Mark Schapiro
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 But van der Vlies and her colleagues have been attempting to ascertain the entirety of real costs involved—including those that have been borne by society as a whole, such as the costs of cleaning up toxic pollution or the healthcare costs borne by the victims of chemical exposure for which producers historically have taken no responsibility. Suddenly, what looks cheap to the producer and individual consumer turns out to be expensive to society. |
KC Craichy
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 Each year the United States spends more than $300 billion to cover the healthcare costs brought on by stress in the workplace. And occupational experts report that workers who admit they are stressed cost companies an average of $600 more per person than other employees. This is because they incur 46 percent higher healthcare costs.5
Some physicians estimate that stress and anxiety may be a contributing factor in 90 percent of all illnesses. Many psychiatrists believe that most back problems are related to stress. |
Bottom Line Health
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| The National Health Law Program offers *~ advice on how to control your healthcare costs at www.healthcarecoach.com.
Medicating the US: How Drug Companies Are Turning Us into Patients
Alan Cassels, drug policy researcher, University of Victoria, British Columbia, and coauthor of Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients. Nation.
How many pills did you and your family take today? It seems that there is a prescription drug for every condition now, no matter how benign.
In fact, the US has become the most medicated society in the world. |
Dr. Abram Hoffer, MD, FRCP (C) and Dr. Harold D. Foster, PhD
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 The addition of 100 mg of niacinamide to the public diet would enormously reduce human suffering and have a major impact on the unnecessary escalation of healthcare costs. This additional niacinamide would probably nearly return the daily dietary intake to that experienced centuries ago before the advent of widespread artificial fertilizer use and food processing.
This public health strategy would not be new. During the Second World War, the United States government mandated the enrichment of flour with niacinamide. However, current dietary levels are still too low. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 If GM didn't have to pay healthcare costs, the company wouldn't have to shut down 12 automobile manufacturing plants and lay off 30,000 workers.
That's a direct example of how healthcare costs are reducing our global competitiveness and costing us jobs. The result is that if we don't make changes in our society, we will eventually wind up as a broke, diseased and drug-addicted nation that will never again rise to be a global leader.
Whether or not real health reforms ever happen at a national level, you can make them happen on a personal level. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Why should we fund their healthcare costs... which is essentially a way of subsidizing their tobacco habit? It's almost as if we are rewarding them for being smokers, even while they are draining economic productivity out of society.
This approach would keep smoking legal, would allow people to exercise free will, but at the same time would make them responsible for their health choices. And of course, someone who smokes could stop smoking, and within say, one or two years could once again be covered by health insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| In the United States, our corporations are going bankrupt due to ridiculous healthcare costs. General Motors, for example, is about to go bankrupt. It has already been reduced to junk bond status, largely because of the expense it has to pay for the health care of its employees. Part of that is the fact that we still have a pharmaceutical monopoly in this country, so everyone who buys prescription drugs in the U.S. |
| Some corporations are refusing to hire employees who are obese because of the increased healthcare costs associated with obesity or diabetes. What they are not recognizing is the decreased performance associated with poor health even when obesity isn't an issue, and part of the reason why this might not be easy to notice is because the vast majority of Americans are unhealthy, so diseased people often appear to be of average health.
Corporations are also afraid of the legal ramifications of discriminating against people based on body weight. |
| That's a direct example of how healthcare costs are reducing our global competitiveness and costing us jobs. The result is that if we don't make changes in our society, we will eventually wind up as a broke, diseased and drug-addicted nation that will never again rise to be a global leader.
Whether or not real health reforms ever happen at a national level, you can make them happen on a personal level. You can take this information and apply it in your own life. You can make positive health changes and reform your own health outcome, just like many of these survey participants have done. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 They sell products to consumers, then consumers eat the products, get diseased, have long-term healthcare costs, loss of quality of life and possibly require huge surgical procedures and so on, but these costs are not borne by the corporation, they are borne by the consumers; the people. So, this video really helps answer some of these questions as to how these corporations get wildly out of control and become these self-perpetuating, evil machines that really have no purpose in the world other than to make sure they survive and grow. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 And they can't function from one day to the next unless they've been chemically doped up with psychotropic drugs and blood-chemistry-altering chemicals sold to them at prices so high that our entire national economy is now headed toward bankruptcy due to healthcare costs.
