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2003/6/17 [Health/Disease/General, Health/Women] UID:28741 Activity:very high |
6/16 Socialized medicine: The fix is in http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=33110 Younger workers will be paying for this. \_ If people exercised and ate healthier food, we wouldn't have such extreme health care costs. \_ No. You couldn't be more wrong. Costs spiral due to insurance, lawsuits, and endless medical tests to avoid lawsuits. If we were all as fit and healthy as you costs wouldn't be any lower. \_ I admit, it all sounds reasonable, until you remember that you're reading WorldNetDaily, a publication that thinks that Hitler was a Leftie, and that McCarthy was soft on those commies. Grain of salt with that diatribe? \_ What publications are we allowed to read? What is on the PC list this week? |
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www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=33110 The initial cost, we're told, will be about $40 billion a year. Look for $100 billion a year before you buy your next car. You will be able to show it to your children or grandchildren to help explain why the government is taking 60 percent of everything they earn. Senior citizens are going to be able to use someone else's money to buy their prescription drugs. Senior citizens pledge their electoral support to Democrats as thanks. Senior citizens spend an average of $650 a year on prescription drugs right now. As soon as the drug benefit is added to Medicare, the pharmaceutical companies will start marketing many more drugs to old folks. Every night, you'll see some wrinkled citizens romping on television while the announcer says; The average yearly spending by seniors on prescription drugs will skyrocket from $650 a year to thousands of dollars a year. In short order, the projections for spending on the new prescription-drug benefit will have been left in the dust. Politicians and bureaucrats will start expressing their "concerns" and a fix will be demanded. The "fix" to rising spending on drugs for wrinkled class will be to put limits on what Medicare will pay for certain prescription drugs, just as Medicare has already put limits on what will be paid for certain medical services. Pharmaceutical companies will find that they aren't making any money on selling these drugs to seniors because of the Medicare price controls. In fact, they may find that they are actually losing money. To compensate for these lost profits the pharmaceutical companies will simply increase prices for these and other drugs to their non-Medicare patients. As the prices of prescription drugs for non-Medicare Americans go up, so will the price of health-insurance coverage. Insurance companies aren't going to suffer these increased costs without passing them off to the insured. Basically this is the same thing that has happened in many other areas of health care. As prescription prices and health-insurance premiums increase for non-Medicare Americans, so will the demand for politicians to step in and do something. Politicians, always hungry for both votes and power, will be all-too-happy to oblige. They will be called "greedy" and will be accused of "profiteering" and "exploiting" the frail health of our precious senior citizens. After a short period of scare-mongering, the politicians will vote to institute price controls on the pharmaceutical companies. Politicians will tell us that they are doing this to reign in these greedy corporate monsters who are becoming obscenely rich on the backs of sick Americans. With price controls the earnings figures for pharmaceutical companies will go into the toilet. As earnings go down, pharmaceutical companies will have less and less to spend on research and development for new drugs. Research into ways to treat disease will slow down and, eventually, will become the province of government. Government will be the eventual beneficiary of this mess as the masses clamor for more and more government solutions to these problems that are perceived to be the fault of the private sector. This massively expensive benefit program is a done deal. It's a precursor to the political inevitability of socialized medicine. Full disclosure compels him to reveal that he is also a "reformed" attorney who is being paid massive amounts of money in exchange for his promise not to actually practice law any more. |