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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Augustus Gloop who wrote (25643)	1/9/2005 8:25:30 PM
From: geode00	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 90947

It isn't the streamlining of the FDA process to get more drugs to the market faster, it's the buying up of the FDA's scientists and bureaucrats by the drug companies. It's fascism. The corporatization of the government. Clinton did many stupid things (he even admits that he went TOO FAR with the telecom bill) but Bush Jr takes the cake for sheer insanity in turning over everything he can (Medicare, SS, Judical Nominees, etc.) to corporate interests with zero regard for the US citizenry. Tort reform has very little to do with the FDA. Malpractice suits cost less than 2% of the cost of medicine, where is the rest coming from: 1. The increasingly large numbers of uninsured who get sicker because they lack early care and who end up in very expensive ERs. Someone pays for that...the INSURED do. 2. High tech medicine and the use of most resources during the last months of life. People would be willing to pay more for care but, at the end of life, more use of pain killing drugs is the way to go. 3. Our bad habits (smoking, lack of exercise, refusal to eat veggies, processed food, Krispy Kreme, etc.) and the current cycle of an aging population. Babyboom ended in the early 50s and there was a babybust for some 30 years thereafter. It's a cycle and it will change. ======== I've heard estimates of 100-200K people being injured or killed due to medical malpractice. Should practitioners be immune from liability and responsibility? Is this what we want as a society? I don't think that number includes those injured or killed by drugs. Bush wants to make all drug companies immune from lawsuits as long as their drugs are FDA approved. Does that make any sense to you considering that drug companies own the FDA? If your parents are greviously hurt by, say, Vioxx how would you feel if Merck took its $2.5 billion in annual revenues and simply kept Vioxx on the market. Why not? It has no liability so it should just keep going. Merck, not the FDA, removed it from the market. The FDA is toothless and corrupt. ===== Tort reform is about BUSINESSES being immune from incompetence. What does that do for our society? Why should those who do a poor job or produce a poor product be immune for any responsibility? In those states which have passed tort reform, have insurance prices gone down? Not that I've heard. Tort reform is anti-capitalism. Whatever happened to market forces determining things? Why is the power of the federal government being used to handicap the sides? Just as with the FICTION of Social Security Reform (Bush is simply trying to kill it in stages) and the FICTION of WMDs, Bush is pushing the FICTION of tort reform in order to make the wealthy wealthier and the poor poorer. Is this the country you want to live in? If so, there are plenty of places where this kind of system already exists. We don't have to become one of them.