Give the People What They Want: Real Universal Health Care

By Robert Scheer, Truthdig

The nutty thing about the health care debate that will play a prominent role in the next election is that most Americans want pretty much the same outcome: to control costs without sacrificing quality. And that’s not what either major-party candidate is offering. Few think that Obamacare, a Romneycare descendant that contains the same kind of individual mandate the then-governor of Massachusetts signed into law, will get us to that desired goal. Nor would Mitt Romney, who has been reborn as a celebrant of the old, pre-Obama system with a few nips and tucks.

As the nation awaits a Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of the Obama health care approach, a new Associated Press-GfK poll suggests that the vast majority of Americans want Congress to come up with a better plan. They know that the current system is unsustainable. Only a third of those polled favored the law President Barack Obama signed, but according to the AP, “… Whatever people think of the law, they don’t want a Supreme Court ruling against it to be the last word on health care reform.” The article continued, “More than three-fourths of Americans want their political leaders to undertake a new effort, rather than leave the health care system alone if the court rules against the law, according to the poll.”

That sentiment underscores the opportunity missed by Obama, who limited his ambition to what Big Pharma and the insurance giants would accept as “reform” in a system that they had so successfully exploited. Obamacare is a faux reform born of opportunism, as was Romney’s original version: Play ball with those who have profited most from the run-up of medical costs and expect them to make it more affordable.

Two dynamics doomed the experiment. First, the new Democratic president wanted to launch a bold progressive program, but rather than channel the spirit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to address the economic crisis that he inherited, he continued the bailouts begun under George W. Bush and fixed on health care reform instead of the financial pain being suffered by average Americans.

The second dynamic that undercut the health care bill was an overeagerness on the part of the new White House operatives to collaborate with the profiteers in the very industry targeted by reform.

The email trail of cave-ins to the medical industry heavyweights is startlingly clear, and it is difficult to quarrel with the headline on a Wall Street Journal story: “Emails Reveal How the White House Bought Big Pharma.” Except, as a related editorial in the WSJ makes clear, it was the pharmaceutical industry that did the buying, with “a $150 million advertising campaign coordinated with the White House political shop.”

What the industry bought was an end to the notion of a health care “public option,” and a guarantee of no serious restrictions on drug prices, arranged by then White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who was in close communication with the lobbyists involved. The Journal article pointed to the cynical language of the emails exchanged, quoting one incriminating note from a lobbyist: “Rahm asked for Harry and Louise ads thru third party. We’ve already contacted the agent.” The American Medical Association and others also were in on the fix, yet with all of that power being exercised the public wasn’t conned. As the WSJ editorialized (it galls me to agree with that newspaper’s editorialists), “The miracle is that despite this collusion of big government and big business, Obamacare has received the public scorn that it deserves.”

But scorn for an individual mandate that compels consumers to purchase something they don’t want does not translate into a rational alternative to the current mess. Californian Gary Hess, a retired school administrator and a Republican, is quoted in the AP story about the new poll as saying that he wants the Supreme Court to reject the entire Obama plan but that he still wants the government to retain the requirement that insurance companies cover people regardless of their prior medical conditions. “There needs to be compromise on both sides,” he said. Clearly, any good compromise must include both control on costs and the availability of health care to the needy in places other than the very expensive emergency room.

Let me humbly suggest that as an alternative to a mandatory system rejected by the majority, we return to the idea of covering most people by attracting them to quality public and private programs through consumer choice, and that one of those choices be a version of the public option we now offer seniors. It’s called Medicare and it works splendidly.

Robert Scheer is Editor in Chief of Truthdig, where he publishes a weekly column, and author of a new book, The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.

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OpEds: What Is ObamaCare?

By Paul Craig Roberts

While we think Obama's healthcare reforms are a betrayal of the public interest, and deserve to be scrapped to start anew with a clean slate, this absolutely deranged view of the program by tooconservative.com (a Northern Virginia Republican pod) is sheer and absolute nonsense. Leave it to the rightwing to turn reality upside down.

Growing up in the post-war era (after the Second World War), I never expected to live in the strange Kafkaesque world that exists today. The US government can assassinate any US citizen that the executive branch thinks could possibly be a “threat” to the US government, or throw the hapless citizen into a dungeon for the rest of his or her life without presenting any evidence to a court or obtaining a conviction of any crime, or send the “threat” to a puppet foreign state to be tortured until the “threat” confesses to a crime that never occurred or dies at the hands of “freedom and democracy” while professing innocence.

