Friday Afternoon Rants

The FDA is still trying to intimidate doctors into not prescribing strong pain medication for their patients by having drugmakers create risk management plans.  Since I'm allergic to all of the drugs mentioned in the article I won't be affected, but many people who are in chronic pain will.  I know what it's like to be in constant pain with no relief in sight and it isn't pretty.  Too bad the FDA wasn't interfering when Rush Limbaugh was scoring oxycontin with his secretary's help.  It might have saved him a few brain cells and then he wouldn't run around making stupid statements like the poor have no right to health care because they can't afford it.

We don't want them either.

I was thinking the same thing.  It was okay for them to sleep with a married man, accept his gifts and travel on his dime but now they want money to keep quiet.  Prostitutes have more class.

Oreo.  He certainly made sure bankers can afford to live on their segregated estates while the help live under the bridge.

Aetna only made a 7% profit this year so they are going to raise their rates and eliminate about 600,000 people from their health insurance plans.  What will it take for teabaggers to wake up and realize that the only death panels are located in insurance companies and while teabaggers are purportedly worrying about single payer health care killing grandma that corporations have been robbing the taxpayers blind? Or as commenter Chernynkaya so artfully put it:

I am so s!ck of hearing from the Right how we liberals are always looking for a government “handout.” Here’s what the government has the money to do for CORPORATIONS:
-- subsidies and other direct grants;

-- tax breaks, reductions, deductions, exclusions, write-offs, exemptions, credits, loopholes, shelters, and rebates even for profitable companies;

-- letting corporations be headquartered off-shore and pay no federal income taxes;

-- large government contracts of every imaginable kind; some on a cost-plus basis with every incentive to cheat and get more;

-- discounted user fees or subsidized use of public resources (land, water, airwaves,e­¬tc.);

-- free government-funded R & D;

-- every program from the Department of Commerce, Agriculture and others underwrites it; the FDA for Big Pharma; the FCC for media and telecommunications firms; the FAA for the airlines, the Treasury and Fed for Wall Street;

-- individual tax breaks for the rich; billions offshored to tax havens; allowing corporate fraud and abuse

-- privatizing more - schools, highways, bridges, airports, prisons, public lands, utilities, parts of the military, mercenaries, and thus far a failed attempt to privatise the most important program for seniors and the disabled - Social Security;

But nothing for the basic right of LIFE (unless you haven’t yet had the nerve to be born).

Let the good times roll.

BBB