Respatory Therapists?  Whiny punks.  Sorry Kevin.  That's how it is.

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Times like this I wish I weren't posting under my own name.  Oh, the stories...

Scott, you're not going to believe this (and neither am I!), but I totally agree with your health care solution for America.

I'm buying a lotto ticket today.

Lyndon LaRouche is still around?!? I remember his wacky half-hour TV commercials back in the 1980s during his fringe presidential candidacy, but I had no idea he was still active.

LaRouche always struck me as a "psycho-ceramic." You know, a crackpot.

FWIW Scott, aside from my comments about price controls for the pharmaceutical industry, I completely agree with the rest of your health care solution (items 1, 2, 3, and 5).  With some modification, item 4 could be made workable (the elimination/reduction of frivolous lawsuits and patent reform would have a big impact on pharmaceutical costs, and given a longer patent protection periods would allow pharmaceutical companies to recoup their costs while bringing the cost of 'brand name" drugs down, thus minimizing the need and demand for lower-cost generics in the marketplace).

How can we (the voters) make all this happen?  I fear that neither McCain nor Obama really have this much vision as far as healthcare is concerned, or the ability to make it happen.

Scott Richards wrote: I'm against extending the patents since that would extend the time until a generic version was available.

As I mentioned above (and I think it bears mentioning again in direct response to your comment), longer patents periods combined with legal reforms (restrictions on frivilous lawsuits) would enable pharmaceutical companies to market their "brand name" drugs at a lower cost to the consumers.  Longer patent protection periods would guarantee then a longer period of exclusivity in the marketplace, which would allow the companies to amortize their initial R&D costs over a longer period of time.  This would result in lower-cost "brand name" drugs, thus minimizing the need and demand for lower-cost generics.

Also, don't discount the amount of dollars spent by the pharmaceutical companies in defense of their patents -- the generic companies are bottom-feeders who invest aggressively in legal challenges.  Their legal costs are justifiable expenditures for them because if they can overturn a patent prior to its planned expiration period, they can gain access to an entire product line or market category, thus exploiting another company's R&D costs while only spending a fraction of what the R&D costs would be on legal fees.

Again, in these situations, the lawyers ARE to blame for high costs because big pharma companies have to invest large sums of money for legal defense of patents that were obtained through honest research and development, and ultimately the consumer is the one paying the legal costs.

"Dodd told ABC’s 'Good Morning America' on Friday that the nation’s credit is seizing up and people can’t get loans."

As far as charges being written off, you are denying something that you have no knowledge of.

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No doubt they write off charges. But you can't honestly expect me to believe they aren't making it up somewhere else.

If the doctor that saw my daughter charged $850.00 for the five minutes he spent with my daughter, why do you think that was? Perhaps to make up for what he knew he wouldn't be getting from someone else.

And if he charged the same amount for each one of the other 4 children in there at that time, he was billing $4250.00 for less than an hour. He still had another 7 hours in an average workday to make how much more. You don't see this as a problem?

And quite frankly you have no idea what I do or do not have knowledge of. I've seen people lose their homes after being sued for unpaid medical bills. I watched my grandparents lose their life saving after my grandfather came down with abestiosis. Nobody wrote off any charges for them.

Guess what, bad things do happen. It would be nice not to have to worry that you can't afford to pay for it when it does.