The collapse of health and the downfall of the U.S. economy (preview)

Monday, March 20, 2006 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: Disease Economy, economic news, U.S. economy

A new economic study by the U.S. government reveals that health care spending is rising so rapidly in the United States that in less than ten years, it will represent 20% of the domestic economy. That's an astonishing $1 out of every $5 in economic productivity, almost all of which is based on treating patients with fraudulently approved, dishonestly marketed and utterly harmful prescription drugs that do absolutely nothing to prevent or reverse chronic disease.

This leads us to the astounding (but true) conclusion that conventional medicine is draining the U.S. economy of its productivity and competitiveness. Today, over 16% of the U.S. economy is spent on health care (sick care, actually), making medicine look a lot like a 16% tax on the entire economy. The result, not surprisingly, is that many U.S. corporations can no longer compete in the global marketplace. General Motors, for example, was spending more money on health care than steel. The result? The company is now largely considered bankrupt.

But GM is just the tip of the iceberg on this issue. No country in the world spends anywhere close to 16% of its GDP on health care. Only the United States. But why does the U.S. spend so much in the first place?

The answer is simpler than you think. It basically comes down to four factors:

1. The FDA-enforced pharmaceutical monopoly that keeps U.S. drug prices the highest in the world while discrediting or outlawing prescription drugs from other countries.
2. The continued suppression of natural medicine, nutrition, and other forms of alternative care that actually helps patients heal rather than simply masking symptoms.
3. The harmful nature of most prescription drugs: They cause massive nutritional deficiencies and create secondary symptoms or diseases which are almost always treated with more high-cost prescription drugs.
4. The near-zero investment in prevention. While most first-world nations invest substantial sums in health education and disease prevention, the United States doesn't believe in prevention. In the U.S., "prevention" is limited to mammograms and other screening tests which are really just detection, not prevention.

Big Pharma will bankrupt America

If you really look closely at the issue of health care costs in America, you'll eventually realize that unless trends are substantially altered, there can be only one outcome: The health care bankruptcy of America. Corporations simply cannot pay skyrocketing health insurance costs and simultaneously remain competitive in the global economy. For a 45-year-old manager working in the U.S., the monthly health insurance bill could easily exceed $700 all by itself -- and that's higher than the entire monthly cost (salary and benefits included) of hiring a similarly skilled worker in many other countries.

Thanks to the massive political influence of Big Pharma, the United States has now become the most expensive country in the world in which to conduct business. And there are no signs of change, as the FDA seems wholly committed to protecting Big Pharma's profits by making it more difficult for generic drugs to receive approval (for example), and by continuing to discredit or outlaw herbs and natural medicines that actually prevent disease and make people healthier.

But elsewhere in the world, outright corruption in the health industry simply does not reach such extremes. Citizens of countries throughout Europe, Asia, South America and even New Zealand have far greater access to herbal medicine that really works. Plus, direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs is illegal everywhere in the world except the United States, meaning Americans are the only people crazy enough to tolerate the advertising of prescription drugs to a mass audience that isn't even qualified to prescribe those drugs. Only a doctor can prescribe them, so why isn't drug advertising limited to doctors?

It's going to get ugly around here

The bankruptcy of America won't be pretty. With 50% of Americans now on prescription drugs, and with 20% of children taking mind-altering drugs, we are simultaneously facing an economic downfall and a collapse of mental capabilities throughout the population. Except for a small percentage of people who follow natural, healthy lifestyles, the population at large can no longer think clearly. Most people suffer from drug-induced brain fog, a common side effect of many of the top prescription drugs now being promoted on television in the United States. This widespread brain fog makes it extremely difficult for these people to function as intelligent, productive citizens.

As a result, academic standards in the U.S. are a joke. And as a nation, we've chosen to let psychiatry drug our schoolchildren with mind-altering chemicals rather than actually teach them something useful. So we're producing a generation of brain-suppressed drug addicts and calling it public education. How will these children compete with the extremely smart, disciplined, hard-working students of countries like India, China, and Korea when it comes time to find a job in the global marketplace?

The answer, of course, is that they won't compete. There's no competition. U.S. citizens will be increasingly relegated to switching to jobs that can't be outsourced to other countries, like flipping burgers, greeting customers at Wal-Mart, or working as nurses.

Competing on brains doesn't work when you can't think straight

You see, the U.S. workforce hasn't been able to compete on labor for decades. Nearly all the labor jobs have already left the U.S. and gone to countries like China where labor is a lot less expensive. That leaves the brain jobs.

