And Ema gets very, very snarky. Missouri’s legislators have just passed a vague law that says pharmacists don’t have to fill prescriptions for things that they don’t like, especially nothing that might look sorta like an abortifacient. This is a bad law that removes standards of professional conduct from licensed pharmacies, and further removes all liability from pharmacists who disregard the doctor’s prescriptions for their patients. Well, some of their standards. Ema has a plan.
One last thing. I have a question for Rep. Ed Emery, Rep. Cynthia Davis, and all the other Missouri politicians who passed HB 226. Since you’ve removed the professional duty and standard requirements for the sale of drugs, can I haz street stand for the glorious, Capitalist selling of Plan B in your state?
Silly Ema. Only lawyers and politicians and priests are allowed to determine what is best for women’s bodies.
So, If I don’t want to sell ANY drugs to fundies because of my heartfelt belief that they shouldn’t be suffered to live, let alone breed, is that OK?
That’s utterly disgraceful. Shame on Missouri’s legislators, shame on them.
And of course the Missouri lege is providing all the necessary funding and other support for all the embryonic fundies,…er, wonderful new sparks of humanity soon to be brought into this world?
And also those loving reichwing churches have set up all that daycare, support & donations of money & supplies?
And the addlepated dickheads,…er, conscientious pharmaguys (and gals) are tithing 10% for the well-being of these prospective Liars for Jesus?
No?
Need some amendments to this, liberal Missou lawmakers.
Illinois already has a similar provision, doesn’t it?
All the focus on xians and their obsession with sex. This law will also allow a Scientologist pharmacy not to dispense psychiatric medications. A Jain, who respects all life, will refuse to dispense antibiotics since they kill bacteria. I am sure that the good xians who passed this law would object to the scientologist and the Jain.
I provide a service to the public, & I sometimes find myself in a similar position to the pharmacists who have objections to providing a service with regard to certain items.
In my case, I don’t like to work on churches, but sometimes I have to, to avoid upsetting a regular client. But I am legally free to take on or ignore such work.
The justification that I would offer is that potential clients can simply go elsewhere for the service, which is reasonably true for my profession. This may not always be the case with pharmacies, because it is conceivable that the public could be severely disadvantaged. It seems to follow that their professional or licensing bodies should step in to prevent injustice.
Hmmm I see an opportunity for the free market. Anyone know the markup on black market Plan B or ru-486? Taking advantage of the desperate is classic capitalism, no?
One would think that the person writing the law would at least do enough research to find that RU 486 isn’t available from pharmacies before allowing pharmacies to refuse to sell it.
The bill would look worse here in Texas, though.
I agree that this may be a problem, but I think you’re all looking at this the wrong way around.
As it stands, I actually agree with this law. No person should be forced to supply a good or service to another unless they’ve contracted to do so. Whatever their reasons.
However, the real problem is that the state is licensing pharmacies in the first place, and preventing non-pharmacists from selling drugs – meaning that, inevitably, the supply of medicines gets mixed up with politics.
…and here we go.
One would think that the person writing the law would at least do enough research to find that RU 486 isn’t available from pharmacies before allowing pharmacies to refuse to sell it.
RU486 =/= Plan B.
Here’s part of the bill’s text (emphasis mine):
Does the Missouri legislature think it can make Plan B an abortifacient by legislative fiat? Study after study has shown no difference in fertility from Plan B if administered post-ovulation.
It’s like saying “No public school shall employ as a teacher any individual who has been convicted of sexual offences, including but not limited to rapists and jews.”
So the obvious solution is to remove all gummint restrictions on pharmaceutical sales. Let the Market sort out the honest educated healers from the lying cheating sociopathic scuzzballs. You really are a piece of fucking work, Walton, and I’m sticking you back in the killfile where your ridiculous bullshit belongs.
why is government run by the majority ever a good thing.
Name me Supreme Dictator and stuff like this wouldn’t happen.
A lot of offer stuff probably wouldn’t get done too, but lets ignore the details. Just know you’ll be able to get all the prescription drugs your doctor responsibly prescribes, and I will have many many mansions, castles, estates, and harems.
Walton@9
I would point you in the direction of the phrase “snake-oil salesman” to see why we have pharmaceutical regulations. Unless you think selling a bottle of dirty creek water with tobacco spit and methanol in it is OK.
OK, before I go – don’t want to break my streak, and it may be helpful to someone, so here yet again is the Princeton EC link:
http://ec.princeton.edu/emergency-contraception.html
However, the real problem is that the state is licensing pharmacies in the first place, and preventing non-pharmacists from selling drugs
What’s it like being insane?
More fun than being sane, when one lives in such an insane world as we do.
Walton the libertard, ever wonder why there a laws in place regulating drugs and pharmacies? It is because the free marketplace failed to provide necessary impetus for fly-by-night operators not to fleece/poison people. Free market. Been, done that, and it failed. What part of that do you not understand?
Another batch of idiocy from the know-nothings. Plan B does not disrupt an already implanted embryo.
I’m not the Libertarian Walton seems to be, but he does make a logical point: Fundie pharmacists are trying to have it both ways.
If the government can’t tell us what drugs to sell, then it also can’t tell us what drugs NOT to sell.
Real government cops with guns enforce pharmacies’ monopoly on the sale of drugs.
Therefore these pharmacies owe us -the public- all the treatments we can’t get anywhere else because of this artificial monopoly.
While the info on Plan B would seem to indicate that it in no way operates as an aborifacient, for a “good Catholic” following Church doctrine, even providing contraceptive materials to people would constitute taking part in evil activity. While not all of the anti-choice movement is anti-contraception, the prominence of Roman Catholics insures that there is a strong anti-contraception contingent.
Cynthia Davis is a real piece of work. She’s tried to put ID into the schools on many occasions and has been behind a whole cannon of wacky legislation. She runs a christian bookstore and continues to be elected over and over again. Here’s a sampling of her insanity.
There are days when I’m just happy I’m not living in America. Then there are days, like today, when I am BLOODY happy I’m not living in America.
Thanks, but I rather like being in control of my womb, and rather dislike the idea of religious idiots having ANY say in the matter.
planned parenthood still can give birth control. all plan b is, is six doses of regular birthcontrol. furthermore planned parenthood also will refer you to sympathetic pharmacies for plan b itself.
John Atkeson #20
That’s not Walton’s objection. His complaint is the mean ol’ gummint is regulatin’ and he’s agin the gummint regulatin’. Walton has no problem with a pharmacist refusing to fill a prescription. After all, the free market will ensure that there are other pharmacists who’ll be happy to sell any drugs anyone might want. No, Walton just doesn’t like the existence of the government doing anything other than protecting the country and providing him an annoyance. Walton knows that governments are inefficient, corrupt and evil while private enterprise is pure, noble and good.
Here is my plan and I encourage anyone with the means to do it as well. Go to college and get whatever pharmacological training you need to become a certified pharmacist. Get a job at a pharmacy where you know they support christians not dispensing certain medication. Declare yourself a christian scientist and refuse to dispense any medication whatsoever to anyone at all. When they fire you for not doing your job you can sue the shit out of them for violating your religious rights and all that. With the money you make, you can reopen the pharmacy with good policies. After a few cases like this you might manage to put some bad pharmacies out of business.
Yeah, it’s all hypothetical but it would make for an interesting “civil rights” case if some rich guy could manage to take a case like this to the supreme court. Yes, it would be a farce but that is the whole point. The law itself is a farce. Any comments?
I’ve always felt that these laws will only prevail until a female pharmacist denies a randy state legislator his erectile dysfunction-correcting drug of choice.
Wow… why get a license then??? These laws really piss me off. The people who go into these fields know exactly what medicines are out there and they know exactly what they’re getting themselves into. It’s just like fundies going into OBGYN (way more than makes me comfortable)… they know they’ll have to deal with abortion and they want to go into it so they can raise hell when they face it.
I can’t wait until someone decide to apply their non-christian religious beliefs to refuse to give antibiotics, psych med or anything else that the idiot fundie lawmakers didn’t anticipate.
This law will inflict harma and hardship on just a few groups.
The young teen agers, the poor, and the not very bright or educated women. And their zygotes soon to be children. The rest will find work arounds or not end up in that situation in the first place.
Missouri needs to get ready for girls and women who are least able to cope with an unintended pregnancy and a new child. And the children who will grow up with them. A baby isn’t a political football or a punishment device. The usual, christofascists only care about zygotes not real post birth humans.
“Jack Kemp, crusade[r] for lower taxes, has died of cancer.”
I wrote a diary about this over at DailyKOS, if anyone is interested in reading it.
http://the-tmax.dailykos.com/
Apparently the Missouri bill specifically exempts pharmacists from lawsuits or licensure challenges for refusing to provide their clients with Plan B or RU-486 (mifepristone), or information on how to acquire them elsewhere. The House vote (for this amendment; the entire bill has reportedly been delayed) was a misogynistic 115-43.
A telling quote from Rep. Cynthia Davis:
Can we get all the libertarians to move to her district, please?
DON’T BUY THOSE PLAN B PILLS, THEY’RE REALLY CHEEZBURGERS!
This is ridiculous on so many levels, not least of which, as DaveL pointed out, is them trying to actually change reality by declaring that something is what it is not in legislation.
HTML fail – the link to that Missouri story above is http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2009/04/28/missouri-bill-would-let-pharmacies-refuse-plan-b-sale/
Why hast thou forsaken me, Text Formatting Toolbar 0.1.4.7?
You notice that nothing is asked of these pharmacists in return–e.g., a sign visible from the street that the pharmacist reserves the right to blah blah blah, so that customers needn’t come in, risk embarrassment, and waste everyone’s time with Plan B scrips.
And not just Plan B scrips of course–they needn’t buy shampoo,vitamins, candy, magazines, makeup, stationary, toys, diapers, laundry supplies, soda pop, small appliances, greeting cards, analgesics, sun block, cigarettes, Halloween costumes, paper towels, etc. there either. Or anything. Ever.
I’m genuinely sorry that the subject of warning signs was never brought up with Bible-Banging Pharmacist Association (or whatever they’re calling themselves). I’m sure their answer would have been absolutely fascinating.
I’ve never understood the objection these people have to dispensing the Plan B. By their argument, those who sell guns and ammunition should be cuplable if their wares are then used to kill people.
And, as an aside, I’m sure that majority of the pharmicists who would refuse to dispense Plan B are also anti gun control.
I assume it is also OK in Missouri for homophobes to refuse to fill prescriptions for AIDS medication and bigots do not need to provide hydroxyurea or other medications to sickle cell patients.
That is not what this bill says — it specifically only applies to abortifacients. It does not allow, for example, a strict vegan to not sell animal-derived medications, or a Jehovah’s Witness from dispensing blood-derived pharmaceuticals, or a fundamentalist from providing any contraception.
And there’s a reason that the bill is not that broad, because it would cause chaos if it were. This is not a blow for libertarianism, but a kowtowing to the narrow religious beliefs of a group that would further limit freedoms if they could. No libertarian should be in favour of this.
I’m gonna become a pharmacist and make damn sure none of those blondes get their cancer meds. Its against my religion that I just made up.
“And there’s a reason that the bill is not that broad, because it would cause chaos if it were. This is not a blow for libertarianism, but a kowtowing to the narrow religious beliefs of a group that would further limit freedoms if they could. No libertarian should be in favour of this.”
– Tulse – Comment # 37
Are you actually expecting Walton to have an opinion that makes logical sense?
C’mon…. We all know he doesn’t understand the actual issues, so why tease the poor idiot with logic?
If pharmacists don’t want to sell drugs to women who need them, we need to keep track of these refusers. Keep a database. Then- boycott them.
Probably TMI, but here goes:
This just infuriates me. I had an incomplete miscarriage a few years ago, and the doctor prescribed misoprostol and painkillers to help my body rid itself of the dead fetus.
If it were up to these morons, I would have had to wait with a dead fetus in my uterus until my body decided to naturally get rid of it. If it ever did. Or a D&C, which I wasn’t thrilled to consider.
I would have come unglued if the pharmacy had tried this crap with me.
Texas wingnuts got nuthin on our wingnuts, that’s for sure. Fortunately we have a sane Democrat, Jay “landslide” Nixon, who won by a paltry 19% in November, in the Governor’s mansion and he will veto this apostasy and it will not be overridden. Not only do the wingers lack the votes, but the session is over as soon as they finalize the budget next week.
This is one of those things that the insane fuckheads can go back to their districts and whine that they tried to keep the wimmin barefoot and pregnant but they were thwarted by that librul in the manse.
This is sound and fury signifying nothing.
Think of the babies….
Yes, of course. It would be communism to expect pharmacists to do their jobs. It’s entirely libertarian, however, to interfere with a woman’s ability to make her own decisions on family planning.
“ever wonder why there a laws in place regulating drugs and pharmacies? It is because the free marketplace failed to provide necessary impetus for fly-by-night operators not to fleece/poison people. Free market. Been, done that, and it failed. What part of that do you not understand?”
Why can we still buy aspirin, over the counter then without the involvement of a pharmacist?
Why have previous prescription meds gone over the counter?
Good to hear that, Blue Girl!
D’ya think we could arrange a Death Match wrasslin’ competition between your legislative wingnuts and ours? It might thin ’em out a little….
Or even better, I could find my own conscience telling me that it’s wrong to sell lupron and proscar to fundie men because prostate cancer is of course a punishment from god. And let’s not forget those evil statins, diuretics and metformin, keeping god from punishing sinners with diabetes and heart attacks.
Why would I want to mess around with god’s punishment ? Isn’t it the cause of all sorts of bad things, like, swine flu and stuff?
If pharmacists don’t want to sell drugs to women who need them, we need to keep track of these refusers. Keep a database. Then- boycott them.
Take a good, hard look at a map of Missouri. An awful lot of people there live in small towns an hour or two from the major city centers. “Boycott them” means “don’t get any medication you need when you need it, ever, or most of the basic things like band-aids, milk, and bread that you pick up there all the time because you only have enough time off and gas money to drive the hour and a half to Wal-Mart once every three or four weeks.”
I think it’s time for pro-choice pharmacists in your capital to stop dispensing to politicians. Let’s see how they sound when their viagra and insulin run out.
That’s the weirdest argument in favor of communism I’ve heard for a while, but it’s slowly sinking in.
No place is the adage “The House makes the news, but the Senate makes the laws” more true than in Missouri.
Having watched from the gallery some of the more embarrassing House republican idiocy, I think we ought to fit all state legislators with shock collars and their mikes should be synced up with them so they only work when the collar is in place. The controls should be in the gallery and ordinary citizens and American Government teachers and classes should be able to zap at will the morons who say stupid shit.
Why is heroin illegal ?
Seriously, you really really want all the Dr. Googles around your place to be able to self-medicate with truly potent stuff ?
Let’s have morphin as an OTC drug. Lupron too, for those who feel like chemically castrating their kids.
Do you think a pharmacist only sell the drugs ? The pharmacist is a specialist of drugs who should check for possible contra-indication or potentially harmful interactions, and is also liable in case of harm coming from wrong prescription medication.
Money talks. Boycott the pharmacies that refuse to fill a prescription, or that refuse to sell certain FDA-approved drugs.
For a medicine to go OTC, the manufacturer has to submit appropriate data as to the safety of the product. Also implicit in the decision is the lack of abuse for the drug. Now days, this would happen after the drug comes off patent protection, and cheap generics become available. Most older NSAIDs and some allergy medicines are now available OTC. A recent one that went this way was Clariton. A few, like aspirin, where grandfathered in as “generally recognized as safe”.
If we could pull it off and sell tickets we could recession-proff our bank accounts and pay for my three kids to get a couple of PhDs and a Law degree!
People, I made the mistake at first when I saw this article as well, but please read the text: it only applies to pharmacists who don’t want to have anything to do with abortifacients, and has no bearing on religious standing.
