Time To Fire Tim Geithner

Toads and lizards fall from this liars mouth every time he opens it. CHANGE? This is more of the same and a kick in the face to the American people from Barack Obama.

Pfizer Broke the Law by Promoting Drugs for Unapproved Uses

“Marketing departments of many drug companies don’t respect any boundaries of professionalism or the law,” says Jerry Avorn, a professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston and author of “Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs” (Random House, 2004). “The Pfizer and Lilly cases involved the illegal promotion of drugs that have been shown to cause substantial harm and death to patients.”
The widespread off-label promotion of drugs is yet another manifestation of a health-care system that has become dysfunctional.
“It’s an unbearable cost to a system that’s going broke,” says Avorn, who heads the pharmacology economics unit of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “We can’t even afford to pay for effective, safe therapies.”
10 Million Prescriptions
About 15 percent of all drug sales in the U.S. are for unapproved uses without adequate evidence the medicines work, according to a study by Randall Stafford, a medical professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
He estimates that doctors write more than 10 million such prescriptions each year.

Is the House Health Care Bill Better than Nothing?

(...)

What does the insurance industry get out of it? Tens of millions of new customers, courtesy of the mandate and taxpayer subsidies. And not just any kind of customer, but the youngest, healthiest customers -- those least likely to use their insurance. The bill permits insurers to charge twice as much for older people as for younger ones. So older under-65's will be more likely to go without insurance, even if they have to pay fines. That's OK with the industry, since these would be among their sickest customers. (Shouldn't age be considered a pre-existing condition?)
Insurers also won't have to cover those younger people most likely to get sick, because they will tend to use the public option (which is not an "option" at all, but a program projected to cover only 6 million uninsured Americans). So instead of the public option providing competition for the insurance industry, as originally envisioned, it's been turned into a dumping ground for a small number of people whom private insurers would rather not have to cover anyway.
If a similar bill emerges from the Senate and the reconciliation process, and is ultimately passed, what will happen?
(...)
First, health costs will continue to skyrocket, even faster than they are now, as taxpayer dollars are pumped into the private sector. The response of payers -- government and employers -- will be to shrink benefits and increase deductibles and co-payments. Yes, more people will have insurance, but it will cover less and less, and be more expensive to use.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcia-angell-md/is-the-house-health-care_b_350190.html&cp

On the anniversary of the crashing of the berlin wall, why we must endure bogus claims about Reagan

Reagan's record speaks for itself.  He was a disaster for the country. His administration trashed carter's energy conservation polices in favor of building up the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, ripped the solar panels from the white house, pulled the funding for alternative energy research and development, shoveled money into the pentagon instead. Without Reagen we may have solved our energy problem decades ago.
As part of his moronic deregulatory agenda he gutted the FTC allowing, among other travesties, defense contractors to buy media conglomerates. Clear conflict of interest. And bent the rules to allow that pig Murdoch to become a media mogul in the US.
His administration not only created the environment for vast media consolidation, but consolidation of all kinds, the utter suppression of healthy competition, the destruction of main street, the wiping out of small towns, family farms, common sense.
He appointed narcissistic shit stain Antonin Scalia to the court, empowered Bush family ambitions, staged dirty wars in central America resulting in untold deaths, cut deals with the Iranian militants to hold American hostages - a treasonous act - ignored AIDS until MILLIONS were infected, deregulated industry after industry, began the revolving door between government and industry with the ultimate consequence that our food, water and air are not safe anymore.
Because of Reagan our unions are broken, allowing far too much power to corporate interests. Who have taken a wrecking ball to the American middle class and to anything that remotely resembles democracy. On and on. I don't have all day though it could easily take all day to list Reagan's list of crimes against freedom, democracy, life, America.
There was not widespread homelessness in the US prior to Reagan. The dollar had value prior to Reagan. There was a healthy middle class prior to Reagan, and plenty of upward mobility. America was not teetering on the brink prior to the right wing onslaught of idiocy.

Reagan most certainly DID NOT win the cold war - which was a joke anyway - the soviet union broke itself in Afghanistan. Its called bankruptcy. And we are there now thanks to Reagan's right wing heirs in both parties.
  He was a very bad turning point. Just look at the record. Though he was apparently personally likable, though I did not imbibe,  and probably never made a single decision on his own he began the earnest destruction of the US in favor of making a small group of people fabulously wealthy. He was even surrounded by some of the same scum who ran DUBYA. Neither man should ever have been president.
People praising Reagan are simply uninformed and probably watch that propaganda outlet FOXS news.
And yes, Clinton was also a right wing piece of shit who did huge damage to the country and to the democratic party by causing those running it to agree to shift right in the hopes of getting elected.