insurance and boast that it has administrative costs of just two percent. The number is highly misleading in that it doesn't include many expenses that would be considered when calculating administrative costs in the private sector, because those expenses show up elsewhere in the federal budget. Examples include the cost of tax collection, office space, and staff salaries. The true administrative cost of Medicare is more like 6 percent to 8 percent, according to a 2006 report by the Council for Affordable Health Insurance. But to the extent that Medicare does have lower administrative costs than private insurance, the programs' defenders ignore one of the consequences: lax oversight of claims that leads to widespread fraud.

...

In 2006, the Los Angeles Daily News wrote about the indictment of a Russian-Armenian crime syndicate "that gutted Medicare of more than $20 million using a network of clinics, paid kickbacks to marketers for patient referrals and billed Medicare for tests that were unnecessary or went undelivered." And the Associated Press recently found that the mafia is increasingly resorting to Medicare fraud as a substitute for dealing drugs.

"Building a Medicare fraud scam is far safer than dealing in crack or dealing in stolen cars, and it's far more lucrative," the AP story quoted Lewis Morris, a lawyer the Department of Health and Human Services, as saying. There's also a lower likelihood of getting caught, and even if caught, the penalties are much lighter.

Scam artists often file fake claims by paying people for their Medicare numbers or somehow acquiring lists of beneficiaries. In some cases claims have been filed by dead doctors, or on behalf of patients who were dead or deported at the time of the claim. In his testimony, Sparrow noted a July 2008 study by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that found from 2000 to 2007 "between $60 million to $92 million was paid for medical services or equipment that had been ordered or prescribed by dead doctors."

By contrast, only about 1.5 percent of private health care claims are lost to fraud, because private insurers are more aggressive about policing claims, Merrill and Meredith Matthews write in a chapter of Stop Paying the Crooks.

...

Philip Klein
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/10/23/medi-fraud-for-everyone

 

[RobDownSouth]

Nice to know you ignore the facts to blindly support your party and your "right" to an abortion and to protect the "rights" of your sexual orientation...




Very sad. Very sad indeed to see you lash out like a spoiled child.

Once again, Lit's biggest John Galt wannabee, who ceaselessly preaches his "rugged individualism uber alles" pablum as a universal cure-all for the world's ills, makes an important exception: women must have their reproductive systems regulated by the Federal government, to avoid havin' them make choices that their purdy little minds aren't capable of makin'.....

He's no misogynist, nossir, he's just lookin' out for their best interests.....

 

[Pookie]

Nice to know you ignore the facts to blindly support your party and your "right" to an abortion and to protect the "rights" of your sexual orientation...




Very sad. Very sad indeed to see you lash out like a spoiled child.

You are just soooo ... precious. It's your own fault for leaving the safe confines of American Thinker.

 

[Pookie]

Duncan Maxwell Anderson
American Thinker



Pook... got your thinking cap on yet, or just wadded panties over my racist, anti-Obama views on health care?

Sure I do. But you're too busy hiding behind American Thinker. We can seeeee youuuuu!

 

[Pookie]

Once again, Lit's biggest John Galt wannabee, who ceaselessly preaches his "rugged individualism uber alles" pablum as a universal cure-all for the world's ills, makes an important exception: women must have their reproductive systems regulated by the Federal government, to avoid havin' them make choices that their purdy little minds aren't capable of makin'.....

He's no misogynist, nossir, he's just lookin' out for their best interests.....

Aren't wingnuts just the cutest things? Bless their hearts.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Can't address the facts again.




Everyone can see that.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way.

–Jim Malone,

"The Untouchables"

When Barack Obama promised to deliver "a new kind of politics" to Washington, most folk didn't picture Rahm Emanuel with a baseball bat. These days, the capital would make David Mamet, who wrote Malone's memorable movie dialogue, proud.

A White House set on kneecapping its opponents isn't, of course, entirely new. (See: Nixon) What is a little novel is the public and bare-knuckle way in which the Obama team is waging these campaigns against the other side.

In recent weeks the Windy City gang added a new name to their list of societal offenders: the Chamber of Commerce. For the cheek of disagreeing with Democrats on climate and financial regulation, it was reported the Oval Office will neuter the business lobby. Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett slammed the outfit as "old school," and warned CEOs they'd be wise to seek better protection.

That was after the president accused the business lobby of false advertising. And that recent black eye for the Chamber (when several companies, all with Democratic ties, quit in a huff)—think that happened on its own? ("Somebody messes with me, I'm gonna mess with him! Somebody steals from me, I'm gonna say you stole. Not talk to him for spitting on the sidewalk. Understand!?")

The Chamber can at least take comfort in crowds. Who isn't on the business end of the White House's sawed-off shotgun? First up were Chrysler bondholders who—upon balking at a White House deal that rewarded only unions—were privately threatened and then publicly excoriated by the president.

Next, every pharmaceutical, hospital and insurance executive in the nation was held out as a prime obstacle to health-care nirvana. And that was their reward for cooperating. When Humana warned customers about cuts to Medicare under "reform," the White House didn't bother to complain. They went straight for the gag order. When the insurance industry criticized the Baucus health bill, the response was this week's bill to strip them of their federal antitrust immunity. ("I want you to find this nancy-boy . . . I want him dead! I want his family dead! I want his house burned to the ground!")

John Stossel

You guys are just acting as Obama's SA jackboots in your howling mindless rage...

 

[Pookie]

Can't address the facts again.




Everyone can see that.

You haven't addressed anything. However, if I want to address the "facts" you posted, I'd go over to American Thinker and engage them there.

 

[Pookie]

John Stossel

You guys are just acting as Obama's SA jackboots in your howling mindless rage...

Oh, for fucks sake. You've devolved into busybody. Spamming the board with wingnut articles doesn't mean you're addressing anything, AJ. It just means you've got nothing to say.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

I addressed your point about the "savings" we were going to get by insuring the uninsured.



At that point, you offered nothing relevant, so there we are.