Times stories about recommendations for less cancer screening

I think these new medical guidelines would be easier to accept if the various panels and study groups came up with numbers for false positives and went into more detail about the damage that too much testing does to people's lives. That's the missing piece here. The only number we have is the ONE--that's the one person out of almost 2,000 whose breast cancer might not be discovered in time if women between 40 and 50 don't have mammograms. What we need to know is at least some approximation of how many people have their lives disrupted for no good reason when over-testing is the rule. How many people have unnecessary surgery, por ejemplo. And in the case of cervical cancer, how many young women have had trouble in childbirth, maybe, as a result of unneeded pap smears.

Today's letter to The New York Times

Has there ever been a more blatant giveaway of taxpayer money than these latest "health reform" or "patient protection" bills? All these new taxes and higher premiums are being created to shore up the insurance companies' bottom lines. Why do we, as a nation, have that obligation? I thought capitalism was a system in which you take your chances--you can make it big or you can fall by the wayside. Yet somehow (hmm, wonder why?) insurance companies have been enshrined in our system as untouchable, much better protected than the people's health and seemingly more deserving of protection. Their stockholders and their executives are being paid millions on the backs of the American people. There has to be a way to stop this. Is there not one patriot in our government who will do it?
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Nice going, New York Times

Can't stop at the post below, now that I notice that the Times has not only managed to create a "fierce battle between the generations" within AARP but has also managed to win the story a place in the top-ten emailed category. And it's swill! Never a mention of how everyone in every other industrialized country has health care without any age group having to give up any part of their care. And every other country spends at the very most (Switzerland) 61 percent of what we spend per person. Why is that? BECAUSE THE INSURANCE COMPANIES ARE ALLOWED TO STEAL MONEY FROM THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. Simple? Yes. So why can't the Times tell us this? Why can't it include the information on how other countries manage to provide health care at such a low cost in every health care news story? This, as Bob Somerby says, is the way it is in North Korea. People aren't allowed to know what is happening in the rest of the world. Does the Times think they publish in North Korea? Or is there something else going on? You tell me.

How utterly wrong this is!

How completely infuriating! The New York Times says the old are being asked to sacrifice health care for the middle-agers and so are the young, who don't really need insurance but will have to get it. This is total hogwash. Or at least it should be. It's the insurance companies, who have run wild with profits on sickness and denying care, who should be sacrificing here AND the doctors who are, for example, prescribing drugs and tests and then profiting by them. How dare the government let these two groups go on amassing their ill-gotten gains while the rest of us pay? Down with capitalism!! Let's try democracy, as Michael Moore puts it, or some kind of democratic socialism as a financial system anyway.

No one fought the madness

It's important to remember that Democrats and centrists and even "reasonable people" (especially if they're in the press) bear at least half of the responsibility for this hideous political climate we are mired in. The Repugs attack; the Dems fall back instead of fighting back. It's come to this: A poster with Obama in full witch-doctor gear, touting Obamacare. Racist, yes. But would they have been gentler with Hillary if she'd won? No, they would have attacked just as viciously (they certainly have in the past) but in other terms--harridan, dyke, murderess, whatever.... These people have been getting away with this monstrous behavior at least since Bill Clinton's presidency. It's become not just a part of who they are, it is all that they are. And yet they're still treated as a functioning political party and ideology in the press, on TV, in the halls of Congress, even in the White House. It's gotten so bad it's hard to even read the news, let alone react. I admire those who go on fighting, but I'm finding it hard to be at all involved. I thought when Obama was elected we'd be safe from this depravity. But it just gets worse and worse.

terms of endearment

When the New York Times says,..."a number of prominent conservatives say critics have been smeared" by being called racists in their attacks on Obama, and then quotes Rush Limbaugh, I just, frankly, don't know what to think. Do they consider Rush Limbaugh a "prominent conservative"? As far as I can tell, he's a prominent lunatic, and very obviously, just according to things he's actually said on his actual radio program a prominent racist. So what do they mean by quoting him as if he's a perfectly reasonable opposition figure? This is a step that's very far down the slipperly slope to total, fascistic chaos, and an editor at the Times either let it go by or inserted it him/herself.

from The Pen (activist.thepen@gmail.com)

"What Obama did more than anything else last Wednesday night was throw
down the gauntlet to US, standing in the way of real single payer
reform. He said as bluntly as possible, for those with ears to hear,
that if you want single payer you will have to fight HIM, to go
through HIM. For his real constituents in this are NOT YOU, they are
the medical industry special interests, in that way just like George
Bush served only the upper class, and we might as well face up to it
now. Because for him to even suggest that a silly new insurance
"market" would give you as a medical care consumer any negotiating
leverage comparable to single payer, with each of us out there still
forced to bargain all alone by ourselves, is absurdity on steroids."

Face it, people, you've been scammed.