Agree or Disagree (1) ?

[Poimen]

Forgetting Candidates, Parties, etc., & just looking at the issues, such as ...

Health Care and Government
James Madison said: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined." (Federalist Papers #45) The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people (Amendment X).

We oppose the governmentalization and bureaucratization of American medicine. Government regulation and subsidy constitutes a threat to both the quality and availability of patient-oriented health care and treatment.

Hospitals, doctors, and other health care providers should be accountable to patients - not to politicians, insurance bureaucrats, or HMO Administrators.

If the supply of medical care is controlled by the federal government, then officers of that government will determine which demand is satisfied. The result will be the rationing of services, higher costs, poorer results - and the power of life and death transferred from caring physicians to unaccountable political overseers.

We denounce any civil government entity using age or any other personal characteristic to: preclude people and insurance firms from freely contracting for medical coverage; conscript such people into socialized medicine, e.g., Medicare; or prohibit these people from using insurance payments and/or their own money to obtain medical services in addition to, or to augment the quality of, those services prescribed by the program.

We applaud proposals for employee-controlled "family coverage" health insurance plans based on cash value life insurance principles.

The federal government has no Constitutional provision to regulate or restrict the freedom of the people to have access to medical care, supplies or treatments. We advocate, therefore, the elimination of the federal Food and Drug Administration, as it has been the federal agency primarily responsible for prohibiting beneficial products, treatments, and technologies here in the United States that are freely available in much of the rest of the civilized world.

We affirm freedom of choice of practitioner and treatment for all citizens for their health care.

We support the right of patients to seek redress of their grievances through the courts against insurers and/or HMO's.

We condemn the misrepresentations made by the Federal Administration in securing passage of the recently enacted Medicare prescription drug bill, and the use of such legislation to secure government subsidies to special interests, such as the HMOs, and to protect the artificially high cost to consumers of prescription drugs.

[dolfan]

I agree except for abolishing the FDA. If run well, it has an essential role in regulating commerce. Congress has the power to regulate commerce under Article I of the Constitution. Just as the federal control of interstate highways is necessary to insure interstate commerce runs well (and, I think we can agree that the interstate highway system is one of the few --albeit tainted--success stories of government) The FDA is corrupt, though, awash with favors for money from lobbyists on every side of every issue. The problem with big-government FDA is that both Congress and the bureaucracy class use it to wield power and exercise control for the sake of power and control. It is so with every agency of government. We do need some form of gatekeeping and accountability given the advances in medical science, the extremely high motive to exploit those advances (good motives) versus the equally high motive to exploit citizens with those advances (bad motives). States are simply unequipped to tackle that task, and will never be able to provide the necessary minimal safety measures that we, citizens who need medicine, need.