I am also amazed that they are trying to declare Plan B (and by extension, birth control pills) abortafacients. If you legislate it, it MUST be true. But what I’m curious about is how this will affect over-the-counter sales of Plan B. I mean, it certainly gives the store the right to not stock it, but can a cashier refuse to ring up the purchase?
Money talks. Boycott the pharmacies that refuse to fill a prescription, or that refuse to sell certain FDA-approved drugs.
Again, that’s only a choice for people privileged enough to live somewhere with multiple pharmacies, where at least one pharmacy DOES have staff who will dispense it, and that participates with their insurance provider. There is effectively no such thing as choice in pharmacy for a good portion of this country.
“it only applies to pharmacists who don’t want to have anything to do with abortifacients, and has no bearing on religious standing”
Exactly. This has nothing to do with religion, only some pharmacists with good morals that don’t want to have killing babies on their conscience.
Except Ineffable the religiotard, they aren’t babies until they are born. Even your bible says that.
Why just limit this to just perceived abortion?? Why have pharmacists at all? If this is religiously motivated, isn’t ANY illness or injury or whatever condition a result of the “will of the lord”? How dare doctors or pharmacists interfere !!!!!!
This is just BULLSHIT interference with the sex lives of the women in MO with a “choose life” smokescreen!
Okay, this is very, very simple. Nobody is required to dispense drugs they object to. There are many, many careers that don’t involve dispensing drugs; simply select one of them, and you won’t have this problem. Seriously. What are people THINKING?
#58:
WHAT. FUCKING. BABIES?
How does Plan B kill “babies”?
MORON!!!!!
@Redhead
watch this video
And I you still aren’t convinced watch this series
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=EBC8CA897FE015D1
Don’t you care about the babies?
….”Exactly. This has nothing to do with religion, only some pharmacists with good morals that don’t want to have killing babies on their conscience.” -Ineffable
Ineffable, go eff yourself.
Let’s say I’m a pharmacist… My morals are such that I believe that sex is for the purpose of procreation ONLY. So I’ll want to make sure that if I DO have to distribute Viagra, it can only be to married couples who are both able to bear children, and will ensure it can only be taken when the woman in that marriage is most likely to conceive. Sound fair to you?
…After all, it’s MY morality, and I have every right, in your stupid little world, to enforce that morality on everyone I meet… Right?
Now, why can’t the Pharmacist refuse to dispense Insulin to a diabetic?? After all, it is a gentically engineered Human type product (U-100 Human). Or we could go back to the old days when Insulin was made from Pork. Muslim Pharmacists always had a “cow” with that one – you know injecting pork/pork products (old 40/80) into a human body. There was a beef special insulin (100% beef) but I can see where the Hindus would refuse that one.
Again, the fundies know not what they do.
Would this be gross ignorance or just plain stupidity?
Don’t you care about the babies?
Yes. The fresher they are, the crunchier and saltier.
I think all the sensible pharmacists should band together and refuse to fill the perscriptions of the people who voted in favor of this bill. They can just say it is against their religion to sell to assholes.
Ineffable, I watch nothing from idiots like you. Why don’t you crack a biology/medical book and find out the developmental stages required from fertilization until the baby is finally born and living outside of the womb. Up until then, it is called various things, with the last being a fetus, and at all points along the development it is considered a parasite. Welcome to real science.
Just tell these legislators, “be careful what you wish for”:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article2603966.ece
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1577426/Female-Muslim-medics-disobey-hygiene-rules.html
#63:
More of the moronic and facile conflation of the horrors of the Holocaust and abortion (which is, most often, an expurgation of a ball of cells).
Always from someone who never had to undergo the horrors of the Holocaust.
But that’s another story.
PLAN B has precisely NOTHING to do with babies, MORON!
Here, once again, is the danger expressed of affording government the job of dictating morality…
Unprincipled populations who try to use government as a tool for their moral or sociological ideals tend to find out the hard way that the monster they so want to create doesn’t really love them at all…
Seeing the faces of those who finally figure this out?
Priceless.
actually, I think this is one of those that will fix itself. I think some people are going to be out of work, and their Law makers will be the cause.
There will be pharmacies that will sell drugs putting their ethical duty over the religious morals. Those that do, will get more customers, and those that don’t will have to change their ways or close.
It’s a horrible law, but I think it’ll wake some people up, and might have some good come out of it.
Give me a fucking break. If this was really about saving the precious lives of children, then these people would be working to set up systems of support for families, too. But they aren’t doing that, because it’s not about the babies, it’s about punishing women for having sex. The fundies can’t bear the thought of a world where women can freely have sex without consequences, so they want to make sure that every time a woman has sex she runs the risk of getting pregnant. They’re not “pro-baby” at all — they’re “anti-woman”.
I was outraged originally by this, but thinking further, the christians do see selling abortifacients as no different from selling a gun to someone you know is going to kill a child.
If I believed that were true, if I truly believed what they do I, I could see myself refusing.
Maybe they need to find a new line of work? Or it should be at least one pharmisicts on staff who is not crazy?
Yea, it is a law based off superstition, but it does bring up questions on the control government can have over a personal decision.
Ineffable and the Missouri legislators glory in their ignorance. Please don’t confuse them with facts. In their warped minds ideology trumps facts, always.
Fact: RU 486 is entirely different from Plan B. RU 486 is an abortifacient, It’s been in use since around 1990 in Europe but only since about 2000 in the US. It’s only available directly from a physician, and never a pharmacist, since it must be administered under a physician’s supervision. No pharmacy in the US stocks it.
Fact: Plan B, also known as the “morning after pill” and “emergency contraception” or “EC”, prevents ovulation. It has no effect on an established pregnancy and has not been shown to prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. Plan B is not an abortifacient, contrary to what the Missouri legislature seems to think.
Thus only RU 486 is an abortifacient under the law’s definition, so the law only applies to it. But since pharmacies cannot legally stock and dispense it, the law is an exercise in public posturing with no effect. Legally a Missouri pharmacist will still be required to dispense Plan B.
Further the state legislature has no authority nor competence to determine what is or is not an abortifacient, so any competent court should have no difficulty determining the law to be an unconstitutional overstepping of the legislature’s authority.
If anything all legislatures should be enacting laws that make it a felony for a pharmacist to refuse to fill a legal prescription or sell Plan B. The law should also state, if it doesn’t already, that a prescription if the property of the patient and that a pharmacist must return it to the patient, if he/she can’t/won’t fill it, and refer the patient to a pharmacist who will.
Of course, the anti-sex crowd (who go by the oxymoron, pro-life) would have one believe that all contraceptives are abortifacients. But on this like most issues relating to sex—abstinence sex ed works, abortions are used by most women as easy birth control (tell that to a woman who’s had one), abortion causes breast and cervical cancer, or banning abortions will make them go away—the anti-sex crowd is either ignorant, engaging in wishful thinking, or lying. What they’d really like to do is ban all contraception and get the state into the business of licensing people who can have sex. That’d make the Missouri nuts real happy. Of course, they’d exempt legislators, so they can still chase skirts in their off time.
Jeff S. – You have no right not to be offended.
Taking a gun and shooting someone is illegal. Plan B is not.
You do not have the right to take away my rights, you do not have the right to not be offended and you do not have the right to interfere in MY personal and completely legal healthcare.
Saying that you do because of what you “feel” is disgusting.
You disgust me, Jeff S. You are a sick, twisted person who feels they have the authority to decide what’s best for me based on a “feeling” you might have.
Fuck you.
@JeffS
They DO need to find a new line of work !
And your analogy sux. Really !
Sigh.. Let me paraphrase a neat little article I just read not long ago for our “libertarians”:
“It was found that, among imported, non-regulated, Dietary Aids, which are neither tested for effectiveness, nor required to properly label their ingredients, that **many** of them not only contained pharmaceutical drugs as their ‘active’ ingredient, but in fact, in some cases, contained 4 times what was considered a lethal dose, if given to patients with certain medical conditions. It is the opinion of some people that the reason nothing is being done about this is ‘willful blindness’.”
Libertarian = willful blindness, when ever some subject comes up where they “insist” that the market can “fix” something, while the thing that was created to fix the fracking market in the first place is “bad”.
Urgh, I’m studying pharmacy in the uk and I’m amazed how fine most of my fellow students are with the fact that you can choose not to sell the “Morning after” pill as long as you recommend the person on to another available pharmacy. What a pile of arse! I don’t know why anyone thinks this sort of thing is acceptable.
Keanus, don’t confuse Ineffable with facts.
Isn’t caffeine an abortifacient as well? I seem to recall something mentioning that recently as well.
So are they going to refuse to sell soda and coffee too?
Actually, Rev, not only Ineffable, the MO legislators also need a healthy dose of these facts, preferably through an enema… because that’s where they are stuck up, and it is all shuttered upstairs.
Hang on. Neither Jeff S nor, to my knowledge, any Missouri pharmacist is claiming that they are entitled to “take away your rights”. This bill does not make it illegal to buy abortifacient drugs. It merely guarantees vendors the right not to sell them. It isn’t the same thing.
To draw a parallel. Alcohol is not illegal, nor should it be; and if my government ever tried to ban alcohol, I would fight it tooth-and-nail. But if my local supermarket merely decides – for ethical or religious reasons, say – not to stock alcohol, has it “violated my rights”? Do businesses have an obligation to supply everything their customers might need or want? Just as I have a right to drink if I want to, my neighbour has a right to refuse to supply me with alcohol if he sees fit. There is a difference between “allowed” and “compulsory”.
Likewise, if a government tried to ban abortifacient drugs, I would fight it as an illegitimate restriction on liberty. People’s bodies are their own, and they have the right to use whatever medicinal drugs they want, regardless of anyone else’s moral disapproval. But this does not mean that you have a “right” to obtain abortifacient drugs from any pharmacist, any more than you have a right to obtain any other product from any other vendor.
When I take a job, I do so knowing that I have responsibilities. If at some point those responsibilities become offensive to my personal beliefs I have the option to quit.
It’s surprising to me that people take a career path knowing that they have responsibilities and then throw a fit when they are called on to follow through with them.
Walton: No matter how many failed analogies you try on us, you’ll still be wrong. Fractally wrong.
You analogy is not only inaccurate, but demonstrates just how utterly misogynistic you are.
Take a moment and REALLY think about what you’re trying to say. I mean REALLY THINK about it and you might just figure out where you went so horribly wrong with your example.
I know it’ll be difficult for you, but if you manage to stop masturbating to Ayn Rand for a bit, you just might feel the clue bat smacking you in the face.
Lets see if we can get all Libertarians to drink lots of Hydroxycut! They like unregulated things, so drink up!
http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2009/NEW02006.html
Also:
Does anyone else here see the “Oh, just let the pharmacists do what they like, since there are other pharmacists who won’t deny a woman a legally prescribed drug.” as being much the same as the following statements:
“It’s fine to let a hospital emergency room deny treatment to someone who is ill, because there are other hospitals in other places that don’t!”
Or:
“It’s perfectly fine for a bus driver to refuse to allow a black man to board the bus, because there are plenty of bus drivers who WILL allow him t oboard the bus!”
Or:
“It’s great that the police have the right to refuse to stop a crime in progress because they feel the victim deserves it! After all, there are still plenty of police officers who would stop the crime regardless of their personal feelings!”
There are many jobs that conservative Christians might avoid for religious reasons, like bar tending, porn shops, stem cell research or natural history museum tour guide to name a few. So what if pharmacist becomes one of those off-limits jobs? More good jobs for the rest of us.
Do businesses have an obligation to supply everything their customers might need or want?
Pharmacies are obligated to provide any prescription medication because they have a federally mandated monopoly on providing said medications. The granting of that monopoly does indeed come with the obligation of fucking actually doing it. The reason that such a monopoly is better than the Wild West of medicinal dosing has already been addressed.
And for the third time, there are many places for which one particular pharmacy, with less than a handful of pharmacists, is the only place a person has to obtain prescriptions. All the talk about not patronizing those pharmacies because the market will put anyone not providing all medications out of business is bullshit in the real world of those small towns. They are the only game in town, and the only way to make them do their duty is to legally force them to do it. At the very least, the pharmacists and state legislatures should be bound by what the FDA says about how a drug works (i.e., admitting that Plan B does NOT prevent a zygote from implantation.)
Fixed.
and the libertarian ethos shines through
There’s your problem.
No, it hasn’t.
@Kate
Look at this video
Think of the babies
A better analogy would be.
“That train driver should be forced to take those innocent Jews to be slaughtered even though he ethically objects to it. he should be fired for not doing his job. Killings Jews is perfectly legal under the law of germany and he should do what he is legally obligated to do.”
Hey Walton what is your take on the military? Do we have a right to be defended by an army?
Walton, you’re a fucking idiot.
Every statement you make is so very wrong, on so many levels.
I’m killfiling you, as I don’t see how any amount of reason is going to do anything to dispel the miasma of stupid which surrounds you.
Aren’t you in the UK, Walton? That’s pretty rich coming from someone who has benefited from spending his entire life in a country that believes in the right to medical treatment. Next time you get a sniffle, don’t go to the doctor unless you plan on paying the full cost of it yourself. In the US, that would be between 100-200 dollars just for walking in the door. Add another hundred if you need a bacteria tested for, then another 50 to 140 if you need an antibiotic.
Or quit
Before giving out Viagra, prudes can demand to see
wedding rings or,
marriage licenses, and
a signed note from the wife that hubby needs it for her and not some floozy.
Walton, you write as if ‘rights’ have some sort of independent existence. They don’t. Only ‘the powerful’ can grant rights, & in a democracy, the citizens are the ‘the powerful’, so they have granted pharmacists certain rights, & duties.
If pharmacy is a self-governing profession in the USA, the professional body will control its members within guidelines that are written into State legislation. This legislation should give both the public & pharmacists ‘rights’. I don’t actually know how USA law works in this regard.
As I wrote back at # 6, “… because it is conceivable that the public could be severely disadvantaged. It seems to follow that their professional or licensing bodies should step in to prevent injustice.”
I would have thought that it is reasonable that there is a regulation obliging pharmacists to fill properly obtained prescriptions. How does the new law tie in with existing legislation? Are there any lawyers here?
@Chayanov
Why do you think so many Christians set up organisations like “Focus on the Family” Thye do it to promote good family values.
It is false to say people don’t try to help out families and just want women to be punished.
Ineffable,
That’s a rather hyperbolic comparison. When the vast majority of abortions take place, the “baby” is nothing more than a ball of cells, with no brain stem, no personality and few human attributes. It’s hardly comparable to an adult human being, in terms of the value of its life.
And, more importantly, women (like all human beings) are rightfully sovereign over their own bodies. Even if the foetus were in all respects a developed person, the woman would still have an absolute right to deprive it of access to her body. This is for the same reason that we don’t force people to donate organs without their consent, even if the organ is urgently necessary to save someone’s life. Your body is your own property, and it remains so even if this leads to the death of others.
You know, if I were the CEO of a large corporation, and weren’t a complete idiot like so many are… I’d shy away from states like these. The reason being I know that I’m going to have gay, liberal, etc. employees that, if they have to transfer there are:
a) Not going to go because they’re revolted.
b) If they get there, will be appalled at the rest of the crap that goes on there and will start looking to leave because they’re uncomfortable and don’t want their kids to be exposed to that stupidity.
Those two examples come from real-life experiences of friends. I’m sure there are more.
Walton:
This bill does not make it illegal to buy abortifacient drugs.
It has been pointed out on this thread already that in many religious and rural areas where a fantastic free market of pharmacies does not in fact exist, it entails pretty much the same thing: people who need it can’t get it.
Does that bother you?
What should a person in such a locale do, according to you?
Ineffable, you’re also an idiot.
How you can miss the point so spectacularly is amazing. Really amazing.
So, kill file for you.
