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If there was one thing Americans had a right to expect from Congress, it was a federal plan to help the elderly pay for prescription drugs. It is a promise that has been made again and again--in particularly high decibels during the last presidential election. The House and Senate have passed bills, and although both are flawed, this page has urged Congress to finish work on them as a first step toward fulfilling this longstanding commitment. Unfortunately, things have changed. The government cannot afford the program now. That is the fault of President Bush and the Republican majorities in the House and Senate. They broke the bank with their enormous tax cuts. The country is facing the largest budget deficit in history, and there is no realistic plan for getting it under control. The limited version of a prescription drug benefit now being considered in Congress would cost about $400 billion over 10 years. Older Americans had a right to expect that help, but they do not have a right to demand it, not when it would be financed by borrowing, with the bills to be paid by their grandchildren. Mr. Bush, a specialist in pain avoidance, told people that they could have the programs they wanted prescription drugs for the elderly, better schools for children along with modest tax cuts for the middle class and whoppers for the wealthy. When 9/11 occurred, the president simply added the war on terror, and then the war on Saddam Hussein, to the list. For all his talk about fiscal conservatism, Mr. Bush has never vetoed a spending bill, even the obscene $ 180 billion farm subsidy program. To pay for it all, he simply increased the deficit. Deficits in and of themselves are not necessarily a problem, but the current one is frightening for two reasons. One is its size: projected at well above $500 billion for next year, and approaching 5 percent of the gross domestic product. The Other is its permanence. Cutting taxes temporarily to fight the recession made sense, but the Bush tax cuts are meant to be permanent even though Congress gave most of them a phony 10- year expiration date in an attempt to mask their effect. Dropping the proposal is, of course, just what a large chunk of the Republican Party was hoping for all along. For those Republicans, deficits are a useful tool to beat back popular entitlement programs--a "starve the beast" strategy, in the words of Ronald Reagan’s budget director. Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, rail against the deficit, but they are still pushing for the prescription drug plan. Like the tax-cutters, they are simply building up to some sort of financial Armageddon like soaring interest rates or a collapsing dollar and hoping that blame will fall on the other party. Our answer is different. The people have to decide whether they want tax cuts or programs like the prescription drug plan. It’s true that the tax-cut radicals will win this round. But then we will have an election. According to the passage, ______ will be the victim of the tax-cut.
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男性，30岁，因受凉后出现畏寒、发热，咳铁锈色痰，伴左侧胸痛。K线胸片左下肺大片密度增高阴影。 最可能的诊断是
Women are trying their best to go after equality themselves instead of waiting for organizations to deliver it（）
ProblemsCausesSolutions Washer Won’t start 1.Chesk the and breaker 2.Power cord may not be irmly plugged in the receptacle 1.Consult the seller 2.Make sure power cord is firmly connected What is Not supplied 1.Water tap may be closed. 2.Water supply is suspended. 3.Foreign matters may be ccumulated on the met in the mater inlet. 1.Turn on the water tap. 2.Clean the foreign matters on the net according to "maintenance". Water is not drained 1.Knob may be set to "Wash ＆Rinse". 2.Drain hose is not laid down. 3.Drain hose may be collapsed. 4.The lid may be open. 1.Set the knob to"Wash ＆Spin" . 2.Lay down the drain hose. 3.Contact the seller. 4.Close the lid. In order to drain the water, we should set the knob at（）position.
Growing concerns over the safety and efficacy of anti-depressant drugs prescribed to children have caught the eye of Congress and the New York state attorney general. Now they’re becoming the catalyst for calls to reform the way clinical trials of all drugs are reported. Pressure is already causing some changes within the pharmaceutical industry. And it has put the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which approves new drugs, in the hot seat. If reforms are carried out, they could bring an unprecedented level of transparency to drug research. The solution now under consideration: a public database, or registry, of drug trials, where companies would post the results of those trials. In congressional testimony Thursday, a spokesman for the American Medical Association endorsed the registry and said it should include information on each trial’s purpose and objective, its design, and the dates it begins and ends. If the trial is not completed, the registry should include an explanation. While drug companies have been eager to make public any positive results of their trials, recent revelations suggest they’ve balked at divulging tests when the results are not what they’d hoped to see. The furor has centered around the use Of anti-depressants on children. The industry has begun to make some moves to address the concerns about drug trials. Drug companies have agreed to set up a voluntary system of posting their drug trials on the Internet. But that seems unlikely to satisfy some members of Congress, who are expected to introduce legislation to establish a mandatory drug registry. Last week, editors of a dozen influential medical journals announced that they would begin requiring drug companies to post a drug trial in a public database prior to accepting an article about it. Doctors rely on these articles to make treatment choices. The editors hope that the registry will force unfavorable drug studies, before kept secret, into the open. Medical journals already had been tightening up on the authorship of their articles, insisting that authors declare if they had any conflicts of interest, such as any financial or other ties to the drug company, says Daniel Callahan, a director at the Hastings Center, a nonprofit bioethics research institute in Garrison, N.Y. Information from previously undisclosed clinical trials could lower prices, reduce the number of badly designed trials, and help doctors considering the use of a drug for a non-approved purpose to know why it hasn’t been approved for that use. Antidepressant drugs "have some serious side effects ... that seem to be much more common than people realize ... much more common than you might think from seeing drug ads and from reports on drug studies," says Joel Gurin, executive vice president of Consumer Reports. His magazine just finished a survey of readers showing a "dramatic shift from talk therapy to drug therapy for mental health problems" during the past decade. In 1995, less than half of people getting mental health treatment--40 percent--got drug therapy. Today 68 percent receive drug treatment, Mr. Gurin says. Some studies coming to light show that antidepressants work no better than placebos. Even better than merely registering drug trials, Caplan (director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia) suggests, would be to require that a new drug not only be "safe and do what it’s supposed to do", but that it do it as well or better than other drugs already on the market. That, he says, would help push research into new areas and save money. What causes the pressure to reform the way clinical trials of all drugs are reported
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