(...)Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist - and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels - is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes. Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive, but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the resulting medicine for years. Nobody else can make it.
(...)But a detailed study by Dr Marcia Angell, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, says that only 14 per cent of their budgets go on developing drugs - usually at the uncreative final part of the drug-trail. The rest goes on marketing and profits. And even with that puny 14 per cent, drug companies squander a fortune developing "me-too" drugs - medicines that do exactly the same job as a drug that already exists, but has one molecule different, so they can take out a new patent, and receive another avalanche of profits.

Among those who would lose their health care are 56 million Americans with pre-existing chronic health conditions. Thus, McCain, a cancer survivor, would be unlikely to get coverage under his own plan if he did not have government-provided insurance. The McCain plan offers a simple prescription for Americans: Don't get sick.

"sicko", health care, and the other side of hitler
Health care is not a commodity, it is a human right that should be apportioned without regard for accidents of birth, class, sex and race. Of the 46.6 million uninsured Americans, almost one-third (14.1 million) is Hispanic and almost one in five (7.2 million) is African American.

the thinning of the welfare state:
Some 47 million Americans have no health insurance, and the number grows daily. Health insurance is rapidly becoming unaffordable. Premiums rose an average of 73 percent in just five years (2000-2005.)
(...) Social Security replaces, on average, 41 percent of workers' pre-retirement income. Most experts agree that, to maintain something close to the lifestyle you lived in your working years, you need retirement resources that replace 75 to 90 percent of your wages.
(...) The employer attack on pensions has been highly successful. There were 95,000 such plans in 1980; it was down to 85,000 in 1993, and fell to less than 27,000 in 2005. Today only 21 percent of the workforce is covered by defined benefit pensions-the most secure type of employment-based retirement plan.