This sentiment has been expressed before:
If you’re a Muslim, don’t work at a pig farm. If you’re a Christian Scientist, don’t work at a hospital. If you’re Amish, don’t work at the Sony factory.
Actually, it seems in most of the above situations, the said people would acknowledge that they are not fit for these jobs and so not consider them, kind of like most Silicon Valley guys accept that Olympic Marathon Runner is not a valid career choice for them.
Why then do Fundamentalist Christians want to work as Ob/Gyns or pharmacists? It seems like a greater percentage of them would want to sabotage their jobs than anything. We don’t protect environmental terrorists who get jobs at factory farms. ] That would be stupid. Why the hell are we protecting fundamentalist Christians who choose to work as pharmacists who fill contraception prescriptions for everyone in a community? With the anti discrimination laws against creed (which I agree with), I don’t think employers can ask a potential employee whether they’d fill a contraceptive prescription while hiring them. And now they can’t fire them for not doing their job? If I was a right winger, and this crap was coming from the left it would smell like socialism!
Argumentum ad hominem. The fact that I myself receive free medical care has no bearing on the validity of my argument.
Before giving out Viagra, prudes can demand to see wedding rings or,marriage licenses, and a signed note from the wife that hubby needs it for her and not some floozy.
That’s already been done for decades wrt birth control pills until very recently, and I wouldn’t doubt if it’s still being done in some places where it’s small and insular enough that no one steps up to complain about it.
The fact that I myself receive free medical care has no bearing on the validity of my argument.
I wasn’t addressing your argument directly; I was addressing the fact that you have no concept of the real-world consequences of your lofty thought processes and then try to hand-wave it away when anyone tells you what those consequences would be.
if you manage to stop masturbating to Ayn Rand for a bit, you just might feel the clue bat smacking you in the face.
Based on previous adolescent whinging from Walton, the resulting improvement in personal appearance from a smack of the clue bat may improve Walton’s chances with whatever species he’s pining for.
Perhaps taking the gender out of the equation will help Walton grasp the situation.
Almost ten years ago, I popped a blister or “blep” near the apex of my right lung that was one of those congenital things affecting a tiny percentage of tall skinny people; it could have gone at any time, so I was fortunate that it didn’t happen decades earlier. The resulting collapsed lung required surgery, opening an incision in my right side, starting beneath the nipple, the surgeon pried a couple of ribs apart to get access to staple off a bit of my lung. The surgeon missed a spot and, a couple of days later, had to continue the incision nearly to the spine to finish the job. Having your ribs pried apart twice in 48 hours, along with having close to fifty staples in your side, is quite painful, and, after recovering for a day or two on morphine, I was switched over to highest-strength percoset, and discharged with a prescription to fill.
I went to a local pharmacy at a drug store, where I watched the pharmacist look at the prescription, and look at me, then back at the prescription. It had been some time since my last meds, and it was starting to become very painful to breathe. She demanded to know what I was trying to pull on her, that if she filled that prescription the DEA would pull her license, with the implicit accusation in her manner that I was a DFH trying to scam opiates with a fake prescription. The doctor had merely failed to specify a number for the dosage, but she refused to contact the doctor and correct it. I had to drive back to the hospital, ask the doctor to write a new prescription and have it filled elsewhere.
I was at fault, from that pharmacist’s position, she was practically shouting at me. How dare I ask her to fill a prescription for opiates. If I was experiencing pain, I must deserve it for looking the way I do. Had I been a woman trying to obtain Plan B, I’d have been an eqivalently despicable whore, somebody the pharmacist would be entitled by such legislation to withhold medicine because of their superior virtue.
America is psychotic with respect to drugs, and about wombs.
Are you stupid? Because this isn’t even good trolling.
The reason is because after years, sometimes decades, it’s been shown those medicines are extremely, but not perfectly, safe and reliable. Further, they have an extremely low incidence of abuse because, frankly, they don’t get you high. Additionally, they are generally for medicines for chronic conditions where constant medical supervision (such as allergies) is not warranted. Or for non-chronic issues regarding easily diagnosed conditions where the medicine has, once again, has low potential for harm from abuse under conditions of widespread availability.
You don’t find codeine OTC. You won’t find statins OTC. You will find acid-reflux medication, allergy medication and certain other antihistamines as OTCs now.
Ineffable, did you know that Walton supports selling hard-core pornography to schoolchildren?
Walton, have you heard that Ineffable wants to restrict individual commerce and freedom of the press?
Everybody else, while those two are engaging in an uplifting exchange of perspectives, how ’bout some popcorn & beer*?
*Not Bud or Busch – I feel a boycott of all things Missourian coming on…
Ineffable, they aren’t babies until they born. Saying anything else shows you to be a liar. Nobody is interested in your propaganda. So, the best thing you can do is to simply fade into the bandwidth. Doing so will improve the aggregate IQ here.
Libertarians, think for just a minute about what complete freedom of the market in health care would actually mean. What price for your life? When any surgeon or EMT pr pharmacist is capable of charging whatever they want or refuse service, what price do you think the market will bear for that? And how many people do you think will be able to afford it? When you’re in the middle of your heart attack, how much time will you spend doing cost comparisons of the three local hospitals, all of which are charging as high as they can get away with?
This is terrible. How can this crap still go on. It is time to bring home the troops, to remove the Taliban from Missouri. Until they come back to their senses, Missouri should go back to being the back wood inbreed territory it always was. I lived there for a job. After 2 years, I had enough and moved back to Wisconsin. http://noguyinthesky.blogspot.com/2009/05/ceo-annouces-creation-of-burger-king.html
Oh, whatever. Maybe you’re right. It’s not been a great week and I am fully conscious of the fact that I may be talking crap. I frequently do.
But at least my remarks got an interesting discussion going, rather than 1000 repetitions of “fuck the evil religious right” and “can I move to Canada now?”, interspersed with a bit of nonsense from Ineffable.
Ya know, if I had two hours to burn, I would write a greasemonkey script that would replace the comments of idiots like ineffable with something like “Do you like pie?” or “I’m a useless douchebag and my comments are not worth reading.”
Carlie, they can’t think that far ahead… they can’t yet get past their teen-aged masturbatory fantasies of a world in which they can do whatever they please, whenever they please.
They lack a sense of responsibility and duty.
I suggest that compulsory military service, as in some European countries be introduced here in North America. There are more than a few “entitlement-whores” who could benefit from the life lessons such service imparts on the participants.
JeffS @74: “I was outraged originally by this, but thinking further, the christians do see selling abortifacients as no different from selling a gun to someone you know is going to kill a child.”
There is a big difference. In the case of the homicidal gun fancier, you would be helping him commit a crime. In the case of Plan B the person is doing something perfectly legal. We ALL agree that putting a bullet through the head of a child is wrong. We disagree on whether taking plan B is wrong.
When you accept a position as a pharmacist (or police officer, or physician, or many other careers in the public service) you also accept certain responsibilities that are based on *public* mores and laws. If you are unwilling to accept those responsibilities, you should not enter these fields.
And it cuts both ways even if you are a rational and progressive atheist. I’m an ER physician and I see a number of kids in my granola college town whose parents don’t vaccinate. My belief (based on both the available evidence and medical ethics) tells me that these parents are being irresponsible and endangering their child. I would love to lock the parent out of the room and provide their kids with a ‘vaccination extravaganza’ that would make Jenny McCarthy shit herself. I also think that would be the ethical thing to do given that children cannot consent and when parents refuse proper health care for their children, society must assume that responsibility. However, that is neither legal nor currently considered ethical by our society, so I can’t. Failing to protect these kids from their fucktard parents seems unethical and wrong to me, but I am forced to do that by the standards of professionalism and the cultural mores of our society.
But then I knew that going into this field and accepted the restrictions that would be placed on me by my profession. And even if I hadn’t known that, upon learning of it I would have only two acceptable options: chose to work with that sort of restriction or if it is too great for me to ethically accept, take the honorable way out and change professions. Deciding to foist your ethics on others when you have been given a position of power over those others is morally bankrupt and professionally inexcusable.
Walton, I certainly think you’re interesting to argue with, and leagues above people like Ineffable. But do listen when you get criticisms of your position, if only to figure out in your own mind how better to defend yourself the next time.
No Guy – let’s not tar all of Missouri, shall we? There are a lot of really good people there.
@ Blue Girl
OMG. DO IT! DO IT NOW!
oft quoted but very appropriate
Rev: I remind you that I’ve never read Atlas Shrugged.
That’s something that’s puzzled me for years. They’re so often “Teh Bibble iz tru!” Well, then why the upset at abortion? They’re not actually ‘people’ according to Exodus. If I beat a pregnant woman and she miscarries, it’s just a civil matter:
That simple. But if I hurt her more than just the miscarriage:
Exodus 21:22-25 Clearly, hurting the woman (a full person) is far more serious than causing a miscarriage.
Now, I know there are lot more verses in the Bible that are routinely used by the anti-choice lobby. However, I know these verses and they taken out of context, or read in novel ways that do not make any sort of sense, to support their anti-abortion screeds.
Which is not difficult. I can take Bible verses and show support for euthanasia and abortion. And, they’re in more context when I do it than the Creo-tards and their anti-abortion stance.
None of this means I’m “Pro Abortion.” I’m really not. But I understand it’s not my place to legislate my beliefs. Or to even try to guilt-trip women into making bad life decisions. Not because I’m a man. But because I damn well understand I don’t have all the answers and, ultimately, it’s my job as a husband and father to support the decisions made by my wife and daughters about their bodies.
Just as I expect them support the decisions I make about mine. I’ll be frank, I live with the very real possibility of death-by-prostate-cancer as it runs in my family. It’s killed a good one-half of my male blood-line relatives over the past 50 years. (They were all old men, don’t get me wrong it’s not “heart-attack-at-40” tragedy, but it’s what got them.) Having watched it twice, an uncle and my grandfather (and his brother whom I didn’t see), the last few months are pretty fucked up. If it happens to me… I’m hopping on a plane to Oregon and that’ll be that… And I expect them to respect that decision.
So, really, I’m in the “safe, legal & rare” category. Which is why I’m big on sex ed, condoms, the pill, and dealing with the reality that mistakes (and bad things) happen and the best course of action is to prevent pregnancy.
You didn’t miss anything. But maybe you should. You’ll see how incredibly stupid it really is…
It’s both amazing and amusing to me that Walton can hang out here for so long, and so often, and get stoopider by the week. By this time next year he should be able to cluck and lay eggs.
One of the links given @#69 leads to an article about Muslim women in medical professions refusing to scrub before surgery, of refusing to wear surgical scrubs that stop at the elbow. The reason: the women’s forearms would be exposed. This is where exceptions for religious beliefs can lead. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Universities and NHS trusts fear many more will refuse to co-operate with new Department of Health guidance, introduced this month, which stipulates that all doctors must be “bare below the elbow”.
The measure is deemed necessary to stop the spread of infections such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile, which have killed hundreds.
Minutes of a clinical academics’ meeting at Liverpool University revealed that female
Muslim students at Alder Hey children’s hospital had objected to rolling up their sleeves to wear gowns.
Similar concerns have been raised at Leicester University. Minutes from a medical school committee said that “a number of Muslim females had difficulty in complying with the procedures to roll up sleeves to the elbow for appropriate handwashing”.
Sheffield University also reported a case of a Muslim medic who refused to “scrub” as this left her forearms exposed.
Documents from Birmingham University reveal that some students would prefer to quit the course rather than expose their arms, and warn that it could leave trusts open to legal action.
Hygiene experts said last night that no exceptions should be made on religious grounds.
The point of the quote still stands.
@ KATE
It will take some time, and a fair amount of work, and then it will only work if you are using Firefox. But if I do, will that redeem Missouri a little bit? :)
@ Blue Girl:
I already use Firefox, and I don’t blame you for the idiocy of your fellow Missourians.
I just think it would be friggin’ HIGH-LARIOUS.
I’m all about the giggles, you see.
Calie @57: Thanks for making that point again. It didn’t sink in the first time. You are right. I didn’t think of the consequences for people who live near a single pharmacy, or, worse yet, have to drive long distances to get to even one pharmacy.
I like Walton. He makes an effort. I disagree with almost everything Walton says. And he can be monumentally irritating. Still, he’s real. He’s unique. He’s himself. I think we’d recognize him even if he signed on as anonymous.
Now, Walton, dear, extend your efforts just a bit more so that your frontal lobes are not soaked in libertarian koolaid.
One question: would pharmacists in Missouri enjoy the option of filling or rejecting prescriptions for anti-HIV or anti-hep drugs, users of which are frequently members of groups subject to sectarian opprobrium?
@Lynna:
…and now if only everyone else could grasp this elementary fact, perhaps sanity and reason might take the forefront in this “debate”. (It’s not a debate really, though…. is it? It’s just a bunch of whiny babies bitching about having to actually do their jobs…)
@ Kate
I’m pretty into the giggles myself. I’ll put that on my to-do list. I try to do at least one good deed a week – I’ll try to do as this weeks public service effort!
I fell the same way about Walton.
But lets not turn this into another Walton feeling sorry for himself thread please.
@Lynna: I was referring to your comment about the possible lack of other options for those denied drugs by a pharmacist, not Walton’s supposed or imagined worth as a human being.
If Walton ever showed the least bit of interest in participating here, he would stop making the same tired arguments which have been refuted time and again.
Walton is both stupid and boring, two character flaws from which he shows no signs of recovery.
fellfeelA lot of commenters have noted that if the requirements of a job go against your religious beliefs, you should not plan a career in that field.
YECs are not qualified to teach evolution, geology, etc. But they do train for and sign up for those positions, especially at the high school level. I suspect that there is some sort of emotional gratification going on here. They stood up for their beliefs, they suffered, they slowed down the growth of materialism, maybe they’re even saving the world.
Far from staying out of the pharmacy business, I expect them to try to take it over step by step.
Lynna,
Thanks – I was starting to feel like a broken record. It’s just that even for people raised in medium-sized cities, or near them, it’s hard to fathom how isolated so many people are. A person doesn’t have to live in NY or LA to not quite get how difficult it can be to get services. Take a town with just one pharmacy, and already you run the risk that the pharmacist on duty is friends with your family and likely to tell them you were in for EC (even if a legal adult, that can still be shaming in conservative families). Swallow that fear and go anyway, and now the pharmacist doesn’t give it to you? How to get it somewhere else, assuming the pharmacist gives you the prescription back? You might work at a job that has a shitty schedule and no time off, like most crappy jobs. The nearest pharmacy around that will give it to you might be two hours away, and you don’t have a four-hour block of time during open pharmacy hours (because most in small places aren’t 24/7) until five days from now. Oops, there goes the chance to use EC altogether. It’s not hypothetical. It’s not a chance in a million. It’s a certainty if this law stands.
Rev @135: Please don’t fall over Walton. Walton falls all over himself.
We need a law that allows pharmacists to ask if the patient is religious and attends church regularly. If so, the pharmacist may include Prozac with all other prescriptions. Utah has the highest per capita use of Prozac, and other “red” states are right up there. I mean, as long as we’re passing laws, let’s do something useful.
MosesZD,
Don’t try mixing aspirin and ibuprofen next time
you have a headache or an aching joint.
Mixing the two can cause bleeding problems.
Also, you should make your pharmacist and doctors aware if you regularly take aspirin or ibuprofen.
More generally regarding pharmacists checking for drug interactions. This only works if the pharmacist knows all
the medications you are taking. If you have to go to a second pharmacy for any reason how likely will it be that both pharmacists will have a knowledge of all you prescriptions?
I’m not saying pharmacists should be done away with,
but there is an inherent problem with saying only a particular group can sell something, and then allowing them to decide if they will sell that item.
I find it interesting that ineffable thinks a Jew is no more of a person that a zygote. (In its retarded analogy, women are nazis, right? Because women are evil.)
