This CounterThink cartoon was originally published in 2006, and at the time it seemed almost outlandish to suppose that virtually an entire economy could be run on junk foods, sickness, disease and health care. And yet in the years since, this scenario has become more of a reality in the United States of America, where politicians are announcing "The economy is good" even while an increasingly large portion of that economy is based on disease-causing products and sick-care maintenance of the population (the "health care" system). Now that the new health care law has been passed by the Congress and signed by the President, it seemed like an especially good time to revisit this cartoon which turns out to be eerily accurate in predicting the future emphasis of the U.S. economy. When looking at this, remember that this cartoon stemmed from what I knew four years ago... long before the Wall Street bailout or health care reform. Yet even then it was obvious that the economy was headed in the direction of the "business is booming" proclamation made by the mayor in this cartoon. What follows is the full text of a recent article I posted called, "America does not have a shortage of doctors, it has an excess of disease." This article is particular relevant to the message of this cartoon, so I'm including it below.

America does not have a shortage of doctors, it has an excess of disease

Now that health reform relying on monopolized pharmaceutical medicine has become the law of the land across America, the mainstream media is reporting on a sudden shortage of doctors. The nearly one million doctors who already treat a sick, diseased population is no longer enough, it seems, and medical schools are ramping up to churn out more doctors to treat yet more disease. There are never enough doctors to go around when everybody's sick, it seems... What we're witnessing here is a massive expansion of the sick-care industry which already swallows 20 percent of the U.S. economy. Over the next few years, that percentage will rise to 25 percent, then 30 percent, and this financial sinkhole called "mainstream medicine" may even hit one-third of the entire national economy. That puts the U.S. in a dire financial situation. If a third of the economic productivity is being spent on sickness and disease, and another third (or so) is being spent on war and imperialism, and another third is spent on debt interest and social security, then where do you get the money to actually build roads and schools, pay government employees or administer the business of government? The answer, of course, is that you simply print more money and keep on spending -- a sure path to currency hyperinflation. But that's another story. The topic of today is how to solve the doctor shortage. And the answer to that is quite simple: Unleash the power of nutrition to prevent and reverse disease.

Nutrition ends the doctor shortage

We already know that vitamin D, all by itself, can prevent nearly 4 out of 5 cancers (http://www.naturalnews.com/021892.html). It also helps prevent heart disease, diabetes, depression, seasonal flu and kidney disease. Distribute free vitamin D supplements across the entire population and you solve the doctor shortage problem in one year as the public gets healthier and reduces doctor visits. It's a simple, cost-effective solution that any intelligent nation would embrace without a second thought: Invest a few pennies in the health of the population and save yourself many dollars in reduced health care costs. Regular vitamin D supplementation has no negative side effects and requires no prescriptions, no injections and no visits to the doctor. What's not to like about that? Except the sick care industry doesn't like it at all. Drug companies, hospitals, conventional doctors, med schools, medical journals and now even the mainstream media all generate extreme profits from the ongoing business of sickness and disease. Vitamin D would disrupt their profit agenda and send people home healthy and well instead of bringing them back into the hospital sick and diseased. America, you see, does not have a shortage of doctors... it has an excess of disease. And that's an excess that the sick-care system seems determined to continue.

America must decide: Sickness or health?

Faced with such a situation, the nation can make one of two choices: Choice #1) Invest in more doctors and expand the business of disease to ensnare the entire population in a cycle of pharmaceutical dependence, nutritional ignorance and accelerated disease. Choice #2) Invest in nutrition and shrink the sick-care industry by showing people how to stay healthy, fit and free of disease. Downsize sick care, in other words, by unleashing health. Which choice has America made? It's obvious, isn't it? With the recent health care reform legislation, the country has invested heavily in choice #1: More sickness, more pharmaceuticals, more hospitals and more doctors.

The business of disease is booming!

I first wrote about this in a tale called The Town of Allopath (http://www.naturalnews.com/008674.html), a fable that has been featured on Mercola's website for several years now. In that tale, I wrote about a society that believed it was experiencing economic abundance because it kept spending more and more money repairing car crashes and hospitalizing victims of automobile accidents. The town removed all stop signs and traffic lights to make sure more traffic accidents occurred, thereby ensuring jobs for the local car repair shops, hospitals and doctors. I also depicted a similar scenario in a CounterThink Cartoon published in 2006 called Business is Booming! (http://www.naturalnews.com/021218_disease_economy_drug_racket.html) This cartoon shows a town mayor announcing "Business is booming" while, in the background, the cityscape features chemical companies, fast food restaurants, hospitals, cancer centers and funeral homes. Sure, business is booming for all the companies that create disease and treat disease, but is the quality of life for that society getting any better? Not by a long shot. What's really interesting about all this is that today, just four years later, the "Business is Booming" cartoon has become reality in America! The Town of Allopath is now the country of America. This country has decided to expand the business of disease, and this is what has created an artificial "shortage of doctors." This shortage of doctors is an entirely manufactured shortage. America already has nearly one million doctors. If anything, we have way too many doctors. We'd actually be better off with far fewer doctors combined with a Health Freedom Protection Act that would allow naturopathic physicians to practice medicine alongside Traditional Chinese Medicine doctors, chiropractors and other holistic practitioners. And if we could roll back the FDA censorship of nutritional supplements and superfoods, then we could finally start to educate people about how to prevent disease using supplements, herbal remedies and nutritional therapies. All of a sudden we would find ourselves with far too many doctors -- and too many cancer centers, hospitals and clinics, too. This should be the goal of any intelligent nation: To protect and enhance the health of its people. But America's leaders (if you can call them that) have chosen a different path for the People: A lifetime of nutritional ignorance, medical enslavement, vaccinations, mammograms, chemotherapy, psychiatric drugs and an endless assortment of other dangerous medications. It makes you wonder... why?

