Page 4, Terrace Bay-Schreiber News, Wednesday, November 27, 1985 : ace Bay ehreiber Editorial It's a Doll's Worid The Terrace Bay-Schreiber News is published every Wednesday by: © Laurentian Publishing Co. Ltd., Box 579, Terrace Bay, Ontario, POT 2W0. Telephone: (807) 825-3747. EDITOR ADVERTISING OFFICE PRODUCTION MANAGER Se eS Pea ae OF Se Marilyn MoQuin ie ae See oe Ce ee Gigi Dequanne Acadia es ee ee ESS Gayle Fournier Bier ea en ee oe oe eee Mary Melo I think this article is rather self explanatory. My name is Annette Valda. I was born on September Ist and recently turned 1 year old. 'I lived my first 3 months at BabyLand General, which is a special place built by a young boy called Xavier. I was chosen for adoption on November 24th. I would like to take this time to let you know a bit about myself. I have long, dark brown hair, purple/blue eyes, dimples and am 16' tall. My favorite month is summer. I'm one of a kind and easy to take care of. All I ask is that I get hugged at least once a day, that I get cleaned gently with a damp cloth if I get dirty and if you take care of me I'll always love you. I have a wide variety of friends, light haired girls and boys, dark haired girls and boys, preemies, twins, some wear glasses and some have teeth now. Already I have a large collection of designer fashions running at $10.00 an outfit. I have a brass plated bed - $39.99, a wardrobe trunk - $19.99, a rocker/car- rier - $17.99, quilted car bed - $8.99, special disposable designer diapers - $3.99 for a set of 6, Nurseryland diaper bag set $9.99, a carrier - $7.99, stroller, deluxe carriage, the list seems endless of what I have and what's available for birthdays and Christmas. | am a Cabbage Patch Kid. Letters fo the Editor _ The Hon., Murray Elston ~ price is completely ar- Minister of Health 10th Floor, Hepburn Block 80 Grosvenor Street Toronto, Ontario M7A 2C4 Dear Mr. Minister, For several years now, government, drug manufacturers, _ phar- macists and all Members of the Legislature have known that problems existed in the Ontario Drug Benefit Pro- gram. Consumers and government are paying too much for prescription drugs. Currently the drug for- mulary is based on prices submitted by the drug manufacturers. The prices have nothing to do with what it actually costs the drug companies to produce and market the drug. The How the better half lives it up bitrary and the government has no input on the prices listed in the formulary, they simply accept the price. Once the govern- ment receives and prints the prices lowest listed price for each drug type is used for reimbursement for all Ontario Drug Benefit plan prescriptions. While it may be the lowest price, in many 'cases, not all, it is grossly inflated. At the same time the company with the lowest listed price is not necessarily the cheapest for the pharmacy because of the fact that the formulary has nothing to do with real costs. Thus profits for the pharmicists are a result of both the price spread (bet- ween ODB payment and wholesale prices) and dispensing fees of $5.00. It seems to me that the Minister of Health must be able to set prices for the drug formulary based 'on information about real costs. Further, only one price need be set in the drug formulary. The 30 day refilling of a prescription should be eliminated this saving millions of dollars. All prescriptions should show the cost of the drug and the dispensing fee so that con- sumers know what they are paying for. Finally, the ODB has to provide pay- ment to the pharmicists quickly so that pharmicists are not subsidizing the programs. I recognize the need for pharmicists to make a fair profit. The system must however provide that pro- fit up front through profit margins on the drugs and fair dispensing fees. I do not see the pharmicists as the **bad guys". Instead I see a program that has not been properly administered by government and Manipulated by the drug companies. Whatever. proposals come from the government to correct the situation, they will only receive my support if they are fair to the taxpayer, consumer and pharmicists. Sincerely, Gilles Pouliot, MPP. Lake Nipigon Riding. / KNOW How YOU FEEL, MY DEAR, WHEN THE WILL WAS READ | INHERITED A SORRY ECONOMIC (9ESS ""No Nonsense" Tips While logs are burning, throw salt on them from time to time. This reduces the soot, making clean-up that much easier. Give old ping pong balls new life - drop them in boiling water. To keep nylon cord from fraying, heat the ends with a match or lighter. This will melt the strands together. Use popcorn as a packing material when shipping fragile gifts. It works well, it doesn't cost much, and it's lightweight so it doesn't add much to your postage costs. To clean the tip of a ballpoint pen, stick