I also find it interesting (but not even remotely surprising) that Walton doesn’t object to anything that deprives women of liberty. It’s facism for him to pay taxes or obey speed limits, but it’s hunky dory to forbid women from controlling their own bodies. Like so many libertardians, he’s a bigoted little tyrant. He really doesn’t give a flying fuck about freedom.
rnb, I know you’re stupid, but quit trying to come up with a hypothetical situation to support your Wild West Pill Show idea. You’re only making yourself look like more of a desperate libertardian every time you post.
@Walton:
I’m going to list a series of statements. Please tell me which in the sequence you disagree with or feel is/are unwarranted.
1) The/A fundamental right of all humans is to protect themselves.
2) Humans have a (derived or fundamental, doesn’t matter) right to freely band together for a common purpose.
3) One of these purposes may be to enforce (1).
4) In order to accomplish (3), restrictions may be placed on the handling, possession, ownership, and usage of certain dangerous substances and materials (‘S&M’).
5) To ensure (4), those who wish to handle, possess, own, distribute, and/or use such S&M may be required to demonstrate the ability to do so in a proper and safe manner.
6) A special designation or permit – such as a certification or license – may be issued and limited, in use and nature, for the purposes of (5).
7) The attainment of such a designation or permit as in (6) may require substantial investment of time, money, education, and other resources to attain.
8) Due to (7), the supply of those who are able to comply with (5) may be quite limited.
9) Further, not all who are able to comply with (5) may have an interest in doing so, further limiting the supply.
10) Some S&M which fall under (5) and (6) may also be necessary to the health and/or protection of some individuals.
11) Some designations and/or permits for S&M that fall under (8) and (9) may create local or general monopolies, in fact or by law.
12) Designations and/or permits that fall under (10) and (11), in reasonable potential or in reality, may have requirements and/or restrictions imposed in accordance with (3).
13) Requirements as indicated in (12) may include positive actions such as the providing of a restricted S&M, or services related to the designation and/or permit and the S&M it regards, as long as the receiver meets all basic requirements to receive such service and/or S&M.
From the Berkeley Concert, Lenny Bruce lays down The Law, and the reason for separation of Church and State.
And then there is no guarantee that even Wal-Mart will have a pharamacist willing to fill the scrip.
The other problem is that the rural areas are way more likely to have non-prescribing pharmacists.
And I’m not sure what Walton’s problem is. I’d guess that he has a perfectly coherent and internally consistent philosophical system that completely fails in the real world. Good luck arguing with that.
Carlie – true story follows.
One of my coworkers, a 40-year-old, was asked by two high school boys of his acquaintance to buy them some condoms. Hot double date, I suppose. He did so at the convenience store in his town of Roby, Texas, which is too small to even have a pharmacy. By the time he got home, his wife knew he’d bought four condoms and was wondering, out loud to him, why……
If housepets were libertarians (my apologies if this has been posted here before):
http://www.leftycartoons.com/if-housepets-were-libertarians/
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything which so succinctly disposes of libertarian “reasoning.”
i love lenny bruce
Anonymous @ 100
That you’re naming this group as something positive tells me that by “good family values” you mean “Christian theocracy.” Thanks for clearing that up.
Why do politicians give names like “Blue Skies” to bills that increase air pollution and turn the air brown?
Idiot…
And, yes, they want women punished. But beyond that, they want you to HATE yourself. You’re a worm. A sinner. You are wretched piece of shit in God’s eye. But he loves you. And they’re MORE THAN HAPPY to sell you their books on how to get better with God so he’ll LOVE YOU and YOU CAN BE happy… It’s a total scam. Just like Benny Hinn and the rest.
I agree with this law.
I have no problem with Plan B, and I’ll gladly dispense it to anyone who needs it, but I agree with the law.
Why do you think so many Christians set up organisations like “Focus on the Family” Thye do it to promote good family values.
Like how James Dobson says that little boys should watch their fathers in the shower so they don’t turn out to be gay, because by admiring their father’s huge penis they’ll want to be manly men too.
@#4: My understanding is that Illinois has an OPPOSITE provision, that is currently being challenged in court. Any pharmacist, when presented with a legal and valid prescription, is REQUIRED to fill it. I may be a little vague on this, but will try to find a reference.
I fail to see how this applies to anything I said about OTC/prescription drugs. I was explaining why certain drugs have gone from prescription to OTC. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Whomever you are arguing with, it isn’t me.
As for the issue of the thread, I’m a licensed professional. In my profession we have a quasi-monopoly protected by the state. Because of this, we have obligations to the State and to the general public beyond our obligations to our client. Many people in my profession moved away from this.
We had Enron and the end of Arthur Anderson. Before AA went down, L&H went down. Other big firms have collapsed when they have forgotten these obligations. Many in my profession have done jail time because they have forgotten these obligations. Or have been sued into poverty.
Pharmacists have, in my mind, the same obligations. And one of them is to, baring professional reasons to safety and efficacy, fill all prescriptions as written. If they don’t do so, they should lose their license. Period.
If you think that’s harsh, my other solution is “responsibility.” They want to play
god, they need to suffer the consequences. First, if a woman ends up pregnant because she couldn’t, within reason, get the RX filled. The Pharmacist should be on the hook for child support, through college, just like any dad where I’m from. Second, there should be a civil penalty over him/her that is held in abeyance and is forgiven if s/he completes his child support obligations. Third, if she doesn’t come up pregnant, there should be a substantial civil penalty (at least $100K) to the State plus a minimum ($100K )civil remedy for the emotional pain and suffering to the woman.
I figure, you want to meddle in some-one’s life. Sure, be an ass if that’s what works for you. But you get the responsibility for your interference.
If you don’t like to provide necessary meds, but rather want to promote ancient rubbish ideas, you really shouldn’t be a pharmacist.
Focus on the Family as a supporter and promoter of families? What a laugh. You’re going to have to try harder than that.
Moses ZD @156 You’ve hit the nail on the head.
They don’t WANT to be responsible… for anything. It’s everyone else’s duty to be responsible, NOT theirs. It doesn’t matter that the religiotards interfere with and obstruct people who are TRYING to be responsible, those evil LIBRUL-ISLAMOFASCIST-SOCIALIST-COMMIE-HIPPIES should just BE responsible anyway… through magic or fairies or some such thing.
…Then again, if you “forced” these idiots to take responsibility for their actions, you’d be a big meanie who’s trying to TAKE AWAY THEIR RIGHT TO TAKE AWAY OTHER’S RIGHTS!!!!111!!!!!one!!!!!1111!111!!eleventy-one!!
It’s unfortunate for the rest of us, and fortunate for the far-right that there is not, as of yet, a concerted effort to make them aware of and legally responsible for the consequences of their actions.
I guess the point I’m making is they scream and cry and wail about “Not granting special rights”, then they ask for special rights in the very next breath… but don’t for a single second see that they are so very wrong all over. It boggles the mind, it does, how they can’t even allow the tiniest bit of logic to permeate.
I’m sure I’ve read this thread last year ! Or the year before?
Pharmacists not filling scripts,the female muslim doctors not washing their hands…
It’s all been said before,if your religious persuasion interferes with your ability to function as required in a certain profession,you shouldnt be doing it.
Or,the law should state that you shouldnt be doing it.
And here is Missouri doing it all backwards,protecting charlatans for not doing their job ! *Sigh*
Focus on the Family is usually called Focus on Overthrowing the Government. Although some misguided individuals call it Focus on the Patriarchy.
Dobson and his merry band of fanatics are hardcore Xian Dominionists. He makes no secret he wants to overthrow the US government, set up a theocracy, and head on back to the Dark Ages.
Dobson is a individual of many and intense hatreds and power hungry as well. What these so called xians have to do with xianity has never been explained.
It is called branding or lying. War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.
Christofascists always do this.
The Discovery Institute. Which discovers nothing and is just a propaganda arm for xian Doms.
Institute for Creation Research. A diploma mill in Texas that does no research.
Liberty University which should be called Christofascist U.
Dobson and his wannabe theocrats are very much in favor of keeping women barefoot and pregnant. He opposed for decades having women work outside of the home. Then turned around and supported Sarah Palin, a mother of 5 children, one a newborn Downs as a US VP candidate.
The hypocrisy wasn’t lost on anyone especially women. Focus on Overthrowing the Government is losing money and members right and left.
Why are pharmacists allowed to keep a position when they know full well they aren’t going to be able to do the job? No-one else is.
A suitably illustrative anecdote: I have a degree in psychology; however I don’t feel comfortable working with depressed people, because – amongst other reasons – I’d worry too much I wouldn’t be able to help them.
You know what I did? I didn’t pursue a career in counselling. I fucking didn’t well put up a shingle and have people come to me for help and have me turn them away because I didn’t like what their problem was. I realised my feelings prevented me from being able to fulfill the requirements of the position.
So I echo the sentiment: don’t want to dispense these drugs? Then find another fucking job, Christard.
Really this is just fundie xians trying to irritate the rest of us. They do it all the time. Creationism in kids science classes, the 10 commandments in court houses, hating gays, throwing a hissy fit about Happy Holidays, burning Harry Potter books, Warring on Halloween, bombing family planning clinics.
An endless parade that says to everyone, we are going to force our weird, toxic cult down your throat whether you like it or not. I doubt they really give a damn about any of their causes.
And it is working. The majority of the US population is sick and tired of these brain damaged creeps. Proof below, facts to a fundie are like a silver bullet to a werewolf.
Of course, what they aren’t anticipating is that this will be an own goal – religiotards already have high rates of teenage pregnancy, and if they really believe that use of emergency contraception is restricted to atheists, they’re in for a shock.
I, of course, will continue to dispense emergency contraception, for free, from my emergency department.
But then I’m probably a devil worshipper.
http://doihaveswineflu.org/
They know, they just don’t care.
Red states like Missouri have much higher social problem percentages than the rest of the USA. Teen pregnancy is a big one because it correlates with life long poverty. You end up with a lot of single female parent households on welfare with poorly socialized kids running loose, some of which will end up in prison.
Instead of fixing their social problems, they are just pouring gasoline on them. Not smart.
Except for the proportion who are complete hypocrites*, as illustrated in Joyce Arthur’s essay on that topic, The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion.
*Note: I consider most Christians to be hypocrites by definition; however, not all of them are necessarily hypocrites regarding abortion. Those who are against it, however, are certainly all idiots.
And that probably makes you the most ethically questionable of anyone here.
Don’t you get it? Most of the posters here, like you, would have no problem getting emergency contraception if we needed it. We are (with one or two exceptions) educated, literate, able to argue our point, have the strength to go from one pharmacy to another until we get what we need and have the financial wherewithal to pay for it.We are arguing on behalf of those who are not in that position.
No political party is going to be able to take away my ability to pay the bills and put food on the table. I’m incredibly fortunate. It therefore behooves me to fight for those who are poor, less articulate, less educated because society sure won’t listen to their arguments.
If you have to go to a second pharmacy for any reason how likely will it be that both pharmacists will have a knowledge of all you prescriptions?
Depends.
Do they have these new-fangled things called “telephones”?
If so they can use them to call the doctor listed on the scrip.
I wish we had a pharmacist that could answer this (I might call my sis in law and ask)
But I was getting a scrip filled a few weeks back and the lady in front of me was told she couldn’t get a scrip for her mother filled because it had already been filled at another store. We were at CVS the other store was Wall Mart.
I wonder how they knew? Is there a cross store system that tracks these things?
OI wasn’t paying good enough attention to see if she had called anyone.
ineffectual @93:
I suspect that spamming those vid links will get you tossed into the dungeon quick enough, so if that’s your goal (it’s obviously not to present any kind of rational argument), then why not just spam links instead of saying anything at all?
Your goal will be reached even more quickly.
The day is not very far off, when the script goes directly to the pharmacy electronically,( which in some instances now occurs ) and is filled according to corporate policy. Even Wal-Mart has many small towns covered. The pharmacist almost becomes a bean counter, because his computer checks interactions, and all meds history is available centrally.
This can be argued as bad, but anonymity can be positive. The personalized decision was made by the doctor, after that, all is assembly line.
Rev @170
If she has a drug plan, with auto pay, co-pay deducted at store level, then the insurer computer said something to the effect of only once thank-you.
riiiight the insurance
should have thought of that
*blames his hangover
@174
Canadian Bacon with a little liquid homeopathy I was told somewhere else works.
Okay, it has gotten a tad long, so if this has been addressed before, well now it’s being addressed again.
The post title is best worded as either…
Missouri Absolves Pharmacists of Responsibility
or…
Missouri Shields Pharmacists from Responsibility
From the wording of the post itself, the second sounds like the more likely outcome of Missouri’s action.
Alan Kellogg, taking inordinate pride in his autistic traits. :)
“This can be argued as bad, but anonymity can be positive. The personalized decision was made by the doctor, after that, all is assembly line.”
Ummm.. are you thick?
IT’S NOT A PERSONALIZED DECISION.
IT’S A FUCKING MEDICAL TREATMENT.
IT’S A CONTRACEPTIVE THAT PREVENTS OVULATION THE SAME AS THE PILL.
Holy crap there are a whack-load of dull, dense, stupid people here tonight.
We’re not all insane in Missouri. I recommend all fellow Missourians get behind Senate Bill 203 (http://www.senate.mo.gov/09info/BTS_Web/Bill.aspx?SessionType=R&BillID=561077)
basically it states:
This act provides that upon receiving a valid, lawful prescription for a contraceptive, a pharmacy has a duty to dispense the contraceptive or a suitable alternative permitted by the health care provider who issued the prescription.
Kate @177
In the sense of thick skinned.
You should include yourself, and re-read the whole post for meaning. The post started pointing out the process of filling scripts would soon be automated,nothing about what came before.
Will re-write to a grade 2 level:
Patient sees doctor. Doctor makes diagnosis. Doctor decides a drug treatment course. Doctor discusses with patient. Doctor tells patient to go get the script at pharmacy, as doctor has electronically transmitted. End of personalization. Pharmacy may or may not know patient, fills script, patient picks up, automated process, nothing personal. There are some that may object because they would like to “take a note from the doctor to the drug store”.
Did you have any examples of where fucking is part of a medical treatment?
Is that supposed to make some sense? Is it a question or a statement? Or, is it a reflection of your current estrogen or blood alcohol level? Choose one or more, and explain to the thick.
I’m looking forward to that new firefox script that will turn plonked posts into even more amusing gibberish, so I can read that instead of lines like this misogynist turd plopped in pharyngula’s punchbowl by RMM Barrie:
Fuck you and your facile equivalence. When I read posts like that, despite my testosterone poisoning, my cycle starts to synch up with the estrogen-identified posters.
Or, is it a reflection of your current estrogen or blood alcohol level?
How cute, the little sexist troglodyte wants to talk like the adults.
Too bad, fucktard. Killfile.
I’m a pharmacy student, and honestly, I cannot understand someone who goes into the profession deciding a priori that there are prescriptions they don’t want to fill. It’s like a med student specializing in gynecology/family medicine knowing that they don’t want to prescribe birth control or educate patients about contraception, and only discuss sex if they have a wedding ring on. I don’t care what the law or your conscience says, it’s an important part of the job description and if you are unwilling or unable to fulfill it, find another line of work.
Attitudes like this are seriously damaging to the profession. Laws like this, and the pharmacists who they protect, do nothing to make pharmacists look like highly educated and trustworthy health care professionals, and makes them look like judgmental twats over-exercising their power. Odds are people are scared and nervous enough to ask pharmacists about Plan B, nevermind what happens when there’s a legitimate chance they could be refused help.
Also an important issue to bring up: there is no evidence that Plan B is an abortafacient. And what many religious authorities declare to be abortafacients are often not considered abortafacients by medical authorities.
Well, RM,you managed to miss the point twice.
So, since that’s the case, it seems my original assessment of your thick-headedness is being propped up by the evidence you have so graciously provided.
