So you want to go back to 1900? When most people died before age 40 when you factor in the child mortality rates? When those who died of old age did so in thier early 50s unless they were rich? When women died not from old age but in childbirth? When every cut was a potential death sentence from tetanus? When smallpox, TB, plague, cholera and typhoid were alive and well in the United States of America?

Let's face it, the system isn't perfect and it has a ton of room for improvement. Like paying the guys at the top something "reasonable", say a half million dollars a year rather than ten million dollars a year (factor in the perks). Like capping malpractice settlements (NOT malfeance- if you don't know the difference, look it up).

But if you take government funding out of it, please tell me where the money would come from. Don't point a finger at a group, put your damn finger on a number. The non-profits have open books, show me where the money would come from. It's one thing to run your mouth, it's another to actually find a solution. If you could find a couple extra billion dollars a year that don't have, they'd fund more research- they already put a hell of a lot of money into R&D. But those couple of extra billion dollars don't exist.

You'd also be taking out the regulation of pharmaceuticals. Yeah, the FDA has dropped the ball a number of times. But they also do things like keep rat poison out of aspirin- before there was government funded regulation of pharmaceuticals, you could sell people kerosene cut with enough cheap booze, perfume and sugar to cover the smell, and it was legal. And it happened, and people died. There was no licensing of doctors, no accountability. ANYONE could hang up a sign that said they were a doctor, and if they could blind enough people with brilliance and baffle the rest with BS, they were fine. And there was no guarantee that there wasn't arsenic in your aspirin, any more than there was a guarantee that there wasn't finger in your sausage. Do you really want to go back to when the difference between russian roulette and your medicine cabinet was mess it made if you were wrong?

And if anyone thinks I sound like I'm taking this personally, no crap. I was born twelve to thirteen weeks premature- 30 years later, while your odds are surviving your first year still suck, I helped test some of the techniques that mean you have a chance. My little brother was born deaf, and he was given hearing by what was a new procedure 26 years ago. I have a strong history of cancer in my family, it contributed to the deaths both of my maternal grandparents, and my mother is a cancer survivors. If you want to spit and whine like a pig ignorant peasant about doctors and medical research, you are whining about me being alive and my brother not being a cripple- and you are spitting on my mother. You are spitting on every cancer survivor you know. Every person you know with diabetes. Every person you know who wasn't killed or maimed by TB, typhoid, cholera, or polio. Every person you know who has ever had an infection that should have killed them beaten by an antibiotic. Every person you know who's had an organ transplant. And every person with a prosthetic limb that is more than a peg leg or hook. ALL of this medical technology was paid for, in no small part, by government funding. ALL OF IT!

Go ahead, spit in their faces. Just be careful you don't spit on yourself or your children.