A new study from the Washington, D.C. based Center for Studying Health System Change has revealed that 9 million Americans no longer have health insurance coverage through their employers compared to those who received coverage in 2001. In other words, employers' ability to provide health insurance coverage for their employees is in a rapid decline, leaving employees either without health insurance or needing to look elsewhere. It's a growing trend, and this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
The problem, by the way, is not that employers don't want to provide health insurance to employees, nor that employers are just skimming profits in order to lower their costs. The problem is that health insurance is unaffordable to both employees and their employers, and the root cause behind that is that insurance costs are being driven up by several things: outrageous profits in prescription drugs, the widespread pursuit of unnecessary surgical procedures that are extremely expensive, and the fact that even though western medicine is the most expensive form of medicine in the world, it is one of the least effective at actually preventing chronic disease.
In other words, as a nation, we are not investing in prevention, and as a result, health care costs are sharply rising and health insurance costs are following suit. The result of all of this is that if the trends don't change, we will soon be a nation without readily available health care coverage, but with skyrocketing rates of chronic disease and unaffordable health care costs.
The pharmaceutical companies, for their part, aren't helping the situation. They are continuing their attempts to work together with the FDA to monopolize the U.S. drug market by prohibiting drugs from Canada and other countries. They continue to sharply increase the prices of their drugs and promote them with distorted scientific studies, outright bribery to physicians, and highly misleading marketing and advertising that inevitably results in higher drug sales.
Health insurance companies aren't helping the situation either, but they can only do so much. When health care costs go up, health insurance companies must raise their rates accordingly. Over the last five years, we've seen alarming increases in health insurance rates, and employers can only absorb so much cost before they have to start cutting these benefits. The situation has gotten so bad that today, as the president of Arial Software, I've received resumes from people who said they would work for practically any pay whatsoever, as long as they could get guaranteed health insurance coverage. I view this as a sad situation, and an indication that our health care system is utterly broken. Western medicine is a complete failure in terms of enhancing the health of our nation and preventing chronic disease.
The only way out of all this is to invest in prevention and move to a national health care system that follows free market principles, and allows health care providers to purchase prescription drugs from around the world rather than limiting them to monopolized U.S. sources.
But prescription drugs are never the answer, anyway. The real answer to all this is prevention, and as a nation, we don't invest in prevention. We need a system that teaches people how to be healthy from the time they are a young child all the way through adulthood. We need a system that rewards and incentivizes healthy eating habits, healthy exercise, and healthy choices in daily life. We need a system that teaches and preaches self-care rather than care through chemicals and prescription drugs. We need to teach people how to regain strength and flexibility and cardiovascular fitness. We also need a system that supports the patient's own immune system rather than trying to destroy it through barbaric therapies like chemotherapy.
Obviously, we need a lot of changes in our health care system in order to make health care insurance affordable to both employees and employers. Until that happens, the situation is only going to get worse. You can expect more and more Americans to go without health insurance in the years ahead until this issue is addressed and we ultimately see a true revolution in modern medicine.
About the author: Mike Adams is a consumer health advocate and award-winning journalist with a strong interest in personal health, the environment and the power of nature to help us all heal He has authored and published thousands of articles, interviews, consumers guides, and books on topics like health and the environment, and he has authored and published several downloadable personal preparedness courses including a downloadable course focused on safety and self defense. Adams is an independent journalist with strong ethics who does not get paid to write articles about any product or company. In 2010, Adams co-founded NaturalNews.com, a natural health video sharing site that has now grown in popularity. He also launched an online retailer of environmentally-friendly products (BetterLifeGoods.com) and uses a portion of its profits to help fund non-profit endeavors. He's also the founder of a well known HTML email software company whose 'Email Marketing Director' software currently runs the NaturalNews subscription database. Adams volunteers his time to serve as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and regularly pursues cycling, nature photography, Capoeira and Pilates. Known on the 'net as 'the Health Ranger,' Adams shares his ethics, mission statements and personal health statistics at www.HealthRanger.org
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Friday, August 06, 2004
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