Before I killfile you, just one more thing:
You’re a Douche, RM. Practically useless and irritating to women. If you had even bothered to think previous to making your very stupid statement, you might not have come off as such a spectacularly misogynistic fool.
Ken @180
Perhaps I should have written it better, as the estrogen was tying in to the statement “IT’S A CONTRACEPTIVE THAT PREVENTS OVULATION THE SAME AS THE PILL.” which I cannot make any sense out of. Can you explain that to me?
@Adam #182:
Just so you know, this hasn’t soured my views on your profession as a whole.
I rely on my pharmacists knowledge to improve my health through education (I ask a lot of questions!), I rely on their expertise and years of study to ensure I am not only taking the right medications, but that I am doing so in a safe and effective manner. I trust that I can ask them about OTC meds, so that I can ensure I am not mixing things I shouldn’t or using a product that isn’t right for me.
I, like you, object to those who would pervert what is a necessary and vital part of health care for all people.
All the best to you in your studies,
Signed
Someone who appreciates your dedication to the ethics of your future profession.
in general response to Blue @181 and Kate @183
Will not elaborate since it will not be read if I am in the kill file, and I doubt anyone else would want to read.
Two points:
1. I should learn how to spell abortifacient.
2. I have been saying for the longest time that when I graduate, I am going to refuse to dispense lipitor because I am morally opposed to fat people. I don’t live in an area where a law like this exists, but I wonder if it could work in Missouri.
@184
Barrie… the sentence you are trying to understand is a valid and factual sentence.
Plan B prevents ovulation, it is considered an emergency contraceptive, and you can get the same effect by taking 6 regular birth control pills (3 in the AM, 3 twelve hours later).
There may have been a slight breakdown in communication somewhere, but that sentence made sense, as it was relevant to the overall topic.
On another note… something we perhaps haven’t thought of:
Perhaps these legislators do understand exactly what Plan B is, and what it does; and therefore they might be trying to push their BS onto regular birth control (as it is the same ingredient as Plan B)
Any thoughts? Maybe these people are being way way way sneakier… as is evidenced by the fact that ru486 is unavailable at a pharmacy (so legislating it out of the pharmacy does nothing) – Perhaps they’re trying to attack ALL birth control by pointing to this as precedent?
Scary thought (and it hasn’t been brought up yet, i checked!)
This particular issue has just gotten under my skin. I’ve just stepped away from an argument about this law on Reddit, linked below if you want to read it.
Arguing with some people is like arguing with a child who just learned the word ‘why’… it’s frustrating and I should learn to just back away sooner. I feel this way most when arguing with people coming from a theist mindset. I gather some of you often feel the same way about the trolls that appear here. Maybe I am a glutton for punishment–injecting myself into situations I know are going to do me no good.
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/8hihy/wtf_missouri_house_passes_law_that_says_no/
Adam @187
There is pretty good evidence that a statin, in general, will lessen the severity of a second stroke in normal weight populations, and familial hypercholesterolemia does not leave a lot of choices after diet an exercise.
This is where the pharmacist plays such an important role in patient guidance.
That is what is going on.
The fundies extremists keep trying to outlaw all birth control. They claim the hormonal pills and IUDs are abortifacients. They aren’t under medical definitions and US law.
Some fundie pharmacists have gotten in trouble for refusing to fill BC prescriptions.
Some Catholic owned pharmacies refuse to stock any BC, like the wacko one in Grand Rapids.
Really, this is just xian fanatics being assholes. “We irritate people, therefore god exists and you should join our cult.” The logic is lacking here.
Docs hate this crap BTW. This puts pharmacists in the role of practicing medicine. A lot of states have laws against it.
Patients hate it too. It puts pharmacists in the role of totalitarian bigots running their lives. Both are BS, they are supposed to dispense drugs.
Kate, May 3, 2009 9:35 PM
It is not an either or situation, it is a personal decision regarding a medical procedure. The procedure being one in which a woman, as is her right, takes steps to discourage the fertilization and implantation of an ovum. A medical procedure is not something that just happens to one, unless one is either incapable of acting on one’s own behalf, or is not given the opportunity to make the decision. In all cases where one is able to make the choice, and allowed to make the choice, how one decides is one’s responsibility, and one’s responsibility alone.
“There is pretty good evidence that a statin, in general, will lessen the severity of a second stroke in normal weight populations, and familial hypercholesterolemia does not leave a lot of choices after diet an exercise.”
My mistake. If I offended skinny people with high cholesterol, I sincerely apologize, and promise to direct my moral outrage at orlistat from now on. Although, relevant to the discussion, birth control has therapeutic use even for women who aren’t sexually active – it treats acne, endometriosis, dysmenorrhea, and irregular periods. It’d be hard to object to these uses, but if laws come into place allowing pharmacists to refuse to dispense, well, you can see where I’m going with this.
As for the suggestion that Plan B is being restricted in the hopes that efforts could go on to restrict regular birth control – I’m not sure the politicians have ordinary birth control in their sights. I think they’re trying to restrict plan b because they wish it were an abortifacient, possibly because that way they have a legal avenue to fight what they think is abortion, or be seen doing that, or worse, trying to establish a framework to build a legal avenue to restricting actual abortion.
By the way, just to clear up some misinformation – “Plan B” is 2 tabs of 750 micrograms of levonorgestrel, a synthetic progesterone. It is not the same as taking 3 tabs of ordinary birth control. Most birth control contains estrogen along with progesterone, and some are progesterone-only (the combinations allow lower doses of each to be given). In some cases, taking multiple doses of ordinary birth control may contain the same amount of progesterone as Plan B (and this is how emergency contraception used to be done back in the day), but I’d advise against it unless you had no other option, as the estrogen component in high doses could cause side effects.
Fun fact: progesterone is also used to maintain the uterus in pregnancy, and RU-486 is a progesterone antagonist.
It is almost impossible to turn a crackpot.
You will learn this sooner or later.
Religious fanatics are the worst. They do stuff like fly planes into skyscrapers and bomb medical facilities without a second thought. Many xian fundies openly and deeply hate the USA and want to destroy it.
They aren’t capable or interested in reasoning when they can believe and hate. Mostly they are on forums to they can get off telling people they are going to hell, a sort of vicarious bullying sadism.
genewitch @188
You are right, thanks, and went over my head as my post was only about the impact of computerization, and I was implying all this discussion will not make any difference since it all will become an automated corporate process, that like anything else has plus and minuses. Individuals at service level will have no say.
Scary thought as it is more than plausible. Seems to be a tactic fundamentalists or conservatives use frequently. As to how smart they are, how well planned, or whether they just stumble into it, is open to debate, as another common denominator is the lack of truth telling by them.
I generally stay away from posting where the topic is very country specific, except my own of course. Further up, there was reference to codeine not being available OTC, but it is in Canada compounded with ASA. RU486 in Missouri, I have no knowledge about, so I really hesitate to comment. In Canada, the drug was not approved for the longest time so as to prevent it going to the US via the black market. Politics anyone? The Truth? I think cop out, but do not know.
How lame; the AMA should kick their asses hard. Basically the legislators are saying it’s fine for unqualified people to second-guess the physicians. Next thing you know nurses will be diagnosing patients and writing scripts.
You know, I love pharyngula but some peopel here really are retarded when it comes to reading comprehension
I never said I was offended anywhere, I don’t get that. I said I was “Outraged” which I usually am when any fundie sneaks in any laws to promote their superstition.
Again, I said they believe its like selling someone a gun to kill a baby. They do. From my comment its obvious I don’t feel that way (if you have half a brain cell).
People, learn to read and think critically. You attack me for things i don’t believe. This is the second time this has happened. Again, it is for things I did not say and for adding in things I most certainly do not believe or could have been confused as believing if the entire comment (which wasn’t long) was read.
I am against government control of personal choices (WHICH APPLIES TO ABORTION) I am pro-choice. I am an athiest. I think all religions are shams. I do not think people should be a pharmicist if they won’t serve the people they are responsible for serving.
Learn to read. Do not read one line and reinterpret to get angry. Read the entire comment before you start spewing your idiocy. Learn to look at situations from all sides.
I even suggested that pharmacies should always have one person on who will not refuse to give those prescriptions. If I was “offended” by people wanting to be responsible would I have suggested that.
You can say fuck me, but I tell you to learn to read and comprehend.
Adam @193
YES and add Plavix for the lazy.
There is a local morning radio personality by the name of Chris Boyer. Boyer’s shtick is, he’s a blowhard. He knows nothing about any subject, which is why he’s an expert on them. However, every now and then you will hear one Dave Rickards -of the DSC on the KGB- stumbling through the phrase, “Boyer is right.”
This is what we have here regarding one RMM Barrie; and what we have here where Barrie is concerned is a “Boyer is right” moment. To word it as basically as it can be worded, “Barrie is right.”
What I see here is Kate and others reacting to what Barrie said according to what they think he said, or what they wanted him to say. How they came to the conclusion that Barrie is against women making a decision to prevent a pregnancy is quite beyond me, for Barrie addressed only the benefits of extending anonymity to women seeking such treatments.
A woman seeks a contraceptive, a doctor agrees to prescribe an appropriate contraceptive, and the woman then takes the prescription to a pharmacy to have it filled. Ultimately it is the woman’s decision, and I see nothing in Barrie’s original comment in which he said he disagreed with that. Where Kate got the idea he did shall remain a mystery.
MadScientist @196
It has already started in British Columbia, and there is so much WOO out there, I am not sure which fight a body like the AMA should pick.
I think the only hope is education and continuing education of the population in general. But as you are well aware, easier said than …….
Reading comprehension, review and not jumping to conclusions instruction would also be helpful. ;-) ( thanks Jeff S )
Adam, May 4, 2009 12:02 AM
As an obese man (340 pounds at last weighing) with moderate to low serum cholesterol I take offense at your implied assumptions. :grumph: :D
What I see here is Kate and others reacting to what Barrie said according to what they think he said, or what they wanted him to say.
After a remark like his conclusion @179, he’s got nothing else to say I could give two shits about, no matter how much I may agree with it, unless he’s got a better explanation than I’ll bet he’s capable of.
@ 153; Already mentioned, but I’ll reiterate. If you are in a profession that directly affects the medical decision making( i.e. the health and life) of someone else you can counsel, debate, etc.But your professional mandate is to not interfere with their ability to make a decision for themselves and this functional usurping of this right has to be one of the most weaslely ways imaginable to force your concept of morality on another human being.Pharmacists and physicians are counselors as much as anything and the minute they make a decision for a patient they have intruded in an area that they should not go.As stated by a previous poster, if you are a Muslim don’t work in a pig farm .I fear this is the beginning of an assault on our rights by a minority faction that is not concerned about the rights of any one ideologically different from them. This is also the group that ironically usually refers to themselves as the real America( whatever the hell that means).
Add Thanks Alan Kellogg @199.
Brevity and the volume of posts contribute, as virtually nobody would read a complete write up.
@190
RMM:
http://www.badscience.net/2008/11/you-are-80-less-likely-to-die-from-a-meteor-landing-on-your-head-if-you-wear-a-bicycle-helmet-all-day/
It’s about statins.
“Already mentioned, but I’ll reiterate. If you are in a profession that directly affects the medical decision making( i.e. the health and life) of someone else you can counsel, debate, etc.But your professional mandate is to not interfere with their ability to make a decision for themselves and this functional usurping of this right has to be one of the most weaslely ways imaginable to force your concept of morality on another human being.”
Dr. P, I hope you are right, because I’m about to go into my MD to try to get some so called “smart drugs”, I’ve read about because I don’t think my memory is what is used to be. Other people manage to get them, but I don’t think I should have to waste time doctor shopping. Do you have something I can cite, code of ethics or something, that will remind my MD of her obligations? thanx
@203
The problem is, even though they are minority, they are a very vocal minority with lots of pull.
The key to combatting this is to become vocal.
I would like to see if any kind of federal funding could be withheld if the state enforces this law. One way to combat it would be to have, at the federal level, legislation passed that set specific guidelines statse had to follow if they wanted certain related funding.
That way, even those outside the state can fight things like this.
I could be wrong, I’m pretty sure this tactic has been used successfully before.
JeffS,
One of Missouri’s senators (McCaskell) is a democrat, and unlikely to vote with the Dems against her own legislature. The demographics of other states may peel off other democrats also. Is it a battle they want to fight at this time?
Your best hope is the assumption of more power by executive branch justified by popular outrage.
High-five to Alan Kellog, from someone classified as “morbidly obese” with a cholesterol level of 150.
(and normal blood sugar too, so nyah)
Our society and the pharmaceutical companies manage very well to trick us into thinking all it takes to fix our health issues is to go to the chemist and swallow a pill,be it against high Cholesterol,high blood sugar or whatever else.
There is stuff going on on the microanatomical level(well,even macro,if you looked)in an obese person,in the joints,the vascular endothelium,the renal parenchyma,lots of stuff going on behind the scenes that one day will add up to an unpleasant doctor’s visit.
Time to lose weight and exercise if you are overweight is now.
I concur (though I am aware that some people do have metabolic problems and other medical conditions which make it hard to keep their weight down or to do exercise).
FWIW, I am 172cm tall (5’7″ and a bit) and weigh 62kg (about 140 lbs). My body fat is somewhere within the 10-15% range. I realise this is partly due to my age; but my father, who’s 48, also manages to keep his weight down and exercise regularly, despite having a full time job.
Long term followup shows that diets almost never work. Building up stores energy must have been important to our suvival multiple times in our past. Obesity is condition crying out for pharmaceutical solutions. It doesn’t help when the FDA takes promising compounds off the table. For instance the cocaine receptor is of interest for appetite suppression. Unfortunately, every active compound so far has the side effect of making people feel good (like food?). Millions die of complications of obesity while the FDA waits for something it thinks might be better.
On reading it again, I want to apologise for my comment at #211, as it may have been a little insensitive to those readers who suffer from obesity (which, I realise, may in many cases not be the sufferer’s fault).
Africangenesis,
are you implying that a doctor is obliged to prescribe for you simply because you think you need a drug?
My code of ethics says that I will prescribe appropriately for the clinical conditions I find. It does not turn me into a drug dispensing automaton.
(I thought you were possibly being sarcastic, but then remembered your track record)
From my point of view (as one of those dirty European socialist peasants) it looks like America is actively trying to destroy its own health care. Is there anyone at the top, besides Prez. Obama, with some brains that haven’t been completely poisoned by religious bias, and the illusion that they are doing [insert deity]’s will?
Tassie Devil,
So do you prescribe smart drugs to you patients if you believe their memory has deteriorated? Or do they have to shop around if they think their judgement and values should be determinative?
See it now?
I find it a pretty effective treatment for depression ;o)
Emmet’OM#218,
I think it has also been touted as an ancient chinese treatment for virginity. Repeat treatments are seldom necessary. It should be noted that it has not been reviewed by the FDA for safety and efficacy.
If it were prescribed on the NHS, I might just change my view on socialised healthcare. :-)
(Kidding, of course…)
It should have noted that although not necessary, repeat treatments are well tolerated and patient compliance is generally good. Long term followup studies have not been performed, but there are anedotal reports that repeat treatments increase the risk of side effects that generally resolve after nine months. There are no good pharmacuetical replacements currently in the pipeline, but several corporations have expressed interest in bringing this therapy through the approval process, if the FDA agrees to allow patent protection for 15 years. An FDA panel has reported that due to the side effect profile, approval is unlikely. Treatments with a risk of abuse by the normal population are strongly discouraged.
Rorschach – Your concern has been noted, and it is being placed in the most appropriate receptacle.
As for the topic, the minor drift is turning into an entire derail, so back to pharmacists imposing their religious beliefs upon others?
AG –
If I find a reason to have serious clinical concern, I refer to a neurologist.
As for the rest, I ask about diet, exercise, sleep routine, stress and depression, and check for diabetes and thyroid disease.
I don’t prescribe lifestyle drugs with a dubious track record and research data wholly provided/sponsored by the company that produced them.
