Democrats will cut your Obamacare!

I think 2012 is a little soon; they have to attempt to repeal closing the donut hole for America's seniors first...

But I've been saying what this cartoon does better since the bill passed.



My congressman is John Shimkus. He's a coal guy, and even though I don't like his quoting the Bible in congressional hearings to contradict global warming...



So even though he's, well, kinda nuts and a dangerous theocrat, he's pretty typical back-bench House GOP Christian white guy. And since the laptop on which I type is currently powered by a coal-burning power plant, I get that he has a vested interest in promoting an industry which is owned by those who pay his re-election bills.

I don't get the logic of how he is going to go about "repealing" the health care bill. How he's going to tell the seniors who voted for him that closing the donut hole is somehow going to give them more "freedom" "America" and "no death panels."

Even in their own twisted mindset, it makes no sense. He could play the deficit card, but betcha he voted for the handout to pharma with Medicare part D, so that's a crock.

I wrote about reimportation at DG's and I'll cut and paste with a bit of editing here:

The reimportation issue is a gift to the pharmaceutical companies, in that it completely dodges the real issue of patent reform. The Canadians set prices on drugs and we should, too. Instead, we subsidize the Canadians (and every other industrialized nation) with a patent system that lets pharma charge Americans whatever the hell they want for seven years. (I never understood why the anti-immigrationists didn't jump on this. Essentially paying for foreigners to have cheap drugs.)

If we want cheap drugs, we need to make pharma have a decent but reasonable profit without gouging just because they will make no profit after seven years. There is no reason that a six-year, 364 day old drug should cost $53.00 a pill but that same pill at six years, 366 days old costs 53 cents.

Why should we have to sneak Canada's reasonable drug pricing policy across the border when we can have one of our own?

Extend the patent time to ten years, require pharma to charge costs plus 15 percent if they want that patent. And ban pharmaceutical advertising outside of medical journals.

Reimportation covers up their greed and doesn't fix the real problem.