Friday, October 14, 2005 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: health care reform, sick care system, health care system |
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.
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!"
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Get independent news alerts on natural cures, food lab tests, cannabis medicine, science, robotics, drones, privacy and more.
Permalink to this article:
Embed article link: (copy HTML code below):
Reprinting this article:
Non-commercial use OK, cite NaturalNews.com with clickable link.
Follow Natural News on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and Pinterest
"Big Tech and mainstream media are constantly trying to silence the independent voices that dare to bring you the truth about toxic food ingredients, dangerous medications and the failed, fraudulent science of the profit-driven medical establishment.
Email is one of the best ways to make sure you stay informed, without the censorship of the tech giants (Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.). Stay informed and you'll even likely learn information that may help save your own life."
–The Health Ranger, Mike Adams