Doctors, Big Pharma Profit On Blindness, Taxpayers Lose

The Article: An effective eye drug is available for $50. But many doctors choose a $2,000 alternative. by Peter Whoriskey and Dan Keating in The Washington Post.

The Text: The two drugs have been declared equivalently miraculous. Tested side by side in six major trials, both prevent blindness in a common old-age affliction. Biologically, they are cousins. They’re even made by the same company.

But one holds a clear price advantage.Avastin costs about $50 per injection.

Lucentis costs about $2,000 per injection.

Doctors choose the more expensive drug more than half a million times every year, a choice that costs the Medicare program, the largest single customer, an extra $1 billion or more annually.

Spending that much may make little sense for a country burdened by ever-
rising health bills, but as is often the case in American health care, there is a certain economic logic: Doctors and drugmakers profit when more-costly treatments are adopted.

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Bill Nye’s Open Letter To Barack Obama

According to your favorite science guy, NASA is America’s best and most beloved brand. And he’s got a point: while founded in a Cold War context, it’s scientific inquiry and exploration for the sake of innovation and growth–not overt, undemocratic dominance. And for those reasons, it needs more funding.

The First Welfare System In The United States

Perhaps that’s why conservatives are so averse to hand outs–they’re historical scholars that want to avoid repeating the mistakes the Native Americans made in bestowing charity upon their white brethren. Right.

‘The Wire’ Creator: There Are Two Americas

The Article: ‘There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show’ by David Simon in The Guardian.

The Text: America is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part of the viable America, the America that is connected to its own economy, where there is a plausible future for the people born into it. About 20 blocks away is another America entirely. It’s astonishing how little we have to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity.

There’s no barbed wire around West Baltimore or around East Baltimore, around Pimlico, the areas in my city that have been utterly divorced from the American experience that I know. But there might as well be. We’ve somehow managed to march on to two separate futures and I think you’re seeing this more and more in the west. I don’t think it’s unique to America.

I think we’ve perfected a lot of the tragedy and we’re getting there faster than a lot of other places that may be a little more reasoned, but my dangerous idea kind of involves this fellow who got left by the wayside in the 20th century and seemed to be almost the butt end of the joke of the 20th century; a fellow named Karl Marx.

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Those Lazy, Working–I Mean, Err–Mooching, Homeless

When nearly half of those without a consistent home to return to at the end of the day are actually working, it’s no wonder that finding a job isn’t that appealing to some. It’s time we had a talk about fair wages. Employment is supposed to provide a way out of poverty and homelessness–not condemn you to it.