it into a cigarette filter and twist. Spray your child's artwork with hairspray to keep it from fading or gettin dusty. = - : Store wax candles in the freezer. They will burn much longer and won't drip as much. To help keep your car windows from fogging up in cold weather, rub lightly with hair shampoo or rubbing alcohol. ~s ' Well, I don't know how things read in your cheque book, but I find I'm making a lot of entries in red ink these days. Broke again -- and Christmas is still more than 30 just-say-charge-it days away. Being in debt is not one of your Spiritual Bliss-type experiences. As a matter of fact, it's a bit of a stone bummer. There are a couple of ways to deal with it, though... one can go out and get pie-faced drunk so that the pain of one's hangover will make one forget one's pecuniary woes. One can pull a Horatio Alger by taking an extra part time job to earn the greenbacks to pay for the triple bypass one's going to need because of the stress of working so hard. Alternatively, you can do what I do -- pick up a copy of Forbes Magazine and read all about the doings of the Ultracapitalists. Also known as the Rich Folks. These are people who lose more money in the cracks bet- ween their couch cushions than you oores ww we were 442 and I will see in a lifetime of moiling for nickels and dimes. You can read all about them in Forbes -- each fall, the magazine special issue in which it lists the 400 richest people in the United States. It makes for swell reading. Helps you to appreciate other folks' problems instead of dwelling on your own. Now you take Gordon Getty. Poor sap. I wouldn't be at all surprised to read in the papers one day soon that Gord has run away to join a Tibetan lamasery or turned himself into a Skid Row wino. Or even worse. Well, how would you feel if you dropped to fifteenth place -- fifteenth -- of the top 400? Especially if, like Gord, you'd held down the number one spot for the past two years in a row. Last year Getty led the pack with an income of a little $4 billion -- but that was before he was forced to divide up his oil trust with other members of the Getty gang. This year Gordon has to try and make ends ya -- what's a body to do? There are' several predictable names on the 400 list. Eight Rockefellers nipped in under the wire. The list positively crawls with Cabots and du Ponts and Hunts and Hearsts and Kennedys. Some old drinking buddies made it too -- Busch and Coors and Stroh and the borthers gallo all managed to get their elbows on the bar. Another couple of good ways to make the list are owning baseball teams or peddling soft core porn. Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner is there along with his $300 million; and so is Mister Grecian Formula and Gold Chains, Bob Guccione. The publisher of Penthouse has apparently flogged enough centrefolds to net himself $220 million. é There are 14 billionaires on the list of 400, but I'm afraid Gloria Steinem still has her work cut out for her. On- ly two of the 14 are women, and they both inherited their respective bundles from H. L. Hunt, who was their father. And a man. The richest American this year. The number one capitalist in the en- tire U. S. of A.? You may have already seen him on the TV newscasts. He's the fat guy who danced a jig on Wall Street last year. His name is Sam Moore Walton and he broke into a dance (the hula, the Wall Street Journal insists) -- the mo- ment the news flashed across the commodities board that his Wal-Mart discount shoes stores had met their projected profit goals. That meant that Sam Moore Walton was official- ly the richest man in the country with a nest egg of $2.8 billion. I don't know what kind of finan- cial shape you're in, but that's more than I make in two years, even. Pretty impressive, I suppose, but it pales when you move into the really Big Leagues of buckmaking. Foreign oil money, for instance. Right now, somewhere in the tiny, fly-blown jungle fiefdom of Brunei by. e South China Sea th squa a diminutive chap in goatee and bathrobe. His title is Sultan of Brunei and he is probably the richest man in the world. He is worth -- big breath now -- three thousand, seven hundred and eighty million dollars. Per year. And if he runs through that, the Sultan can always dip into Brunei's foreign reserves, which stood at $14,000 million, the -last time anybody bothered to count. You know what that means? It means the Sultan of Brunei could patch up the dimsembowelment Mulroney's Tories have wreaked on the CBC with the interest he'll make between now and noon tomorrow -- and still have enough left over to pick up a brace of Rolls Royces and maybe a couple of pizza franchises. Hmmmmmmmmmmmm. I wonder if Pierre Juneau has the Sultan's home phone number...