Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 REPPED: All of a sudden, everyone's talking about health care reform in the United States. From corporations like Wal-Mart to the newly-elected Democratic majority in the House, it seems that everyone -- business, government and the public -- recognizes our health care system is broken. And it is widely recognized that it needs to be fixed. But so far, nobody in any position of power has offered a plan that would actually make Americans healthier and therefore prevent disease. Prevention isn't even on the negotiating table. |
| Until we end the drug cartel now operated by Big Pharma and the FDA, we will never see health care reform that makes any real difference.
So when it comes to health care, don't expect any legislative miracles from either political party. Even a massive switch to socialized medicine, if it could be pulled off, is still useless unless we start teaching disease prevention. |
| If our national leaders really want health care reform, they should outlaw known cancer-causing chemicals like sodium nitrite, sodium benzoate, artificial food colors, aspartame, monosodium glutamate and others.
After all, we're talking about health care costs here, right? How much financial sense does it make to allow food companies to poison the population, and then have to foot the bill for treating all the resulting diseases from that poison? This financial burden really belongs with the food companies. |
| Any genuine health care reform should start with one simple principle: stop poisoning the people. Sorta simple, isn't it? Too simple for politicians to grasp, of course, especially when they're confused by all the special interest groups screaming at them. So don't expect any real action on protecting the American people from known poisons in the food, water and dental industries.
Democratics and Republicans, you see, don't really fight over whether the American people should be poisoned or not. They simply fight about who should be in power while the poisoning takes place. |
| Without question, the healthiest people in the United States are those who operate outside the health care system. health care reform doesn't matter to them, because they've already reformed their own health! They make informed choices about foods, medicines and exercise. They don't see M.D.s, and many don't even carry health insurance. They are skeptical, informed and healthy consumers. They're the kind of people who read NewsTarget. And it's an honor to write for people like you. You are the only hope for the possibility of a brighter future in the United States and around the world. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Yet in the months and years ahead, you're going to see a whole lot of people out there with all kinds of credentials, degrees and positions of authority, who are going to try to convince you, the consumer, that health care reform has nothing to do with heath. It only has to do with promoting a financial shell game by pushing nonsensical ideas like "the government here to rescue you." We're going to mandate coverage for all drugs and it's going to be paid for by the government.
They don't talk about who funds the government: The taxpayers. It's your money. |
| So I ask: Where's the health in health care reform?
You can't reform your way out of chronic disease by changing who pays for it. You can't take away a nation of degenerative brain disorder sufferers and a whole generation of children who have been born with malfunctioning nervous systems because of the malnutrition the mothers have been experiencing. You can't take that away by changing who's writing the check. You can't solve obesity and diabetes by insuring all the uninsured. This is not a paperwork problem, yet that's the solution we hear out there. It's all about paperwork. |
| Big Business makes big bucks off a nation of diseased people
Health care and all the discussion about health care reform is really a discussion about managing a nation of diseased people. It's not about ending disease. It's not about curing cancer. It's not about preventing heart disease. It's about managing these illnesses. The question essentially becomes: "How are we going to keep people on just enough prescription drugs so we make a lot of money from them, but not so many that it kills them?" That's basically the strategy of Big Pharma. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Although I'd love to see a woman in the White House, I'm not sure I'd want a health care dictator in cahoots with Big Pharma calling the shots on national health care reform.
No serious health care reform proposals
The truth is that no politician other than Rep. Ron Paul has any real plan for health care reform. No one is talking about getting people OFF prescription drugs and onto disease prevention diets, healthful lifestyles and low-cost nutritional supplementation. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Make sure you frame this whole discussion of health care reform in terms of who pays for it and who gets coverage." That's because if they can keep you in that little box of thought, then you won't talk about the causes of these diseases, which are largely found in foods.
Then over on the left side of these decision makers, you've got reps from the pharmaceutical industry, and they're saying, "Make sure our drugs are covered because we want to keep selling drugs and have the government pay for them. |
| We don't see people talking about health care reform and saying, "We need to address the health: We need to ban dangerous food ingredients. We need to teach people about sunlight and water. We need to educate mothers on how to have good nutrition for their children." Have you seen any of that going on out there? I haven't and I've been paying attention. I review hundreds of news articles every single week and I haven't seen a word about this. It's all about who pays for the drugs.
A nation invested in disease must change from the top down
We are a nation invested in disease. |
| No health discussion = No health care solution
Unless we make some changes and really start talking about the health in health care reform, nothing's going to change. It will just be the status quo applied to another generation of sorry, suckered Americans who are now chronically diseased just like their parents. To drive this point home, America used to be number one in a lot of things: We used to be number one in information technology and computer programming. We used to be number one in science and math. You know what we're number one in today? Mental illness. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| You know, the kind of legislation that essentially eliminates the sick care industry (conventional medicine) and starts giving Americans the information and resources they need to actually prevent disease in the first place. And since any real progress in health care legislation is nothing but a pipe dream (there are way too many jobs and investors tied up in the continued diseasification of the American people to expect any real reforms), I thought I'd offer my own version of that pipe dream for your general amusement. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 What about health care reform?