In the same way I don’t prescribe performance enhancing drugs to athletes.
By prescribing a drug I am endorsing its use and opening myself up to legal action if something goes wrong. I’m willing to bet you know little more about these drugs than that students are taking them for some supposed advantage in exams.
If you want dodgy drugs with uncertain effect profiles and poorly established adverse effects, get them off the internet like everyone else and run the risk alone.
I think that another angle that this bill could be shot down with is the fact that it is medically untrue. It states that Plan B is an abortifacient, when there are actual studies showing no difference in pregnancy rates in primates that were given it after ovulation and those that weren’t. It’s pretty damned clear that all it does is inhibit ovulation, both from experimental evidence and from knowing how it works. There should be some kind of out clause for invalidating bills that are actual lies.
While you’re at it, would you mind including his concern over nonexistent trends as well?:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/what_are_you_doing_alberta.php#comment-1608675
Tassie Devil,
“I’m willing to bet you know little more about these drugs than that students are taking them for some supposed advantage in exams.”
You would be right. Although I almost always know more about the drugs I’m prescribed than the doctors who prescribe them, I don’t currently recall the two drugs I had in mind. I know one was approved for parkinsons. I will have to research them again and take notes before my doctors visit. Doctors usually don’t have the time to stay as informed on particular conditions or drugs as scientifically literate patients.
What the State giveth, the Supreme Court will surely taketh away!
In the beginning, there was a thread topic…
This bill is about allowing a pharmacist to replace their judgment – a religious one at that – for that of the patient and doctor.
A quote comes to mind – something about heat and kitchens. If the career you have chosen leads you into acts you think are wrong, the solution is, amazingly, change careers. Not always the easiest option, but it is far better than allowing one person to control another in this manner. Note that the group being controlled is women, most often by men. Try to imagine the results of a woman denying a script for Viaga.
Bad grammar is not amusing. Or clever.
*claps*
That was fucking funny.
Huh?
If you clench any tighter, you’re going to bend that poker, Walton.
*sigh*
If you’re on the latest, subspecialist prescribed DMARDA, then that may be true – immunosuppressive agents are popping out faster than I can keep track of, and seeing as I only see maybe four patients a year on them, I can’t afford the brain space and google is only a click away. But as for the rest, I have honestly yet to have a patient come to me clutching something other than the latest ghostwritten pharma blurb from a newspaper, or some badly disguised advertorial from the internet. (in fact generally what they bring is thirty or more sheets printed off some woomeister site, and expect me to read it in a 10 minute appointment).
Should you actually decide to read pubmed, I’d advise you to check for the following:
inadequate randomisation
poor or absent blinding
selection of irrelevant data points
dodgy subgroup analyses
Absence of real-world advantage
Funding/conflicts of interest
test groups large enough to accound for significant, serious side effects and drug interactions (you imply you’re on other meds – have they got enough experience of combinations to find interactions?)
If you are competent to critically analyse all of those, then your research may be worthwhile. If not – then had you ever considered that that is my job, and perhaps I’m quite good at it?
I’m aware that there are crap doctors out there, and I spend much of my time endeavouring not to be one of them. But when you start spouting the ‘I always know more about my medications than my doctor’, I realise that I’ve met a few people like you. They think they know more because actually stopping to listen to their doctor is utterly beyond them.
You can’t have a meaningful therapeutic relationship with such people, and I generally encourage them to register elsewhere, as I am not prepared to be held responsible for the likely disasters that will ensue.
People accuse doctors of being arrogant, but they have no idea how much value they lose from their physician when they simply sit there thinking ‘I know more than you and I shall do what I want.’ Medicine is a partnership between doctors and patients – both have to listen to get the maximum benefit.
The fact that it applies only to abortifacients I believe makes this arguably run afoul of the establishment clause, since clearly it is facilitating a particular religious view. If they said that pharmacists could deny any medicine to which they had a moral/ethical objection, then the law would be stupid but constitutional. As it is, I don’t see how it is defensible in light of the first amendment.
Tassie Devil,
“You can’t have a meaningful therapeutic relationship with such people, and I generally encourage them to register elsewhere, as I am not prepared to be held responsible for the likely disasters that will ensue.”
You might be surprised what you can learn from patients if you aren’t too insecure to admit you don’t know everything. You might actually find it easier to to deal with a patient who respects you more when you consult a reference than when you pretend to know everything.
“Not always the easiest option, but it is far better than allowing one person to control another in this manner. Note that the group being controlled is women, most often by men. Try to imagine the results of a woman denying a script for Viaga.”
Women should be free to control their own bodies without a doctor, pharmicist or the FDA putting their oar in.
We have a problem with this in Canada too. As it stands now, I don’t think there’s anything to prevent a pharmacist from dispensing, or a doctor from prescribing, things like birth control if it goes against their religious beliefs.
The College of Ontario actually considered adopting a policy that would at least require that docs refer their patients to another doc if they were “unable” to offer a particular service. Of course, conservatives flipped their collective lid and the policy died, much to my dismay.
Excellent job providing a case in point for Tassie’s example.
I’ve taken it upon myself to do a little investigative research into Rep. Emery, the proposer of the amendment.
http://www.moneduloides.com/conscience-legislation-abortifacients/
Carlie wrote:
Walton responded:
What’s her problem? That pharmacists are given a federally madated monopoly?
OK, I understand that from a libertarian standpoint this is bad, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is still true.
So go ahead and lobby to dispense (pun intended) with the notion of pharmacy licensing, I don’t care (it won’t get anywhere, so it’s no skin off my back). But here in the real world, we still have pharmacies granted special priviledge to sell stuff that other businesses cannot. With that priviledge comes responsibilities beyond those of other business.
How does it hold it to the Lemon Test?
AG:
As someone posted earlier – ever hear of snake oil salesmen? There is good reason to require some measure of safety and effectiveness in medications.
The woman is, of course free to visit her local herbalist or homeopath or chiropractor or just pray on the issue. If, however, she wishes to have reasonably safe and effective treatment, she might want to have her doctor evaluate her condition and work together to reach some sort of treatment. That is what my doctor and I have done. While I know a lot about my meds, I also have to recognize the value of his experience as well. See @233 as well.
Eidolon,
I actually think FDA approval is a valuable piece of information, as are the studies done to get that approval. But I think nearly all the benefit of the FDA can be achieved on a voluntary basis without restricting individual freedom. The woman you are referring to would be wise to insist on only FDA approved drugs, if she hasn’t taken and interest in reviewing the literature itself. Unlike the anarchists, I even support mandatory oversight and standards for emergency rooms when treating unconscious patients who are unable to consent. Only FDA approved drugs and clinical trials should be used without consent, unless the patient has somehow forseen this need and given consent for something different. Drugs should be released to the public before efficacy has been proven in order to prevent the significant loss of life caused by FDA delays in approval, at least for those patients willing to assume the risk. I think it could still be called freedom, although perhaps not pure libertarian. And it would be an amazing coincidence if it was what the anarchists had in mind, since they are pretty short on sharing any details.
I should become a prostitute and refuse any customer who is too ugly because it’s my moral belief that ugly people shouldn’t get any. I wouldn’t have to have sex with any men at all, and my “agency” would still have to pay me full wages, according to a law like this.
Again – this is NOT a law. There was some wingnut grandstanding, but Rep. Emery tries this or something similar every years, and because it is the end of the session with no time left on the legislative calendar even if the Senate let it advance – which they haven’t – it violates Article III of the state constitution – Gov. Nixon would veto it in a heartbeat.
Ema leaped without looking I already dispensed with this silliness way upthread, but it is buried, so here is a post I put up last night that ought to drive a stake through the heart of this nasty little panic attack.
But I think nearly all the benefit of the FDA can be achieved on a voluntary basis
We know you think this. It has been explained to you repeatedly why your thinking this is completely fucking moronic. You still choose to repeat this drivel at every opportunity. Which not only makes you obstinate and dumb as a sack of hammers… it makes you boring.
I never understand how libertards can’t see why organizations like the FDA came into existence and got the power it did over the years. In every case where FDA got more powers, there was a failure of individuals and/or the pharma industry to regulate itself properly, and somebody got hurt. Free enterprise needs regulation to keep it honest. Failure to understand that is why libertarians are seen as amoral idiots.
Stu,
“It has been explained to you repeatedly …”
Actually no it hasn’t, it has been self-reighteously called moronic, like you just did. But no one has explained it, and I doubt they could. You don’t seem like the type that could explain it, so you must be relying upon some authority you are following. Feel free to reference such an explanation or authority. BTW, you might interested in this cato institute report on how the status quo FDA, which you apparently uncritically support, is costing lives.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb105-32.html
Nerd of Redhead,
You didn’t state which benefits of the FDA, for those that want them, couldn’t be achieved voluntarily?
The FDA exists precisely because voluntary controls did not work. As has been mentioned. Repeatedly.
Oh, and referencing the Cato institute? Really? Are you that hell-bent on self-parody?
AG, I’m sure you would be interested in my new line of Patent Medicines. Would you like some paregoric mixed with swamp water and cayenne? Cheap alcohol with goose shit? Perhaps a nice teaspoonful of tobacco spit mixed with grasshoppers? They all cure everything, and no government should be able to tell me they don’t! (What an asshole this guy is). Step right up folks! We’ve got the answer to all your prayers!
Doesn’t he even remember Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves”? Medicine shows? What the fuck is his problem?
@Walton:
Could you please respond to my question way up at #145?
Libertarians are be deaf if anything is said that might refute their sophistry. That is part of the reason we find them so tiresome, and amoral. No real thinking going on, just how to present their amoral sophistries.
Genewitch @ 205
Thanks for the effort on the citation. However, it all comes back to the individual decision in consultation with their doctor. Each individual circumstance has to be analyzed.
@africangenesis:
Suppression of drugs like rohypnol.
Thanks Blue Girl. I missed it upthread too. *mumbles something about finals week*
Stu,
“The FDA exists precisely because voluntary controls did not work”
Perhaps, but that does not mean that the proof of efficacy before the drug was allowed on the market was necessary. The FDA can allow the drugs on the market, and perform the efficacy testing itself or perform aftermarket monitoring or both. Those who want to use the drugs before FDA approval is complete could do so, those that want to wait for full FDA approval can wait. Everybody who wants the benefit of the FDA can get it.
The FDA can either do all the testing itself, or use the stick of being approved for medicare forumulary to get the companies to pay for the studies. Otherwise the manufacturers are liable for assuring the quality and purity of their product,
The FDA can allow the drugs on the market, and perform the efficacy testing itself or perform aftermarket monitoring or both.
Sure. At how many deaths do you pull it, though?
I see AG is being stupid again. The FDA does no clinical testing of drugs. Period. The FDA reviews the clinical testing run by the Pharma companies for their new drugs. Here is the best reason for the FDA. There was some data that caused an FDA reviewer not to rubber stamp a NDA for an anti-nausea medicine. The drug, thalidomide, was approved in Europe and resulted in birth defects (flipper limbs). Since the FDA was slow to approve the drug, no birth defects were caused by the US sales of the drug. This also resulted in all drugs being tested for their teratogenic potential. It should be noted that thalidomide is now approved for use in the US, with the highest warnings allowed by law.
Stu,
“Sure. At how many deaths do you pull it, though?”
The Cato Institute estimtes that there will be fewer deaths with aftermarket monitoring than are caused by delays in getting life saving drugs to market. There is no proof that the FDA saves more lives than it costs.
The Cato Institute estim[a]tes
You’re NOT helping yourself.
We don’t need to refute the libertarians. They do it themselves with their self serving posts of amoral sophistry.
Nerd the Redhead,
You are so stupid you didn’t know that I had been involved in attempts to get compassionate use access to thalidomide for its possible anti-angiogenesis effects, and that the FDA had been discouraging research on its poster child drug, even though it had approved accutane a far more toxic and teterogenic drug. You are so stupid that you didn’t realize that it took a lot of public pressure from AIDs patients to get access to thalidomide for cachexia, and you are so dishonest that you didn’t mention that the delays in approving thalidomide were unjustified and unrelated to the problems that eventually cause such concern.
There, how do you like it, you possible ignoramus.
There, how do you like it, you possible ignoramus.
You’re not very good at this, are you?
AG:
The multiple acts of legislation that resulted in the (woefully underfunded) FDA as we know it today came out of catastrophes that the free market failed to prevent. The elixir sulfamilamide disaster in 1937 resulted a hundred or so deaths gave birth the the act the created the FDA.
There are countless medications prescribed every day for “off-label” purposes or those without an FDA-approved indication. The problem is that the FDA-approved medications are not always the best medications for a given scenario. There are often vastly cheaper alternatives with more than adequate evidence to support use in the medical literature, but do not have FDA-labeled indications. No drug company is going to fund trials to obtain FDA-approval on a drug it no longer has exclusivity for.
What about the significant loss of life or permanent injury when drugs are released before safety has been established? Are these deaths less signficant than potential lives saved? What about (again) the exlixir sulfanilimide or thalidomide?
Who is going to fund the FDA’s studies? The cost of running clinical trials is substantial. The FDA is stretched so thin performing its current duties, but let’s add this on? I think a lot of the delays in drug approval could really be ameliorated by a better staffed, better funded FDA.
@africangenesis:
Actually, in addition to what I said at #255, could you respond to #145 as well?
SquidBrandon,
“I think a lot of the delays in drug approval could really be ameliorated by a better staffed, better funded FDA.”
I say fund it. I think a lot of the funding can be justified by possible cost savings in medicare. I also think, even as a libertarian, that once one has a government prescription plan, the government should fund research into cost saving drugs and bring them through trials itself. I was probably a rarity among libertarians in supporting the prescription plan, I didn’t think a medical plan made sense without it. Too many decisions were made based on what was covered, not what was best medical practice, and opportunities for prevention were being missed.
Part and parcel of the Cato analysis is increased funding for aftermarket monitoring. I take it a little farther than they do as mentioned above. Freedom may not be free but it is worth the cost. I think Cato makes a good argument, that we can be more free and have fewer prople dieing.
the government should fund research into cost saving drugs
Like Zyklon B?
*ducks the Godwin hammer and runs*
AG is still pretending the FDA runs clinical trials. It doesn’t. It approves the clinical protocols that the drug companies will run based upon ICH guidelines for their NDAs. The ICH guidelines were developed so that it is much easier for drugs to be approved in the US, Europe, and Japan without the need for clinical trials to be run in all three locations (manufacturing and analytical are also under ICH guidelines). Then, once the clinical trials are complete, it reviews the data, often with a panel of outside specialists. Pharma companies may provide a drug for humanitarian purposes during the clinical trials, but this isn’t always done due to liability concerns, and limited supply of the drug.
Warning: africangenesis has tried my patience. Further expectations of a reply from him may be dashed when he abruptly disappears, so he is not the most promising person to engage on any thread.
Dreikin#255,
I’ve a couple responses to rohypnol vis’a’vis the FDA. One is that the drug is still available on the street. Second, I am willing to compromise for more freedom. A few sensational rapes should not be enough to deny the benefit of an important drug to millions, so such decisions should be made rationally and not by politicians reacting to news stories. On the recreational drug front, while I’d want pot and cocaine legalized, I concede that methamphetamine may be too dangerous. I base this on the reports that studies showing that cocaine wasn’t addictive have faced considerable difficulty getting published, and on the studies where communities were “drug tested” vi their sewers that showed that cocaine use peaked on weekends and dropped during the week, while meth use was constant. I think it is possible that with cocaine back in coca-cola we might have a true diet drink that could save millions, but the research won’t be permitted.
Your #145 post seems too complicated for me to address at this time, but keep in mind that many American libertarians are no long strict noncoercion, but support the US constitution, strictly interpreted. So there would be considerable cut back on the government “liberties” taken under the commerce clause. I don’t know how much of #145 is relevant under this, I’ll try to remember to look at it later. BTW, it would be a major achievement if you could get the anarchists to respond in any specificity to practical matters such as this. They run under the radar a bit and are given a free pass and assumed to be benigh.