Why America's government needs you to die sooner

If you do the math on this, you'll discover that the federal government cannot afford to have people live very long. If people live too many years past retirement, they keep collecting social security benefits. But social security is broke. It has no real money and only operates on a system of IOUs from the U.S. Treasury. Social security is one of the largest outlays of cash from the U.S. government -- cash the country simply doesn't have and therefore must borrow or print. From a financial point of view, the U.S. government sees retired people as purely a financial burden: They pay no taxes, they produce very little work, and they drain cash for every month they stay alive. It sounds cruel, but it's true: The government of the United States of America cannot afford for retired people to stay alive for very long. The more quickly you die, the more money the government saves. Kinda sick, huh? Now, imagine the financial burden on the Treasury if all of a sudden 70 million elderly Americans were taught the truth about vitamin D and nutritional therapies. Imagine people living just ten years longer than they currently do. The cost to the Treasury would be in the hundreds of billions of dollars each year! And yet the federal government doesn't have hundreds of billions of extra dollars. It's already spending such a fortune on disease, war and debt that it don't have a dime to spare. See The New Mr. America: Bankrupt, Diseased and Running Out of Options (http://www.naturalnews.com/026686_America_national_debt.html).

Help reverse the national debt... die sooner!

And this bring us to the health care reform legislation which, depending on whom you ask, contains "death panel" provisions or "taxpayer-funded assisted suicide" support. Whether such provisions actually exist under current reform legislation is hotly debated, of course, but the way they theoretically work is simple: Bureaucrats get to decide who lives and who dies based on how much money the state can afford to spend on them. Well, I can tell you this right now: If you're retired, the state believes it can't afford you at all! From a purely fiscal point of view, the state wants you dead, not alive and collecting money from social security while spending even more money via Medicare. This is truly a case where if you're retired, you're worth more DEAD than ALIVE (to the state, that is). Could our sick-care system actually be designed to "expire the taxpayers" right around retirement age? Every few years, the government raises the age qualifications for collecting social security (http://www.ssa.gov/retire2/agereduction.htm). At the same time, they keep increasing the toxicity of mainstream medicine by pushing more chemicals and radiation onto more people. The result is inescapable: Fewer and fewer people will ever live long enough to ever collect social security. Do you think this is coincidence? America's leaders, you see, aren't necessarily trying to reduce the population per se. But they don't want you to live a day beyond retirement because that's when you stop paying taxes and start collecting money from the state. That's unaffordable, so the "perfect system" (in their eyes) is one that causes your death somewhere between the ages of 55 and 70. They don't want medicine to kill you in your twenties or thirties because that's when you're working hard and paying taxes. What they really want is a system of medicine the offers accumulated toxicity that catches up with you in your late 50's and kills you before age 65. And isn't that exactly what mammograms, vaccines and pharmaceuticals do? CT scans catch up with you, too, and the combined toxicity of all these medications hit your liver and kidneys in your 50's, usually. By age 67 when full social security benefits are supposed to kick in, most people are either pumped up full of medications or they're dead. Cancer doesn't just happen overnight, you know. It takes many years (decades, usually) for a tumor to grow to the size where it can be detected on a mammogram. Meanwhile, doctors and medical staff are bombarding your breasts with radiation every year, practically guaranteeing that you'll end up with breast cancer in your 60's if you don't die from something else first. Am I saying that government-run health care is out to kill you? Not exactly. But they sure aren't trying to keep you alive, either...

Mainstream medicine is the real killer

You know what the No. 1 killer in America is? It's not cancer. Not heart disease. Not strokes, accidents or terrorism. The No. 1 cause of death in America is mainstream medicine, which kills anywhere from 250,000 to over 750,000 people a year, depending on whose statistics you believe. These deaths are called iatrogenic deaths, which means "deaths caused by doctors." You might just call it iatrogenocide, though, given how little regard the mainstream medical system has for protecting human life. So, getting back to the title of this article... if doctors are already killing over half a million people a year in America, and if we now have a "shortage" of doctors that will result in hundreds of thousands more doctors practicing the same backward system of drugs-and-surgery medicine that's killing people right now, can you guess what will happen to the iatrogenic death rate in America? You guessed it: It's heading skyward. Expect to see over a million Americans a year killed by mainstream medicine within the next decade. And why will a million Americans needlessly die each year from a monopoly medical system run by a bankrupt government? Perhaps because it's easier and more profitable to just watch Americans die before they collect social security than to teach them how to stay alive and healthy. The game is rigged, folks. And it's even more severely rigged if you're black, by the way. The vitamin D deficiencies suffered by black Americans today practically guarantee most middle-aged African American men will never live to collect social security. So you actually have a country full of hard-working black Americans paying taxes into a social security system that disproportionately pays out to white folks. Check it out: The average life expectancy of a black American male is about 67 years. You collect social security, if you're still alive, only after reaching -- guess what? -- age 67 (http://www.ssa.gov/retire2/agereduction.htm). Meanwhile, the average life expectancy of a white American male is 74 years. So that means white males are collecting social security for 7 years longer than black males. So working black men are actually subsidizing retired white men. At the same time, the sick-care system seems to be trying to kill us all before we reach retirement age because that saves more money for a bankrupt government that's bowing to the Chinese and Japanese governments to keep lending it more money. How many dead Americans does it take to eliminate the national debt? I don't know, but you can bet some pencil pusher in Washington has already done the math on that, and the answer is not one that prioritizes your personal health. Sources for this story include: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304506904575180331528424238.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-04-12-deficit_N.htm