While I hold no love for insurance companies or big pharma, they all need a seat at the table. Without them, we have no health care programs in this country. Without them we have very little research to help advance health care. Leaving them out makes absolutely NO sense.

Edwards is saying what he thinks Americans want to hear and if by some crazy twist of fate he was elected, he would not be able to deliver what he has "promised". You cannot leave pharma or insurance companies out of the discussion. Like it or not, they play a huge role in our health care system. Unless we're planning on doing away with one (or both) completely, they deserve a seat just like anyone else who has a stake in these decisions.

Again, Hillary wins this one for me.

~Denise
Fast Times @ Homeschool High & Flamingo House Happenings

We (in a US-centric perspective) don't have money to fund health care. Ugly but significant facts just insist on raising their heads, don't they?

Universal health care, education, living wages, alternative energy, sustainable manufacturing all depend on the massive outpouring of outrage by U.S. women against our war culture and our coddling of corporatist greed.

As someone who has lost family members to cancer (father and two brothers) -- including a brother who wouldn't have to have died had there been decent health insurance that would have paid for the "preventive" monitoring for cancer recurrence) I know how much health care costs.

Every day we stay silent about the theft of our tax money by a corrupt government and the theft of our capital resources by corporate administrators who earn 800 times as much as the regular Janes who work for them we give them our blessing.

Do something about this today!

Does the candidate you support back vast over-funding of U.S. aggression both militarily and through direct support of corrupt, violent governments? If so then any words spewed about funding healthcare are just gaseous erruptions. We cannot do both. We can work for the betternment of our lives here in the U.S. and the lives of everyone in the world or we can continue to attempt to police the world with violence, invasion, occupation, and the backing of military dictatorships and absolute monarchies.

Write your Reps, your Senators, your favorite presidential candidates.

Nancy

Build Peace
My Life As An Avatar

As a cancer educator, and a woman who lost her mother to breast cancer as a child, I have strong opinions about the fact that, as Hillary Clinton mentioned, the cancer research funding has been slashed dramatically.

In fact, while at the National Institutes of Health in 2005 for a conference on skin cancer prevention, nearly 90% (of the dwindling cancer research funds are funded by the Department of Defense and the only two cancers the DOD funds are prostate and breast cancer.

According to the World Health Organization, Americans spend more than 100 billion on cancer treatment alone. Yet, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of treatment. WE NEED TO BE TEACHING PREVENTION and FUNDING PREVENTION. Granted, many cancers have a strong hereditary link, such as breast cancer does, but even still there are ways to teach prevention in effort to significantly reduce cancer incidence and mortality (such as melanoma, which is killing more women in their 20s and 30s but is largely preventable).

I have long thought that cancer research and funding has become politically tainted. For some reason, we are willing to spend millions of dollars on treating AIDS in Africa (which is important!) and not on cancer prevention and research here in our own country. WHY?

While I'm not the biggest fan of Hillary Clinton, I do think she has a more clear grasp of the economics of health care than many of the other candidates. And I'm disappointed that two cancer survivors did not make it a priority to attend such a pivotal and important forum discussion on cancer.

And while I generally have a poor opinion of insurance and how they have failed to protect, provide for, and care for cancer patients over the past 20 years, I agree with Denise that to assume universal health care is possible for all cancer patients without considering insurance companies is a bit naive.

Anyway, I just wanted to THANK YOU for posting this forum and making it available to all of us.

In closing I would say that CANCER PREVENTION is something that we cannot lay at the feet of the government; we must be individually proactive about proper prevention such as wearing sunscreen, avoiding tanning beds, annual mammograms and pap smears, monthly skin checks, monthly self breast exams (and, for the guys, monthly self testicular exams), and EDUCATION, EDUCATION, EDUCATION. It is not enough for us to simply raise awareness, rather we must provide hands-on PREVENTION EDUCATION. We do need the government to make cancer a top health priority but we must also take personal responsibility to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and neighbors by promoting and providing PREVENTION, as well. Until the government "steps up" its efforts, let us not forget that we can still make a difference, too. Each of us has a moral responsibility to fight cancer and save lives.

Danielle M. White
The Cancer Crusaders Organization
info@cancercrusaders.org
http://onlyskindeepbook.blogpspot.com