Health

The mystery whether John McCain will be present during next week's historic tax bill vote is over: according to CBS, the Arizona Senator will not be on hand for the final vote on the Republican tax bill, expected early this week, and instead is returning to Arizona after spending several days in a Maryland hospital recovering from side effects from chemotherapy treatment for brain cancer. As CBS furter notes, McCain left Washington Sunday and is heading back to his home state to spend the holidays with his family.

In recent months, it seems like there’s been nothing but bad news for Uber, like having its operating licence revoked in London (“not fit and proper”), concealing a massive cyber-attack, price gauging a passenger $14,000 for a 5-mile ride and reporting a quarterly loss of $1.5 billion. Indeed, the company is becoming almost synonymous with problems.

Avondale, a secretive Alabama-based drugmaker, has gained unwanted national attention after the company increased the price of a bottle of vitamins to almost $300 that can be bought on the internet for $5.

In the latest example of price-gouging in America’s lightly regulated pharmaceutical industry, records show Avondale inflated the price of Niacor, a prescription-only version of niacin, by “809 percent last month, taking a bottle of 100 tablets from $32.46 to $295”, according to the Financial Times.

Authored by Allen Marshall (Crimson Avenger) via Defiant Living blog,

America is the only nation brought forth by a set of beliefs, and those beliefs, captured so eloquently in our founding documents, are some of the most powerful and inspiring ever conceived. We consider this to be the land of the free, where the individual is supreme and nothing prevents us from going as far as our talents can take us. That image of America – that “brand” – is incredibly strong.

Ever since it was signed into law in 2010, defenders of Obamacare have dismissed staggering surges in annual premiums by highlighting only the rates paid by those fortunate enough to receive subsidies.  In fact, last year we wrote about Marjorie Connolly's, from Obama's Department of Health and Human Services, response to the Tennessee insurance commissioner's fear that the exchanges in his state were "very near collapse" after a staggering 59% premium surge: