Where's the health
in health care reform?
By: Mike Adams
Originally published October 14 2005
www.naturalnews.com
In the months and years ahead, you're going to hear a whole lot of talk
about health care reform, but most of what you're going to hear is
about reform, not health. You see, there's this great lie out there,
this huge misconception, this big shell game, where all these
politicians and power-hungry people think they can convince the public
that health care reform is just about shifting paper around and
deciding who pays.
But I say that you cannot talk about
health care reform with any degree of honesty or credibility until you
talk about health. None of the discussion I have seen from anybody out
there – not the press, not the health care authorities, not the American Medical Association, not the politicians
who are going to ride this issue all the way into public office –
covers substantial ideas about actually making people healthier. 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.
It's all trending towards a national system – a government-sponsored health care system,
just like they have in Canada. Now, personally, I'm not necessarily for
or against the government-sponsored system. I've seen countries do it
very well; I've seen countries do it poorly, too. It's not the system
that's good or bad; it's the idea that you can wiggle your way out of
the health care crisis just by shuffling paperwork around and changing
who's writing the checks to cover the costs.
Health care reform: Money vs. people
Now, let's get serious about this: If you
want to reform health care, what are you really talking about here?
You're talking about two things: Cost and people. And that's the order
that most people think of them in, by the way. It's the money first.
Why? As a nation, we're going bankrupt. We're already bankrupt,
actually, but we're just making it even worse with these sky-high health care costs.
Our employers are going bankrupt trying to fund the health insurance
of their employees. It makes U.S. workers unable to compete in the
global marketplace. This is one of the reasons jobs are increasingly
shifting overseas. It's because U.S. workers are just too expensive to
insure due to our health care system (if you can call it that). I say
you can't solve this problem by subsidizing insurance or by forcing employers to cover everybody. You can only solve the problem by making people healthier. You've got to address the health.
Now, secondly, it comes down to the
people because now we have a whole nation of unprecedented illness and
chronic disease. Anywhere from 25 to 46 percent of our nation is
suffering from mental illness, depending on whom you ask. We have 40 percent of our people on prescription drugs
– drugs that take away mental clarity and quality of life. These drugs
are killing people at a rate that's approaching the Holocaust.
At the same time, we've got a nation with a public school system that continues to feed our children junk food, soft drinks and candy bars. The school lunch programs are a nutritional disaster. We've got hospitals
serving hamburgers and fries. We've got hospitals where we can buy a
pizza. "Come out of heart surgery and get yourself some extra cheese!"
Health reform starts with food reform
You see, all this talk about covering the
uninsured and saving people money and all these ridiculous distractions
like the Medicare drug discount card are all a shell game. It's all a
show; it's just theater designed to keep people occupied so that nobody
has to talk about the real issues.
The real issues start with the foods –
that's right, the foods. These products are manufactured by big
businesses that have a whole lot of influence in Washington, and they
don't want anybody talking about them because their foods are causing
these diseases. It's all that added sugar and white flour, and all those refined carbohydrates. You've got hydrogenated oils that function as brain poison and heart poison in the human body. You've got sodium nitrate that causes cancer.
That's why people who consume processed meats have a risk of pancreatic
cancer that is 67% percent higher than everybody else. You've got added
salts, artificial colors, all kinds of preservatives and monosodium
glutamate (MSG)
hidden in foods. It all starts with the foods, so all this talk about
who's going to pay for the disease is all just a distraction so no one
has to talk about the foods and the beverages that are causing these
diseases in the first place.
The food and beverage companies, of
course, would love to keep it that way. They would love for everybody
to just keep arguing over who's paying these sky-high prescription drug prices while ignoring the simple fact that prevention programs and junk food advertising bans could make prescription drugs practically irrelevant. Of course, all these drug companies say they need the money to "find a cure for cancer." What a brilliant con!
You don't need to find a cure for cancer if you stop poisoning the public with the national food supply.
You don't need a cure for cancer if nobody has cancer. The way you have
a population that's cancer-free is to teach people about the healing
power of sunlight – about getting some sunlight and some vitamin D. You
teach people to avoid these dangerous ingredients and you ban them from the food supply:
You outlaw hydrogenated oils. You outlaw refined sugar. You outlaw
sodium nitrate. That's what you do if you want to reform health care.
It's the only approach that makes any
sense. It's the only sane approach. That's exactly why no one's talking
about it. No, we can't have anything that actually works in this
country because the pharmaceutical industry
would lose money. What would all those people who work for the
hospitals do and what would the drug companies and all those drug reps
and doctors do? Gee, what would people do for jobs if so many people weren't so sick?
