The Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, warned about the potential of an undercover medical dictatorship if one class of men were to monopolize the art of healing. Unfortunately, that day has come. Here is a bit of a background on why we need to change our health care system.  Fortunately, Ron Paul is fighting back with plans to recapture the power of health care from Big Pharma’s industrial monopoly and restore it to its proper owners, patients and doctors. Get free market competition back to health care and get rid of our false healthcare monopoly is the only way we care reduce health care spending and restore the health of our nation, our family and our own body.  Let Dr. Paul explain his ideas on saving our health care system.  Two features I found on youtube.com, you can access the video by clicking on the links.

Ron Paul on health care, part 1 of 4

Ron Paul on health care, part 2 of 4

Ron Paul on health care, part 3 of 4

Ron Paul on health care, part 4 of 4

Ron Paul: Saving the American Health Care System Part 1

Ron Paul: Saving the American Health Care System Part 2

Ron Paul: Saving the American Health Care System Part 3

Ron Paul: Saving the American Health Care System Part 4

“If we’re going to have a successful democratic society, we have to have a well educated and healthy citizenry”. — Thomas Jefferson

By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR

WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans who refuse to buy affordable medical coverage could be hit with fines of more than $1,000 under a health care overhaul bill unveiled Thursday by key Senate Democrats looking to fulfill President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated the fines will raise around $36 billion over 10 years. Senate aides said the penalties would be modeled on the approach taken by
Massachusetts, which now imposes a fine of about $1,000 a year on individuals who refuse to get coverage. Under the federal legislation, families would pay higher penalties than individuals.

In a revamped health care system envisioned by lawmakers, people would be required to carry health insurance just like motorists must get auto coverage now. The government would provide subsidies for the poor and many middle-class families, but those who still refuse to sign up would face penalties.

Called “shared responsibility payments,” the fines would be set at least half the cost of basic medical coverage, according to the legislation.

In 2008, employer-provided coverage averaged $12,680 a year for a family plan, and $4,704 for individual coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s annual survey. Senate aides, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said the cost of the federal plan would be lower but declined to provide specifics.

Read the Full Article

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press

Comment:  Is this constitutional?  Am I somehow teleported to the PRC some how??  Shared responsibility payments?  Does it sound like collectivism?  It does to me. 

Having practiced medicine for over 30 years, Congressman Paul gives his perspective on the past and future of medicine in this country, and the effects of government and special interests on quality, costs and access.

We would have a much better health care system if we allow free market and competition back.  Government health care has been an ulter failure and should be abandon.  I think I can make better decision on how to take care of my health than a third party insurance company agent can.  The problem with the high cost of health care is due to the lack of competition. 

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A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost.  She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below.  She shouted to him, “Excuse me, can you help me?  I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level.  You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.”

She rolled her eyes and said, “You must be a Republican.”

 “I am”, replied the man.  “How did you know?”

“Well”, answered the balloonist, “Everything you told me is technically correct.  But I have no idea what to do with your information, and I’m still lost.  Frankly, you’ve not been much help to me.”

The man smiled and responded, “You must be an Obama Democrat.”

“I am”, replied the balloonist.  “How did you know?”

“Well”, said the man, “You don’t know where you are or where you are going.  You’ve risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem.  You’re in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it’s my fault.”

More……

Life is too short not to laugh….LOL…men hurting themselves.

Don’t watch this one if you can’t bear to see women drivers….

The Swine Flu vaccine will be commercially available in July. Specialty drug maker Baxter International Inc. says it’s in “full scale” production.  The company made its announcement one day after the World Health Organization declared Swine Flu a global pandemic. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 45 swine flu deaths nationwide.

The
National Vaccine Information Center released this video that might help us understand the situation a bit better.

It is important that we make sure we are well nourished both physically, spiritually and emotionally to strengthen our immune system.  Organic foods, vegetables, fruits, herbs, meats, beans and whole grains; sleep, exercise, humor, loving friends are all builders of a strong immune system.

Sources:

• Washington Post June 13, 2009
• National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) June 18, 2009
• http://www.viddler.com/explore/NVICstandup/videos/7/

Hapyy birthday United States af America!!  Today is also the date of passing of the author of the Declaration of Independance, Thomas Jefferson.  Of all the founding fathers, I admire TJ the most.  He is also a kindred spirit in matters of diet and health.  His dietary habit is more in accord with the 21st century than his own time, the 18th century.  He surely was a man ahead of his times.

The Healthful Habits of Thomas Jefferson

By Thomas Jewett

“Health is worth more than learning. -Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson’s diet, his hygiene, exercise regime and views toward alcohol and tobacco were amazingly in accord with contemporary attitudes. Conversely they were most opposite of those of his fellow Virginians. These habits allowed him to live to the age of eighty-four with little illness during his lifetime.

I have been more fortunate than my friend in the article of health. So free from catarrhs that I have not had one, (in the breast, I mean) on an average of eight or ten years through life…A fever of more than twenty-four hours I have not had above two or three times in my life.

