Breaking Bad....Only in America

[Autumnlicious]

As someone who grew up with the NHS I find it mystifying that Americans think Healthcare should be in private hands. To me it is the same as education or defence and has to be a public service.

Us Americans are lectured all the time about the Evil Government and how Inefficient it is.

Irony is, we made the government that way.

The ensemble of all of us acting together is what makes the US Government the way it is.

Think about it -- if the vast swathe of Americans believed that the NSA scandal was wrong, would they have let it die down?

The reality is that enough members of the USA think what the NSA is doing is fine.

Enough members of the USA think that drug possession should be treated harsher than violently assaulting another human being (mind you, I am speaking merely to the act of possession alone). Many lobby for denying unemployment assistance and benefits for ex-convicts while remaining oblivious to the fact that such increases the chances for committing another crime.

So when you see the current rejection of Public Healthcare, you really see what America stands for currently. Like all things, it'll change eventually.

[max-greece]

You do understand that I am not American don't you?

Apologies my friend!

Whilst I'd agree on the pharmaceutical side there is the whole insurance side to this too. That is huge business with huge profits that appears to spend enormous sums on getting out of insurance claims.

Essentially its a screwed up system where private enterprises put profits ahead of patient care.

There's no such concept of "patient care" at a gas station or a supermarket, that concept applies to doctor's surgeries and to pharmacies.

As someone who grew up with the NHS I find it mystifying that Americans think Healthcare should be in private hands. To me it is the same as education or defence and has to be a public service.

I'll re-state what I said earlier. While this is correct, America already squanders the healthcare money that would be required, and thus they cannot afford to implement universal healthcare AND to continue the wastage. I actually don't know too much about Obamacare, but what I do know is that what should have been done is to begin national healthcare reform by cutting the wastage, and that is done by setting up new government health departments specifically to address the areas that need improvement, doing cost-benefit analysis and then implementing the reforms and changes required to get the system running efficiently for money.

To go back to what I was saying about the subsidies on pharmaceutical medication, the way you could do this is have a 6 year plan: year one, decrease the government subsidies on all over-the-counter drugs by 50% and set up a govt. department to investigate and initiate reform into these medications, years two-four: legislate to phase out all subsidies on all over-the-counter drugs from any store that is not a pharmacy, and restore 100% subsidies of over-the-counter medications sold from pharmacies, investigate the subsidy levels drug-for-drug and their cost-benefit for future reform. Years 5-6: Legislate to remove over-the-counter drugs from being should outside of specialized pharmacies.

There's a huge reason for removing drugs from non-pharmacy stores. Pharmacies are the ones that need to get the profit from those drugs so that they can employ knowledgeable trained pharmacists!! Also, pharmacies in Australia are even known to sell complete pseudo-medical shit like earwax candles, so I really dread to think about what products pharmacies in the USA may have to peddle to make an extra buck!

Basically - we agree entirely. Needs fixing both from the POV of the drug issue and the insurance issue.

[Aractus]

Yes indeed, and also from the POV that taxpayer money is accountable to the taxpayer and thus the government needs to exercise due care to spend the public money wisely. As it was put not long ago, I believe by our Prime Minister - the money in the Federal Government's budget is taxpayer owned money and not government owned money.

[Rahul]

So...

Will you cook me up some Meth?

Heck no.

Booo.

So do they teach everyone how to cook meth in chemistry school?

I always wondered how Walt just knew off the top of his head how to make Meth. Like, oh yeah, no problem.

[Aractus]

Because it's a very simple matter of converting (synthesizing) one chemical molecule into another. Although I can't recite it off the top of my head, I know people that could. Meth itself is quite a complicated molecule, but if you have a starting molecule that is already Meth with extra bits on it - or could become meth if you bond extra atoms to it then it becomes easy. The show pretty accurately depicts the original cook in season 1, but the P2P cook is more obscured as to what exactly's going on (this would be because Walter must have some way of separating the d-meth from the l-meth or rather he's depicted as creating only d-meth somehow so it's less realistic).

[Aractus]

another interesting fact i suppose is that you can also make P2P from phenylalanine.

[Autumnlicious]

For someone who is anti-drug to the point of being unreasonable in understanding the causes and experiences of others and their relationship with any drug, you sure put a lot of effort into solving the meth production problem presented in Breaking Bad.

I find that funny.

[Shaggy]

Heck no.

Booo.

So do they teach everyone how to cook meth in chemistry school?

I always wondered how Walt just knew off the top of his head how to make Meth. Like, oh yeah, no problem.

He knows how because he's a chemist. That's it lol.

[Aractus]

For someone who is anti-drug to the point of being unreasonable in understanding the causes and experiences of others and their relationship with any drug, you sure put a lot of effort into solving the meth production problem presented in Breaking Bad.

I find that funny.

Well, meth is one of the easiest illegal drugs to make, but it's also one of the very worst for your body. Whereas other dugs - even heroin and cocaine - do have some therapeutic merit (even if it's only limited), there's no redeeming aspect to meth at all.

On this subject though, I find it fascinating that we in Australia supply the most raw opium to the global pharmaceutical market (excluding India), but that America refuses to grow their own Poppies and gets every ounce of opium for their medicine from India! But then I also find it amazingly stupid that we've essentially shut down tobacco growing in Australia so that smokers have to smoke imported products, it's ridiculous. And furthermore, I think I mentioned this earlier in the thread, it is in fact far more illegal to grow a tobacco plant in your back yard than it is to grow a marijuana plant!

[Rev. Rye]

Well, meth is one of the easiest illegal drugs to make, but it's also one of the very worst for your body. Whereas other dugs - even heroin and cocaine - do have some therapeutic merit (even if it's only limited), there's no redeeming aspect to meth at all.

Actually, there's a far worse drug for you than meth. It's called Krokodil; it's a knockoff of heroin that came to be after Russia started cracking down on heroin sales and production in 2003. The crackdown worked way too well because heroin became impossible to get and addicts managed to create something that's not only of poorer quality, but dangerous enough that it literally makes your flesh melt off your body, like a Nazi looking into the Ark of the Covenant. I've watched all 5 seasons of Breaking Bad (excellent show, by the way) and I've never seen meth do anything like that to its users on that show.