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. "How are we going to extract a whole lot of profits out of the general public and call it science-based medicine?"
There are all sorts of people – most of
them in Washington D.C. – who are scheming about how to make this
happen. And sitting to the right of them is, of course, the food
industry – the Big Sugar people, the oil processors and the grain
processors – the big food companies.
They're all saying, "Hey, don't mention the foods. Don't talk about us.
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. That way we'll
shift money from the pockets of taxpayers to ourselves and our
investors and we'll call it public health."
Wow, what a great scheme, and if the FDA
is protecting the U.S. drug market, they can set any price they want
because the FDA will say the drugs from overseas are dangerous. The
drugs you buy in the United States
are perfectly safe, but if you buy the exact same chemical compound
from Canada, "No, no, those are dangerous. You're unpatriotic. How dare
you buy them from overseas? You must buy them here in America
where we set the prices." It's called a monopoly. It's called
protectionism. It's called screwing the U.S. consumer and it's what's
going on right now, every single day in America.
Everyone's out to make a buck
Unless we see a radical shift towards disease prevention
rather than disease treatment in this country, what we're really going
to end up with is a health care system that is ultimately designed to
do two things. Number one: Extract as much money as possible from the taxpayers and shift it into the pockets of drug companies. Number two: Distract people from the real causes of disease
so that everyone continues to believe that disease is just a matter of
bad luck or bad genes, and that only drugs can treat or cure any
disease.
It seems that everybody out there is
greedy and wants to make more money. And most don't really care who
suffers in order to make that money. The politicians, they want to get
in power. How do you get in power? You keep big, rich companies happy.
That's how you get in power, and that's how you stay in power. And once
you're in power, you thank them by passing new legislation that makes
sure there is a windfall of public money headed in their direction.
And how do you do that? You announce the
Medicare drug discount card and make it illegal for the government to
negotiate volume discounts with drug companies. You mandate mental
health screening for the entire population. You make sure that health
insurance has to cover Viagra even if it's being prescribed to sex
offenders, which is exactly what's going on in this country. That's a
good example of how insane our health insurance industry and health
care coverage really is. We're using taxpayer dollars to pay for Viagra
for people who have been convicted of sex crimes.
Health care reform goes far beyond crunching numbers
Now, I repeat my first statement here, which is that you can't have an honest debate about health care reform unless you address the issue of health.
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. It's just a matter of how
you wish to redistribute it. And frankly, if our nation continues to be
so diseased (cancer, obesity and diabetes are all at record heights), then we're going to basically drive ourselves into extreme poverty because you
cannot afford to keep funding chronic disease and the treatment of
symptoms through prescription drugs and expensive medical procedures.
You can't keep doing that over and over, with the same patients,
generation after generation, if you want your nation to be financially
solvent. You just can't keep doing that. You can't spend 25 percent of
the GDP on health care and be the world economic leader. Do the math.
You've got other nations spending a
fraction of that on health care. They manage to cover everybody. Most
nations will spend at least one or ten percent of their health care
budget on prevention. But here in the U.S., we don't spend anything on
prevention. Nothing. In this country, we think prevention should almost
be outlawed. "How dare you teach people about nutrition?
It's unproven," say these doctors, medical researchers, medical
journals and corrupt health authorities. "How dare you teach people to
heal themselves with foods?" They want to outlaw healing. They want to
outlaw nutrition. They want to make sure people only choose drugs.
Choose drugs: that's what makes money for the people in power.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
The bottom line is that if you have a
nation of people who are healthy, your health care costs plummet. Do
you know what my own personal health care expenses are? Zero. I spend
nothing on over-the-counter or prescription drugs and nothing on
doctors; nothing whatsoever.
I do spend some of my money on
prevention, of course. How do I do that? I visit natural health care
practitioners and naturopaths to keep me healthy – not because
something hurts or is falling off, not because I'm having a heart
attack, or I'm going blind or I'm having seizures and my leg went numb
because I'm diabetic
and I'm still drinking soft drinks by the gallon. I'm going to my
health practitioners because I want to stay healthy. It's all about
prevention, people. Prevention is dirt cheap. So is good nutrition.
A drugged nation can't think clearly about health
Now, here's the ironic thing about all of
this: No matter what health care reforms they come up with and try to
pitch to the public, no matter how ludicrous and insane they may seem,
most people will buy into them because half the nation is drugged. I'm
not making this up. Half the nation is literally drugged up. They've
lost mental clarity. They can't think straight. They can't make good
decisions anymore. They've got brain fog side effects from their
prescription drugs (like anti-inflammatory drugs).
