Obamacare website

[Syn7]

I like how you threw in the fact you're an engineer it try to make your opinion valid. My two friends are engineers but that doesn't make their opinions on healthcare more or less valid. Keep your Resume to yourself unless you somehow feel your words are inadequate without it. A woman on American Idol stalked about how she was friends with Mariah Carey and how her singing coach told her she sounds just like her. This was all right before Simon told her she couldn't sing. You can't sing either.



If you're in Canada why do you even care? Everyone's rates have to go up in order to subsidize the people who aren't covered. I'm not currently insured but I'm not worried because paying the $99 penalty is cheaper than buying insurance I don't currently need.

Not all Canadians share your opinion but I suspect you will trash this too.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/59612

Really? You're gonna post an Alan Caruba article? Trying to be objective, are we? lol

It's not a name drop or some attempt to sound smart. It's about a lack of standards I see within the public discourse. I'm just sayin... There are some objective facts here, we shouldn't gloss over these facts. Facts that cannot be denied with good reasoning. Facts that aren't subject to ideology. We should focus on those if we want to find the truth. To be honest, I think the ACA is garbage. I also think it's better than what was before it. Time will tell, I suppose. I also believe it will succeed in states that try to make it work and it will possibly fail in states that go out of there way to make sure it fails. And are we talking about the ACA or Obama as a whole? Are you capable of separating the two? You rant from one to the other and never really produce a coherent argument.

Rather than some moronic circular debate of prime time talking points, can't we break it down to specifics and argue those points? Why obfuscate the overall picture by avoiding the details? That's why I mentioned engineering at all. It's simple. You either deal with the minutiae or you run the risk running into a serious pickle. What is trivial to many is actually where the real substance is found.

Unless your friends allow ideology to cloud better judgement, then they too will call that statistic bullshit. Why do you keep dancing around this with more anecdotal evidence?

And yeah, you don't need the insurance. Till you do. Meanwhile any trip to the ER will cost everyone more than it has to. And that's not to say insurance is the only reason for that, but it's a big part none the less. And what's so horrible about lifting the standard of living up for everyone? The ACA addresses far more than just insurance. I'd say learn what it really is, but.... I know I know, 1200 pages bluh bluh bluh. It's a freakin health care bill, what do you want? The coles notes?

Why do I care? A couple reasons. First, I find the whole dichotomy fascinating. Second, this crap is spilling over into our backyard. And our backyard is dirty enough. Our economies are connected. We feel your pain. And having a significantly smaller population, we feel your pain more than you feel ours. So yeah, I like to know what's going on.

[Syn7]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/bu...rugs.html?_r=0

Glaxo Says It Will Stop Paying Doctors to Promote Drugs

The British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline will no longer pay doctors to promote its products and will stop tying compensation of sales representatives to the number of prescriptions doctors write, its chief executive said Monday, effectively ending two common industry practices that critics have long assailed as troublesome conflicts of interest.

The announcement appears to be a first for a major drug company — although others may be considering similar moves — and it comes at a particularly sensitive time for Glaxo. It is the subject of a bribery investigation in China, where authorities contend the company funneled illegal payments to doctors and government officials in an effort to lift drug sales.

Andrew Witty, Glaxo’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview Monday that its proposed changes were unrelated to the investigation in China, and were part of a yearslong effort “to try and make sure we stay in step with how the world is changing,” he said. “We keep asking ourselves, are there different ways, more effective ways of operating than perhaps the ways we as an industry have been operating over the last 30, 40 years?”

For decades, pharmaceutical companies have paid doctors to speak on their behalf at conferences and other meetings of medical professionals, on the assumption that the doctors are most likely to value the advice of trusted peers.

But the practice has also been criticized by those who question whether it unduly influences the information doctors give each other and can lead them to prescribe drugs inappropriately to patients. All such payments by pharmaceutical companies are to be made public next year under requirements of the Obama administration’s health care law.

Under the plan, which Glaxo said would be completed worldwide by 2016, the company will no longer pay health care professionals to speak on its behalf about its products or the diseases they treat “to audiences who can prescribe or influence prescribing,” it said in a statement. It will also stop providing financial support directly to doctors to attend medical conferences, a practice that is prohibited in the United States through an industry-imposed ethics code but that still occurs in other countries. In China, the authorities have said Glaxo compensated doctors for travel to conferences and lectures that never took place.

