Quote of the day:   The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.   Edith Sitwell (1887 - 1964)

By now the Super bowl is over…. your team either won or gave a valiant effort. You watched the new commercials which cost $70,000 per second and may actually remember them for awhile. Your Super Bowl party may have cost a bit "but was worth it". If your team actually was in it then you may have been wearing their colors. If you attended then there was the price of the ticket, travel, hotel, parking, food and a souvenir or two. People don't seem to mind spending money on sports and leisure. Stadium bills abound… in Minnesota the Twins, Vikings and Minnesota Gophers each want a new stadium with taxpayer support. It appears to me that we have come to the point that the Roman Empire reached at its peak…. Coliseums and spectacle for the masses…. that was just before their fall from world power. Except for the public subsidies, people seem to understand that they have to pay for the "sports and leisure stuff" they consume. For all that is spent on fun and games people will still complain about outlay of cash for necessities such as prescription drugs. Here they want someone else to pay for what they consume. See item 2 for some projections of drugs for seniors. We must get in the mindset that we take care of necessities by ourselves first and THEN use the "leftovers" for recreation. Don't get confused or future archeologists will be studying the ruins of our stadiums and lamenting our downfall.

True that it does cost a lot of money to satisfy the FDA that a new drug is both safe and effective. Research is expensive. Researchers and facilities are not cheap. (Ever price even a used piece of lab equipment?) Universities and hospitals extract additional fees for administering the projects (…and the use of their prestigious names).   Much of the $800 million dollars it takes to bring a new drug to market is related to sales and marketing but what the "free-market" people REALLY don't like are patents. Patents are the only things that makes the investment of so much money into the development of new drugs worth the investment.

http://www.forbes.com/personalfinance/retirement/newswire/2004/01/27/rtr1230471.html

In his book, AGE POWER, Ken Dychtwald, the geriatric futurist shows projections of 45,000,000 Americans over age 65 by 2010. If the average drug spend for each senior is now $1,500 per year then, doing the math, we would expect $60 billion is being spent by/on our 40 million seniors THIS year.  If we "trend the spend" by 16% per year then the seniors would spend $3654 each in 2010. That works out to $164 Billion just in the year 2010. We will need a means test….like it or not!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63427-2004Jan30.html

http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2002/08/26/daily6.html

Whine: http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/4350210.html

Cheese: http://www.newsday.com/news/health/wire/sns-ap-canadian-drugs,0,463737.story?coll=sns-ap-health-headlines

aside: The word Canuck was first used to represent Canadians  in the mid-1800s. By 1900 the term  Johnny Canuck was being used to personify Canada in the same way that Uncle Sam  does the United States.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=571&ncid=571&e=4&u=/nm/20040123/hl_nm/canada_drugs_dc_1

http://newsroom.lilly.com/news/Product/2004-01-26_cialis_superbowlad.html

I hate the little buggers and hope that this cold snap does them major damage…. but a misquito born virus selectively attacks mouse tumors and leaves good cells alone. It may be a good research area but I'll wait for the vaccine.

http://scienceblog.com/community/article2234.html

Steve