MEDICAL MISINFORMATION

As part of another discussion with L.C., this time on health care, it sounds like someone is being sold a bill of goods that somehow the poorest among us are responsible for a failing health care system, surely an easy scapegoat but as erroneous an argument as we'll ever encounter.

the problem is that there is so much exploitation of our health care system now that ends up getting paid for by the taxpayers...i do not feel i should be liable to pay for someone's abortions, you know? yes, it is unfair that kids do not have health care and i am not sure what the answer is to that but i know i do not want to sacrifice my health care as a hard working middle class contributor that does pay for it...i should not be forced to wait for treatment or for better technology because the government tells me i have to.

You're ABSOLUTELY correct that there's exploitation of our health care.

Pharmaceutical companies and their price-rigging cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, such as PROHIBITING Medicare from using its tremendous buying power to negotiate better prices — something that is outright anti-competitive and anti-capitalist (it's what Wal-Mart does).

My sister lives in Canada and has NEVER waited for access to a doctor or a dentist any longer than I have, nor does she have to go to a government doctor. She's 29 ... and her take-home pay is the same as mine.

The US has the best treatments available because of the money the pharmaceutical companies make on the sales of their drugs...they are the primary innovators of new drugs marketed, especially for cancer research and heart disease...the # 1 killers in the country. Who is going to pay for the billions of dollars that go into R&D?? Medicare?? I don't think so...they are too busy paying for abortions and health care to illegals, Bruno...with my tax dollars to boot!!

Expecting Medicare to step in and regulate the drug companies would only hurt the welfare of the citizens of the US.

By the way, I know a lot of young healthy people in Canada too and they say the same thing you did about your sister. However, bottom line, I do not want socialized healthcare because I never want to be put in the position where I could become ill and not just need to go get a yearly physical, but need chemo or specific treatments that are life-saving. I doubt your sister and neither my friends use the Canadian health care system in that capacity.

So, anticompetitve measures should be enacted wherever possible in order increase profits (not R&D budgets, but profits) over the public good and affordable health care? That's domestic protectionism. Yet drugs can be purchased more cheaply in Mexico, Canada and abroad — the same ones Americans are turning to in order to bypass pharmaceutical profiteering.

Medicare doesn't pay for abortions. Plus, the amount of money it pays for health care to "illegals" are but a drop in the bucket for the amount of labor they perform at below-market levels and the extent to which they buoy the American economy. (How many people do you know who would pick lettuce for 60 cents a head or wash dishes at a restaurant for $40 a night?)

Yet taxes can go down as we spend upwards of $330 billion a MONTH in Iraq?

My grandfather (and several aunts, uncles and cousins) also lived in Canada, and he had great health care throughout his declining health, eye surgeries and long-term hospital stay before he died last December. He had top specialists from all over the world, including the U.S., because, bottom line, Canada takes care of its citizens.

His quality of life was excellent and he lived to be 89.