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Politics : HOWARD DEAN -THE NEXT PRESIDENT? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (57)	8/8/2003 1:54:44 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3079

Gephardt is undesirable though, as is Daschle. Kerry and Dean with a wildcard Wesley Clark are the contenders I think. I'm not too sure about Kerry's politics in terms of health care. One thing I have determined these last few years, I want someone in the white house who personifies optimism. That is unbelieveably important I think. Dean is like that, he makes you feel good about the future when you listen to him. Kerry I'm not sure. Bush freaks everybody out with these terror scares, it is incredibly damaging. Hey some of the top chip guys in San Jose are in love with the new Opteron (?) chip from AMD. Apparently it blows the Itanic out of the water. Maybe a good spec investment in AMD, a little scary because AMD has always been such a loser. But I really trust these guys, they know what they are doing.

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (57)	8/9/2003 12:26:26 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3079

Brian, Re: What needs to be done is to allow the reimportation of drugs from Canada and other countries. That seems to be a Rube Goldberg approach. Wouldn't it make much more sense to create a single-payer system in the U.S., remove the perverse incentives for big PHARMA to play obscene patent games, force an end to wasteful advertising and in general, rationalize the insane and silly system that warped notions of "free markets" for the consumer and protection for big Pharma and the big insurance rackets has created? We've got a monstrously dysfunctional system in the U.S. The public sector in the U.S., UK, Germany, France, Canada and Scandanavia provide health care with an overhead cost of 2-3%. Compare that to the U.S.'s astonishing 15 to 25% overheads via wasteful private insurance schemes. The math just doesn't add up for the private system of insurance company and big Pharma coddling that we've create in this country. Nor do the profits of big PHARMA bear any resemblance to the reality of their R&D costs.

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (57)	8/10/2003 8:13:29 PM
From: KyrosL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3079

Before the govt gets into healthcare(indeed if they do at all!), the price increases we see year after year need to be addressed. It would be disastrous to implement a universal healtcahre system for all without doing so. The government is already into health care big time via Medicare. No reason why Medicare can't be extended to cover all Americans. The result will be a US that spends a lot less on health care, gets much better health care on the average, and eliminates the huge wasteful overhead of administering the current system, a system that, by some estimates, spends 40 cents on the dollar on overhead, roughly ten times what countries with nationalized systems spend. The experience in the US compared to countries with nationalized health care systems has proven beyond reasonable doubt, IMO, that a market-based health care system is unworkable and far more expensive than a nationalized system. Markets simply don't work when human lives are at stake. The result is that we still take care of everybody, but we are doing it when their illnesses have reached such a critical stage, that they are far more expensive to treat -- or, even better, prevent. As for Dean, I like the guy for a somewhat strange reason: he is a doctor. We need all the non-lawyer politicians we can get. Dean is no flaming liberal. His fiscal management of Vermont was a model of conservatism. He will have no trouble pointing that out and contrasting it with the gargantuan deficits Bush is bestowing on the next generation. I suspect Dean knows what a great deal a nationalized health care system will be for the US. A nationalized health care system will be a great boon to US competitiveness and productivity. Just the elimination of the enormous amounts of time, money, and effort we spend administering the current hodgepodge would be wonderful. The elimination of the crazy quilt of individual employer plans would greatly boost the competitiveness of US businesses. The bottom line will be considerable savings for the US economy. Kyros