| And yet the health care reform debate rages on, focusing on how we can make these dangerous drugs more affordable to people. This is how the federal government comes up with nonsensical ideas like the Medicare "drug discount card." If senior citizens sign up, they can buy drugs in the U.S. at monopoly prices that are only 500% more expensive than the same drugs in Canada, Europe or Mexico. But this is a huge savings (we're told) over the 700% markup people usually pay in the United States, thanks to a policy of drug protectionism fully enforced by the FDA. | | Don't be fooled by the words of politicians when it comes to health care reform. Don't be fooled by the frame of the debate. They're debating a distraction while ignoring the fundamental question: how will we make our people healthier?
Until we answer that question, we will be mired in chronic disease, skyrocketing health care costs and bankruptcy at all levels: personal, corporate and government. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |  So don't look for any serious health insurance or health care reform in your lifetime. Nearly every public discussion about these topics is nothing but sleight of hand designed to distract you from the real problem, which is the disease-care industry and food & beverage industries that have no incentive to help people get healthier.
Here's a final question in all of this: Why is it that other countries can provide meaningful, full coverage health insurance for their entire population at the equivalent of about $25/month? Of course, I am referring to Taiwan. |
Leslie Taylor, ND
See book keywords and concepts |  This new health care reform bill was aimed directly at reforming the practices and prosecution authority of the New York health department (OPMC), and passed the Senate in July 2004 by unanimous vote.
While inroads are being made on the state level to allow doctors and physicians the ability to offer CAM services to their patients, many professions are not addressed by any state licensing program. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |  It's a good thing, then, that politicians are pretending to get serious about health care reform. These health reform proposals pretend to reduce health care costs through a shell game illusion that merely shifts the burden of paying for disease management services to whatever group hires the fewest lobbyists. Once the reforms are complete, corrupt politicians can take center stage and pretend to have helped the American people. Remember the recent Medicare drug benefit circus? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |  A democratic Congress, however, could set the stage for serious health care reform following the 2008 Presidential elections. If, by some rare alignment of heavenly bodies, the Democrats take control of the House, the Senate and the office of the President, it would set the stage for sweeping reforms in the direction of socialized medicine (i.e. the system in Canada, Taiwan, and most other industrialized nations). |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |  We welcome Five Step Solutions on gardening, green living, renewable energy, health care reform, saving the environment, animal rights, tax reform, personal finances and just about any subject that helps readers find solutions for a better life. The solutions must be well written, of course (we review and approve or reject each post), and they must offer real solutions without being overtly commercial. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |  We do not claim to have a monopoly on the truth, and there are a variety of ways to look at many issues like health care reform, global warming, prescription drugs, and so on. The difference, however, is that our truth is based on respect for life, integrity, and a desire to end suffering by empowering people with information that enhances quality of life. The truth put forth by many mainstream publishers, in contrast, is based on pleasing advertisers or pursuing a political agenda. |
Marcia Angell, M.D.
See book keywords and concepts |  The top ten drug companies (which included European companies) had profits of nearly 25 percent of sales in 1990, and except for a dip at the time of President Bill Clinton's health care reform proposal, profits as a percentage of sales remained about the same for the next decade. (Of course, in absolute terms, as sales mounted, so did profits. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |  The entire debate about health care has been framed in terms of a financial crisis. The only thing wrong with peoples' health, we're told, is that there's not enough money to treat everybody. If we only had more money for drugs, more money for surgery, and more money to find that elusive cure for cancer we've been promised since the 1970's, then all our health care concerns would be a thing of the past.
All of this, of course, is a calculated distraction from the real health problem in this country. |
John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
See book keywords and concepts |  Never before have private interests spent so much money so publicly to defeat an initiative launched by a President," states Thomas Scarlett in an article titled "Killing Health Care Reform" in Campaigns & Elections magazine.41
In 1993, Childs recalled, "The insurance industry was real nervous. Everybody was talking about health care reform. . . . We felt like we were looking down the barrel of a gun." Forming coalitions, he explained, is a way to "provide cover for your interest. We needed cover because we were going to be painted as the bad guy. You [also] get strength in numbers. |
Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
See book keywords and concepts |  Although the Carter administration rejected Enthoven's proposal, his ideas were embraced by conservatives who saw in them a way to apply their own free-market, antigovernment theories to health care reform. After Reagan won the 1980 election, the stage was set to implement these ideas in the marketplace.
The nudge from Washington was all Wall Street needed to ignite an explosion of activity to convert nonprofit HMOs into investor-owned corporations. "Word of phenomenal growth and hefty profits has forecasters abuzz," gushed an article in National Journal. |
Bob LeBow, M.D., M.P.H.
