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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: High-Tech East who wrote (25198)	12/21/1999 11:25:00 AM
From: JC Jaros	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Check out Nova tonight (at least in Boston - 8:00 pm, Channel #2 - PBS - the home of Nova) Oh, thanks Ken. I'll look for it. My wife has been wanting to buy ORG (Organogenesis) for over a year now and I've managed to keep her at bay. She thinks I've spent all this time on the internet doing DD on ORG. <g> Anuway, she's really into this stuff. Popular Science had a special issue on it last month(?) which I bought and read much of. BioMed STOCKS scare me though. I feel the way about BioMed that twister feels about dot coms. The dollars seem so tenuous to me; so inflated. You look at the financing and the debt and the deals and it's hard to find the value, even with a total brain replacement. "Who's gonna pay for these patents?" is my refrain there. I bought a Medical technology company a few years ago called Imatron (IMAT). Perhaps you're familiar with it. They have a a special x-ray type of machine that detects heart plaque and accurately assesses risk. It's really nice technology. It would be saving lives and lowering costs, blah blah blah. But nobody aside from Cedars Sinai (and a few other hospitals where the bean counters don't rule entirely) have it. Insurance companies won't touch it. It's preventative medicine. There's nothing in it for Kaiser in the 'current quarter'. Our health care system is completely f*cked. Add to that biomed technology that helps people live longer and you have HMOs feeling compelled to counteract the dynamic by sending out death squads into the field. So, two things scare me there, one being "how do the shareholders get paid?" and the second thing (same thing) is,- with the changing nature of IP (patents in this case), if a bio technology or a cure for cancer came along, wouldn't political pressure come heavily to bear on the government (politicos) to weaken present patent laws? If the Fountain of Youth (or cancer cure) was found, what politician wouldn't want to liberate it from patent protection and get it into the hands of informed voters cheaper than his or her political opponent? This is an area in our society in need of wholesale change. I start changing from a dot com libertarian and start becoming a rabid brick tossing socialist real fast when it comes to our system of health care. Next to bootstrapping the information 'have nots' in our new age, changing our healthcare system should be the first thing we do with all of this new wealth. IMO -JCJ