On topic and as a licensed pharmacist, I abhor this piece of legislation. Unfortunately, as a clinical pharmacist in a hospital setting, this is out of my scope of practice. This is a repulsive violation of physician/patient and pharmacist/patient relationships. The potential impact this legislation could have on women in rural areas with very limited access to pharmaceutical care to begin with is staggering. This is one particular instance for which I am saddened for and embarassed by my profession.
@Nerd of Redhead: “Free enterprise needs regulation to keep it honest.”
As someone with (lowercase) libertarian leanings, I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. One of the base assumptions of free-market capitalism is equality of information. Without regulation, this is impossible to ensure. The defense of liberty, which should be a core value for “libertarians”, absolutely requires a functioning legal system that includes protections for citizens rights, one of those rights being equal access to information regarding the products of trade. Without some degree of regulation this is simply not possible.
@Nerd of Redhead: “Failure to understand that is why libertarians are seen as amoral idiots.”
Well, I understand “that” and I self-identify as a “libertarian”. Am I still an “amoral idiot”?
IMO, the problem isn’t so much “libertarians” as it is that the term itself doesn’t seem to be very well defined. I find the “libertarian” tent an overly broad one. People who oppose any and all regulation seem to me more like anarcho-capitalists. Ditto for the “taxation is theft!” and absolute laissez-faire types. Trade is a social activity and as such there’s simply no way it’s going to occur in any manner without some means of protecting me from you and you from me. And that means at least some level of state regulation. Valuing liberty must mean more than simply valuing the freedom to order one’s life as one chooses, it must mean also valuing the liberty of others, to the extent that we must also put in place a means of protecting it.
Call this view “nuanced libertarianism” if you will: the recognition that, as Donne said, “no man is an island.” I think the modern libertarian movement has many, many sympathizers who would identify more with this view than the more anarchic one, only the pseudo-anarcho-capitalists are more vocal.
OT, this sort of situation (PZ’s post) troubles me. If I own the pharmacy, do I still have the ability to fire the ignorant ass of a pharmacist who refuses to dispense these medications?
Now you’re just arguing with yourself.
I’ve a couple responses to rohypnol vis’a’vis the FDA. One is that the drug is still available on the street.
On the recreational drug front, while I’d want pot and cocaine legalized, I concede that methamphetamine may be too dangerous.
Also, while I have some slim hope you were kidding with
I think it is possible that with cocaine back in coca-cola we might have a true diet drink that could save millions
I think you might have been serious… and can’t make up my mind whether to laugh or cry.
Stu,
See post #212
Call this view “nuanced libertarianism” if you will
Actually, I would call that a correct definition of liberal.
Bill, my remarks were directed to AG, who is an ideologue. And they were referring to what may be considered “strong libertarianism”, where the idea is taken to the extreme of every man is an island. Many people here, my self included, have some libertarian leanings in certain areas, and yet recognize the need for regulation. I would call this “weak libertarianism”, or more mainstream politics. My remarks are not meant for those with the latter leanings. Sorry if you are offended.
dreikin @145,
Yep. (A, not The.)
To freely band together, as sovereign individuals, yes. But that isn’t the same as saying that they have the right to compel anyone to join their “band”, or to coerce anyone into furthering their “common purpose”.
You haven’t established that you have the right to force unwilling people, through the use of coercive power, to comply with your “common purpose” or to follow your rules. That’s the fundamental difference between a voluntary association and the State.
Since I’m not an anarchocapitalist, I’m not claiming that the State shouldn’t exist or that it shouldn’t regulate anything – just that your argument does not provide a justification for its doing so.
I more or less agree, except that I’d draw a distinction between first principles and practical reality.
On first principles, I’d say that some taxation is theft. I would assert (though I’m wary of using this term) that a person has a natural moral right to keep the fruits of his or her own labour. So income tax is theft, and is inherently immoral.
By contrast, other forms of tax – like inheritance tax, for instance, or land tax – are not theft per se. Although they override individual property rights, I’d contend that property rights in land and other natural resources, and rights of inheritance, are purely a creation of the State. There’s no natural deontological basis for the private ownership of land. If A owns a plot of land, he owns it because the State says so, not because he has a natural moral right to that land. Likewise, if B inherits money from A, he inherits it because the State has prescribed that he shall so inherit, not because he has any natural moral right to inherit. And, thus, since it is the State which institutes these property rights, the State can suspend them at will; and thus taxation of land or of inheritances cannot be theft.
And as regards your last sentence: this I heartily agree with, and it summarises why I’m not an anarchocapitalist. Libertarians and anarchocapitalists agree that people have sovereign moral rights over their own body and the fruits of their labour; but the difference is that anarchocapitalists fail to convincingly explain how, if the State were to be abolished, these sovereign moral rights would be protected. I would suggest, therefore, that we need police and courts in order to protect individuals from each other, and to define, delineate and arbitrate individual rights. And, obviously, to fund these institutions, we need some minimal level of taxation, distasteful though it is.
OK, so:
but
First off, I really don’t understand this distinction — wouldn’t a libertarian see the holding of land or natural resources as the fruits of one’s labour?
Second, unless one is on a boat, the fruits of one’s labour take place on land that is, according to you, owned only by virtue of the arbitrary legal framework of the State. Given that, I don’t see why “labour” can’t be taxed, since effectively the State is (according to your formulation) making it possible for you to carry it out.
@africangenesis (if you’re still around):
Which is why I said suppression. With the proper knowledge and means, almost anything can be obtained, regulations and restrictions be damned. That is not, however, and argument against the attempts to control it than the fact that murders still happen is a reason to make it legal.
True, political reactions to hype are not a good way to make policy. But change that slightly – do you think a drug which is NOT known/shown to have any such benefit, yet has at least one well-known detrimental side effect, should be freely obtainable on the market*?
From this, I will assume the answer is ‘no’. Given that, and given that a great many chemical substances CAN be incredibly addictive (eg, morphine) or harmful (you mention methamphetamine), would you agree there should at least be testing for safety and/or efficacy before allowing it on the free market?
Which report? I took a(n admittedly quick) look via google and was not able to find it.
Interesting. Do you happen to know if they controlled for amphetamines used for non-recreational purposes like dextro/levo-amphetamine, or were able to test for sufficient specificity that related amphetamines were not included?
I rather assumed that, actually. Being strict noncoercion would eliminate the ability to have a police force or military, and would in fact require rather Gandhi-like characteristics in it’s practitioners, which was never my impression.
I quite agree, and further think that some types of coercive spending are improper (eg, chaining highway funds to drinking age). However, I also think that there may be legitimate functions of govt left out of the constitution but that are currently wedged in via the commerce clause. That’s not a reason to keep that horrible kludge around, but to amend the constitution such that those functions, if they exist, are explicitly stated.
I’ve never actually seen any anarchists around here – or none that did not self-identify (properly or improperly) as l/Libertarians. But then, I don’t read/browse nearly every thread here.
In relation, but separately, a few questions occurred to me that may be rather important, but not explicitly mentioned thus far (that I recall). Do you think that all drugs should be available without a prescription? If not, do you think there should be govt requirements concerning prescriptions, such as who can issue them, and improper issuance (such as giving certain prescriptions only to people who need them – eg, rohypnol)?
*Within reasonable limits, of course. Alcohol is both addictive and potentially harmful, but neither to sufficient degree to be declared illegal.
@Walton:
Nor does it claim to, nor is it used for that purpose.
Again, the argument does not do that. It is based on incentive (potential of acquiring a benefit), not compulsion (threat of punishment).
You misassume my purpose, and assume premises and statements not given. I try to use language very precisely and clearly in such things, and none of what you object to is part of what I have stated in #145.
Walton, let’s look at the different possible situations and weigh the outcomes.
Situation #1, where there’s no FDA and no requirement for pharmacists to offer whatever’s available. This seems to be your preference.
Situation #2, with no FDA, but with a “must offer” requirement. Unforeseeable.
Situation #3, with the FDA, but with no requirement to offer. This where nearly all American citizens find themselves today. Missouri is merely the most recent state to remove the option for citizens to bring civil suits.
Situation #4, with the FDA and pharmacies “must offer” requirement. This is my preference. Only California and New Jersey fit here.
I’ll ignore #2 for obvious reasons.
Nearly everyone lives under #3, so let’s look at the results:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5490-2005Mar27_2.html
The social prejudices that made Eisenstadt v. Baird necessary even after Griswald v. Connecticut are still around today; a common barrier those pharmacists who believe “sluts should be punished” and so will only dispense birth control to women with a wedding ring. And you’re assenting to this ritual of shaming.
Some pharmacists are working in concerted effort with the Dominionist movement, and they have become more brazen in recent years. So we have instances of pharmacists tearing up prescriptions, like this one for herpes treatment where the pharmacist helpfully informed the patient that the disease is God’s punishment. http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/5/2/81737/65743
If pharmacists are not required to fill valid prescriptions, you know that it’s only a matter of time before an HIV-positive patient is denied the anti-retroviral drugs that can keep the virus in check. Realize that you are advocating for death, Walton.
To the other options, then. There’s your preference of #1, where we remove the FDA as well; I assume this means no more need for prescriptions. I needn’t argue that this is a horrible idea — even though it is a horrible idea and would lead to millions of deaths — because we can look instead at the political possibility. And you know there’s not a chance of this in your lifetime. The very mention of such a proposal is dead in the water, as are the political joke parties that might ever support dismantling the FDA. Among those who actually get elected, it’s unspeakable, left right and center.
And then there’s #4, where we keep the FDA and require pharmacies to offer all FDA-approved drugs. You may see this as worse than #1, but you know it’s better than #3. And an important difference is that this is politically plausible. Rather than making the libertarian-perfect the enemy of the good, you could settle for this compromise, at least until Grover Norquist flies into Washington in a flaming chariot pulled by winged boars that poop gold and spit bullets.
You’re admirably willing to accept state intervention in the form of taxation for the sake of providing poor people with baseline nutrition, healthcare, and shelter. But when the issue is poor women in rural areas being unable to get the contraception they need to take their own economic futures into their own hands — unplanned children being a major factor contributing to women’s poverty — suddenly you revert to strict dogma that cannot admit of gray shades. Please ask yourself why this double standard seems to you so obviously acceptable.
Tulse, dreikin, a heads up. When Walton says things like this,
he is trolling you. He is deliberately saying simplistic crap that even he does not believe, because he does not respect you enough to delve into the nuances of what he actually does believe. That would be too much effort, and he just doesn’t think you’re worth it.
Proof that I am characterizing his habit accurately:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/right_wing_inanity.php#comment-1590310
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/right_wing_inanity.php#comment-1590357
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/right_wing_inanity.php#comment-1590430
Kaessa,
I’m sorry about your miscarriage. I had one, too, but it didn’t require any medication. It was devastating, though.
It’s stories like this, about Missouri, that makes me happy that Pres. Obama is planning to get rid of that Conscience Rule nonsense: http://is.gd/wJRT
strange gods before me,
That is simply not true. It’s true that I have acknowledged, on other threads – as I have here – that some taxation is necessary, and that some basic welfare provision is desirable. I did not say that all taxation is theft, which would, indeed, be simplistic crap.
Rather, I said that income tax, and especially progressive income tax, is immoral – which I believe it is, as well as being disadvantageous to society by discouraging the creation of wealth. Indeed, IIRC, you and I are presently arguing this very point over at the Alberta thread.
OK. I’ll take your word for this, as, never having lived in the US – nor visited any part of the US except Washington D.C. and its suburbs – I don’t know how widespread that sort of intransigent wingnuttery actually is. But if it is as common as you suggest, then yes, there is a serious problem. (And I’m beginning to understand the depth of the hostility to religion among American posters here. I’m starting to get the impression that the religion of rural America is a million miles away from the milquetoast tea-and-buns Anglicanism I grew up with. But I digress.)
True. Fair point. (Though I wouldn’t call the LP a “joke party”, I’d acknowledge that there’s no chance of their winning control of the federal government any time soon.)
Yes. Perhaps it is, indeed, the best available option. If there’s going to be regulation and control of pharmaceuticals, that regulation and control has to be administered on an equal and non-discriminatory basis. Though the ideal would be to eliminate regulation and control outright – and I could argue that point, but I won’t – I will concede that pharmacists, as the beneficiaries of a privileged monopoly, should have an obligation to supply any legal prescription drug.
This is, in fact, rather like our discussion about guilds and women’s rights on another thread. The ideal is to have no guilds and to let everyone trade freely; but if we can’t have that, then the guilds, being privileged monopoly classes, need to be regulated so that they can’t coercively impose their own wishes and values on everyone. Ditto for modern-day pharmacists.
Posted by: Walton | May 3, 2009 2:24 PM
“It’s fine to let a hospital emergency room deny treatment to someone who is ill, because there is no “right” to medical treatment.
Fixed.
[Sry. My HTML skills are non-existent.]
That has to be the most disgusting thing I have ever seen on the internet.
Then you haven’t been on the internet much. I assure you, there are much worse people than me out there. :-)
Ten minutes on Google will find you anything from neo-Nazis to neo-Stalinists to wacko religious cults. In comparison, I’m relatively normal.
(And if you think that’s disgusting, I wouldn’t advise watching 2 Girls, 1 Cup…)
“That has to be the most disgusting thing I have ever seen on the internet. ”
Since it comes from some privileged, clueless ass with FREE HEALTHCARE, it’s especially disgusting. Walton’s living proof that unexamined privilege makes people sick.
Firstly, there’s no such thing as “free” healthcare. What you mean is “socialised healthcare”, or, in full, “healthcare provided by the State using funds coercively extracted from productive citizens.” Let’s say what we really mean.
Secondly, do you consider my opinion on the subject worthless merely because I happen to live in a country with socialised healthcare? By that token, would you say that no UK resident has any right to argue for reform of the NHS?
I would contend, in fact, that having no experience of a system actually makes it easier to make a rational judgment about it. Anecdotal evidence based on personal experiences – which may not be representative of the general trend – may produce an emotional response, rather than facilitating a rational assessment based on sound principles and empirical evidence. “Think of the poor kiddies with no healthcare!” is not a rational argument, unless you back it up by illustrating empirically that the average child receives better care under a socialised system than a free market system, and that the difference is sufficiently substantial to merit a reduction in individual freedom.
I am fully aware that I am personally privileged, since (as a student without a full-time job) I pay no taxes, and receive healthcare at the expense of the State. And, as any rational person in my position would do, I take advantage of this when I need to. But that doesn’t mean it’s right that I, considering that I contribute nothing to the economy, should receive healthcare at the expense of those more productive than myself.
Richard (#6 & #98) when you don’t want to work on a church, and are able to decide not to (it’s not for a current client), then don’t you refer the possible client to someone else who will work on a church?
As I have read and heard about the bill, the pharmacist does not have to even post that they will not serve you if you fall under this description and/or these circumstances, nor do they have to refer you to a pharmacist that will.
“There’s no such thing as ‘free’ fire protection. What you mean is ‘socialized fire protection, or, in full, ‘fire protection provided by the State using funds coercively extracted from productive citizens.’ Let’s say what we really mean.”
“There’s no such thing as ‘free’ sewers. What you mean is ‘socialized human waste disposal’, or, in full, ‘human waste disposal provided by the State using funds coercively extracted from productive citizens.’ Let’s say what we really mean.”
“There’s no such thing as ‘free’ food safety inspection. What you mean is ‘socialized food safety inspection’, or, in full, ‘food safety inspection provided by the State using funds coercively extracted from productive citizens.’ Let’s say what we really mean.”
Needless to say, I’m not impressed with your rhetorical tricks, Walton.
@Walton:
You seem to have missed my reply to you above – could you please reply to it?
