Drug manufacturer Pfizer has launched a program called Maintain to provide free prescription drugs to laid-off Americans who lack insurance. Powerhouse drugs like Lipitor, Norvasc, Caduet and, yes, Viagra, are on the list, though you might be hard pressed to make a medical necessity case for the latter.

Cynics will counter that it’s all “great PR,” and I can see the New York Times invoking “the Obama Effect,” as in “the Jesus Effect” in parting the waters, feeding multitudes with one fish–and now providing free prescriptions (soon health care as well).

As an enrollee you, of course, have to be able to prove your unemployment and meet other tests, but this sounds great to me (especially since I’ve used one or two of those drugs to treat my own conditions, and no, not Viagra–LOL).

Check out the program’s Web page, or call (866) 706-2400.

I found this great graph on a site called The Glittering Eye that shows exactly what will happen to costs when the public option takes over. Note how the U.S. costs for health care are stable and relatively equal to other countries up to the age of 65 when the current public option, Medicare, kicks in.

Gee, once health care in America becomes subsidized at age 65, people flock to their doctors. What does that portend for our health care costs when Obama’s “public option” starts signing people up?

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that costs will skyrocket out of control (which says a lot about the level of intelligence of those in the White House and the left side of the aisle in Congress).

I hope those making $250,000 and above won’t mind paying for all of this. (Another great farce and illusion in the whole argument, but I’ll save the topic for another time.)

It was big news when Wal-Mart came out this week in favor of an employer mandate for health care, meaning that all employers (unless exempted by size) would have to provide health care for their workers or pay a tax to the government.

Not only did Wal-Mart endorse the employer mandate now under discussion in Congress, but it also did so in concert with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) by issuing a joint statement.

Is this a reprise of the British surrender tune at Yorktown of “The World Turned Upside Down”?

Not really, though the news did garner gushing gagas from the liberal media.

In truth, there was at least one obvious motive in Wal-Mart’s endorsement–crush the competition by making them spend their money on health care.

Behind the scenes, there may also have been some promises or compacts made between the SEIU and Wal-Mart: “Keep the unions out, and we’ll endorse the employer mandate” or some such.

Finally, there’s the obvious clout with official Washington that this brings to the nation’s largest private employer.

Plus, why fight the obvious? With Democrats holding all the cards in D.C., an employer mandate is as sure as death and taxes.

Chalk one up for Wal-Mart.

The British organization going by the acronym of NICE is anything but when it comes to its role in policing health care in the United Kingdom. It routinely denies the use of drugs that the United States and European nations rely on to prolong and save lives from chronic diseases such as cancer.

NICE stands for the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, Britain’s model for what Obama and crew want to accomplish here in nationalizing and then rationalizing (and rationing) health care–true cost effectiveness.

As British oncologist Karol Sikora points out, however, NICE manages cost effectiveness by keeping the nation in the medicinal dark ages. “If it costs too much, it can’t be any good” seems to be NICE’s motto when it comes to drugs.

Writing in the Manchester Union-Leader, Dr. Sikora notes that Obama wants a similar mechanism for holding down costs and warns that it will cost thousands of Americans their lives in premature deaths and suffering:

As a practicing oncologist, I am forced to give patients older, cheaper medicines. The real cost of this penny-pinching is premature death for thousands of patients — and higher overall health costs than if they had been treated properly: Sick people are expensive.

Sadly, the model upon which Obama is building is based on Tom Daschle’s book, which praises NICE and slams old people for hanging on to their lives too long and costing taxpayers too much money (which presumably could be spent elsewhere in buying votes).

The thing about bleeding-heart liberals (see Obama, Barack, Kennedy, Ted, and Baucus, Max, et al.) is that they only bleed for taxpayer dollars and for systems they can run–not for real people in suffering.

“Build them a system, and they will be happy–and we can take credit for it forever.” Or at least until the “happy” citizens die at 67 instead of 81.

This comment by an emergency room physician is so juicy and right on that I just have to reprint it here from another blog–sorry about that, blogger, but I did give you a backlink:

Your reader’s response to Megan got a lot closer to the core of the problem with healthcare costs. I am a physician in an emergency room in New York City, and every day I see tons of cash needlessly flying out the door due to “the Burger King factor.” American patients often come to the ER with very minor complaints – back pain for which they have not even tried tylenol, nasal congestion for two days, itchy mosquito bites, and so forth. All of them expect something from you, quickly, for their trouble – and it must meet their preconceptions or they will accuse you of ripping them off.

