I noticed that there are some severe drug shortages here lately too especially for life sustaining chemotherapy medicines. There’s more than one way to ration healthcare apparently.
It won't matter, because they are free.</sarcasm>
Big Pharma was one of Obama’s biggest backers in 2008 weren’t they?
“when the Democrats would screech to high heaven about the GOP being in cahoots with Big Pharma”
Well it seems that Rick Santorum is still in cahoots with Big Pharma, just like he’d been as Senator 200-2006...
A child asked Santorum what the candidate would do to lower the cost of medicine.
February 1, 2012, the candidate Santorum declared: “”People have no problem going out and buying an iPad for $900. But paying $200 for a drug they have a problem with — that keeps you alive. Why? Because you’ve been conditioned in thinking health care is something you should get and not have to pay for. Drug companies, health care companies need to have a profitability, because if they don’t, then how are we going to regulate costs?”
The mother of the child yelled out that she was going bankrupt just to pay for her child to keep breathing.
“I hear these and sympathize with these very passionate cases,” Santorum responded to the mother. “Look, I want your son and everybody to have the opportunity to stay alive on much-needed drugs. But the bottom line is, we have companies with the incentive to make those drugs.” (meaning making more money and getting the medication more expensive)
In the years before he lost his Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2006, Rick Santorum worked hard to win hundreds of millions of dollars in additional Medicare money for hospitals in Puerto Rico.
He sponsored at least two Senate bills and pushed to amend a mammoth Medicare overhaul to include the extra spending, which would have benefited Universal Health Services, a Pennsylvania-based hospital management company with facilities in Puerto Rico. If it seems at odds with the small-government philosophy Mr. Santorum now espouses in his presidential campaign, it was in line with his legislative efforts to help businesses in his state.
Within months of leaving the Senate (in 2006), Mr. Santorum joined the board of Universal Health Services, where he collected $395,000 in director’s fees and stock options before resigning last year (in 2011).
It’s amazing how much Santorum was willing to help corporations, and how little is he ready to help sick children to survive.
Planned Parenthood is a big seller of contraceptives too. So they stand to benefit tremendously from this requirement.
In this case, the government. Under Obamacare, the government has pretty much applied Euro price controls on just about anything made by pharmaceutical companies.
Not to mention, birth control pills have been around for decades, and most of the earlier generation pills have long since gone generic.
Obama is trying to drive ins. premiums up and run ins. companies out of business:
http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2012/02/10/obama-administration-doubles-down-on-contraception-rule/
Posted by streiff (Diary)
Friday, February 10th at 2:00PM EST
35 Comments
Following on what my colleague Francis Cianfrocca writes below, the Obama Administration’s ballyhooed “compromise” on the extraordinary rule that gives the US Department of Health and Human Services the final say in how religious groups operate is actually a finger in the eye.
From the White House statement:
Under the new policy announced today, women will have free preventive care that includes contraceptive services no matter where she works.
If a woman works for religious employers with objections to providing contraceptive services as part of its health plan, the religious employer will not be required to provide contraception coverage but her insurance company will be required to offer contraceptive care free of charge.
If we actually believe that in the real world TANSTAAFL is an immutable fact, who, then, is actually paying for the “free of charge” contraception and abortifacient cover. My guess is that the employer whose employees are getting the “free of charge” service is going to see their bill go up.
This is not a trivial issue. This is an attack, one of several staged by this Administration, on religious freedom. One hopes that the Catholic Church and other religious groups see through this charade and continue to oppose the supplanting of conscience by federal regulations.