It has never been revealed how a single citizen, or any number thereof, could possibly comprise a threat to a government that has a trillion plus dollars to spend each year on security and weapons, the world’s largest navy and air force, 700 plus military bases across the world, large numbers of nuclear weapons, 16 intelligence agencies plus the intelligence agencies of its NATO puppet states and the intelligence service of Israel.

Nevertheless, air travelers are subjected to porno-scanning and sexual groping. Cars traveling on Interstate highways can expect to be stopped, with traffic backed up for miles, while Homeland Security and the federalized state or local police conduct searches.

I witnessed one such warrantless search on Easter Sunday. The south bound lanes of I-185 heading into Columbus, Georgia, were at a standstill while black SUV and police car lights flashed. US citizens were treated by “security” forces that they finance as if they were “terrorists” or “domestic extremists,” another undefined class of Americans devoid of constitutional protections.

These events are Kafkaesque in themselves, but they are ever more so when one considers that these extraordinary violations of the US Constitution fail to be overturned in the Supreme Court. Apparently, American citizens lack standing to defend their civil liberties.

Yet, ObamaCare is before the US Supreme Court. The conservative majority might now utilize the “judicial activism” for which conservatives have criticized liberals. Hypocrisy should no longer surprise us. However, the fight over ObamaCare is not worth five cents.

It is extraordinary that “liberals,” “progressives,” “Democrats,” whatever they are, are defending a “health program” that uses public monies to pay private insurance companies and that raises the cost of health care.

Americans have been brainwashed that “a single-payer system is unaffordable” because it is “socialized medicine.” Despite this propaganda, accepted by many Americans, European countries manage to afford single-payer systems. Health care is not a stress, a trauma, an unaffordable expense for European populations. Among the Western Civilized Nations, only the richest, the US, has no universal health care.

The American health care system is the most expensive of all on earth. The reason for the extraordinary expense is the multiple of entities that must make profits. The private doctors must make profits. The private testing centers must make profits.The private specialists who receive the referrals from general practitioners must make profits. The private hospitals must make profits. The private insurance companies must make profits. The profits are a huge cost of health care.

On top of these profits come the costs of preventing and combatting fraud. Because private insurance companies resist paying and Medicare pays a small fraction of the medical charges, private health care providers charge as much as they possibly can, knowing that the payments will be cut to the bone. But a billing mistake of even $300 can bankrupt a health care provider from legal expenses defending him/her self from fraud accusations.

The beauty of a single-payer system is that it takes the profits out of the system. No one has to make profits. Wall Street cannot threaten insurance companies and private health care companies with being taken over because their profits are too low. No health-provider in a single-payer system has to worry about being displaced in a takeover organized by Wall Street because the profits are too low.

Because a single-payer system eliminates the profits that drive up the costs, Wall Street, Insurance companies, and “free market economists” hate a “socialized” medical care system. They prefer a socialized “private” health care system in which public monies flow into private insurance companies.

To make the costs as high as possible, conservatives and the private insurance companies devised ObamaCare. The bill was written by conservative think tanks and the private insurance companies. What the “socialistic” ObamaCare bill does is to take income taxes paid by citizens and use the taxes to subsidize the private medical premiums charges by private health care providers in order to provide “private” health care to US citizens who cannot afford it.

The extremely high costs of ObamaCare is not “socialistic medicine.” ObamaCare is high-cost privatized medicine that guarantees billions of dollars in profits to private insurance companies.

It remains to be seen whether such a ridiculous health care scheme, nowhere extant on earth except in Romney’s Massachusetts, will provide health care or just private profits.

Paul Craig Roberts is an economist, former writer for the Wall Street Journal, and (believe it) a cabinet member in the Reagan administration.

 

 

 

 

 

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Challenging Obamacare

By Stephen Lendman


PPACA: A Boon to Industry Predators

In 2010, Ralph Nader called Obamacare a sellout to Big PhAMA and other healthcare giants, saying:

It doesn’t “provide universal, comprehensive or affordable care to the American people. It shovels hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money (to predators that) created the problem.”

“It requires no contractual accountability or other benefits for people denied coverage under a pay-or-die system that’s the disgrace of the Western world.”

There’s no public option. Millions are left uninsured, millions more underinsured, and as poverty increases, so will their ranks exponentially.

“There’s (also) no free choice of doctor and hospital under this. There’s all kinds of exploit(ive provisions to let) health insurance (and drug) companies continue their ravenous ways over people who are (the) most vulnerable….when they’re sick or injured.”

