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bre2002

User Profile Image bre2002
Member since : May-27-2009 (Verified)
1 Ideas, 16 Comments, 319 Votes

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Ideas Posted

The “War on Drugs” is a war on us, the American people. 30% of Americans use or have used illicit drugs. Those who are prosecuted and imprisoned, however, are by far and away the poor, the disabled, the disenfranchised, the Black and Hispanic, the men in our communities, who cannot parent their children because they are in prison, who will be denied forever the right to vote because they went to prison. The last President of the United States never denied that he used illegal drugs. Hard drugs. Was he prosecuted? Of course not. Was he imprisoned? Don’t be silly. Was he denied the right to vote, or to contribute to society? Was he denied the ability to raise his children? Of course not. Has the “War on Drugs” created a “drug-free” society? No. Has it kept drugs from the reach of our youngsters? Not remotely. Drugs are everywhere, as available as they have ever been. It has, however, created a society in which young Black men in America are far more likely to go to prison than to college. A society in which drugs and violence are on every corner. In which the police are powerless to do their job and have declared war on our communities and our children as a consequence. IN WHICH OUR CHILDREN HAVE MORE TO FEAR FROM THE POLICE THAN FROM GANGS AND DRUG DEALERS. The “War on Drugs” is killing us. The “War on Drugs” is a war on us. STOP THE WAR ON DRUGS.
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Comments Posted

bre2002 9 months ago
To mjdabrow -- You don't hear of people flocking to Europe for treatment?

You're not paying attention.

Check out http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/health/21patient.html. When Ben Schreiner, a 62-year-old retired Bank of America executive, found out last year he would need surgery for a double hernia, he started evaluating possible doctors and hospitals. But he didn’t look into the medical center in his hometown, Camden, S.C., or the bigger hospitals in nearby Columbia. Instead, his search led him to consider surgery in such far-flung places as Ireland, Thailand and Turkey.

Ultimately he decided on San José, Costa Rica, where just a week or so after the outpatient procedure and initial recovery, he and his wife were sightseeing throughout the country, then relaxing at a lush resort. He was home four weeks later, with no complications.

Or check out http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/opinion/10milstein.html. Every year, thousands of Americans undergo surgery in other countries because the allure of good care at half the price is too good to pass up.

Wake up and smell the coffee. Or, stick your head in the sand. And keep on defending the good old American system.
bre2002 9 months ago
Those of you trashing government programs: who exactly is it you would like to see in charge of our health care? Profit-making corporations? Insurance companies? Exxon? Enron? AIG?? Hello? If you're happy with health insurance companies you're not paying attention (and you've obviously never dealt with them). Medicare is what has kept elderly Americans alive for the past 40 years. Social Security is what has kept them from poverty. You want to do away with those programs? Brilliant. Maybe there are problems with these systems. Try doing without them. Or better yet, go ahead, put all your petty rage and intelligence to work and design a better one. We're all waiting.

Single-payer, public health care is much more efficient and effective than private health insurance companies, for the simple reason that the objective is to keep people healthy, not to make a profit. Private health insurance pays 30% on the dollar for administrative costs. You complain about taxes but you don't notice who is actually taking your money and where it is going. Private insurance companies are much more likely to deny care than Medicare. Doctor's offices have more difficulty and problems dealing with private insurance companies than Medicare.

So socialized medicine has been a failure everywhere in the world that has tried it? I don't think so. Just exactly how many of these systems have you actually studied? Wake up. Our beloved health care system in the United States is ranked 37th in quality of care by the World Health Organization. Hello? People in this country are dying left and right of preventable diseases that on one dies of in Canada, Europe, Australia, or any other civilized nation that can afford to provide for its people. Is that because they are spending exorbitant amounts of their money on health care? Far from it. They pay a fraction of what we do.

I'm sure it feels great to trash the government. Gets your blood going, and probably a few other organs as well. Well, wake up. For most of us ordinary people, the government is what educates our children. The government is in charge of making the laws and enforcing them. The government is in charge of defending our borders and fighting our wars overseas. The government protects us from crime and fire. Yes, those cops and fire fighters -- guess who they work for? No one else stops or punishes murderers, rapists, and thieves, or white collar criminals. The government cleans the streets and collects our garbage. The government builds our roads and bridges. The government runs our buses and trains. The government protects us from consumer fraud, dangerous foods and drugs, and disease epidemics. The government has funded nearly every major medical advance made in our country other than drugs that are developed to make profits. The government has been delivering my mail for 50 years, and, I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember the last time I didn’t get something I really wanted. The government put a person on the moon, developed nuclear power, cleaned up our filthy air and water. (You remember the filth our free enterprise system brought us, don't you?) The governments (of our country and others) stopped Hitler from taking over the world. That was a shame, wasn't it? SSI and Medicare in one act eliminated the poverty that faced nearly all of us when we retired before they were enacted.