Many of them become virtually incandescent with anger if they aren’t given some kind of medical test that they (or one of their friends) thinks is a good idea, but they don’t really need. They insult you, they threaten you, they loudly announce that they’re going to call their lawyer or the hospital administrator, etc. Sometimes we stand up to them, and sometimes we’re too exhausted to fight. Sometimes it’s just easier to get the x-ray on the patient with back pain rather than take the abuse and argue with them for 40 minutes and then have them send an angry letter to the review board. Others are simply beyond the pale and can’t put anyone else ahead of themselves. Some are incensed that I have to see a critically ill patient before I see them, because “I got here first.” People will literally interrupt cpr to scream that they want a sandwich or something to eat NOW. People want a blood test, a cat scan, an EKG, anything in exchange for their time. People will quote TV shows as medical authorities. All of us have our favorite ‘placebo’ methods to try and gratify these patients, from ultrasounding their skulls (safe, dramatic, shows nothing but costs nothing) to pointing an ultraviolet flashlight into their maalox before they drink it. It’s our version of wearing a wooden mask and shaking a rattle – we hate it, and patients love it.

The amazing thing is that when needless tests come back negative, the patient is completely satisfied. There is never a sense of regret, or how much money they just wasted, but rather one of accomplishment, even if they still have the same problem they walked in with.

Ultimately, the American sense of entitlement, so long appeased and encouraged by our commercial culture, is what is poisoning the healthcare system. Doctors have played into it and are just as guilty for caving in when they know better, or billing for procedures a patient doesn’t really need. We have played along and made medical glitz into the standard of care, feeding and feeding off of a narcissism that cannot be satisfied. It is a uniquely American problem, which is why the solutions that other nations have reached will not work as well for us.

Things in the nation’s capital get curiouser and curiouser everyday for those who pay attention to what’s being said and done (and who aren’t the ones actually doing the doings and saying the sayings and those who are supposed to report on them in the Fourth Estate).

First, Senator Kent Conrad (D.-N.D.), chairman of the Budget Committee, shreds Barack Obama’s budget by half (the discretionary part at least, so don’t get your hopes too high for a balanced budget any decade soon) and leaves no money in it for health care reform. He does, however, leave some wiggle room in something called “deficit-neutral” reserve funds.

Now, I assume “deficit-neutral” means something like “don’t add to the already-ginormous budget deficit,” but it’s probably just another way of saying one thing and allowing another to occur. Thus “don’t increase the deficit” becomes “don’t talk about increasing the deficit even as you do.”

At least, that’s the conclusion I drew from Senator Max Baucus, D.-Mont., chairman of the Finance Committee, when he immediately observes: “I’m very happy that healthcare reform does not have to be paid for in the first five years. We could not do meaningful healthcare reform [otherwise].”

In other words, we’ll do what we please and the press (Fourth Estate) will interpret away all the red ink for public consumption.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could all just print money in our basements?

Two admittedly left-leaning columnists, a married couple (he a pollster, she a lawyer), have produced a comparison of polling results then and now. “Then” refers to the Hillarycare hubbub in 1993-1994, and “now” refers to the Obamacare hubbub in 2009-?.

Results are a bit different than you would expect if you listen to or read what our left-leaning media have to say about health care reform.

Surprise, surprise, there was more public support then than now!

You can read through the nitty-gritty polling numbers in “A New Day or Groundhog Day,” but let me focus on just one of the results to show you why Obama and the Democrats are going to stuff health care reform down our throats whether we like it or not.

A poll in 1993 when Hillarycare filled the air found 66 percent agreeing with the statement, “I would be willing to pay higher taxes so that everyone can have health insurance.” Just 30 percent were opposed. A poll released March 1 of this year found just 49 percent agreeing and 45 percent disagreeing.

But wait–here’s where it gets interesting. When those who agreed with the statement in 1993 were asked how much they’d be willing to spend a month so that everyone could have health insurance, just 25 percent said $50, 40 percent said $30, and 61 percent said just $10.

The same breakdown isn’t available for 2009, but I bet you’d find few people willing to pay $50 more a month in this economy. I’m not even sure you could get a majority to commit to $10 (unless they thought that they would then get health care for free, an extraordinarily popular delusion in this day and age).

That in a nutshell is why the Dems are rushing to pass “reform” before anyone can sort through the details (which in any case won’t be fully available until the thing is published as law). They know the nation can’t afford it and taxes will be flying at everyone (and not just the rich) right and left to try to fund so-called reform (to say nothing of the long lines to see doctors, waiting lists to get hospital treatment, and medicines and procedures banned to save money).

