And once again, you read wrong.  You really should graduate to adult reading
material that prints the truth, instead of these biased, right-wing articles
you allegedly refer to.

Taxotere has been available here for a lot longer than that.  Women have
been using it for 10 years or more for breast cancer.  Men have been using
it for at least 2 years for prostate cancer.  In fact, our rad onc and I
were discussing it exactly 2 years ago re the good results they were
seeing..

And once again I will point out that I have never, ever heard of a person
living in this Province going to the US for prostate cancer treatment of any
kind!!  So kindly provide me with evidence of this.  We have two very
well-known, large cancer hospitals here in Toronto that are doing an amazing
job with tx and research.  BC has one of the best Genome Labs in the world
that is doing amazing research.....seems you forgot to check that out.

And may I point out......your definition of *socialism* and ours is quite
different.  A National Health Care System is just that.....a national health
care system.  It is not *socialism* as you perceive it to be.  Perhaps you
should learn how our system works, then you will have some idea of what you
are talking about.

And I said I would not comment further, but I will not sit here and read
your distortions of the truth.   Get your facts straight!!

HF

I think Claude is right I.P.  Your statement really is composed of "easy cliches".
There are lazy poor people who smoke, watch TV, and spend their money
foolishly - but I think you'd be surprised if you lived in a poor neighborhood to
see how many people there behave a lot more responsibly than that.

When it comes to spending money foolishly the great American middle class,
and especially the "upper" middle class, seems to set an astonishingly
high standard.  Let's count the number of middle class people who buy
houses with mortgages at the extreme limit of their ability to pay, with credit
cards maxed out and paying 25% interest, with SUV's that cost double the
price of an economy car and get 1/3 the gas mileage, with second mortgages
that drained all the equity out of their houses, and with little or no savings in
spite of pretty good salaries.  How many of those with the good fortune to have
employer paid health insurance, are just one or a few missed paychecks
away from bankruptcy?

Is that a cliche?  Yes it is.  Many middle class people are not at all like that.

Your characterization of the poor is in the same class as that.

I wish it were true that every poor person could pull himself out of poverty
by his bootstraps.  But it isn't true.  Life can be very tough.

Is Medicaid a safety net providing health care to everyone who needs it?

No.  It's not.  Medicaid is much better than no Medicaid.  But millions of people
who really need it don't qualify at all and among those that do, the availability
of services is limited and strictly rationed.

See http://www.cbpp.org/2-4-05health.htm for a liberal, but still pretty well
documented discussion of the Medicaid program.

   Alan

I've not worked with the poor professionally, but I grew up in the deep,
very rural south with sharecropper kids who lived in uninsulated, unpainted
wooden "homes", and now I'm very often around migrant workers who pick fruit
80 hours a week and live in their 20-year-old cars. I have more respect and
empathy for hard-working people like that than I do people who choose bling
and yucks over an education and then expect a free ride at society's
expense. And I loathe the left's ENCOURAGEMENT of that choice.

By "poor" in this context and thread, I was referring to people who claim
they can't afford health insurance, regardlesss of their income. That
includes legions of people like my buddy whose pickup truck cost $40k U.S.
(it got repossessed), who lives in a beautiful 3-story home on a wooded
acre, who is trying to put three kids through school . . . and thus can't
afford medical care and went bankrupt.

I paid my own way through college, got my first cell phone just this summer,
drive my cheap cars into the ground, buy my clothes at Walmart at the end of
the season, have spent less than $3,000 on furniture in our 38 years of
marriage, consider my 100%-mortgaged $165k home almost lavish . . . and thus
have plenty of money for the IMPORTANT things in life. i.e., I CHOSE to be
well-off.

I know that true poverty is a snowball rolling down a mountainside, that
they face bigger obstacles to boot-strapping themselves than I did. But we
all have access to the same secondary education that millions of self-made
millionaires and scores of millions of middle class people did, and that's
where it starts.

I.P.

Nothing personal, but "'complexity of poverty" IS the cliché.  IP's
descriptions in his last few posts, whether garnered by experience or just
dumb luck, are extremely accurate.  The crux of the issue does not exist so
much in the complexity of poverty, but the simplicity of its solution.