See book keywords and concepts |  When I talk about health care reform, I frequently get an array of Canada-bashing type questions—except from the Canadians, who often come up after the session to praise their system and scratch their heads over why the U.S. system is so bad. Canadians are outraged at the hatchet jobs that certain U.S. interest groups (like the AMA and the pharmaceutical industry) have done on the Canadian system. The great majority of Canadians are fiercely proud of their health care system (called medicare with a small "m"). | | The millions spent by the AMA in the early '90s to discredit Canada's system, the many more millions spent in 2000 by the pharmaceutical industry on "the bus from Canada," and the millions spent on "Harry and Louise" by the insurance industry and small business to kill Clinton's plan (bad as it was) are but a few examples of the concerted and directed effort to kill or delay meaningful health care reform.
These efforts to keep America clueless have been amazingly successful—to the point of having created inner (almost) dogmas that inhibit rational thought. |
John D. Lantos, M.D.
See book keywords and concepts |  There were workshops on euthanasia, sex selection, rationing, futility, health care reform, medical humanities, fiction, theater, movies. There were sessions addressing the special issues of Orthodox Jews, women, Norwegians, and "non-heart-beating cadavers." Now, one might think it unnecessary or redundant to specify that cadavers did not have beating hearts. Cadavers, after all, are dead, and thus we might expect that their hearts had stopped. | | The recent explicit debate over health care reform was, in many ways, an attempt to address these issues forthrightly. Our national failure to come to closure on that debate represents a flight from reality that is analogous to our willingness to believe the survival rates for CPR on television.
Clinton, Health Reform, and Postwar Politics
I had a unique view of the Clinton health reform process. In the spring of 1993,1 was invited, under the false pretenses that my expenses would be paid, to participate in the work of President Clinton's Health Reform Task Force. | | The Clintons' attempt to forthrightly address the issue of health care reform failed under a barrage of misinformation and lies from various interests too vested even to identify themselves by name. The health reform task force was accused of being "secretive," even though the details of its plans were in the Times and Wall Street Journal every day. Current efforts at health reform are shielded from public scrutiny in a way that the "secret" task force meetings never were. Key policy decisions are now corporate secrets or are carefully veiled in the uninterpretable language of the bureaucrats. |
Bob LeBow, M.D., M.P.H.
See book keywords and concepts | | In my quest, I've found that one of the greatest obstacles to meaningful health care reform is the degree to which we Americans are clueless about our health care system. Most Americans—including politicians and even knowledgeable health care professionals who should know better—have been led down an assortment of primrose paths. They have been sucked into arguing about the fine points of a variety of diversions such as the nearly irrelevant "patient protection" debate. |
Elaine Feuer
See book keywords and concepts |  Without health care reform, the Department of Commerce forecasts that health care expenditures will "rise by an annual rate of growth of 13.5 percent" in the next five years: By the year 2003, 20 percent of the GNP?2 trillion—will be spent on health care, $7,059 per capita.
Fifty million Americans have inadequate medical insurance and 37 million are without coverage entirely. A 1992 University of Arkansas research study showed that one-half to two-thirds of hospitalized or institutionalized elderly Americans are malnourished. |
J.D. Kleinke
See book keywords and concepts |  We should create health care reform policies that acknowledge and accommodate this, and leave the rest to be sorted out in the marketplace.
Such an accommodation is a key element of the reform plan outlined in Chapter Eight of this book, the one dedicated to tax parity. Because government pays for nearly half of all medical services in the United States, we have decided one thing: health care is a social good, and an investment in our collective health status is worthwhile at the most fundamental level. |
John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
See book keywords and concepts | | During the 1993-94 debate over health care reform, the National Journal reported that drug companies and trade associations were "practically throwing money at journalists to get them to speak at their events." Media figures including Fred Barnes of the New Republic, Eleanor Clift and Jane Bryant Quinn of Newsweek, Dr. Bob Arnot of CBS and Dr. Art Ulene of ABC collected speaking fees ranging from $7,500 to $25,000. | | The Christian Coalition also did its part to defeat Clinton's 1994 health care reform proposal. Reed told of plans to "drop into 60,000 evangelical churches 32 million postcards that have a picture of a 4-year-old child getting a shot." The caption under the picture read, "Don't let a government bureaucrat in this picture."22
Democratic Centralism
Like the Christian Coalition, corporate grassroots strategies are designed to mobilize the masses in political campaigns while keeping effective control of actual political debates concentrated in the hands of a select few. | | Robert Hoopes, who also started his career working for liberal Democrats, was another key player in the PR campaign against health care reform. In 1986, Hoopes was a college freshman when he picked up a Time magazine, saw Michael Deaver on the cover, and decided, "I want to be a lobbyist, because this looks like a great job. You sit in the back of a limousine, you're on the phone, you've got a view of the Capital, and get paid big bucks." In pursuit of this dream, Hoopes went to work for liberal Democrats including Senators Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd. |
Ralph Golan, M.D.
