I don’t know what to make of Chuck Grassley. He has been working hard to block health care reform, including repeating much of the misinformation being spread by the right. The compromise measure he’s working on in the Senate Finance Committee is probably worse than doing nothing. On the other hand, he has done some helpful things with regards to health care. As I’ve written before, he was instrumental in watering down the attempt by George Bush to destroy the Medicare program. The New York Times also notes another effort that has value to improve the credibility of medical research and stop a tactic used by the pharmaceutical industry:
A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at some of the nation’s top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their reputations to scientific papers that were drafted by ghostwriters working for drug companies — articles that were carefully calibrated to help the manufacturers sell more products.
Experts in medical ethics condemn this practice as a breach of the public trust. Yet many universities have been slow to recognize the extent of the problem, to adopt new ethical rules or to hold faculty members to account.
Those universities may not have much longer to get their houses in order before they find themselves in trouble with Washington.
With a letter last week, a senator who helps oversee public funding for medical research signaled that he was running out of patience with the practice of ghostwriting. Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who has led a long-running investigation of conflicts of interest in medicine, is starting to put pressure on the National Institutes of Health to crack down on the practice.
Folks I need your help. If we are going to get a government option we must turn the tide. Instead of complaining about those dirty tricks the conservatives are playing we must go on the offensive. How you ask? My idea is to use scare tatics just like they do. See My Answer To Sarah Palin on facebook and get the word out. flood the internet with insurance companies rejections, turning down common proceedures as experimental, post every law suite you can find they yhey lost. Print their ceo and upper management salaries and bonuses and corp profits. Expose which hospitals they own. Go on the offensive the other side expects us to just sit back and cry. Lets let them know what they are standing for. The public wanted a government option before they started to scare them it won’t be as hard as it looks to scare them back to our side. Then once the ball is rolling our way (after Labor day and we must pound once twice a day till then) we start exposing the liars and the techniques like bring conservative forieners to host the Limbaugh radio show and tell horror stories. One more thing the government option is more like Blue Cross Blue Sheild than it is like medicare or medicade people just don’t understand the it is just a competitive plan to Cigna and United Health etc that will make them streemline their plans and actually pay for something. Please help start today
I’m no doctor and I’m not trying to be my usual catty self, but sometimes I wonder if Grassley isn’t a victim of early stage Alzheimer’s disease.
In Grassley’s case I think the episodes of confusion are a consequence of believing the conservative line as opposed to Alzheimer’s.