The government does some things well and some things poorly, and we all suffer or benefit as a consequence. But it's pretty stupid and self-destructive to give up on making the government do things well. Without government the world would be a nasty place. Believe me, you'd find the people in control even nastier than you find the government today. In every other developed country in the world, the government provides national health care to everyone, they pay less for it than we do, they get better care, they have lower rates of preventable diseases, no one gets rich by denying people care the way they do in the United States, and everyone has free health care. In many poor communities in the United States rates of disease and death are as bad as those in the poorest nations in African or Asia-—in the United States, but not in Europe, Canada, or Australia. If they can all do it, why can’t we? It’s not because of too much government. They all have more than we do.

Good quality health care is a human right. We are all entitled to it as human beings. Once you understand that, it becomes very clear that market-driven health care for profit doesn't do the job. It cuts out those who need care because they can’t afford it. It simply drops those who need help and covers those who don't--it has to, to fulfill its obligations to its shareholders. Meantime it takes billions of dollars from us and pays fat salaries to wealthy executives and keeps the rest for profit. Eliminate profit and you eliminate private health insurance companies and eliminate the practice of denying health care to those of us who need it. Public systems like Medicare and Medicaid can do it for less because they don’t have these huge administrative costs and need for profit. It costs less than 5% of health care dollars or premiums to run Medicare vs. 30% for private insurance companies. Saving the better part of that 30% by going to a public pay system provides enough dollars to cover all the uninsured and without waits. People have to wait in Canada because as a nation they spend half what we do per person. How much we spend and how long we wait will be up to us. But only if we take control of our health care from private health care interests and have a public system.

Single payer represents an excellent public system. With a single payer system we would have more choice than we have now. You could go to any doctor, clinic, or hospital, most of which would continue to be private just as they are now and our nation could afford it. This is the simple truth. Guess who doesn't want you to believe it? Guess who wants you to keep railing against the government and protesting that you don't want any change from the current system? I'll give you a hint. Someone who's getting a boatload of money every day from every one of us who has health insurance.

Single Payer for all is Medicare for all. It is simple. It is the standard in the civilized world worldwide. It's time to cut loose the private interests who are making billions of dollars every day preying on our needs when we get sick. For the real facts about single payer, check out www.pnhp.org.

Or go on railing about government, paying like suckers, and dying like flies.
bre2002 9 months ago
What ever happened to telling the truth? Now America stands for suppressing the truth? Why do we have so much to hide?
bre2002 9 months ago
The reason we have to bail out the banks and car companies is that the people who were supposed to be watching them were asleep at the wheel -- a situation which Reagan and Bush put into place as a matter of policy (can you say deregulation?). It's not as though it wasn't predicted that this would happen. But with both Democrats and Republicans controlled by the wealth and the wealthy, of course no one did anything about it. So long as the rich are getting richer, and the politicians are getting re-elected, why bother?
bre2002 9 months ago
If our ultimate protection against tyranny is for us all to have guns so we can go and out start shooting people, heaven help us. The only purpose guns serve is to injure or kill people or force them to do things against their will. We have so much more power to resist tyranny and achieve good by using our voices, hearts, minds, and actions than anyone ever will by killing. What we fail to accomplish by collective action will never be accomplished with guns. Meanwhile, while we're waiting for the exceptionally rare circumstances when everything goes wrong and we have to resort to guns, thousands of people in our communities are being gunned down every day. Thousands of needless funerals. We don't need guns. We need the shooting to stop. We need peace.
bre2002 9 months ago
If the government had been doing its job, it would never have allowed corporations to be "too big to fail," requiring the taxpayers to foot the bill for mistakes they made in order to get filthy rich.

If these corporations had not been so big, maybe they would have failed before they ever had the power to create the mass mentality that led so many to act in ways that were so stupid and so risky. Maybe those pursuing a saner strategy would be left standing now, and we'd have avoided having been taken to the cleaners for their mistakes.
bre2002 9 months ago
kburrows -- here here!
to curt and rachel -- so, if our children are some of the worst educated in the world, is that because they're educated privately in other countries? i don't think so. maybe it's because they invest more in their public education systems than we do in ours. if our judges are racist, is that because of too much government intervention or too little? or are you saying there shouldn't be judges in the first place? if you think the government will be bad at providing healthcare, who do you think will be better? megacorporations? insurance companies? do you put your trust in prudential? met life? exxon? enron? who will keep the megacorporations and insurance companies from ripping us off?
bre2002 9 months ago
cool!
bre2002 9 months ago
Well, let's see. The government educates our children. The government is in charge of making the laws and enforcing them. The government is in charge of defending our borders and fighting our wars overseas. The government protects us from crime and fire. No one else stops and punishes murderers, rapists, and thieves, or white collar criminals. The government cleans the streets and collects our garbage. The government builds our roads and bridges. The government runs our buses and trains. The government protects us from consumer fraud, dangerous foods and drugs, and disease epidemics. The government funds nearly every major medical advance other than drugs that are developed to make profits. The government put a human on the moon, developed nuclear power, cleaned up our filthy air and water. The government (ours and others) stopped Hitler from taking over the world. SSI and Medicare in one act eliminated the poverty that faced nearly all of us when we retired before they were enacted.