Now pay attention, because this is perhaps the most important point of this entire essay: Competing on brain jobs requires that your population can think straight. And when your population is drugged up from childhood to old age on drugs that cause brain fog and mental disorders, then that population can't think straight. This, in turn, means the U.S. will soon be unable to compete on either labor jobs or brain jobs.

Just compare your average U.S. high school with a high school in India if you don't believe me. The students in India are doing college-level academic work while U.S. students can barely read. That's not an exaggeration. And let's not even talk about basic math, like calculating a 15% tip at a restaurant. Most high school graduates can't even do that in their head. Meanwhile in Taiwan, 6th grade students are performing complex multiplications in their heads using a virtual abacus (you can actually see their fingers flicker as they quickly calculate the solutions). In the U.S. such a student would be considered a genius. In Taiwan, it's routine.

So what's left, then? If we can't do labor jobs, and our population can't think straight enough to compete on the brain jobs, what kind of work can we do? The answer is obvious: we can all get jobs treating each other's diseases! (See my popular, humorous article, Welcome to The Town of Allopath, to see an example of this in action.)

Over the next twenty years in the United States, there will be an explosion in the number of job openings for nurses, physician's assistants and other roles that manage disease, but at the same time there will be a huge decline in jobs that actually compete in the global marketplace or produce anything useful.

This is why I now call the U.S. economy the disease economy -- because more and more jobs will be dependent on the proliferation of disease. And no national economy, by the way, ever got rich by spending all its time, money and energy treating chronic disease with overpriced prescription drugs.

Economists lose their minds... again

Some economists, however, think all this is wonderful. "It will create jobs!" According to economic statistics, you see, it doesn't matter if a person makes cars, flips burgers, or fills prescriptions for dangerous drugs at the local Wal-Mart pharmacy. It's all the same to economists: It's all GDP.

But in reality, some economic activities are constructive, while others are destructive. Building new technology, or new homes, or new factories is constructive. Doping up the population with more medically unjustified drugs is destructive. On the balance sheet of the national economy, however, they all look the same.

So politicians can shout all they want about the "strong U.S. economy." But in reality, it isn't strong. It's diseased. And the disease is only getting worse, since the government departments regulating much of health care (the FDA and others) flatly refuse to allow any genuine discussion of alternative medicine, nutrition, natural health and herbs. In fact, they go out of their way to isolate Americans from the very possibility of learning about true disease prevention, thereby boosting profits of the drug companies that rule Washington.

Prevention, you see, would make people healthy again. And that would cost the economy billions of dollars in "lost profits" expected by drug companies, hospitals, surgeons and others in health care.

Why the disease economy requires more disease

The United States is now so completely invested in disease that, believe it or not, the U.S. economy cannot afford to invest in making people healthy, because the loss of business to drug companies and hospitals could cause an economic disaster.

When you've built 1/5th of your national economy on pharmacies, drug companies, cancer centers, hospitals and outpatient surgery centers, the idea of showing people how to take care of their health and avoid all these products and services is simply incompatible with the economic foundation of your nation. The United States economy has invested trillions of dollars in disease, and it's counting on the continued proliferation of disease in order to prop up an economy that can no longer compete in a global free market.

For investors, the big lie is that we will all get rich by investing in drug companies and keeping the population sick. The more sick people we have, the bigger the payoff to Big Pharma. And the coming waves of diabetes, Alzheimer's and osteoporosis will only create even more profits for those smart enough to buy pharma stocks now.

But it's all a big lie, of course, because you can't create abundance by keeping your population diseased. And that is the position the United States has taken: Outlaw prevention, discredit natural medicine, ban the free trade of medicines, and sock it to working Americans by keeping them ignorant, sick and indebted. And then tell them they're getting a "discount" on prescription drugs by unleashing a government drug benefit program that costs states hundreds of millions of dollars more than what they were paying before.

In 1998, I predicted the dot-com crash. In 1999, I publicly predicted terrorist attacks on Washington and New York, naming those exact cities. Today, here's what I'm predicting for the future of the U.S. economy and its practice of medicine:

This feature story continues at www.HealthRanger.com (membership required) where you will read my predictions and trends for the next decade concerning the U.S. economy and the future of Western medicine. Huge economic shifts have already begun. Learn what's coming, and take steps now to save yourself from the Disease Economy. Click here for details.