The Binary Circumstance

From 60 Minutes:

[President George W.] Bush created the program in 2004 with the bi-partisan backing of Congress; last year, Congress raised the funding to about $7 billion a year for the next five years.

Dr. Mugyenyi has called this the greatest aid effort in modern times. “There has never been a rescue mission, a mission of mercy of this magnitude that has produced such magnanimous results,” he explained.

He told us Africans now see America differently.

Here in the United States where mostly gay men fought for HIV/AIDS funding in the 80′s and taxpayers paid for the research to develop the drugs and many HIV patients were used as guinea pigs to test them, many people can’t afford to get medications to fight HIV. Others have access to them but pay thousands of dollars a year for the treatments.

Things are better in Uganda.

But today generic drugs have made AIDS pills much cheaper: treating one patient for a year used to cost more than $7,000; now, it’s less than $300. As HIV destroys a person’s immune system leading to AIDS, patients need powerful pills, antiretrovirals they’re called, or miracle pills.

Where are the AIDS patients in the U.S. being treated for $300/year?

What’s wrong with this picture?

The Democrats are determined to “reform” health care whether you want it or not and have just released the specifics of the bill they hope to ram through Congress this weekend without any Republican support.

I stated on more than one occasion that the only way to reform health care is to make it a free market. Over time, this will produce results similar to what has happened in telephones and computers over the last 30 years where market forces have caused quality and innovation to soar while prices have plunged.

I’m not going to say more on that or discuss how forcing businesses to provide health insurance could be a big job killer when unemployment is already very high.

I just wanted to point out what nobody else is pointing out about the whole process now taking place in Congress. Millions of Americans are about to be enslaved to those who want to force a particular view of health care on them. How can a health care system that forces the will of some people on others be considered good for the health of those who don’t want it? Is battering good for the person who is being battered in a relationship? Of course not. So why is it healthy when it’s done politically?

While I admire the quality of relentless determination, it would be nice if it was focused on increasing individual liberty rather than further restricting it. This bill forces individuals to subsidize the insurance industry, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, health care unions and many other related industries. If you don’t subsidize them by buying mandatory insurance, you have to pay a fine.

This story sounds like it’s out of the Dark Ages. Once science gets married to religion or politics, it ceases to exist. This is yet another reason why I don’t want the government messing around in my health care, although it’s obviously already too late to stop that. They’ve been doing it for decades.

This article makes you wonder how many other possible cures they’ve suppressed.

From Alternet.org:

Most Americans don’t know anything about the Madrid discovery. Virtually no major U.S. newspapers carried the story, which ran only once on the AP and UPI news wires, on Feb. 29, 2000.

The ominous part is that this isn’t the first time scientists have discovered that THC shrinks tumors. In 1974 researchers at the Medical College of Virginia, who had been funded by the National Institute of Health to find evidence that marijuana damages the immune system, found instead that THC slowed the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice — lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia.

The DEA quickly shut down the Virginia study and all further cannabis/tumor research, according to Jack Herer, who reports on the events in his book, “The Emperor Wears No Clothes.” In 1976 President Gerald Ford put an end to all public cannabis research and granted exclusive research rights to major pharmaceutical companies, who set out — unsuccessfully — to develop synthetic forms of THC that would deliver all the medical benefits without the “high.”

Seattle’s Group Health Cooperative has been around for 60 years and offers many of the features that have been proposed as necessary for health care reform.

The Seattle Times reports on the cooperative and wonders if it could be a model for America’s health care in the future.

Yet even some of Group Health’s most ardent admirers warn that replicating the co-op would be difficult — and replicating it quickly practically impossible. Sixty-two years after its founding, Group Health remains one of just two major health cooperatives in the nation. The other is HealthPartners of Bloomington, Minn.

Creating health co-ops, after all, could involve building or assembling new organizations from scratch, including management, medical staff, clinics and customers.

And that “just doesn’t happen overnight,” Kreidler said. “Group Health has had 60 years” to gain 600,000 members.

What’s more, though Group Health is well-regarded for delivering cost-effective, quality care, it hasn’t avoided such problems as ever-rising premiums and periodic financial losses.

Still, even critics of the co-op option under discussion by Congress and the administration agree that Group Health’s approach to health care is worth emulating.

It hasn’t always been that way.

Founded in 1947 by maverick-minded physicians and supporters, Group Health was the first organization in the nation to offer both insurance coverage and comprehensive medical care. The integrated approach was so radical at the time that the King County Medical Society — derisively referring to the co-op as “Group Death” — denied membership to its physicians and blacklisted its patients.

Doctors have a history of trying to block alternative ways of delivering health care just as they did with chiropractors.

It will be important for any health care reform to insure that doctors have much more competition. A free market is the best way to achieve that.