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Got cancer – and millions of dollars? Nancy Pelosi can help!

Let me summarize this Dallas Morning News article about Lisa Blue: if your husband (Fred Baron) is a millionaire and multimillion-dollar Democratic Party fundraiserJohn Edwards’ bagman, in fact – and also dying of bone marrow cancer, then you can not only get away with smuggling into the country experimental cancer medicine of dubious efficacy; you can get the Speaker of the House herself to lean on the FDA to let your husband get the medication in question – despite the fact that it didn’t actually work.  And then you get to brag about it, while piously talking about how awful it is that regular families don’t have your ability to violate federal regulations on access to experimental and untested medicines*. 

Which is irrelevant, of course: because it’s not going to get any easier for people to get that access in a system where private health insurance is eliminated.  In fact, as the Avastin controversy demonstrates, access to experimental or possibly-marginal medicines will decrease under an universal health care regime.  Not that it matters to people like Lisa Blue, Fred Baron, and Nancy Pelosi – after all, they live in the other one of the Two Americas that Edwards liked to so pontificate about.  The one where you can publicly call in a marker like this to the Speaker of the House and not be shunned afterward.

It takes a lot to erode my instinctive sympathy for both anybody dying of bone marrow cancer, and their families.  Being lectured on the need for universal health care coverage by a person who successfully evaded an intolerable medical regulatory regime that her own husband helped spawn will do it every time, though.

Moe Lane

*Regulations, by the way, that are in place partially because of unscrupulous tort lawyers like… Fred Baron.  You see, drug companies are terrified of lawsuits, because they’ve been taught to be by a generation of lawyers.  And those lawyers get away with it because many of them are heavy contributors to the Democratic party, like… Fred Baron.

Crossposted to RedState.

COMMENTS

  • sponge

    Find me a politician that actually lives by the laws they pass………1/2 of them don’t even read the bills they vote on, and won’t swear an oath that they’ll actually read them.

  • merryj1

    to say anything like “karma’s a _____” No, I’m not going to say that (every time I think it, it seems like, it bites me). But I do have a jaundiced view of regulations that prohibit terminal patients from access to long-shot remedies. Even hope of a slim chance can help some (adequately optimistic types) people gain time and/or quality of life.

  • clintonformccain

    The President of the Trial Lawyers Association of America wanted a drug manufacturer to bypass the safety testing and grant a waiver for him to take the drug? What? So his heirs could have another class action suit to file, claiming the drug manufacturer was negligent in not doing the testing?

    ———

    The ultimate hypocrisy was John Edwards prattling on about lobbyist when his own campaign finance chair was President of the trial lawyers lobbyist group! Not that the JounoLists would have ever pointed out these contradictions.

  • http://impudent.edublogs.org/ kyle8

    I find it absolutely reprehensible and disgusting that the federal government can stop free adults, who are terminal, from having access to experimental drugs. All they should have to do is sign a waiver saying they or their heirs will not sue.

    What possible compelling state interest is served from keeping a possible life saving product from those who will die anyway?

    Just more stupid big government control. It is all about control.

  • http://www.rightklik.net rightklik

    This is statist health care at its finest

  • davesinsanantonio

    can stop free adults who are terminal from having access to any drugs. Except the promised pain pill, of course. Of course, that presupposes you believe Obummer will keep that promise any better than he has kept the rest of his promises.

  • dambama

    When it comes to government it ALWAYS helps to know an influential politician.

    This is how it is going to work from now on. You and I will wait in line, while the politicians (who have their own separate health care system, and retirement system) cut right to the front, like a “VIP” in a Vegas Nightclub, to get their friends the best seats in the house.

    We will get the leftovers … the rationed leftovers.