I have news for these consumers, and I have news for everyone out there considering taking drugs to treat some symptom, disorder or discomfort. The news is that even healthy people have bad days sometimes. Life is not a giant party. Sometimes you don't feel like waking up. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 We do not have to live in a society of obesity and skyrocketing healthcare costs. We don't have to live in a society where our children can't focus, where their nervous systems are impaired because of the diets they're fed and the artificial foods and colors they're being served not only at home, but right there in the school cafeterias!
We don't have to live in that kind of society. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| If they choose to take a road of slow suicide, and they're going to destroy their health and create outlandish healthcare costs, then they should be warned up front that they're going to be responsible for their own health care costs. Because right now, smokers are essentially saying to society: "You should pay my health care costs. Even though I'm going to sit around and smoke cigarettes and destroy my health, you should pay for me."
I think that we as non-smokers in society should stand up and say we are no longer willing to subsidize the slow suicide habits of people who choose to smoke. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 These food and beverage companies are preventing the government from providing information to the public that would save countless lives and dramatically improve the quality of life while reducing healthcare costs in the decades ahead. This action by the food lobby, in my opinion, is nothing less than the outright suppression of advice that would prevent chronic disease and save countless American lives. |
KC Craichy
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| Therapy has been shown to decrease the number of sick days and to lower healthcare costs.
In turn, individuals with an effective social support network have also been shown to have stronger immune abilities.
Dietary Options and Supplements
One of the chief problems with the body's stress response has to do with the "auto-oxidation" of the very stress hormones that our bodies naturally release in order to help us deal with the stress. |
| This is because they incur 46 percent higher healthcare costs.5
Some physicians estimate that stress and anxiety may be a contributing factor in 90 percent of all illnesses. Many psychiatrists believe that most back problems are related to stress. Accumulated stress can predispose patients to medical conditions such as hypertension, ulcers, and heart disease, but that's just the beginning. Here are just a few of the many links between stress and physiology:
!!l!l!l!llil!lll!l!lllllllll!!l!IIH It is not stress that is harmful-it is dis-tress. |
Mike Adams
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 How do we reinvigorate our future generations with genuine health so that they can pursue life's greater ambitions—happiness and purpose, scientific advancement, artistic expression, spiritual development, and so on—without the burden of outrageous healthcare costs?
How do we stop the drug racket that's operating today? How do we put an end to the Big Pharma/FDA conspiracy that prevents us from learning the truth about natural health solutions that can prevent these chronic diseases? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Adams: How do you think our country would look in terms of healthcare costs or patient counts if every person were out there getting sensible sunlight and getting adequate vitamin D? What would change?
Dr. Holick: It's almost incalculable, because like I said if you just think about the study that was done in Finland where it can reduce your risk of getting type 1 diabetes by 80%. |
Mike Adams
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| Of course, doing so will cost taxpayer dollars, but it will also serve as an investment and ultimately will save billions of dollars in long-term healthcare costs. Remember, investing in prevention is a good investment. It's money well spent at both the personal level and national level.
End corn and sugar subsidies
Moving on down the line here, another fantastic idea for improving the nutrition and health of our nation is to end the subsidies on corn and sugar. There's no sane reason why corn and sugar need to be subsidized in this country. |
Alan R. Gaby, M.D., Jonathan V. Wright, M.D., Forrest Batz, Pharm.D. Rick Chester, RPh., N.D., DipLAc. George Constantine, R.Ph., Ph.D. Linnea D. Thompson, Pharm.D., N.D.
