Daily Kos

Are McCain/Palin hazardous to your health? Oh, Yeah!

Sun Oct 05, 2008 at 02:22:55 PM PDT

Here is an ugly truth is conservatives are legally using a Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc. and the Data Quality Act to allow industry to rewrite laws that protect the public. Both McCain and Palin think tax cuts and deregulation will take us where we need to go. President McCain will encourage corporate donors and more cronyism to fill the gap between their promises and reality. How could the United States government possibly deregulate more than President Bush? One can't go past the bottom of the barrel!
Like the story of Alice racing the Red Queen in Lewis Carrol's book Alice Through the Looking Glass America is running as fast it can just to stay in the place. To quote the Red Queen:

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.  If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that

Corporate America has a bad habit of manufacturing doubt and uncertainity about science. These lies are dangerous and costly habit. Governor Sarah Palin doesn't understand what she is doing. She is (like most of her party) out of her political depth and the American public will pay the price. Our health care system is currently a major part of our economy. Hence money means power. Ideas driven by power are very hard to challenge. We can only keep this pathology up for so long. We have more social inequity than ever before and it killing us prematurely at a great social cost.
Here are TEN seldom thought ideas about health and health care which America has think about sooner rather later from the PBS documentary program "Unnatural causes":

  1. Health is more health care.
  1. Health is tied to dist ribution of resources
  1. Racism imposes an added health burden
  1. The choices we make are shaped by the choices we have
  1. High demand plus low control equal chronic stress
  1. Chronic stress can be deadly
  1. Inequality both economic and political is bad for your health
  1. Social policy is health policy
  1. Health inequities are neither natural nor inevitable.
  1. We ALL PAY for the price of poor health.

 
If John McCain gets elected legal cases which gave rise to movies and books like Erin Brockovich and Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action will be things of the distant past. According to the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy, the Daubert ruling allows judges not trained in science to determine what science is and is not. Daubert takes the incompatable philosophies of Karl Pope and Carl Hempel and pounds them together into a scientific absolutism that doesn't exist. Daubert coupled with the other two cases  like a boat on dry land: amibition is there without the knowledge to get justice.  
According to the former Republican Majority Leader (and cardiac surgeon) Dr. William Frist in a 2005 his Harvard Shattuck lecture estimated any paradigm change takes the medical community seventeen years. If one uses the Hardy Weinberg Equation or p squared + 2 x p x q + q squared = 1 at a 0.7 percent mutation rate then America doesn't have 17 yrs because states like Mississippi are two years away from a public health point of no return! Obesity is the best example of our epidemic of morbidity. Obesity is not alone. America is looking at,more cancer, more diabetes, heart disease and stroke with coupled with an ever increasing survival rate can only mean insurance costs to everyone (sick and healthy) will rise.

Tags: Health, Morbidity, Politics, McCain, Palin, Supreme Court, epidemic, Toxins, Food, Red Queen (all tags) :: Previous Tag Versions

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