The latest development appears to be that government-run health insurance programs are, if not off the table, at least sliding toward the edge. Meanwhile, town hall debates rage, Washington lobbyists (outnumbering senators and congressmen by an astounding six to one) hector Congress and the signal-to-noise ratio in the health-care debate steadily deteriorates.
In this shifting and parlous fray, we must carefully delineate the problems that we are trying to fix. Only once this is done should we try to fix them.
I gave my general take on what's amiss in "The Wrong Diagnosis." Now, it's time for more specifics. Here's my assessment of the three main negative trends in American medicine. I discuss each in detail, and propose solutions, in my next book, Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine that can Transform Our Future, which will be published September 8th, 2009.
Trend #1: Deterioration of Medical Philosophy and Practice
Technology has a shadow side. It accounts for real progress in medicine, but has also hurt it in many ways, making it more impersonal, expensive and dangerous. The false belief that a safety net of sophisticated drugs and machines stretches below us, permitting risky or lazy lifestyle choices, has undermined our spirit of self-reliance. The cold fact is that while Americans live more than 30 years longer than they did at the turn of the last century, public health measures such as better sanitation, immunizations, better food and water, and safer and less polluted workplaces account for 25 years of that increase; medical intervention, only five years. A recent study showed that in the 1990s, only about one in 16,000 Americans had his or her life saved or significantly extended by improvements in health-care technology. "Let's Take the Stomachache Out of Health Care Reform" provides a real-world example of a different approach.
Trend #2: Failure to Provide Health Care for All
Virtually every other developed country has a national health care program. They are not perfect and never will be, but they generally work better than ours. Studies in places such as Germany, France, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom and Canada show that citizens in those countries are happier with their systems than we are, and are healthier as well, with lower rates of obesity and chronic disease. I fully support a national health care program for the U.S.
Trend #3: The Growing Influence of Money
This is the darkest cloud over American medicine. The profit motive, once only a part of health care, now drives the whole system. If current trends hold, a family of four will spend about $64,000 annually for health care in the next seven to nine years (except that they obviously can't and won't - so the system, without reform, will collapse before then).
Virtually all of the incentives run in the wrong direction - that is, toward high-tech interventions to make money rather than toward modest, simple protocols that (in at least 80 percent of cases) make or preserve health. Yet there are pockets of efficiency and effectiveness in America. The nonprofit Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, is among the highest quality and lowest cost health-care systems in the country, largely because its salaried doctors have no incentive to drive up costs by over-testing and over-treating. Similarly, at the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, we train health care professionals to use only the appropriate level of technology for the condition at hand.
In coming blog posts, I'll propose some detailed solutions to each of these problems. In the meantime, I urge you to read the New Yorker article "The Cost Conundrum: What a Texas town can teach us about health care" by Atul Gawande, M.D. It's an extraordinarily clear-eyed assessment of how and why American medicine has lost its way, and how it might return to its healing roots.
Andrew Weil, M.D., is the founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and the editorial director of www.DrWeil.com. Become a fan on Facebook.
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https://www.madashelldoctorstour.com/Mad_as_Hell_Video.html
These Oregon physicians are in the process of organizing a caravan designed to inform the public about the benefits of the single-payer option. At last count they will be stopping in approximately 23 states, on their way to demonstrate in Washington. They need volunteers and our support. Please spread the word.
(1) Acid in that soft white creamy stuff that grows on teeth, it eats holes in teeth, it is the only thing that causes cavities in teeth.
(2) Acid in soft creamy stuff causes tooth aches, it is the only thing that causes tooth aches. And if you scrub all the white stuff away your tooth ache would forever go away.
(3) Light brushing is worthless. It takes a full 11 days for the white creamy stuff to build to a thickness that can eat holes in teeth, three days if you have cavities. So if you scrub and floss vigorously once a day no more cavities. If you scrub lightly after each meal you will always have cavities so long as you have teeth.
(4) Sugar will build up the soft creamily stuff faster, but any food especially high fat processed food will fuel the dangerous bacteria. Even saliva fuels those little tooth eaters, and that is why patients fed by a tube need to brush those little bastes away.
(5) No drill dentistry. Fillings kill more teeth then cavities, as drilling all the black away could penetrate the root, and hot-cold food causes fillings to put teeth in a state of shock. I have six cavities, four that developed under crowns, that have not changed in over 20 years. Before I started brushing they always gave me pain, now they give me no pain. Surely teeth are living things and heal themselves.
(1) All things done behind closed doors with no government regulation. All is darkness, a pretense of good hiding an intent to do evil.
(2) Over 90% of illness in America caused by a processed food industry that gives Americans a 50% fat diet that is void of nutrition.
(3) Doctors are not required to take one course in nutrition, and virtually no doctor mentions nutrition to their sick patients.
(4) Doctors make more referring patients to a specialist then they do treating patients. For doctors get a 40% referral fee, a full 40% kick-back of all money given to a specialist they recommend.
(5) Virtually all doctors retire millionaires. Enough said.
There is a central "cause" behind the other causes that created the crisis in healthcare, etc.
The biggest power shift in American history occurred in 1913 when the balance of power between the Executive, Judicial and Legislative branches of government shifted to the Executive branch vis a vis the Federal Reserve Act which created the Federal Reserve Bank, INC (FED). The FED is privately owned by the international banking houses. The FED is under the Treasury Dept in the Executive branch. The power to print and coin money was intended to be Congress' check on the authority of the Executive branch. Greater and greater powers are being concentrated in the Executive. The FED prints money "out of thin air" there is nothing backing it or controlling the value of it. The currency has been debauched, it doesn't buy the same amount of goods and services.
The economy is anemic with diluted money. The Healthcare crisis is a symptom. Government healthcare or single payer healthcare is like taking aspirin. Some of the pain may go away for awhile, but the real illness is still there eating away at your body. The surgery that we need is to get rid of the FED and restore the Balance of Power by returning to the Constitutionally mandated role of government.
For the U.S. Constitution, being created by ungodly slave owners, is the most perfect tool for protecting excessive wealth the world has ever known.
130 million Americans lack dental insurance so a dental health crisis persists Many dentists make three times as much as physicians while working fewer hours and days doing less critical work. Now dentists are lobbying to ban those tooth whitening kiosks - dentists want the tooth whitening monopoly, too, and drain more money from wealthier Americans...
Groups willing to fill the dental void include dental therapists, trained for 2 or 3 years to drill, who drill, fill and pull teeth. DTs have worked successfully in other first world countries. But the rich powerful US dental lobby fights hard to make our legislators reject DTs.
Last year the Louisiana Dental Association actually got a law passed forbidding a Medicaid-accepting dentist from bringing dental care into the schools because the LDA says he was taking business away from local dentists - who don't take Medicaid patients anyway.
The New York Times reported how the NYS Dental Society always gets its way in the NYS legislature.
It looks as though every issue is now just a pretext to unlease a renewed spew of horror. We need to take a long look at ourselves!
Notice how above two posts try to draw our attention from what pleases our guts, and the average American 50% fat diet that about destroys every internal organ including the guts.
A large chunk of the additional cost in medical care comes from this.
Whereas, healthcare reform is all about health, and if medicine is wages due and owed to the laboring class so they can have equality in the form of equal health.
Capitalist medicine for the few or democratic medicine for all, that is the issue.