He spoke of his habits in an 1819 letter to Doctor Vine Utley:

Sir,—Your letter of February the 18th came to hand on the 1st instant; and the request of the history of my physical habits would have puzzled me not a little, it not been for the model with which you accompanied it, of Doctor Rush’s answer to a similar inquiry. I live so much like other people, that I might refer to ordinary life as the history of my own. Like my friend the Doctor, I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet. I double however, the Doctor’s glass and a half of wine, and even treble it with a friend; but halve its effects by drinking the weak wines only. The ardent wines I cannot drink, nor do I use ardent spirits in any form. Malt liquors and cider are my table drinks, and My breakfast, like that also of my friend, is of tea and coffee. I have been blest with organs of digestion which accept and concoct, without ever murmuring, whatever the palate chooses to consign to them, and I have not yet lost a tooth by age.

Thomas Jefferson started each day early. “Whether I retire to bed early or late, I rise with the sun.” He rose as soon as he could read the hands of the clock kept directly opposite his bed. He started his own fire and soaked his feet in cold water.
Jefferson maintained that this foot bath attributed to his good health. Jefferson was rare for his day in that he often bathed. Franklin was adverse to water baths, opting instead to stand nude in the wind to take an “air bath”.

Jefferson slept five to eight hours a night in a semi-reclining position since his bed was too short for his height. This position facilitated his habit of reading in bed. “I never go to bed without an hour, or half hour’s previous reading of something moral, whereon to ruminate in the intervals of sleep.”

While not a vegetarian, as we understand the term today, Jefferson was unusually moderate in his consumption of meat and was notable for the amount and variety of vegetables that he ate. His granddaughter wrote: “He lived principally on vegetables….The little meat he took seemed mostly as a seasoning for his vegetables.” Jefferson’s fondness for vegetables can be traced in his garden books that contain thousands of entries detailing the many varieties that he grew for his own consumption. Two of his favorites were peas and cucumbers.

As the founder of the University of Virginia, Jefferson had a say in all aspects of its building and operations. He drew up the daily menu for the students. It was heavy on vegetables and fruits. Only the mid-day meal included a small portion of meat.

Read the Full Article

Copy Right © earlyamerica.com

By GARDINER HARRIS and DUFF WILSON

Published: July 1, 2009

WASHINGTON — Federal drug regulators warned Wednesday that patients taking two popular drugs to stop smoking should be watched closely for signs of serious mental illness, as reports mount of suicides among the drugs’ users.

But officials emphasized that fear should not stop patients from taking the smoking-cessation medicines, Chantix, made by Pfizer, and Zyban, made by GlaxoSmithKline, which also sells it under the brand name Wellbutrin, for depression.

“Stopping smoking is a goal we should all be working towards,” said Dr. Curtis J. Rosebraugh, director of a drug evaluation office at the Food and Drug Administration. “We don’t want to scare people off from trying a medication that could help them achieve this goal. You should just be careful.”

Pfizer will add a so-called black box warning — the F.D.A.’s most serious caution — to the packaging information for Chantix.

The Pfizer drug, introduced in 2006, has about 90 percent of the market for prescription smoking-cessation drugs, according to IMS Health, a health care information company. Even so, Chantix sales — $846 million in 2008 — had been less than Pfizer had hoped because of previous warnings of its side effects.

Glaxo will expand its existing black box warning on Wellbutrin, citing suicidal thoughts by patients who use it for depression, to include Zyban, which has had only modest sales in the smoking cessation market.

Both companies will also be required to conduct clinical trials to assess the mental health risks associated with the drugs’ uses. Pfizer is already enrolling schizophrenia patients in a trial.

Because smokers and people trying to quit are statistically more likely to be depressed and suicidal, officials for both companies said it was difficult to identify the specific impact of the drugs on those risks. “Nicotine withdrawal itself can be very difficult for people to endure,” Dr. Steve Romano, a Pfizer vice president, said Wednesday.

New York Times Online July 1, 2009

More bad news with man-made chemical drugs.  They just keep coming.

Ever wonder why the State has a hard time paying for everything?  We borrow to the hilt from Asian countries by the trillions.  Medicare is bankrupt. Yet Mr. Obama promises more free health care for all by threatening to nationalize health care services.  How are we going to pay for it?  With the population getting older and sicker, the work force shrinking and tax dollors diminishing, where is the money coming from?  Every dollor that the State promises to pay for anything coming directly from the citizen’s (us!) fruit of labor.  We are spending way too much on fighting foreign wars and guarding foreign territories.  I agree with Dr. Paul; we should stop meddling with the intenal affairs of other countries.  If we bring our troops home, may be we will have more money to fix our health care problem.

‘Fight Them Over There vs. Over Here’ a False Choice

by Ron Paul

There is no area in which Republicans have further strayed from our traditions than in foreign affairs.

