Any objective comparison to our healthcare system to many of the other major industrialized countries will tell you one thing, we pay more for worse healthcare than they do. I don't see how that is acceptable, even if we do keep our current system.
We should stop discriminatory insurance policies (hell, my mom is in perfect shape and was immediately dropped from her insurance when one test said she had high blood pressure, even though a later test said she didn't), and have far more control over what pharmaceutical companies charge consumers for most drugs. I don't begrudge them recouping their investment capital with a profit, but pharmaceutical companies have a higher profit margin than the OIL companies, and the only companies that can even compete with their numbers are the major beverage companies, like Coke and Anheuser-Busch.
Part of the problem in this country is we are too scared of the government. In France, if they don't like what is going, they have mass protests, and the people in charge shit their pants and give the people what they want. The government is scared of the people rather than the people being scared of the government.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