So, when a politician comes along and
says, "We're going to provide universal health care and cover
everybody," people are going to say, "I'm voting for you!" But they
don't realize what it means. What it means is financial bankruptcy
because, again, if you don't address the health, there is no real
solution. We are at a crossroads here in terms of the history of human
civilization on this planet. What's going to happen to this particular
nation, the United States of America?
I think that if we had some courage, some
honesty and some people who were willing to stand up and tell the
truth, we could turn this around. We could ban junk food advertising
to children. We could ban dangerous ingredients. We could arrest the
criminals at the drug companies and decision makers at the FDA who have
deliberately put us in this mess. We could reform the USDA and break
the ties between food companies and regulators. There are people in
government who have been colluding with the very industries they are
supposed to be regulating.
With some major changes in place, in one
generation we could have a nation of really healthy and happy children
who have the ability to learn well, who are emotionally balanced and
who are not predisposed to diseases like schizophrenia, type 2
diabetes, heart disease or obesity. We could have a nation that could
get back to doing some good things, some creative things, and a nation
that could take a leadership role in the world.
But we've got to make that decision now
because, if we don't make that decision, if we go the other way – that
is, the way of protecting special interest groups, protecting the
corrupt profits of drug companies and keeping the FDA in power so it
can continue to exploit public health in order to send more profits to
the drug companies – if we make this decision, we keep protecting the
politicians that act on the interests of private business instead of
protecting the public. If we allow junk food companies to keep marketing to children, if we allow our schools to be infiltrated by all these foods that promote disease and learning
disabilities and aggressive behavior in young children, then we are
doomed as a nation. We really are. We're heading down the path of self
destruction and we won't be the first nation to go down in history as
one that imploded.
America could fall, simply from bad health
You might recall that the Roman Empire
did sort of the same thing. It's amazing what a bit of heavy metal in
the plumbing will do for a city. In the case of ancient Rome, the lead
poisoning drove the citizens (and their leaders) mad. But today,
instead of poisoning ourselves with lead, we are poisoning ourselves
with food additives. We are doing it consciously. We know it's
happening. It isn't a mystery, but we are allowing it to happen because
the special interest groups are running the country; they are
arm-twisting these politicians who don't have the courage to stand up
and do what's right for the people.
If we don't make some changes fast, we're
going to get past the point of sanity. We may be past that point
already. We're going to get to a point where maybe 60 or 70 percent of
the people in this country are diseased and beyond the ability to
think. How do you run a democracy
when 60 or 70 percent of the people don't have the presence of mind to
even vote rationally? How do you run a democracy like that? Well, you
don't. It's gone. It's basically run by the special interest groups,
just a few people in power who are acting like it's a democracy. I
think that's actually where we are today.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we can turn this
around, but I don't see any indication of it. I don't see any honest
discussion of health care reform, do you? Look around out there! 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.
There are so many vested interests in chronic disease that it's almost
impossible to change the system incrementally. You have to really
reform this system from the top down. You have to overhaul it; you have
to unleash a health care revolution.
All the top Fortune 500 companies out
there (and a lot of people's egos, careers and positions of power) are
all invested in disease. Did you know the top ten drug companies in
America make more money than the other 490 companies on the Fortune 500
list?
On top of that, you've got the American
Cancer Society, which is based on cancer. You've got the American
Diabetes Association, which is based on diabetes. You've got drug
companies that are counting on the next wave of Alzheimer's patients
and counting on another generation of obese children growing up and
consuming these foods so that they're obese just like their parents are today. They are counting on all of this. They've mapped this out and they're rolling out new, patented drugs to cash in!
So, what happens if you try to challenge
this system? Oh boy, you're in for a ride! You're going to be
discredited. You're going to be censored. You're going to be attacked
because there's simply too much money at stake here. Politicians and
power brokers are counting on this disease to pay some salaries, make
some profit, pocket some cash and to keep them in office because when
there's a health care crisis going on, somebody can always get elected by promising a solution, regardless of whether or not that solution makes any sense.
Any real solution to health care must
involve addressing health; any solution that addresses health must
challenge the status quo; any solution that challenges the status quo
will be viciously attacked by the interests that already hold positions
of power and profit in our nation. So, you see how this system is very
difficult to change. In fact, if I was a betting man – and I'm not – I
would bet that this system's going to implode. I don't think we're
going to turn this around.
