And the reason why even those who support single payer healthcare need to oppose the piece-of-junk Obama plan. If even a governmental health care system is not going to make price-competitive drug buys, is there any possibility that the consumer will ever have the right to shop around.

Folks, bear in mind that the only candidate in recent years who made open consumer access to the worldwide pharma market a campaign plank was John McCain.

"The most depressing thing about this show's description is that the lead character being a high school teacher is one of the reasons stated for entering him in the "loser" catagory. Am I the only one bothered by this?"

It could have been worse. They could have made the character an engineer.

"You want cutting edge drugs, devices and therapies that the U.S. healthcare industry leads the world in providing (so far), you just don't want to pay for them - or at least not very much. Econ 101 anyone?"

So you bought the line that pharma companies, because of their high R & D expenses, will have to suddenly stop innovating if asked to compete on price? Computer chip manufacturers, which have similar R & D expenses, have been competing worldwide for years. Consumers have enjoyed steadily declining prices for their products at the same time as they meet the competition with higher specs and more features.

If Intel had the same juicy set of governmental "protections" against worldwide competition that drug companies enjoy, you would only be able to afford a computer if you could convince an insurance company to buy one for you.

"The liberal arts community is not the source of fear of science. You can pin that on:

thalidomide, asbestos, Chernobyl, 3-mile island, mustard gas, the hole in the ozone layer, global warming, global dimming, PCBs, black carbon, predator drones, ..."

Science/tech bestows tools on mankind. How use those tools is up to us. If the liberal arts community were to pull its head out of its Luddite hole, it could take its rightful place in goading our species to make the most of the better side of our nature. We have already found, after all, that Thalidomide cures leprosy, asbestos has saved thousands of people from death by fire, and that carbon is becoming the most versatile construction material of our new century.

While you people cry in your Kopi Luwak about how evil technology is, the Asians have simply shoved you aside as irrelevant in their search for a better life. I bet it still galls you that the people of Hiroshima needed a reliable source of power to rebuild, they chose nuclear.

"Have you looked into purchasing your prescriptions from Canada'

Normally, the prices are about 6 times lower. But that's indeed a gross generalization. For example, in the USA, the cost of Novolog insulin for me is about $1,300 for a three month supply. The equivalent supply from Canada, different name, is around $179; just increased from $139."

Now don't you wish you had voted for the 2008 candidate who supported making this option legal for all Americans?

Those Canadian prices are not in any way subsidized, so don't let our pharma goons tell you that you are stealing from that nation's healthcare system. Those are the prices - with pharmacy profit markup - at which US drug manufacturers freely sell to Canadians. If you live in this state and are willing to take the risk of visiting war-torn Mexico so you can buy from farmacias there, you can realize even greater savings, and for the same reason.

Instead, we're seekig them used as a general-purpose way for little tin tyrants to induce us to respect their authority. You're not supposed to be tasing a college professor who mouths off to cops, or who takes a little too much podium time in court.

If you're concerned about the tattered remnants of our Constitutional liberties, make maximum use of today's instant-camera technology. When you see something like this happening, get footage onto YouTube as soon as you can. If they tell try to make you delete your pictures, make sure you're using one of those cameras with dual memory cards. You can make a big flourish of erasing the wrong card, while keeping your shots safe on the other one.

But that was back in the days of Jack London, when leftists actually cared about workers. Now they only care about the Iss Yews that caught the fancy their brethren (and es, it can be 'brethren'. now) at Vassar.

"So, this article is intended to criticize people for stereotyping an entire group, correct? Then why does the frickin' title and byline imply that ALL liberals and ALL people on the left are "crazy to insult white Southerners as a group?""

Because letter after letter in this thread has proceeded to prove exactly that point! Now we see why liberals, despite scoring the occasional big election after a disaster, are predestined to spend their lives as losers.

"The Northeast is the real America. Everything else is just excess baggage...."

So let's saw off the Northeast - everything down to the southern edge of DC - and let it merrily go on taxing itself into oblivion. Only grad students in fields other than the hard sciences would be allowed to run for office or to speak at public meetings. Only the dead would be allowed to vote. All political controversies would be settled by graft - money talks, and you could print as much of it as you wanted. In New Jersey, men would be forbidden from urinating without the manipulative assistance of an SEIU functionary.

Just one proviso: we would be a lot tougher with immigration from the Northeast into Free America than we have been on our southern border. The difference is that Mexicans do a lot of useful work around here.