Medicare is already on the fast track to go bankrupt in 10 years or less, and somehow our sleight-of-hand artists in D.C. are trying to get us to believe that spending more money actually saves money (in the long run, they add as a disingenuous qualification).

Welcome to life in our Brave New World, where deficits result in savings and less health care is better health care.

To be frank, I share neither the euphoria nor the enthusiasm that seem to surround the rush to “reform” health care. Of course, the optimistic aura surrounding Obama’s push for reform is largely media induced, leaving us little hope that we’ll see or read anything to detract from what’s going on.

My position is that there is no reform of health care going on; there’s just a push to get government more involved with an eye toward eventually creating “Medicare for all,” for lack of an easier description. Once that happens, then the real, intended reform can take place–bureaucrats will dictate to doctors and hospitals what they can and can’t do based on cost effectiveness. In other words, if it’s expensive, don’t expect to get it once Obamacare takes full effect–unless you want to take a medical vacation to India and pay for it yourself.

Consider this example from Great Britain, which I actually found in a real, live American newspaper (but appearing below and inferior to a more “positive,” pro-reform article):

In Britain, for example, politicians were getting pressure from constituents because hospital emergency rooms were so crowded that patients were left on gurneys in hallways awaiting care, sometimes for days. Politicians told the hospitals this had to stop and that they had to admit patients faster.

The response of some hospital administrators: Take the wheels off the gurneys because they then fit the definition of a ‘hospital bed.’ The patients were no better off, but the statistics looked better to the politicians.

The article was written by someone named Grace-Marie Turner, whom the Atlanta Journal-Constitution quickly described as “president and founder of the Galen Institute, which is funded in part by the pharmaceutical and medical industries” (my emphasis).

At least the AJC let the article see the light of print before quickly disavowing and discrediting it.

So you see what I mean about how hard it is to find and read the truth.

I found this interesting. It was on some far-left (the author called himself progressive, but he was way off the spectrum) blog, and it’s a list of who’s received the most in campaign donations from the insurance industry, to wit:

John McCain (R-AZ) $2,799,156
Barack Obama (D-IL) $2,184,670
Chris Dodd (D-CT) $2,138,446
Earl Pomeroy (Blue Dog-ND) $1,735,356
Charlie Rangel (D-NY) $1,346,785
Ben Nelson (D-NE) $1,185,299
Max Baucus (D-MT) $1,171,363
Joe Lieberman (I-CT) $1,033,802
Arlen Specter (R-PA) $1,007,130
Chuck Schumer (D-NY) $943,400
Mitch McConnell (R-KY) $918,007

Said author also reports that, since 1990, insurers have donated $309,549,407, 63% of it to Republicans. Interesting since most of the people on the top-ten list are Democrats.

I’ll take this guy’s word for it even though he didn’t list any sources for this information. On its surface, the list does appear accurate, name-wise anyway.

A group calling itself Physicians for National Health Program (PNHP) has issued a press release revealing the failure of Hillarycare as it was resurrected in Massachusetts by former Governor Mitt Romney (who somehow has now seen the light of his transgressions from Republican orthodoxy).

Costs are up, services are hard to get, the state is going broke, and what was once free for the indigent now costs them money–that’s the Massachusetts health care plan implemented in 2006.

So far, so good–these are the inevitable results of government interference in the free market. (Watch for higher costs and more rationing coming down the pike soon.)

However, PNHP then advocates the adoption of a single-payer national health care system “while maintaining the private delivery system.” This plan is embodied in H.R. 676, the so-called United States National Health Care Act.

The group claims implementation of H.R. 676 would save Massachusetts alone “about $8 billion to $10 billion a year in reduced administrative costs,” but it fails to say how except that it would eliminate (now, really?) the 31-percent administrative fees built into private insurance plans. Eliminate some admin costs, yes, but all, no, but PNHP never goes into detail.

Also, how does this differ from just putting everyone on Medicare? No clue in the press release.

What H.R. 676 really amounts to is a massive “fee-for-service” cash grab by the physicians of America who, once they got their hands on an “unlimited” federal money spigot, would open the valve as wide as possible with a) more patients and b) more services for every patient they see.

Unless they can provide better details than this crappy press release does, these physicians need to go back to the drawing board–and figure out how they can see more patients for the same, or less, than they do now.

Otherwise, it’s just more greedy pigs lining up at the federal trough (see banks, the Big Three, the states, housing, unions, etc.).