Mr. Witty declined to comment on the investigation because he said it was still underway.

Glaxo will continue to pay doctors consulting fees for market research because Mr. Witty said it was necessary for the company to gain insight from doctors about their products, but he said that activity would be limited in scope. A Glaxo spokesman said that each year the company spends “tens of millions” of dollars globally on the practices that it was ending, but declined to be more specific.

Glaxo is among the largest drug companies in the world, reporting global third-quarter sales of 6.51 billion pounds, or $10.1 billion, a 1 percent rise from the same period a year ago. Sales fell markedly in China as the investigation proceeded.

The move won qualified praise from Dr. Jerry Avorn, a professor at Harvard Medical School who has written critically about the industry’s marketing practices.

“It’s a modest acknowledgment of the fact that learning from a doctor who is paid by a drug company to give a talk about its products isn’t the best way for doctors to learn about those products,” Dr. Avorn said. But he noted that Glaxo would continue to provide what the company described in a statement as “unsolicited, independent educational grants” to continue educating doctors about their products.

He said that in the past the grants had often been provided to for-profit companies that rely on such payments from drug companies, raising questions about whether they were providing truly independent information.

Mr. Witty said while the details were still being worked out, the company intended to provide such grants to respected educational institutions and medical societies. “I’d like to look for those sorts of partners, and I do not envision these partners being companies or pseudocompanies,” he said.

Glaxo is first among its peers to announce a plan to end paid-speaker programs, but it is not the only one considering such a move, said Pratap Khedkar, who oversees the pharmaceutical practice at ZS Associates, a global sales and marketing firm.

He said a handful of drug makers were weighing similar actions for several reasons, including concerns about the reaction to the required disclosure of such payments that will begin next fall under a provision of the health care law. Glaxo and several other major companies already report many such payments, but Mr. Khedkar said the new requirements may go ****her than what some companies are reporting, and will be accessible on a searchable government website.

Previously, “It wasn’t really made public in some big, splashy way,” he said.

Jeff Francer, vice president and senior counsel at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry trade group, said many other companies were looking for ways to better reach increasingly busy doctors — who may not have time to travel to a conference in the first place — and Glaxo’s actions represent just one example.

“Of course all of our companies are looking for ways in which they can refine their relationship with physicians to make sure they’re making the best use of physicians’ time,” he said.

Beginning in 2015, Glaxo will also no longer compensate sales representatives based on the number of prescriptions doctors write, a standard practice that some have said pushed pharmaceutical sales officials to inappropriately promote drugs to doctors. In 2012, Glaxo paid a record $3 billion in fines to resolve charges that it had marketed drugs for unapproved uses. It is one of several major companies to have settled such cases in recent years.

Glaxo said its sales representatives worldwide would instead be paid based on their technical knowledge, the quality of service they provided to clients to improve patient care, and the company’s business performance. The company made such changes in the United States in 2011 — and is required to continue the new program under a corporate integrity agreement with the Justice Department — but will now extend the practices to its global business.

Mr. Khedkar said some other companies were also experimenting with ways to compensate sales representatives, but they must tread carefully.

“You remove the incentive to do anything inappropriate, but you also remove the incentive to do what is appropriate, which is to promote the on-label use of your product,” he said.

Mr. Witty said the experience in the United States had been positive and had improved relationships with doctors and medical institutions.

Dr. Raed Dweik, the new chairman of the innovation management and conflict of interest committee at the Cleveland Clinic, said he hoped other companies would follow suit.

“As a physician, I periodically meet with these sales reps and they usually come in armed with information about me that I don’t even know,” he said, like the number of prescriptions he writes for the drug company’s product. “I feel that’s not really a comfortable interaction to have.”

-------------------------------------------------


So I guess this will first be implemented in places where disclosure is either law, or will soon become law?

[Kellen Bassette]

As for gitmo, you want them living next to you? Because that's the problem. They won't be taken back by their native countries. And we've turned them into animals through lock up. Do you want them living in your neighborhood? This has been the issue all along, so tell me, are you willing to ball up and accept that? If not, shut yer bitching about gitmo.