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 Detractors point out that indiscriminate use of self-monitoring is of questionable value and adds enormously to healthcare costs.101 The ADA acknowledges that accuracy of SMBG is instrument- and technique-dependent. Errors in technique and inadequate use of control procedures have been shown to lead to inaccurate test results.102 Nevertheless, it is likely that self-monitoring of blood glucose, if used properly, can have a positive effect by increasing patient involvement in overall diabetes care. |
Peter Rost
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 I added, "But let me comfort you: We did beat them all in one area! Our healthcare costs are twice as high as theirs. And our costs for individual drugs are sometimes twice as high, even ten times as high. The difference, between them and us, is that they all have affordable drugs."
It was time to lighten the somber mood that started to settle over the room: "Are we fools, unable to stop this madness? Abraham Lincoln said 'You can fool some of the people some of the time but not all of them all the time.' And Abraham Lincoln hadn't even read the February 2004 issue of Pharmaceutical Executive. |
Mike Adams
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| How can we, as a nation, achieve better nutrition and avoid the healthcare costs and loss of quality of life that results from poor nutritional habits?
To do this, we have to look at a brief history of nutrition in the United States and Western culture. Historically, in the early part of the 20th century, disease was primarily caused by true malnutrition — or not having enough food. And it was a
K7 straightforward message for the USDA and government regulatory agencies to tell everybody to eat more. The food producers loved this message as well. |
Abram Hoffer, PhD, MD, FRCP(C) and Dr. Jonathan Prousjy, DPHE, DSC, ND, FRSH
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 Neither Canada nor the United States has been able to control the growth of healthcare costs. Brian Ferguson, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph, has shown that the healthcare system of both countries yield similar results if measured by the usual measures, such as infant mortality.
The planners did not foresee the impact on health of the major technological changes in our food supply. The rapid deterioration of the quality of our food is the major factor in causing our health crisis today. |
| He proposes that we "must improve the nutritional status of Canadians to lower our healthcare costs. Governments can demonstrate the effectiveness of nutrition by promoting better nutrition for our hospital patients. Governments could recognize nutrition therapy fees under 'medicare' and as income tax deductions. This would encourage doctors and patients to use nutrition instead of drugs. Governments on behalf of the people of Canada must take the initiative to finance studies to show the effectiveness of Nutritional Therapy and Nutrition as a method of disease prevention. |
Jonathan V. Wright, M.D. and Alan R. Gaby, M.D.
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 The study had two objectives: 1) to see if company employees with long-term, unresolved health problems would find relief through MSA techniques; and, 2) to observe if the company's healthcare costs could be cut by using MSA. ("Icon" has a self-funded medical plan.)
Each participating employee completed a symptom checklist (which weighted each symptom on a scale of 1 to 5) both before and after completing treatment. |
Jacky Law
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 The stated aim is to reduce healthcare costs, including the unnecessary consumption of drugs, by encouraging people to get together and share knowledge about their condition.
Again, it sounds gteat, and again, most of the evidence suggests expert patients take more drugs. A Norwegian study, which taught people with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) the principles of self-management, showed that only a third of patients collected their prescriptions at the start of the exercise. By the end that figure had doubled to 60%. |
| A whole string of class-action lawsuits alleging that HMOs withheld medical services to boost profits expressed some of the mounting anget over healthcare costs in general and drug prices in particular
Insurers, via HMOs, also started contesting FDA decisions about safe, widely used drugs which they thought patients should pay for themselves in pharmacies rather than have prescribed at the insurers' expense. |
The Life Extension Editorial Staff
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 Economic Costs
The healthcare costs related to overweight and obesity are staggering. According to statistics collected in 1995, the direct economic cost of dealing with excess body fat in the United States was $99.2 billion. The indirect costs were projected at $47.6 billion due to wages lost by people unable to work because of illness or disability (Cerulli et al. 1998; Wolf et al. 1998; Colditz 1999). Both the direct and indirect costs of dealing with obesity are skyrocketing. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Both of these can be alleviated as employees are given more access to information about health. How much of an impact can it have? Well, in our survey, 27.3 percent of the employees reported that they reduced their sick days or medical days off after reading this information. Seventeen point eight percent reported receiving praise from coworkers about their level of improved health. These are very positive numbers.
The bottom line is that health information, when made available to people, whether they are employees or not, can boost their work performance. |
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