"My opinion about medical doctors, leadbelly, is that they are ordinary people like you and me".

Indeed, they are highly ordinary, Little Hawk. In former decades, most people only became medical doctors because of vocation, i.e. to help patients without any extreme interest in earning a lot of money. This ethical attitude has changed over the time. Medical doctors of today most often started their studies because of earning -as said- a lot of money. They don't have this ethical feeling to help people in first place. I'm aware in what I am talking about because I have had some jobs in the pharmaceutical industry as marketing research mananger in several companies. Most of doctors are corrupt. Money makes the world go around...

"Public health of a nation should not be based on profit at all."

Sounds good and I do agree! But it's highly idealistic. Perhaps such a system in communist countries works resp. can be established. Apart from this it's a matter of fact than real progress in pharmaceutical research, i.e. in finding new and effective compounds was made by companies in western countries. What's the reason behind this? These companies are investigating much money in order to get much more money back before expiry of patent. That's the result of free economy. On the other hand, no western government would be willing to invest so much money to find new substances. And even if they decide to take part in this business: it's a matter of fact, that only a very limited number of new compounds came from communist countries within the last decades. I don't believe that western governments are reaching better results by doing research on a non profit base.   

What I want to make clear is that we need the competition of pharmaceutical companies to guarantee the ongoing research in finding new compounds. And by no means these companies are worse than bankers. We don't need bankers, but sometimes we do need drugs. You and me: we don't need credits/loans from bankers. Other services can be/ must be taken in modern times. But no credits for ordinary people.

It's another cup of tea whether all new drugs introduced to the market are really necessary and -above all- have to be comparatively expensive. And sometimes they can be dangerous like Valium (Agreed Acorn 4 !)and many other drugs because of side-effects and potential of abuse.

Manfred from Germany