NewsTarget.com
From: http://www.newstarget.com/012330.html
By: Mike Adams

Where's the health in health care reform?

In the months and years ahead, you're going to hear a whole lot of talk about health care reform, but most of what you're going to hear is about reform, not health. You see, there's this great lie out there, this huge misconception, this big shell game, where all these politicians and power-hungry people think they can convince the public that health care reform is just about shifting paper around and deciding who pays.

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.

Health care reform: Money vs. people

Now, let's get serious about this: If you want to reform health care, what are you really talking about here? You're talking about two things: Cost and people. And that's the order that most people think of them in, by the way. It's the money first. Why? As a nation, we're going bankrupt. We're already bankrupt, actually, but we're just making it even worse with these sky-high health care 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!"

Health reform starts with food reform

You see, all this talk about covering the uninsured and saving people money and all these ridiculous distractions like the Medicare drug discount card are all a shell game. It's all a show; it's just theater designed to keep people occupied so that nobody has to talk about the real issues. 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?

Big Business makes big bucks off a nation of diseased people

Health care and all the discussion about health care reform is really a discussion about managing a nation of diseased people. It's not about ending disease. It's not about curing cancer. It's not about preventing heart disease. It's about managing these illnesses. The question essentially
becomes: "How are we going to keep people on just enough prescription drugs so we make a lot of money from them, but not so many that it kills them?" That's basically the strategy of Big Pharma. "How are we going to extract a whole lot of profits out of the general public and call it science-based medicine?"

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.

Everyone's out to make a buck

Unless we see a radical shift towards disease prevention rather than disease treatment in this country, what we're really going to end up with is a health care system that is ultimately designed to do two things. Number one: Extract as much money as possible from the taxpayers and shift it into the pockets of drug companies. Number two: Distract people from the real causes of disease so that everyone continues to believe that disease is just a matter of bad luck or bad genes, and that only drugs can treat or cure any disease.

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.

Health care reform goes far beyond crunching numbers

Now, I repeat my first statement here, which is that you can't have an honest debate about health care reform unless you address the issue of health. Yet in the months and years ahead, you're going to see a whole lot of people out there with all kinds of credentials, degrees and positions of authority, who are going to try to convince you, the consumer, that health care reform has nothing to do with heath. It only has to do with promoting a financial shell game by pushing nonsensical ideas like "the government here to rescue you." We're going to mandate coverage for all drugs and it's going to be paid for by the government.