More on the decline of the American empire

So Andrea sent me the following paragraph from the Organic Consumers Association newsletter:

WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL NATION IS SICK
The World Health Organization has announced that the U.S. now has shorter life expectancies and higher infant and child mortality rates than Canada, Japan and all of Western Europe, except Portugal. Factors contributing to this decline in public health include weaker laws on toxic chemicals, higher levels of economic disparity, junk food diets, and a lack of health care access for millions of families. According to the Congressional Budget Office, average prices for pharmaceutical drugs in the top 25 industrialized nations of the world are 35% to 55% lower than in the United States, where profits of pharmaceutical companies are on the rise. Learn more...

Sure enough, the WHO stats are pretty depressing. Gee whiz, within our "WHO region," the two countries with better stats are Cuba and Canada, the ones with socialized medicine. It makes me crazy that the Republicans seems to have a lock-down on the dialogue around socialized medicine, when it seems fairly clear that the "lower quality of care" they fear monger about actually means people live longer and fewer babies die.

But wait, there's more... When I followed the "learn more" link, it took me to an editorial originally from the LA Times, republished in Common Dreams arguing for reimportation of drugs:

A 2001 study by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen found that drug companies' favorite customers paid just a little over half the retail price. This leaves the 67 million Americans without insurance to pay cash, with no rebates, at double the prices paid by the most-favored customers.

The fight against re-importation of drugs is a fight to continue to charge our uninsureds full price while giving everyone else a rebate.

But what about all those programs drug companies provide to help the indigent pay for drugs? If they really worked, the Kaiser Family Foundation wouldn't have reported that 15% of uninsured children and 28% of uninsured adults had gone without prescription medication in 2000 because of cost, and 87% of uninsured individuals with serious health problems reported trouble obtaining medication.

People today have to choose between drugs and food. The journal Diabetes Care recently reported on a study of older adults with diabetes. One in three said they went without food to pay for drugs.

Of course, while these policies are a disgusting display of venality, this is not new news for those of us for whom health care is an important issue. What is notable here is the editorial's author: Peter Rost, vice president of marketing at Pfizer.

Go fucking figure. Something tells me Rost may just ignore that memo.