I’ve replied. http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/what_are_you_doing_alberta.php#comment-1610626
Please explain how any tax of any kind is not theft in Walton-speak. Pick a tax and tell me why it’s moral.
I’ve never seen you explain why income tax is immoral but some other tax is not. Whether or not it disincentivizes wealth creation is a separate question. Every tax is a tax that someone somewhere would prefer not to pay, coercive by your definition.
How quickly you
forgetignore.http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/right_wing_inanity.php#comment-1590140
I’m out of time right now but I have citations for S-CHIP as well. Later.
strange gods before me,
I’ve actually done that above, at #279. Quoting from what I said there:
All tax is, by definition, coercive. But not all tax is theft, if “theft” is defined as “the coercive appropriation of someone else’s property”; because “property” in this context is a concept defined by the State. The receipt of one’s father’s inheritance, for example, is not a natural moral right. It’s conferred by the whim of the State; as evidenced by the fact that probate and next-of-kin laws differ wildly between different jurisdictions. And what the State giveth, the State taketh away.
By contrast, I would assert that the right to keep the income which one earns from one’s own labour is a natural moral right – not merely a creation of the State, but a fundamental moral precept.
I realise this is a rather heterodox argument, and your average libertarian would tell me I’m talking a pile of steaming crap. (Rothbard would have been tearing his hair out.) But it’s worth a try, to see if it stands up to rational scrutiny. (As you may be able to tell, I made this distinction up on the spot yesterday, and am now developing it.)
Yes. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone referring to “free fire protection”, so your remarks are substantially irrelevant.
I was merely objecting to the term “free healthcare”. The term implies that it comes at no cost. It doesn’t; it merely transfers the cost from the end-user to the productive taxpayer. As, indeed, do socialised fire protection, and sewers, and so on.
My first paragraph wasn’t intending to establish that socialised healthcare is a bad thing – merely to point out that it is highly misleading to term it “free healthcare”. So you seem to have entirely missed the point.
That’s correct, all you’ve done is assert this without any rational argument, and without defining what a “natural” moral right is.
That’s right, because we take for granted that it is “free”, in exactly the same way that I in Canada take for granted that healthcare is “free”, in that in exchange for everyone paying some through their taxes, everyone gets the service.
If you’re going to use the rhetoric of a service “provided by the State using funds coercively extracted from productive citizens”, then let’s make sure we’re clear of all of the services that describes. If you’re not willing to grant that police and roads and military are all “free” services in exactly the same way you talked about “free” healthcare, then you’re being rhetorically dishonest.
huh? how exactly is it “natural”? for social animals, sharing by group-fiat is the norm, not “looking out for #1”. and other than certain instincts and behavioral patterns we’ve inherited from our ancestors, nothing in our morality is “natural”. it’s social constructs all the way down.
No Walton, we haven’t missed your point, because we see the selfishness of your point. You have repeatedly missed ours. There are things one does for the common good, even if it may inconvenience an individual. For example, I cannot drive 70 mph through the city streets to work. Rules have to be in place to ensure the safety of the public. Likewise, socialized health care is seen as a proper public benefit since 1) it is cheaper to run that for profit medicine, and 2) it covers all people, even those too old, young, or out of job through no fault of their own. There have been a few times when the Redhead and I have not been covered when I was between jobs. Luckily, we didn’t get sick or pregnant during those time (pre-existing conditions, not covered). Also, at the moment I am not old enough to be covered by medicare if something happened to my job. This is why I keep saying libertarianism is morally bankrupt. In the extreme cases, it is so focused on the individual that it forgets the common needs. And you are out there with respect to health care.
except that you libertarians don’t deal in evidence. you deal purely in ideology. the evidence is in, and social democracies are better for everyone except the top 1% of every society: the more socialized a place gets, the better off everyone is. the more Chicago-School BS is hoisted upon a society, the greater the gulf between the rich and the poor, and the more miserable those poor are. most, if not all, societies that have liberalized their markets are now worse off than before, economically.
it’s called investing in the future. we all would be less valuable to ourselves and to society if we didn’t have educations. and putting roadblocks in the way of people trying to get an education in the name of “personal freedom” is to cut off your nose to spite your face
You’ve once again missed the point – I don’t talk about “free” healthcare. Nor do I talk about police, roads or the military being “free”. They’re not; they all cost vast amounts of taxpayers’ money.
The reason we have to provide the military, police, fire protection etc at taxpayers’ expense is because these things are, in general, non-rivalrous and non-excludable public goods (at least in part), so can’t be provided effectively by a free market or by other non-coercive means. For instance, if people could choose whether or not to pay for the military, they’d still get the benefit of the military protecting their country’s borders whether they paid for it or not – meaning that each individual would have a rational incentive not to pay. And, therefore, it is necessary to fund these things via tax.
A few elements of healthcare have the same characteristic – vaccinations, for instance, have a public good dimension because they help prevent epidemics from spreading. But in general, surgery and medication are individual private goods; they help the person who receives them. And so there is no self-evident reason why they should be funded by the State. The fact that “they are essential” is not pertinent; food is also essential, yet we don’t have nationalised farms.
Again, failure to understand the need to help the common good. That is why libertarianism is morally bankrupt. By spreading out the costs, health care can be made affordable to everybody. Let me give you a real world example. I have been briefly between jobs (as everybody not going into the family business will be). If the Redhead had gotten pregnant during that interval, I would have had to pay for her medical care even with a new job and medical insurance since it was a preexisting condition. And the cost of the pregnancy could have run about three months wages. When one is barely making ends meet, that can be catastrophic.
I think your understanding of “common good” is rather more expansive than mine.
I agree that the common good exists, and that it is largely up to the State to take care of it. Those things which we refer to as “common goods”, i.e. those which are non-rivalrous and non-excludable – such as clean air, or national defence – cannot be privatised, and so will never be adequately cared for without State intervention (as illustrated by the “tragedy of the commons”). And so, for example, the State must intervene to ensure that everyone has clean air to breathe; because no one owns the air, and so the private sector has no incentive to take care of it.
Yet personal healthcare is not part of the “common good”. Rather, it’s an individual private good, which exclusively benefits the person who receives it. If I get ill – assuming that I’m not spreading a contagious disease* – then my illness does not affect you. It is not your problem, and there is therefore no convincing moral reason why you should have to pay for my medical care. Of course, if you’re a humanitarian, you might well want to pay for my medical care, via donating to charities etc; but this doesn’t mean that you should be forced to do so via State coercion. You don’t owe me anything; why do I have a right to be supported at your expense?
The difference between this and true common goods, such as clean air, is very clear. If I pollute the environment, this doesn’t just affect me and my property; it affects you and your property. By contrast, if I’m dying of lung cancer, this affects me and my family, but has no effect whatsoever on you – meaning that there’s no reason why you should have to contribute to the cost of my treatment.
*This problem is why I support state vaccination programmes.
Walton, if your customers all die of preventable illnesses _your business is screwed_. If your customers don’t have any money because they had to spend it on overpriced health insurance _your business is screwed_. It is simply not the case that other people’s health is irrelevant to your own. You are proclaiming the morality of taking your own private lifeboat and leaving everyone else to the sharks; which is revolting.
And you’ve once again dodged my point, which is that using the rhetoric of State confiscation of citizen wealth applies to all these services. To make my point clear, It’s not “coercive extraction of wealth” that is the issue, since you agree that in some cases, such coercive extraction of wealth is justified. The debate is over in what circumstances such is justified, and thus using such rhetorical tricks only in the case of healthcare is intellectually dishonest.
Right, because other family members, including non-working minors, are not impacted at all by someone’s illness. The workforce is not impacted at all. The customer base is not impacted at all. The economy is not impacted at all. The rest of the population at large is not impacted at all by infectious diseases (not all of which have vaccinations available).
Honestly, Walton, do you actually read what you type?
Walton, like all libertards, is in his own fictional world where everything is well ordered and works according to their ideology. Unfortunately, the real world is messy and needs government to create a degree of order. Health care is one area where almost all the first world countries treat access to health care as a right, which it is. Walton, if you don’t have the compassion to support the common good, then nobody will shop at your store since you will cheat them. That is a reasonable conclusion when someone like yourself doesn’t understand the unwritten social compact. That is also why it took me only 15 minutes 20+ years ago to conclude libertarianism is morally bankrupt. Walton is one dense twit.
@Walton:
Do you support the govt paying for education or welfare (such as in the case of sudden, unexpected job loss) to some degree?
oh wow. that’s so not true, I don’t even know where you pulled that one out of. Ill people cost everyone, be it because of lost labor/productivity, bankruptcies, lost consumer spending, destabilized society, etc.
of course, if we went back to the Gilded Age, or better yet to the age of slavery, then the costs of replacing dying/ill workers would be less than the provision of health, so in that one instance you might be right, and you bosses would indeed not need to give a flying fuck about your health. but then, we’d be back to the ages of high worker-mortality, black lungs, zero work-safety etc. and as far as I’m concerned, callousness with human life is far more immoral than universal health-care could ever be.
I don’t see anything incoherent about this part of the argument, in isolation. But I don’t think it melds with other things you’ve said, including your very next paragraph. I’m going to argue on your terms here; please keep in mind that in reality I think all property claims are suspect — not necessarily invalid but suspect — in part because “a choice between life-threatening poverty and the wage on offer is not a free choice.” For the moment, though, I’ll just pretend that all income is earned fairly and the history of capitalist privatization was nonviolent. ;) So, an individual’s income represents part of one’s life spent laboring for that income. Buying a land title is just one way of taking that liquid income and converting it into a real asset, not clearly different from buying an automobile or another gigabyte memory chip or a delicious cocktail of Kentucky whiskey and colloidal silver; the land title’s future value is simply anticipated to respond to different market pressures than other possible investments. They’re all transactions representing prior labor, like baking that infamous loaf of bread.
And why shouldn’t you be able to transfer your bread to another person without it being taxed? Maybe they did labor for you to earn that bread, but maybe you just decided you like that individual enough to give them free bread. Why is it the state’s business whether they earned the bread or not? Why shouldn’t you be able to transfer the fruits of your labor at will? And if the state shouldn’t be able to tax the transfer of bread or currency as income, why should they be able to tax any other asset transfer?
I know what my answers would be, that violent exploitation is the default for differential power relationships, so there is little opportunity to earn income without state protection, and taxing some income for the purpose of protecting the rest of the income makes good and fair moral sense. I don’t have a problem with that understanding. But if you’re going to present income as an inviolable right, I don’t see how any transfer of that income, whether land title or bread, would not also be inviolable.
I appreciate that you’re trying to make this up as you go. It’s all you can do, honestly. I yet again offer this advice, that it may even improve your quality of life: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/right_wing_inanity.php#comment-1590484
OK, yes. You’re right. The distinction I was previously trying to draw was a load of crap; please ignore it.
In reality, all property rights are fundamental and all taxation is theft – the reason for this being that each person is sovereign over his body and mind, and the income he earns therewith is therefore his and his alone to dispose of as he wishes, including, as you say, via the purchase of real property or via alienation by free gift or inheritance.
No, Walton, property is theft – or so it has been said!
Your claim to own a particular asset deprives me of the use of it even though, if you look at the entire story of how you came by it or the money to acquire it, then my claim to it may be as strong as yours, if not stronger.
I think I have twigged why you ignore history – even recent history – and prefer to live in an imaginary present where anything which happened the day before yesterday can be deemed irrelevant.
I commend a brief look – you don’t have to swallow the entire package – at Marx’s theory of surplus value.
“If the exchange-value of a product equals the labour-time contained in the product, then the exchange-value of a working day is equal to the product it yields, in other words, wages must be equal to the product of labour. But in fact the opposite is true. Ergo, this objection amounts to the problem, — how does production on the basis of exchange-value solely determined by labour-time lead to the result that the exchange-value of labour is less than the exchange-value of its product? This problem is solved in our analysis of capital.”
Marx, K, Critique of Political Economy
Publication date? 1859 – an interesting year, that!
Walton,
I recommend that you read up on E-Prime, even if you never use its principles.
Slogans will only take you so far, and they are not conducive to mutual understanding. I can follow you only because of earlier context. To others the above may read “we must abolish all taxes.” You ought to say more of what you mean and less of what you only wish you could believe.
As you’ve said taxes are necessary, it now appears you have no reason to claim that income taxes are any more immoral than other taxes. And here I agree with Adam Smith, since “the necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor,” progressive taxation is less immoral than flat taxation.
Property rights aren’t “fundamental” at all; they only exist if there’s a common accord that people get to “own” more than they can physically hold on to. Libertarians always seem to take it as read that property rights are somehow obvious; in fact they’re as arbitrary as any other agreed “right”.
OK, forget all this crap about rights.
I tend to talk more about “fundamental rights” when I’m feeling a bit lazy. In terms of the intellectual effort required, it’s a lot easier to be an ideologue than a pragmatist; it takes far less thought and time to filter all policy questions through a simple set of moral axioms and come up with a neat, canned solution, than it does to look up lots of supporting empirical data and explain a sophisticated policy proposal. So it’s a lot less effort to say “taxation is theft” or “government coercion is bad” than to actually explain in depth what I think about an issue.
Walton @ #317:
And this is the chief “advantage” of conservatism. It gives simple, easily stated, and WRONG answers, rewarding the ever-popular vices of laziness and stupidity. There’s no need to think, thinking is just too hard. It’s so much easier to just make shit up and assert it again and again forever, ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
People who actually want solutions that work in the real world have to do some work and use some effot. It’s so much easier to be a conservative, and reflexively attack anything that deviates from the talking points your handlers feed you. And when everything falls apart, just blame it on teh dam libruls, who had the unmitigated gall to try living in the real world.
Walton, we have a term, Jingoist, which covers those who keep repeating slogans instead of discussing issues. I also see you as one of the “chic radicals” that were all over campus during my undergraduate days. The Viet Nam war was in full swing, and many adopted a radical (leftist) posture to protest the war, and piss off mommy and daddy. Not surprisingly, the two interesting features were most of the chic radicals came from the upper middle class, and that they later reverted to type and became suburban republicans. You appear to be trying on a philosophy, and you are getting creamed here using it.
Here in the USA, the people most likely to be without health insurance are those with low level jobs. Professionals like myself get insurance through our jobs. Those on welfare get Medicaid. Those working low level or seasonal jobs often work either part time, their employer doesn’t offer insurance, or they can’t afford the employee contribution for the insurance. We call these people the working poor. And companies like Walmart are famous for only allowing people to work 35 hours per work so they don’t qualify for insurance. And just to give you an example of employee contribution issues, my insurance contribution was about $170 on my last half-month check, or about $4,100/yr. If I was barely able to make ends meet I would need that money for food, shelter, and transportation. I feel compassion for the working poor since they are trying hard, but they are also getting screwed by the system. Having socialized medical care would be a real boon to them.
Phantomreader: No, you misunderstand me.
I wasn’t saying that my ideology is that simplistic. I was just admitting that, when I’m tired and can’t be bothered to make the effort, I tend to revert to reciting slogans – because ideology simply takes less intellectual effort than pragmatism. The same is true of every ideology. Filtering all policy questions through a set of moral axioms (whether it be “taxation is theft” for libertarians, or “property is theft” for socialists and left-anarchists) is a lot easier than actually using empirical evidence to come up with a practical compromise solution.
Nerd of Redhead,
“I feel compassion for the working poor since they are trying hard, but they are also getting screwed by the system. Having socialized medical care would be a real boon to them.”
It probably would help them, but that may not be how they would choose to expend such resources, if undocumented workers are any indication. Instead of spending money on medical care, they freely choose to send so much back to relatives in Mexico that the Mexican economy is dependent upon it. Perhaps more important needs like food and shelter are being met in Mexico. The working poor might be better served by leaving the capital in private hands to be invest in increased productivity and economic growth.
africangenesis:
Could also be because Mexico has cheaper (and at least partially socialized) health care.