Tom Toles for October 24, 2013

But, but, but,,. Our very knowledgeable ultra conservatives here state that our great health care system should take care of all that anyway!

The doctor on the Frontline piece said that big pharma isn’t working on anti-biotics much because people don’t taking them for long periods, like Crestor or other drugs so the profit margin isn’t high enough. And much of the “research” they do is geared to swapping off 1 atom from existing drugs so they can get a new patent.

The doctor’s wasting his breath. His patient has a bad case of Obamacare!

If we could just link the superbugs to Obama, maybe we’d get some action. No, wait, all we’d get is outrage, like the outrage that the healthcare.gov site sucks, so we’re having hearings on how to fix a progarm that we just shutdown the government for in our effort to kill it.

The answer is simple: just pass a law that absolves antibiotic manufacturers and agribusiness firms that load their product with antibiotics from any responsibility for the results of their policies. Seems to work for Monsanto and their genetically modified foods.

There. Problem solved. It’s easy, once you know the secret.

Or…..just move those businesses to China, where there is no pretense of oversight. Remember lead paint on children’s toys? Tainted milk? Toy pieces that, when swallowed, turn into the date-rape drug? Today’s local paper has an article on dog and cat treats made in China that sicken and kill the animals. Not to worry: it’s cheaper, and that’s all that matters to a large percentage of our population.

Obamacare to blame? I think someone is confusing cause and effect.

“sn’t unfettered capitalism just grand?”

It might be, if we had something like that. What we seem to have is government subsidized monopolies, though, which doesn’t satisfy the definition.

Thanks. I’ll read it this evening.

… a major cause of the wholesale deaths of native American peoples when the Europeans arrived, was their lack of immune response to the zoonotic diseases to which the Europeans had developed immunological competence.If I were a NeoConman, I might suggest that it was their fault for not developing their own immunological competence.

Actually the much larger problem is world over population. The action on that is about the same as in the cartoon. Maybe the two problems will take care of each other.