Former CIGNA vice president, Wendell Potter said Obamacare lets insurers shift costs to consumers, offer inadequate or unaffordable access, force Americans to pay higher deductibles for less coverage, and end up scamming them.

“What worries me,” he said, “is that people who are forced to buy coverage and all they can afford to buy is a high deductible. (So) if they get really sick, they have to pay so much out of their own pockets that they’re going to be filing for bankruptcy or (lose) their homes.”

What the 1913 Federal Reserve Act did for bankers, PPACA may do for insurance, PhAMA, and hospital chain predators. Controlling one-sixth of the economy, they’re more than ever able to game the system by:

  • making it dysfunctionally worse;
  • selling junk insurance, leaving millions underinsured;
  • keeping premiums unaffordable for full coverage;
  • adding high deductibles and co-pays for less coverage;
  • denying care by delaying, contesting, or preventing access;  
  • letting pharmaceutical companies provide toxic drugs at unaffordable prices, and avoid generic competition on new products by lengthy patent protection periods;
  • assuring providers more customers and higher profits by requiring individuals and families buy insurance or be penalized; and
  • by 2018, imposing an excise tax on so-called “Cadillac” plans to cut corporate costs, make workers pay more, force many to settle for less, be underinsured, and unable to obtain costly care without paying for what they can’t afford.

In March 2010, Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) took “no comfort in seeing aspirin dispensed for the treatment of cancer.”

Instead of fixing the “the profit-driven, private health insurance industry….this costly new legislation enrich(es) and further entrench(es it by forcing) millions of Americans to buy” defective coverage.

As a result, they’re worse off at a cost of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars given predators to game the system for profit.

Problems PNHP listed included:

  • 23 million or more Americans will be uninsured; it “translates into an estimated 23,000 unnecessary deaths annually and an incalculable toll of suffering;”
  • millions will be forced to buy insurance “costing up to 9.5 percent of their income but covering” only 70% of their expenses; they’ll be left one serious health emergency away from bankruptcy and/or loss of their homes; moreover as costs rise, affordability declines proportionately;
  • for most people, good policies are unaffordable or “too expensive to use because of the high co-pays and deductibles;”
  • insurers get around $450 billion in public money “to subsidize (buying) their shoddy products;” they and other industry giants are also more than ever emboldened to block future reform;
  • safety-net hospitals lose billions in Medicare and Medicaid payments; tens of millions of under and uninsured are left vulnerable without care when they most need it;
  • workers with employer-based coverage face higher costs, fewer benefits, and restrictions on selecting providers;
  • most will be hamstrung with future stiff costs because of unrestricted premium hikes, higher deductibles and co-pays;
  • costs keep rising exponentially because Obamacare doesn’t contain them; providers can raise prices freely;
  • so-called new regulations (like ending pre-existing condition denials) are riddled with loopholes, ambiguities, and legal interpretations to let insurers manipulate them advantageously; and
  • “women’s reproductive rights (are) further eroded, thanks to the burdensome segregation of insurance funds for abortion and all other medical services.”

In other words, PPACA scammed the public with a package of expensive mandates, new taxes, sweetheart deals, and “a perpetuation of the fragmented, dysfunctional, and unsustainable system that is taking such a heavy toll on our health and economy today.”

It gets worse. Last summer, a study showed nearly one in 10 large and mid-sized companies planned to stop providing healthcare to employees by 2014. Another one suggested close to a third opting out once all PPACA provisions take effect.

Moreover, one in three employers provide temp or part-time workers no coverage. Expect that percentage to rise sharply.

Businesses with over 50 employees dropping coverage face fines up to $2,000 for each not covered. Providing it costs much more. In addition, most others providing insurance plan shifting more costs to workers.

Except for the very poor, households (individual or family) face 2% of income penalties.

PPACA’s a can of worms. Industry predators alone benefit. Growing millions are on their own out of luck.

No Debate on Universal Coverage

The Supreme Court challenge excludes the only equitable, effective solution: universal government provided full single-payer coverage, including dental, drugs, and everything else health related.

Everyone in. Nobody out, except industry predators able to game the system for profits at the public’s expense.

A Final Comment

Now age 88, Arnold S. Relman is Harvard Medical School Professor Emeritus and former New England Journal of Medicine editor-in-chief.

Ahead of PPACA’s enactment, he said “our health policies have failed to meet national needs because they have been heavily influenced by the delusion that medical care is essentially a business.”

