How the Rich Got Richer While the Sick Got Sicker
| Written by Minnesota Wellness Publications Tuesday, 22 September 2009 00:25 |
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One of the hottest topics in politics today is health care. The masses are calling for universal health care, politicians are calling for universal health care, and our leaders keep making empty promises while pumping money into the pharmaceutical industry. The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 was a complete fiasco, promising much but providing only windfall profits for the pharmaceutical industry. Many feel it was designed by the far right to eventually destroy Medicare.
If health care is a hot button issue for you, then I'm sure you heard the ostensible reasons behind the exorbitant costs of our health care. I'm sure you've heard that to reduce the price of health care, we must reduce the costs of healt
h care. New technology, new research, scientific breakthroughs, and the cost of bringing new drugs to market; these are the fronted reasons for our skyrocketing health care costs. The debate is all consuming, everyone has stake at bringing down health care costs, and everyone has a solution. Supposedly.
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is all a diversion. You can talk costs and prices and research till you require an I.V., but it will not change a system that is already sick and dying.
The simplest way to explain the high cost of our health care is: Our health care system is costly because it is not a health care system; it is a disease care system. Ninety-five percent of our health care dollars go to urgent care with five percent going to prevention. Were this turned around, the overall price of health care would drop at least fifty percent.
There is, however, an underlying reason why we have this terrible system; why Americans pay the highest health care costs on the planet yet receive an inferior system of health care in which our longevity rate is ranked 20th world wide and our infant mortality rate is ranked 20th. The reason: our government has, since 1806, worked towards making regular medicine (conventional, drug based, allopathic) a powerful monopoly. Got that? Our Government has systematically maneuvered to make orthodox, regular medicine a powerful and profitable monopoly. And you expect the government to fix a problem it has been creating for 200 years?
When this country was founded, medical freedom was assumed. Early Americans ran away from intolerance hoping to find religious and political freedom. Medical freedom was simply assumed. It was assumed that the people had the right to choose whatever form of health care they preferred.
Dr Benjamin Rush proposed that these rights should be specifically laid out in our constitution: "The Constitution of this Republic should make special provision for medical freedom. To restrict the art of healing to one class will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic."
These freedoms did not make it into the Constitution or our Bill of Rights. How could our forefathers have known that Dr. Rush's words ringing through the convention halls would prophesize the exact state of affairs over two hundred years later?
"Unless we put medical freedom into the constitution the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship and force people who wish doctors and treatment of their own choice to submit to only what the dictating outfit offers."
This is the state of medicine today. It is a sad state of affairs. Our drug-based medicine heals little, poisons many, and still our people are clamoring for access to it.
In 1806, the first medical licensing laws were passed in New York. This was called the Medical Practices Act. It allowed only state licensed physicians to recover their fees in courts.