Yes. Put them here in our prisons. Anyone who is worried about them escaping is retarded. That has never been the issue. Incarcerating POWs in foreign countries is nothing more than circumventing our own laws and judicial processes. It's also bull crap to coerce or bribe a third party country into the mess.

There is nothing to fear from a proper trial our putting them into American prisons.

[Syn7]

The problem is that like 80 detainees are cleared to leave. Free to go. But because of the hospitality, the fear is that if they weren't enemies before, they are now. I think they should shut it down, move them all over for proper trial, and if people who wish to do harm are released, so be it. Learn from it. Take the medicine, man the fuck up and do what's right. It's ridiculous to walk around spouting off lines from the constitution, talking about freedom, then doing stuff like this. It's counterproductive and it's straight up wrong. I have no issue with leaving terrorists in a deep dark hole, but there needs to be a legit process that everyone can get behind. As far as where to send the detainees who are let go, send em back where you got em. If the host country has a problem with that, too bad. You think Yemen is gonna give up their cushy position over this? They will bitch and whine, but they'll get over it. If not, fuck em.

[SoCo KungFu]

Yes. Put them here in our prisons. Anyone who is worried about them escaping is retarded. That has never been the issue. Incarcerating POWs in foreign countries is nothing more than circumventing our own laws and judicial processes. It's also bull crap to coerce or bribe a third party country into the mess.

There is nothing to fear from a proper trial our putting them into American prisons.

What makes you think they would all be going into a prison? Its not the guilty ones that are the issue. Its those innocent ones we abducted from a country because they were simply associated with someone suspicious.

[SoCo KungFu]

The problem is that like 80 detainees are cleared to leave. Free to go. But because of the hospitality, the fear is that if they weren't enemies before, they are now. I think they should shut it down, move them all over for proper trial, and if people who wish to do harm are released, so be it. Learn from it. Take the medicine, man the fuck up and do what's right. It's ridiculous to walk around spouting off lines from the constitution, talking about freedom, then doing stuff like this. It's counterproductive and it's straight up wrong. I have no issue with leaving terrorists in a deep dark hole, but there needs to be a legit process that everyone can get behind. As far as where to send the detainees who are let go, send em back where you got em. If the host country has a problem with that, too bad. You think Yemen is gonna give up their cushy position over this? They will bitch and whine, but they'll get over it. If not, fuck em.

Its not just about getting their nation to take them back. This isn't about those that are terrorists. This is about the ones that were innocent before. What's more humane? Locking them up or sending them back to a country where they will almost certainly be executed by the locals that are terrorists? This is the argument some are having who aren't willing to ball up and accept responsibility. The correct answer, we abducted them from their own home. A home they no longer have. The only moral resolution is to give them a life on US soil. And the consequences of that, they will be what they will be. But democrats won't make the move because it'd be political suicide. And republicans won't because, they're republicans and have no shred of moral accountability.

[Syn7]

Maybe, but that will never happen. Also, I think it's likely that a good chunk of those cleared were not friends in the first place. Having them reside on US soil, with all the cost that will go into watching them forever, simply isn't gonna happen. All the options suck. From what I can tell the best of the shitty options is to send em off with a care package. Obviously I have never spoken to a gitmo detainee, but I have to imagine they would rather be anywhere than where they are. If it was me, I would rather go home and take my chances. It's basically either prison or that. What other realistic and actually doable option is there?

And obviously renditioning people like they have needs to stop. I'm not saying they should never do it, but they need to tighten up their shit.

[Kellen Bassette]

there needs to be a legit process that everyone can get behind.

That's the heart of the matter. They want two sets of rules, our Constitution; AND an "anything goes" CIA/military way of doing things. The only reason to do it in Cuba is to keep it out of sight, out of mind; and avoid as much of our own laws as possible.

[Kellen Bassette]

What makes you think they would all be going into a prison? Its not the guilty ones that are the issue. Its those innocent ones we abducted from a country because they were simply associated with someone suspicious.

I completely agree. Keeping them in Gitmo avoids dealing with legit trials. When you kidnap a bunch of tourists and lock them up for 8 years, it's a whole lot easier to ignore in a foreign country than here at home.

Your right about the Republicans having no morals, but neither do the Democrats. If the did, they would have closed it down instead of taking a more politically expedient path. Is there that much difference in doing the wrong thing because your evil or doing the wrong thing because it benefits you?