Wednesday, May 16, 2007
What is actually going on in healthcare?
People who come to this website are often searching for cures, sometimes for hopeless diseases. Discussions about the politics of medical care are inappropriate for many readers who simply haven’t the time, while dealing with serious health problems, to be burdened with the dismaying realities of a failed healthcare system. What is actually going on in healthcare is often never brought to the public’s attention. Few people recognize, that while Medicare is doomed to go bankrupt in the next few years, that the entire Medicare budget could easily be funded if the U.S. government stopped spending 50% of every tax dollar on war. Oh, the pie chart that displays the U.S. budget says defense costs 16%, but government hides the real costs. (see War Resisters League:
http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm ) The latest estimate is that the war in Iraq will cost $2 trillion. The Boston Globe just published what $456 billion, just 1/4th of what the war in Iraq costs, could buy. $54 billion a year would eliminate starvation and malnutrition globally by 2015, while $30 billion would provide a year of primary education for every child on earth. Recognize that the money you have in savings accounts is slowly being siphoned out (stolen) by the Federal Reserve which engineers inflation and the devaluation of your money. A U.S. dollar in the year 1900 is worth about 3 cents today. Oil companies are gaming the public, raising oil prices to the point where consumption levels off, and only then is the cost of gasoline stabilized. Without true price competition, this amounts to gouging the public (where’s the FTC?). Does anybody recall when OPEC was formed because there was a glut of oil and the price for a gallon of gas was dirt cheap? Now they say there is a shortage of oil. Gasoline prices have risen to the point where the public has so little money left to spend that retail store sales have fallen. As the cost of gasoline rises, so does the cost of living, and hospitals will have to raise their rates, which will then bring on universal health care (free for all), which will attract more illegal immigrants and lead to the long rationing lines for care seen in Canada and Great Britain. Few understand that health insurance and Medicare are all about getting doctors and hospitals paid, not about delivering quality health care or preventing disease. Decades ago trolley cars in the Los Angeles metropolitan area were abandoned as automobile manufacturers paid politicians to eliminate public transportation. Big business has learned how to manipulate the marketplace. The same is true in medicine. Ratcheting down the level of nutrients in fortified foods (folic acid, vitamin C, vitamin D) ensures a certain level of disease in the population that then requires treatment. Phony studies are published to scare the public away from vitamin pills. Healthcare now faces a special challenge. Breakthroughs in nutritional science, particularly vitamin D, will soon be announced, which will vanquish the two leading causes of mortality, cancer and heart disease. Other discoveries with vitamin C, resveratrol, magnesium, garlic, probiotics, folic acid, if implemented, could result in the downsizing of American medicine. But will the public catch on? Will health authorities and politicians even let this happen? Technology now exists that would make it possible for Americans to live 120 years in great health. Tom Johnson, a University of Colorado geneticist, thinks people could soon live to 350 years old, spanning the ages like Methuselah and the other Biblical patriarchs. Will the public catch on? Will their doctors lead the way (and put themselves out of business)? - Copyright 2007 Bill Sardi, Knowledge of Health, Inc.
posted by Knowledge of Health at 5:38 PM