Generations of conservatives followed the great advice of our Founding Fathers and pursued a restrained foreign policy that rebuffed entangling alliances and advised America, in the words of John Quincy Adams, not to “go abroad looking for dragons to slay.”

Sen. Robert Taft, the stalwart of the Old Right, urged America to stay out of NATO. Dwight Eisenhower was elected on a platform promising to get us out of the conflict in Korea. Richard Nixon promised to end the war in Vietnam.

Republicans were highly critical of Bill Clinton for his adventurism in Somalia and Kosovo. As recently as 2000, George W. Bush campaigned on a “humbler” foreign policy and decried nation-building.

But our foreign policy today looks starkly different.

Neoconservatives who have come to power in both the Democratic and Republican parties argue that the U.S. must ether confront every evil in every corner of the globe or risk danger at home. We need to “fight them over there” they say, so we don’t have to “fight them over here.” This argument presents a false choice. We do not have to pick between interventionism and vulnerability. The complexity of our world is exactly why the lessons of our past should ring true and demand a return to a traditional, pro-American foreign policy: one of nonintervention.

Moving forward, I suggest that we as Americans adhere to these five principles:

1. We do not abdicate American sovereignty to global institutions. The purpose of the United States is to protect the liberty of the American people. We should never allow the WTO, NAFTA, the U.N. or the Law of the Sea Treaty to transfer power from America to an international body.

2. We provide a strong national defense, but we do not police the world. America should be armed with defensive weapons capable of repelling any attack. We should spend all appropriate money to make sure that no country in world can credibly threaten us.

Read the full Article

ADELPHI, Md. — A federal advisory panel voted narrowly on Tuesday to recommend a ban on Percocet and Vicodin, two of the most popular prescription painkillers in the world, because of their effects on the liver.

Acetaminophen is combined with different narcotics in at least seven other prescription drugs, and all of these combination pills will be banned if the Food and Drug Administration heeds the advice of its experts. Vicodin and its generic equivalents alone are prescribed more than 100 million times a year in the United States.

Laureen Cassidy, a spokeswoman for Abbott Laboratories, which makes Vicodin, said, “The F.D.A. will make a final determination and Abbott will follow the agency’s guidance.”

The agency is not required to follow the recommendations of its advisory panels, but it usually does.

The panel’s 20-17 vote to recommend a ban on the combination drugs was one of 11 it took at a meeting called to advise the F.D.A. on problems arising from the extraordinary popularity of acetaminophen. In 2005, American consumers bought 28 billion doses of products containing the ingredient.

While the medicine is effective in treating headaches and reducing fevers, even recommended doses can cause liver damage in some people. And more than 400 people die and 42,000 are hospitalized every year in the United States from overdoses.

Read the full article

THE GREAT AMERICAN BUBBLE MACHINE

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they’re about to do it again

By MATT TAIBBI

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush’s last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup - which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There’s John Thain, the rear end in a top hat chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain’s sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There’s Joshua Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman - not to mention …

But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain - an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

The bank’s unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere - high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it’s going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth - pure profit for rich individuals.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s - and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet. …

IF
AMERICA IS NOW CIRCLING THE DRAIN, GOLDMAN SACHS HAS FOUND A WAY TO BE THAT DRAIN.

BUBBLE #1 - THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Goldman wasn’t always a too-big-to-fail Wall Street behemoth, the ruthless face of kill-or-be-killed capitalism on steroids - just almost always. The bank was actually founded in 1869 by a German immigrant named Marcus Goldman, who built it up with his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in the use of commercial paper, which is just a fancy way of saying they made money lending out short-term IOUs to small-time vendors in downtown Manhattan.

You can probably guess the basic plotline of Goldman’s first 100 years in business: plucky, immigrant-led investment bank beats the odds, pulls itself up by its bootstraps, makes shitloads of money. In that ancient history there’s really only one episode that bears scrutiny now, in light of more recent events: Goldman’s disastrous foray into the speculative mania of pre-crash Wall Street in the late 1920s.

This great Hindenburg of financial history has a few features that might sound familiar. Back then, the main financial tool used to bilk investors was called an “investment trust.” Similar to modern mutual funds, the trusts took the cash of investors large and small and (theoretically, at least) invested it in a smorgasbord of Wall Street securities, though the securities and amounts were often kept hidden from the public. So a regular guy could invest $10 or $100 in a trust and feel like he was a big player. Much as in the 1990s, when new vehicles like day trading and e-trading attracted reams of new suckers from the sticks who wanted to feel like big shots, investment trusts roped a new generation of regular-guy investors into the speculation game.

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My comment:
I think the debate on national health care and how we are supposed to pay for all the expenses.  If we can get this criminal organization to return all the ill-gotten money that it had cheated out of the American people, we probably will be close to break even.  What do you think?  It gets more exciting as the plot gets thicker in this story. Do read the full article, you’d be glad you did.  It is unbelievable how cleaver these criminals are! Or how stupid our elected “leaders” could possibly be.

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