No One to Blame but Ourselves
Editor:
Ms. Savage is right! ("A Reasonable Ask," Jan. 16.) It's those evil Republicans that are to blame. If it wasn't for those people, we'd be living in a land flowing with milk and honey.
But wait! Shouldn't we be already doing that? We're living in California, where those evil Republicans have trouble getting elected to dog catcher. So we should be living like an illustration from a Jehovah's Witness leaflet.
The fault lies not in our stars, dear Brutus, but in ourselves.
Richard C. Brown, Eureka
Editor:
To respond to Jennifer Savage's question "Why can't we have affordable healthcare, America? ("A Reasonable Ask", Jan. 16). Obviously, we could have affordable healthcare in America. Most of the industrialized world has managed to pull this off, but they don't have a medical industrial complex like we do. Just like the military industrial complex that wants endless war, the medical industrial complex wants endless sickness, simply because that's where the money is. What we have is a medical system governed by marketing in the pursuit of profit. Expensive diagnostics and treatments are aggressively promoted when less expensive but just as effective therapies are often ignored. There is also a complete lack of transparency in the industry. Doctors and patients are purposely kept in the dark about prices and less expensive more effective treatments. This amounts to corruption of the scientific process. For example, if a brand name drug study is conducted that shows a positive result there is a more than 90 percent chance that the study will be published in a peer reviewed journal. A negative brand name drug study, on the other hand, only has about a 10 percent chance of being published. These published studies are the backbone of modern medicine and are often quoted.
We can have affordable healthcare in America, but we first have to dismantle the medical industrial complex, show it for what it is and more importantly make exploitation of the sick a criminal offense. You exploit the sick, you go to jail. The announcement that the State of California is going to set up its own generic drug brand to lower drug prices is welcoming news (NCJ Daily, Jan. 16). Let's watch and see how the medical industrial complex tries to destroy it.
Charles Davy, Bayside
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