Thank Mr. Bush

You know, at the last debate, the president did us a favor. He said, "Well, yeah, I know we promised with the shortage last year that we'd have plenty of flu vaccine this year and we fucked up, but it's all your own fault because you won't vaccinate the drug manufacturers against law suits."

OK, right, the president never admits to any fuckup, and words like "vaccinate" and "manufacturers" wouldn't exactly roll off that platinum coated tongue of his. But that's really what he was telling us.

So if Chiron - the British manufacturer whose entire lot (more than half of what was to be the U.S. supply) was caught by the Brit officials as contaminated - had managed to get its shipment to us, and we received contaminated vaccine which caused even more problems than the flu itself, Mr. Bush would have been fine if Chiron didn't pay a cent for your illness or death.

But at least we know this before the election. Perhaps a few of us will even wonder if Mr. Bush's folks - not exactly the best advocates for Mom and Pop America we've ever seen grace the White House - didn't sort of arrange to put most of our eggs in one basket with a foreign manufacturer so that we could have this catastrophic even so Mr. Bush could point out the need for Pharma and the docs to be protected regardless of what damage it does to the patients.


Now, I'm not a litigious person. It would take willful or gross neglect or error to probably ever spur me to lodge a medical law suit. I suspect a lot of you are like me. Sure, we all know some people who abuse the system terribly, and juries in one state down south are famous for returning huge verdicts on borderline cases. But that's not most of us. Still, we'd like some system in place so that if somebody really fucks us over, we've got some means of redress. We don't want to become millionaires; we just want to make sure mortgage payments and medical bills get met if there is indeed someone or some company at clear and evident fault.

President has done us a favor in reminding us yet again how many ways he's willing to screw with us to make his fat cat friends happy. Remember that as you worry about the flu, or sit in a long flu shot line, and especially as you go vote on November 2nd. Remember, too, that the president told you that even though you pay for him and his cronies in Washington to receive unprecedented health care, that you're not worth it. Recall how he mocked Kerry? So if that level of care is so unaffordable, perhaps we shouldn't pay for the prez or Congress to have it either.