The government does some things well and some things poorly, and we all suffer or benefit as a consequence. But if we give up on making the government do things well the world will be a nasty place. In every other developed country in the world, the government provides national health care to everyone, they pay less for it than we do, they get better care, they have lower rates of preventable diseases, no one gets rich by denying people care the way they do in the United States, and everyone has free health care. In many poor communities in the United States rates of disease and death are as bad as those in the poorest nations in African or Asia-—in the United States, but not in Europe, Canada, or Australia. If they can all do it, why can’t we? It’s not because of too much government. They all have more than we do.
bre2002 9 months ago
Well, let's see. The government educates our children. The government is in charge of making the laws and enforcing them. The government is in charge of defending our borders and fighting our wars overseas. The government protects us from crime and fire. No one else stops and punishes murderers, rapists, and thieves, or white collar criminals. The government cleans the streets and collects our garbage. The government builds our roads and bridges. The government runs our buses and trains. The government protects us from consumer fraud, dangerous foods and drugs, and disease epidemics. The government funds nearly every major medical advance other than drugs that are developed to make profits. The government put a man on the moon, developed nuclear power, cleaned up our filthy air and water. The government (ours and others) stopped Hitler from taking over the world. SSI and Medicare in one act eliminated the poverty that faced nearly all of us when we retired before they were enacted.

The government does some things well and some things poorly, and we all suffer or benefit as a consequence. But if we give up on making the government do things well the world will be a nasty place. In every other developed country in the world, the government provides national health care to everyone, they pay less for it than we do, they get better care, they have lower rates of preventable diseases, no one gets rich by denying people care the way they do in the United States, and everyone has free health care. In many poor communities in the United States rates of disease and death are as bad as those in the poorest nations in African or Asia-—in the United States, but not in Europe, Canada, or Australia. If they can all do it, why can’t we? It’s not because of too much government. They all have more than we do.
bre2002 9 months ago
It's pretty clear that we need to depend on renewable energy sources, and reduce our dependence on fossil fuel before the polar ice caps melt entirely and submerge the entire planet. "Drill baby drill" makes nice mob droning but it's the stupidest idea I ever heard.
bre2002 9 months ago
FIRST we need a national health care system so we all get the health care we need. THEN we need a system to detect and prevent medical errors and continuously improve the quality of care. THEN and only then can we afford to dispense with the only system we have to prevent doctors from making mistakes with impunity.
bre2002 9 months ago
Great idea. Would have to outlaw obvious end runs, like contracting out the services of low-paying employees.
bre2002 9 months ago
Beautiful idea! Why has so much ink been spilled on so many complicated solutions that don't get to the root of the problem when it can all be summed up in 17 words? Eliminate the insurance companies, who get rich by denying us all health care services we need. All we need is one simple system. If it's good enough for them, why isn't it good enough for the rest of us?
bre2002 9 months ago
I don't see what a 72-hour period will do. Are the bills currently secret? Aren't they public information already? How many people are going to be able to review each bill in 72 hours and distinguish "good" from "bad" provisions? I thought it was well established during the last election that "taxpayer-funded outrages" represented a slim proportion of the overall budget, and that many problems of enormously greater import faced our nation (including many caused by insufficient taxpayer funding for things that would make our country safer, our school and our healthcare system better, and our planet greener).

In fact, this seems like a cynical suggestion from the outset. If we want to stop "pork," which is what this proposal seems to be suggesting, then why don't we simply outlaw it? Maybe the Republican leader who proposed this idea doesn't really want to do that. Maybe he just wants to stir up a little antigovernment sentiment, lest we all be too enamored of our current Democratic leader.
bre2002 9 months ago
This is even more important for users of other illicit drugs. The lifelong persecution of illicit drug users which is now Federal law prevents them from ever obtaining services, entitlements, and benefits they need to succeed. Are we more interested in pursuing our hatred of drug users or actually reducing drug use?