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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (506565)	12/9/2003 11:07:12 AM
From: JakeStraw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Really Kenneth? I thinks that's just your opinion...

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (506565)	12/9/2003 11:08:08 AM
From: jackhach	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Report: Boston to begin Canadian drug plan BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) --Starting this summer, Boston will begin buying prescription drugs from Canada for thousands of city employees and retirees, a newspaper reported. Boston would become only the second U.S. city -- after Springfield, about 90 miles west -- to turn to Canada for drugs. Mayor Thomas Menino was expected deliver remarks about the pilot program at a City Council hearing on Tuesday. "The pharmaceutical manufacturers should be more sensitive to consumers' needs," Menino wrote in his comments for the City Council, obtained in advance by the Boston Globe for a story in Tuesday editions. The program, which is slated to begin in July, will cut about $1 million each year from the city's $61 million prescription drug bill, according to city estimates. Springfield Mayor Michael Albano estimates that his city's policy has already reduced its $18 million prescription drug bill by about $750,000. "Not only is it good for Boston, but this will send shockwaves around the country," Albano said. "There's a little bit of a difference when a city like Springfield, Mass., does something and when Boston, Mass., does it." Boston's 15,000 employees and retirees have drug costs covered through outside health plans, which are the choice of most employees, or directly by the city. The second group, about 7,000 people who are mostly retirees, will have the option of buying from Canada. The practice is illegal, although Congress has told the Department of Health and Human services to review whether drugs can be safely imported from Canada. The FDA continues to express doubts about the practice, however. "The unknown concerns us -- where these things are being made, how they're being shipped, how they're being stored," said Tom McGinnis, the FDA's director of pharmacy affairs. "In the United States, we have authority over all of those things. Outside the United States, we don't have authority." In Illinois, Gov. Rod Blagojevich is lobbying the federal government to let the state buy drugs at lower prices in Canada for its 230,000 state employees and retirees. Wanda Moebius, a spokeswoman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said Menino would do a greater service to employees by telling them about programs to aid patients who can't afford drugs. "There are more responsible ways to help those people than to flout the law and flout safety and encourage people to get their prescription drugs from what purports to be Canada," she said.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (506565)	12/9/2003 11:28:08 AM
From: Thomas A Watson	Respond to of 769670

Global Warming The State of the Debate A Cato Institute Conference Friday, December 12, 2003 10:00 a.m.–5:15 p.m. cato.org One can listen only or watch with a real video stream. kenny if you want to learn about ROE and why all you moaning about CO2 is, well just plain stupid. It's this Friday and you can listen only or if you have more than dial up you can watch the real video live. The afternoon session Panel 2 is all about ROE.... Panel 2: Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Costs & Benefits Gary Yohe John E. Andrus Professor of Economics, Wesleyan University William Cline Senior Fellow, Institute for International Economics and the Center for Global Development Robert Mendelsohn Edwin Weyerhaeuser Davis Professor of Forest Policy and Professor of Economics, Yale University Paul Portney President and Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future cato.org Global climate change continues to be a flashpoint in American politics. Although the Kyoto Protocol may be a dead letter at the moment, various initiatives to curb domestic green-house gas emissions regularly pop up at both the state and federal level. Democratic pres-idential candidates, meanwhile, uniformly promise to revive the Kyoto agreement in their prospec-tive administrations. The public debate, however, has been disparaged by both proponents and opponents of the Kyoto agreement as superficial and uninformed. This day-long Cato conference is intended to help remedy that by fairly summarizing what is known about the science and economics surrounding greenhouse gas concentrations and abatement. Moreover, it tackles squarely what is perhaps the most relevant policy issue at the moment—the potential costs and benefits involved in dealing with scientific uncertainty.