Hope Comes to RHOB 2123--Fred Upton Leads a Cure Strategy for the 21st Century

Breitbart.com ^ | May 9, 2014 | James A. Pinkerton

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

The white-marble Rayburn House Office Building, in Washington DC, looks like a giant courts building or a central bank, fully intimidating and imposing in its hulking stony blockiness. And the US Congress, of course, is an institution best known for its tedium, albeit a tedium that is regularly punctuated by fiery partisan combat. On a typical day, the Rayburn building--acronymed as RHOB--is a place where politicos and bureaucrats struggle for and against some special interest, yea or nay, on regulation or appropriation. And the biggest single activity in RHOB, or in any of the other five office edifices on Capitol Hill, is answering the phone and answering the mail, both snail-mail and e-mail. In a country of 318 million souls, plenty of people have the urge to write their Member of Congress--and they want an answer, pronto. So the life of a “Hill rat” is a life of constituent service. From museum tours to Social Security checks, from requests for flags that have flown over the Capitol to requests for an admission to one of the Service Academies, there’s always work, work, work, to be done.

In such a grinding environment, one never knows when genuine hope will pop up. Indeed, amidst the thrum of institutional activity, a sighting of hope might seem improbable.

Yet on Tuesday, inside the marbled majesty of RHOB, several hundred people gathered for an expression of hopeful humanity, a flowering of bipartisan cooperation on behalf of an important issue--namely, medical cures. Come to think of it, it’s fair to say that medical cures are more than an important issue; they are, in the most literal sense, a vital, life-saving issue.

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

A good way to improve our health, or just more big government ad nauseum?

Nanny State PING!

[upchuck]

From the article, emphasis mine:

And so it has come to pass, for example, that we have a raging epidemic of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), costing the US economy some $200 billion a year--headed toward a cumulative $20 trillion by mid-century--and no effective treatment. Thus we are in a paradoxical situation: We have extended a financial commitment to provide healthcare coverage for all, and yet we haven’t made a similar scientific commitment to actual cures. The message seems to be: Uncle Sam can guarantee you a card that says “health insurance” on it, but nobody has bothered to make sure that a health-insurance policy can, in fact, buy health. (Even if Obamacare were repealed, we might note, Uncle Sam’s commitment to the elderly, through Medicare and Medicaid, would continue.)

This jourinalist needs to go back to school. Medicaid is NOT a plan for just the elderly. Anyone 18 or older can get Medicaid benefits if qualified. And with obamacare, that's getting easier and easier. Medicaid is paid 100% by us taxpayers. Medicare is partially paid by the beneficiary.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!