See book keywords and concepts |  Under the new proposed governmental health care reform, it may be difficult for private practice doctors to stay in business. Doctors who use alternative approaches may be required to practice medicine that allows no deviation from conventional methods. Managed health care conglomerates and state or federal health plans might even separate you from your doctor. Such regulations eliminate basic freedoms for both doctors and patients alike.
To preserve medical freedom of choice, massive public support must be rallied. |
Dorothea Hover-Kramer, EdD, RN
See book keywords and concepts |  In the 1990s the social and legal acceptance of these new modalities has become a major focus, with emphasis on health care reform, streamlining complex health care administration, and cost containment. New information about the complex interrela-
XX tionship between the mind and the body has become available as well. Because of their effectiveness in preventing further disability, some unique approaches focusing on this interconnect-edness have set a new standard of care. For example, Dr. |
Elaine Feuer
See book keywords and concepts | | Senator Packwood supported moderate health care reform. Whereas Representative Les Aucoin, Packwood's 1992 campaign opponent, supported a national health care system and did not receive one financial contribution from the AMA. Packwood defeated Aucoin by a narrow margin. Congressman Henry Waxman, a fervent supporter of increased
FDA enforcement powers, received $356,000 in PAC money from medical, pharmaceutical, and insurance companies.
"Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth," warned Orwell. If you are a threat to the establishment, they will do anything to destroy your credibility. |
Richard Leviton
See book keywords and concepts |  The burgeoning debate about health care reform and possible nationalization of health insurance coverage are bringing these underlying issues to light. Key questions will be forced to the surface: Why are we so sick? Why does medical care cost so much? Are there cheaper, more effective alternatives? One of this book's intentions is to provide a therapeutic and philosophical rationale for the optimistic "yes" to these questions.
References
Adams, E.K., and Zuckerman, S., "Variation in the Growth and Incidence of Medical Malpractice Claims," Journal of Political Policy Law, Vol. 9, No. |
John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
See book keywords and concepts | | Everybody was talking about health care reform. . . . We felt like we were looking down the barrel of a gun." Forming coalitions, he explained, is a way to "provide cover for your interest. We needed cover because we were going to be painted as the bad guy. You [also] get strength in numbers. Some have lobby strength, some have grassroots strength, and some have good spokespersons. . . . Start with the natural, strongest allies, sit around a table and build up . . . to give your coalition a positive image. |
Stephen Fried
See book keywords and concepts |  Taking the drug companies to task appeared to be the centerpiece of Clinton's monumental health care reform strategy. To that end, Clinton was joining Pryor, Waxman and Dingell in turning up the rhetoric, providing the media with powerful "did you know" factoids that set the whole legal-drug culture in a new, darker light. Everywhere I looked, I began seeing stories about high drug prices and drug company profiteering. One of the best was a series in my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer. | | The task force the president had assembled to map out his health care reform strategy—and create coalitions that might enable the reform to pass Congress—was making high drug prices its marquee issue. While pharmaceutical companies tried to calmly discuss voluntary price ceilings with the administration, task force members were not-so-subtly leaking their intention to call for a mandatory price freeze on all medications.
They even talked about setting up a government review board, like the ones in Canada, France and the U.K., that would monitor compliance with price restrictions. |
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FAIR USE NOTICE: The research quoted here is provided under the protection of Fair Use provisions and published by the 501(c)3 non-profit Consumer Wellness Center for the purposes of public comment and education. Authors / publishers may submit books for consideration of inclusion here.
TERMS OF USE: Read full terms of use. Citations of text from NaturalPedia must include: 1) Full credit to the original author and book title. 2) Secondary credit to the Natural News Naturalpedia as a research resource and a link to www.NaturalNews.com/np/index.html
This unique compilation of research is copyright (c) 2008 by the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center.
ABOUT THE CREATOR OF NATURALPEDIA: Mike Adams, the creator of this NaturalNews Naturalpedia, is the editor of NaturalNews.com, the internet's top natural health news site, creator of the Honest Food Guide (www.HonestFoodGuide.org), a free downloadable consumer food guide based on natural health principles, author of Grocery Warning, The 7 Laws of Nutrition, Natural Health Solutions, and many other books available at www.TruthPublishing.com, creator of the earth-friendly EcoLEDs company (www.EcoLEDs.com) that manufactures energy-efficient LED lighting products, founder of Arial Software (www.ArialSoftware.com), a permission e-mail technology company, creator of the CounterThink Cartoon series (www.NaturalNews.com/index-cartoons.html) and author of over 1,500 articles, interviews, special reports and reference guides available at www.NaturalNews.com. Adams' personal philosophy and health statistics are available at www.HealthRanger.org.
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