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A search for: +"american medical association" returns

6th place - http://www.aamc.org/
7th place - http://www.amsa.org/

although neither one contains the phrase. I'm only searching one phrase, and the page doesn't have it?!

An extra 5 seconds of ad time used to clarify what the drugs does doesn't sound like a waste of air time to me.

From this page:

"According to these FDA regulations, advertisers who name a prescription drug, and state its purpose and benefits, must also include full disclosure of its side effects, contraindications, and must follow specific labeling guidelines."

By stating the purpose of the drug, that "extra 5 seconds" suddenly turns into a full minute or two of small print being read to you. Not exactly what the advertisers want to be doing with their time/money.

Naiveity can be cute. What about subacute bacterial endocarditis (a severe infection of the heart lining)? Heart attack? Oral health as an indicator of overall body health is being proven today (there is a lot of research in this area, for example "...the Surgeon General found that oral health is often an indication of a patient's overall health"). Your nerves (in the teeth, or gums) are an incredibly important indicator. Without them you would live in the comfort of cold-indetection and without cavity notification for a short time but could be ignoring a huge problem. Check out if your teeth are killing you.

. . .you can bring up the example of Canada and its national health insurance, for which Canadians pay higher taxes than U.S. residents.

From Alice in Universal Health Care Land:

MYTH: Americans would have trouble getting in to see a doctor. FACT: Canadians, who live in a single-payer system, see their primary care physicians more often than Americans do now. There are more doctors per capita in Canada than there are in the United States. Yet the cost of physician services in Canada is one-third less than it is in the United States. About half the cost savings in Canada comes not from offering less care but by reducing insurance overhead and paperwork. The rest of the savings comes from allocating money to pay for expensive equipment so there is less excess capacity and duplication. Ninety-six percent of Canadians prefer their health-care system to the U.S. model.

MYTH: Patients wouldn't be able to choose their own physician. FACT: According to experts, a single-payer plan would give patients more choice than they currently have in most cases. The United States is the only developed country heading in the direction of less choice. Other countries are building more choice into their systems.

MYTH: The United States has the best health care in the world. FACT: The United States has higher infant mortality, higher surgical mortality and lower life expectancy than Canada. The United States has a much lower rate of access to primary care doctors than Canada. Canada has the same acute care bed-to-population ratio as the United States. Patient satisfaction, quality of care and outcome of care in Canada equal or exceed that in the United States, according to the U.S. General Accounting Office. For this lower quality, Americans pay 40 percent per capita more than Canadians do on health care.

MYTH: There would be waiting lists for surgeries and high-tech procedures, which is why Canadians come to the United States to get health services. FACT: The United States has waiting lists for specialty care, too. Canadians rarely come to the United States for health care. Less than 1 percent of Canada's health budget goes to paying for care Canadians get in the United States. Canada's waiting-list problem stems largely from underfunding, which is being corrected now. Waiting times would likely be no longer in the United States than they are now, because we would still spend much more than other countries do on health care and still have many more specialists and capacity.

Don't be an ass. The expenses from a doctor's office are way higher than that of most other professions, and you know it.

Her salary
All Professions

The average salary for a doctor (averaged from all types) is about $110,000. Not poverty, but certainly not enough to buy a private island.

Her rent
All Professions

Most professions aren't more or less coerced into renting from high-priced medical complexes at the pain of losing patients to someplace more convenient. I didn't pick my CPA because of his office location, but plenty of (especially older) people choose a doctor because he's in the same office building as another that they see often.

Her electricity
All Professions

Do attorneys have to run X-ray equipment or sterilizers? Do CPAs have to keep film developers available at all times?

Her heating/AC
All Professions

Given.

Her transcriptionist
All Business related professions (Computer Consultant for example)

Huh? I've never paid another person to dictate my reports. Most doctors have to as per law or insurance requirements (although they could spend 2-3 hours per day doing it themselves if they really wanted to).

Her malpractice insurance
Liability, though not as high, but there

A friend of mine is an OTO (used to be ENT - ear, nose, and throat). He's never been suid, and pays over $80,000 per year for malpractice. Let me repeat: $80,000 per year. Name one profession that pays that much in liability insurance with an average salary less than five times that of the guy that removes your tonsils and puts tubes in your kids' ears.

Her receptionist
All Professions

Sometimes, but I've seen plenty of CPAs and lawyers answer their own phones.

Her phone system
All Professions

Does it bother you that those professions also incorporate operating expenses into their bills?

Her disposable supplies
All Professions

No. I flat-out reject this one. Check the price of a case of legal pads, pens, and a couple of computers. Now, check the price for a box of sterile gauze. Let me know which one is rediculously expensive per amount of goods purchased.

Her equipment investment
All Professions

BS. Take some X-ray equipment, add a few exam tables, some treatment chairs, instruments, and a couple of sterilizers in addition to all of the equipment that other professional offices have to have.

Her student loans
Most all professions

From the American Medical Student Association: the average annual tuition for public and private medical schools in 2002 was $14,577 and $30,960 respectively. In other words, going to a state school is going to cost you at least $60,000. Then you have a few (essentially unpaid) years of residency and intership. My comp. sci. degree cost about $19,500. And you were saying?

I know I'm probably feeding a troll, but there's no way you can rationally state that other professions have the same practice overheads as medicine. It just isn't true and you know it.

There's a primer on gene patents (PDF file) that I wrote about a year ago. It explains the generally-accepted patent criteria and how genetic material has been interpreted to meet those criteria. The arguments for and against patentability of genes are presented, although the bias is against strict patentability; my personal viewpoint is that applications of genetic information are fair game, but the raw sequence itself should be off-limits.

What you describe is the exception, not the rule. Most patents *are* on the expressed sequence of the gene itself (or the amino acid sequence of the protein, which is informationally equivalent in most cases), not on some test kit or therapeutic regimen. The described utility is generally one that has been found through computational homology studies: you screen the gene against a database of knowns, and then declare it to have functionality equivalent to that of the closest match.

As you pointed out, there's supposed to be some novelty here. The trick is that the expressed sequence isn't how the gene exists in your body: in your body, there are unexpressed intervening sequences (comments, sort of), proteins attached to the strand at various points, and other modifications. Courts have held that since the pure expressed sequence isn't the form found in nature, it's a new compound and is patentable.

I agree that the specific applications of genetic discoveries should be patentable and patented, but that ain't what we're arguing here.

Shameless self-promotion: I wrote a primer on gene patents (PDF format) for the American Medical Student Association about a year ago that goes into a lot more detail on the issue.