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
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 I've offered many suggestions in a popular article, The health care reform legislation that Congress should pass, but won't. Lawmakers, you see, have no interest in actually saving America from financial demise. They're only concerned about the next election, and raising campaign reelection funds means kow-towing to the interests of the powerful corporations that really run Washington.
Personally, I don't see that meaningful reform is possible under the current system of politics in America. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 Most hospitals, writes Jack Wennberg, are the "Achilles' heel of health care reform: disorganized, dysfunctional systems that are neither aware of the problem [n]or capable of implementing strategies for fixing [it]." Getting hospitals like Garfield to act more like the Mayo Clinic will probably require a combination of rewards and punishment. Jack Wennberg proposes using the Mayo Clinic and other efficient hospital systems, like Intermoun-tain Healthcare and the VHA, as benchmarks, models that other hospitals will be encouraged to emulate with economic carrots and sticks. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| And please, never be so gullible as to think that your government is going to "save you" with a new health care reform plan. Even if we switch to free health insurance for everyone, the whole system is still based on toxic treatments that cure nothing! |
| John Edwards, for example, has now publicly called for health care reform that would force all Americans to visit conventional medical doctors on a regular basis, then submit to chemotherapy drugs if any signs of cancer (breast cancer, prostate cancer, etc.) were detected. It's a police state medicine proposal, and it came out of the mouth of a Democrat.
When it comes to health care, drug prices and politics, both side of the aisle have been bought off by Big Pharma. I cringe to consider what might happen with health care if Hilary Clinton were to become president. |
| Ron Paul has any real plan for health care reform. No one is talking about getting people OFF prescription drugs and onto disease prevention diets, healthful lifestyles and low-cost nutritional supplementation. The answers to preventing 90 percent of all cancers in this country are right in front of us, yet no one is talking about using a cancer prevention diet (plus sunlight and exercise) to stop this epidemic of preventable disease. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 If this is FDA reform, God help us all when the next President starts talking about health care reform. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 So prepare to cover your ears as this health care reform debate gets underway, especially during the run-up to the 2008 election. health care reform will be the hot topic. Republicans will say they're going to save the nation by drugging everybody. Democrats will say they're going to save the nation by giving us all equally bad medical care. But nobody will be talking about the issue that matters: actually making people healthier.
Treating disease is big business in this country
You see, disease is big business, while health means a loss of revenues. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Yet in politics, overtreatment is routinely left out of any discussion of health care reform. That's partly because getting rid of it smacks of rationing. But rationing is when you deny patients care that could potentially help them. Rationing is when you say to a patient with kidney failure that he can't have dialysis because dialysis is expensive and he's too old. Rationing is when you limit the number of MRI machines in order to discourage doctors from ordering an MRI test for a patient. But getting rid of overtreatment, care that's useless and potentially harmful? |
| In 1993, the group began compiling data from around the country in order to help the Clinton administration plan health care reform. When reform fell through, the group started publishing their data in The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, selling it to hospitals and health plans to try to cover publication costs. By 1994, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a private organization with an interest in improving the quality of health care, began supporting the group with one million dollars annually. |
| All of which points to one of several weaknesses in the new health care reform movement called "consumer-driven health care." Backed largely by political conservatives and free marketeers, consumer-driven health care is aimed at improving quality and bringing down health care costs by putting more decisions in the hands of patients. In consumer-driven plans, insurers offer lower health insurance premiums in return for high deductibles, on the order of four thousand dollars a year. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| But as I've pointed out in a previous article, Where's the Health In health care reform?, almost nobody is considering proposals that would genuinely solve the health care problem in America today. You can't "treat" your way out of a nation that has become so over-drugged, over-fed and over-diseased that even the little children are now being put on speed (also called "Ritalin"). Nearly 50 percent of American adults are now taking pharmaceuticals, most of which are utterly unnecessary from a medical point of view. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| This changes the way we ought to be thinking about health care reform. What we want are efficient hospitals, places where patients can be sure they will get high-quality care, care that gives them the procedures and tests and drugs they need—and doesn't give them what they don't need—for the most reasonable cost. That's what markets are supposed to do—create efficiency. |
| The same agency whose reputation had sunk so low during the 1990s that conservative opponents to the Clinton administration's plan for
Z.D7 health care reform had only to point to theVA system and say the words "socialized medicine" to scare Americans into sticking with the status quo. Back then, the VHA's bad reputation was well deserved. Underfunded, overbed-ded, and poorly administered, it was a model of waste and inefficiency Workers were dispirited and patients neglected. In 1992, three decomposing bodies were discovered on the grounds of a veterans' medical center in Salem, Virginia. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| The uninsured need coverage. Senior citizens on fixed incomes need to be able to afford their medications. The mentally disturbed need to be treated. Children need their medicine, we're told.
But whether the solutions come from the far left (socialized medicine) or the far right (free drugs for seniors!), there's one glaring problem in all the talk about health care reform: nobody is talking about fixing the health problem.
The entire debate about health care has been framed in terms of a financial crisis. |
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