Right Czech, Obama is petulantly demanding a complete government takeover of health care on his terms alone. There is a ton of room for agreement, but Obama's goal is power and control, not freedom and coverage.

Both sides are in favor of creating a national market for insurance companies through an exchange or lifting bans on interstate sales. Both sides want to give tax credits for individual and small business plans. Both sides want to make insurance more portable.

But Obama demands the government be given free reign to rewrite insurance laws and policies. He wants to send bureaucrats into hospitals to decide what equipment is used. He wants to expand public health insurance based on the failed and bankrupt Medicare model to get as many people dependent on the program as possible regardless of the cost. He wants to funnel billions of dollars to ACORN and empower them as a Health Gestapo. He has an unshakeable obsession to control everything from med school loans to who gets treatment. It's all in the bill.

If this was about health insurance, it would have been happily concluded by now. Obama has made it about his personal quest for power and the enslavement of every American to the chains of Big Government.

Plus, CC, he's already cut his deal with Big Pharma to allow them their pound of flesh, and as anyone who's remotely involved in purchasing health care benefits knows, it's been the drug costs which have been leading the spiral in health care costs for at least the past decade.

Yeah, that and the FDA allowing BigPharma to lock up drugs behind patent protection for longer than the normal patent protection period, simply by applying to the FDA for additional approved uses. It's amazing how many drugs get a second life during the last year of exclusive production. I have no problem with Big Pharma having a few years of premium sales to recoup investment on drug development. But when they get close to a fifteen year shot at it, it seems unfair and anti-competitive.

Then BigPharma cries poverty, which just strikes me as ludicrous when one considers what they spend on marketing their products to providers and advertising them to providers and consumers alike. Yes, development is an expensive crap-shoot, but there's no legitimate reason to gouge Americans just because you rolled the right numbers.

If I ever run for office I am gonna hire Hawkins as my campaign manager.

aharris, I'm not a huge BigPharma hater, but their business practices just don't add up to me as a businessman. Since you mentioned it, they have that whole 'differential world pricing' scheme which punishes Americans by shunting the brunt of the their development costs off on their US customers and then dumping the same drugs in other countries at half to a third the price they sell it for here. They don't just sell drugs in Canada and Mexico to socialised medical systems, they sell them at retail for the same lower price in those countries. If they were taking such a beating at the hands of the socialised medicine programmes in other countries, you'd think they'd have fought to keep the retail price on par with that in the US. But they don't. At best, that's a deceptive practice.

Then there's the whole marketing and advertising practice they undertake. How many ads for drugs you can't purchase OTC do you see a night on the teevee? One is too many, but on an average night, you might see five or six. Why are they advertising to an audience which can't legally obtain the product being advertised?

My ex was a provider and I still have boxes of marketing swag given her by pharmaceutical reps. And that doesn't account for the doughnuts, the lunches, the picnics which the drug reps provided for her and her staff. And that doesn't account for the millions of dollars they pay providers to speak favourably about their products during speeches and professional seminars. How about the influential Chief of Psychiatry, I think it was at Emory U Med School who'd been paid several million for touting the wonders of Ritalin. That's shady at best.

When BigPharma whines about their profits, as a business person, I look at their practices and can't help but think that I would do things a whole lot differently, were I them. I'd be much more receptive to their case if they ran their business in a more straightforward and transparent manner. Instead I see them splashing money around like there's no tomorrow and then simultaneously whinging about their phenomenal development costs.

It doesn't add up.

I know your hubby works for one of the larger pharma firms, and hopefully they don't engage in all of the scurrilous practices I've cited above, but a lot of the big pharma companies do, and it's given their market sector a bad reputation. I spent five years in San Diego where Pfizer rules with a heavy hand, and having had friends who held executive roles with them, I have to say that they're one of the worst offenders of the lot. They're also the richest of the big pharma companies.