Except you can’t. Our government in their extreme wisdom spends a lot of money and a lot of effort making sure we can’t find certain substances that make us feel good. We are talking about people who would deny things to cancer patients in extreme pain and discomfort. They, including Governor Tim “Dumbass” Pawlenty, are more concerned about people abusing drugs than they are about relieving the suffering of people who are dying.

I’m not dying, thank God. I’m just pissed off that I feel like shit and that my doctor has a pill that would make me feel better and he won’t give it to me.

What I get addicted to, if I get addicted to it, is no one’s business but my own. Lord knows that millions of you are addicted to alcohol. The philosophical disconnect is gigantic. Alcohol, the most damaging drug known to man and an everyday killer can be safely and conveniently purchased. But if you want some pot or a Percoset, you have to go to the black market.

I propose we decriminalize every drug known to man. If people get into trouble, so what? People get into trouble all the time with all sorts of things. Are you my mom? No, you are not.

The DEA, the ATF, the FDA and my doctor are all idiots and I’m sick of it. And I’m sick of this cold.

Thank you.

People need medical care. It’s required in this day and age. Life is precious and we’ll all spend whatever we need to if we need to. So the market is guaranteed and health care providers have the actual services of value. In between consumers and these providers is a massive corporate for-profit bureaucracy that is trying to milk profits out of the system.

We should learn from France:

Americans often assume that when people get universal coverage, they give up their choice in doctors, hospitals and care. That’s not the case in France, Dutton says. The system is set up both to ensure that patients have lots of choice in picking doctors and specialists and to ensure that doctors are not constrained in making medical decisions.

In France, the national insurance program is funded mostly by payroll and income taxes. Those payments go to several quasi-public insurance funds that then negotiate with medical unions to set doctors’ fees. (Doctors can choose to work outside this system, and a growing minority now charge what patients are willing to pay out of pocket.) The government regulates most hospital fees. This system works collectively to keep costs down.

When someone goes to see a doctor, the national insurance program pays 70 percent of the bill. Most of the other 30 percent gets picked up by supplemental private insurance, which almost everyone has. It’s affordable, and much of it gets paid for by a person’s employer.

“There are no uninsured in France,” says Victor Rodwin, a professor of health policy at New York University, who is affiliated with the International Longevity Center. “That’s completely unheard of. There is no case of anybody going broke over their health costs. In fact, the system is so designed that for the 3 or 4 or 5 percent of the patients who are the very sickest, those patients are exempt from their co-payments to begin with. There are no deductibles.”

I couldn’t find the statistic, but I think we are the only G8 country without some kind of national health care system. Ask the Republicans and France is wrong, the rest of the world is wrong and the US is correct to pay more for a worse system because we fear government bureaucracies more than private bureaucracies. It’s nonsense.

Bush is wrong, McCain is wrong, the Republicans are wrong — we need a national approach to health care. It’s the fiscally conservative thing to do.

So…the hospital can’t tell me, the father of my son, who called the hospital about my son? That is fucking insane.

It’s probably related to all you divorced people who hate your ex. If this was a rational world, not only would they be able to tell me who is calling the hospital on behalf of my son, they would fucking call me and tell me about it. Apparently being the legal parent and guardian of my son doesn’t give me the privilege of knowing who is getting medical care for my son? Again, that is fucking insane.

And, in another post, you said that universal health care is fiscally conservative. Dude, that is laughable, and yes, insane.

No, you’re bad at math. Right now we have a situation where millions of Americans without health insurance get no preventative care at all. So they wait until they are very sick before they go to the ER. They can’t pay their bill so the hospital is stuck with it. The rising cost of health care, among other things, reflects the fact that WE ALREADY PAY FOR THESE PEOPLE but we do so in a manner that gives them no access to preventative care and thus, it costs us much, much more.

This is a fact, by the way — that preventative care saves tons of money on the back end.

Add to this the fact that Medica, Blue Cross and all those other crooks make billions of dollars. Their business model? Make it a pain in the ass to collect benefits, both on the individual side and on the doctor’s side. Ask any doctor about it and they will tell you that those companies are professionals at dragging their feet and delaying or omitting payments. They add no value whatsoever. They just sit in the middle and get paid.

Finally, the cost of catastrophic health insurance isn’t that much! If we covered everyone with high-deductible policies that provided access from the 1st dollar to preventative care, compared to the amount of money pumped into the system today, we’d save billions of dollars. The whole point of insurance is to spread the risk around as much as possible. How about we spread it out among 3 billion people?

I thought Republicans were all about getting rid of waste? We waste money throughout the entire chain because you guys have a Red Scare called socialized medicine. We should not socialize medicine. We should absolutely socialize health insurance.

“Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded,” says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the new book, “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.” “Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave.”

I sure hope this person isn’t employed by anyone. If so, they should be fired. I also certainly hope that this retard doesn’t work directly with patients. This kind of blatant political lie, marked up to pretend it is medicine, should completely undermine this dipshits credibility. Are you a doctor? Or a political hack?

A parental government? Like ones that wants to watch what we do in the bedroom? That arrests us for growing plants that make us feel good? Ones that make our children pledge their allegiance to God every morning?

The reason that people like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and this moron get any traction at all is because they lie about the liberal agenda. If they don’t lie, they have no point. Their argument is completely bankrupt.

The other point, which is not made enough to the general public, is that you almost never really need antibiotics:

…the clinical benefit that patients typically attribute to antibiotics is more often circumstance than cause and effect.

“You’re seven to 10 days into a bout of bronchitis — you’re still coughing stuff up, your chest is sore, so you go into the clinic and get a Z-pak (the antibiotic azithromycin),” he explained. “And you get better. And you feel better because the time frame superimposes perfectly on the natural course of the illness, which is 14 to 16 days.”

On a closely related topic I asked PZ Myers about anti-bacterial products vs. soap and he said:

Normal soap lyses cell membranes — it dissolves the lipid bilayer. It physically blows apart the cells. (Your skin cells are safe because they are protected by layers of keratin, a protein).

Anti-bacterial soaps are gimmicks that do more harm than good, and you should avoid them. They simply don’t kill bacteria at all efficiently.