I think only a few individuals are going
to emerge from this with any degree of sanity or health, and those will
be the individuals who take charge of their own health, who work
outside the system, who find a naturopath, who say no to prescription
drugs and who start feeding themselves healing foods and outstanding
nutrition. They'll be parents who take charge of the health of their
children and don't feed them soft drinks and candy bars
and who don't allow them to eat those nutritionally depleted school
lunches. These are the people who are going to emerge from this system
as being sane, healthy and emotionally balanced.
But the masses will probably never come
around to the power of nutrition. If you have a nation of people who
are mad (who don't have fully functioning nervous systems), I don't
think you can last very long in the competitive global marketplace.
You've got people in India who make top U.S. students seem retarded.
You've got people in China who work for a fraction of what we work for.
You've got schools with real quality standards all around the world;
meanwhile, in America, we have daycare that we call public education.
We're stuffing our children full of these toxic foods, just to make
sure they don't "misbehave." You can't compete like that anymore.
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. We are the
best in the world at driving our population mad. That's right, mental
illness – number one in the world; no one comes close to us. We're also
number one in obesity.
Here in the U.S., we poisoned an entire
generation with fast food, sugars and hydrogenated oils. We made sure
they never got good nutrition. We drove them mad with violent
television programming, violent video games and insane public school
systems. We did a good number on those kids, didn't we? What are we
going to do when those kids grow up and they have diseases? What are we
going to do then? There's an estimate out there that says that 100
percent of the population will be diabetic if the current trends
continue – just in the next decade or so, 100 percent. Think about that
and then think about the real conversation out there about health care
reform. Remember, if you don't address health, any discussion is
essentially pointless.
It's like the captain of a sinking ship arguing about the color of the deck paint.
Now frankly, if the mentally unstable
people who run this country were crazy enough to put me in charge of
the national health system, oh my, we would have this thing licked in a
couple of years. Every pharmaceutical company out there would hate me
and the food companies would hate me because I'd make them use
nutritious ingredients. I would outlaw those toxic substances that are
now added to the food supply (like MSG, aspartame, yeast extract,
etc.).
I would make school lunch programs
actually serve nutritious food to children. I would ban junk food
vending machines. I would have the taxpayers pay for nutritional
supplements for all pregnant women because we would save billions of
dollars in long-term health care costs by spending PENNIES on nutrition
for each expectant mother. I would have some pretty radical ideas that
would definitely disturb the status quo. Not surprisingly, we'd end up
with a generation of people who are actually healthy.
Wow, imagine that for a change. Drug
companies would go out of business. And that's why they can't let it
happen. That's why they would never let a guy like me, or even someone
with a lot of public health credentials who shared my beliefs, call the
shots. It's just too good. It solves so many problems. It eliminates
all these jobs in the health care and disease management industries. It
would shrink the pharmaceutical industry. It would shrink the sick care
system out there. Hospital beds would go empty.
People would live longer and start
collecting more social security because now they'd be living longer.
The government would have to pay more money because these people
wouldn't be dying off as they are today. It would cost the government
and the pharmaceutical companies money. Gee, the only people that would
be better off would be... well... real people! The public would
experience happier people, longer lives, greater cognitive function,
greater clarity of mind and healthier, happier children. There would be
far less disease, more stable mental states and enhanced learning
abilities. These are the benefits that would occur.
So, call me a pessimist if you like, but
I think I'm actually a realist and an optimist on a personal level. I'm
an optimist in my own health and the health of everybody who wants to
take responsibility for their own health. And there are many, many
people like that. Just don't expect to hear anything sane or useful
from our public health officials or politicians who claim to be solving
this health crisis with their ridiculous proposals for health care
reform. This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, for Truth Publishing.
About the author:
Mike Adams is a natural health researcher and author with a strong
interest in personal health, the environment and the power of nature to
help us all heal He is a prolific writer and has published thousands of
articles, interviews, reports and consumer guides, impacting the lives
of millions of readers around the world who are experiencing phenomenal
health benefits from reading his articles. Adams is an independent
journalist with strong ethics who does not get paid to write articles
about any product or company. In 2007, Adams launched EcoLEDs, a maker
of energy efficient LED
lights that greatly reduce CO2 emissions. He also founded an environmentally-friendly
online retailer called BetterLifeGoods.com
that uses retail profits to help support consumer advocacy programs.
He's also a successful software entrepreneur, having founded a well
known email
marketing software company whose technology currently powers
the NaturalNews email newsletters. Adams is currently the executive
director of the Consumer
Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit, and enjoys outdoor
activities, nature photography, Pilates and adult gymnastics.
|