Current proposals “for a more ‘consumer-driven’ health system are likely to make our predicament even worse. A different kind of approach could solve our problems, but it would mean a major reform of the entire system, not only the way it is financed and insured, but also how physicians are organized in practice and how they are paid.”

In 1980, he called America’s health system the “medical-industrial complex,” or in his assessment, a danger equivalent to Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex.”

He said market-based medicine assures unaffordability, “variable quality,” and inequity for millions. Only bottom line priorities matter. Patient needs are sorely neglected.

“Our present medical care system lacks the structure and incentives to provide proper care….A real solution to our crisis will not be found until the public, the medical profession, and the government reject the prevailing delusion that health care is best left to market forces.”

“Once it is acknowledged that the market is inherently unable to deliver the kind of health care system we need, we can begin to develop the ‘nonmarket’ arrangements for the system we want.”

On March 19, The New York Times published Relman’s letter headlined, “The Health Law Mandate,” saying:

The Times’ March 9 article titled, “White House Set to Shape Debate Over Health Law” omits a key argument against PPACA’s “mandated purchase of private insurance, the key issue before the Supreme Court.”

He said 50 doctors and two nonprofit organizations filed an amicus brief. It argued that “Congress could avoid a mandate by legislating a national single-payer system that provides nearly universal insurance coverage.”

Though flawed, comparable systems exist – Medicare and veterans’ health benefits. “(N)o legal barriers prevent doing more.”

“Since a mandate isn’t necessary for Congress to exercise its legitimate role in regulating health insurance, there is no justification under the Constitution’s ‘necessary and proper’ clause for such a legislative requirement.”

How this argument influences the Court “remains to be seen. But the brief is another reminder that the single-payer idea, although currently off the table in Washington, should not be counted out.”

It’s all that’s worth counting in as the only acceptable alternative. Healthcare’s a vital need, a universal right no just society should deny all its citizens and permanent residents.

America isn’t just and never was. That’s the core issue. The High Court won’t touch or resolve it.

People power alone can [rectify these wrongs] with commitment enough to accept nothing less than equity and justice for all, and not just on healthcare.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

 

 

 

 

 

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Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice

Well Duh! We needed a study to tell us that, especially when the media follows the Redumblican debates?

 

By Stephanie Pappas | LiveScience.com – Thu, Jan 26, 2012

There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

“Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood,” he said.

Controversy ahead

The findings combine three hot-button topics.

“They’ve pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics,” said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. “When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it’s bound to upset somebody.”

Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad For You]

“The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the most challenging aspect of this,” Nosek said, referring to the new study. “It’s not that a relationship like that exists, but why it exists.”

Brains and bias

Earlier studies have found links between low levels of education and higher levels of prejudice, Hodson said, so studying intelligence seemed a logical next step. The researchers turned to two studies of citizens in the United Kingdom, one that has followed babies since their births in March 1958, and another that did the same for babies born in April 1970. The children in the studies had their intelligence assessed at age 10 or 11; as adults ages 30 or 33, their levels of social conservatism and racism were measured. [Life’s Extremes: Democrat vs. Republican]

In the first study, verbal and nonverbal intelligence was measured using tests that asked people to find similarities and differences between words, shapes and symbols. The second study measured cognitive abilities in four ways, including number recall, shape-drawing tasks, defining words and identifying patterns and similarities among words. Average IQ is set at 100.

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as “Family life suffers if mum is working full-time,” and “Schools should teach children to obey authority.” Attitudes toward other races were captured by measuring agreement with statements such as “I wouldn’t mind working with people from other races.” (These questions measured overt prejudiced attitudes, but most people, no matter how egalitarian, do hold unconscious racial biases; Hodson’s work can’t speak to this “underground” racism.)

As suspected, low intelligence in childhood corresponded with racism in adulthood. But the factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.

People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with people of other races.

“This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice,” said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.

A study of averages

Hodson was quick to note that the despite the link found between low intelligence and social conservatism, the researchers aren’t implying that all liberals are brilliant and all conservatives stupid. The research is a study of averages over large groups, he said.

“There are multiple examples of very bright conservatives and not-so-bright liberals, and many examples of very principled conservatives and very intolerant liberals,” Hodson said.

Nosek gave another example to illustrate the dangers of taking the findings too literally.

“We can say definitively men are taller than women on average,” he said. “But you can’t say if you take a random man and you take a random woman that the man is going to be taller. There’s plenty of overlap.”

Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.

“Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order,” Hodson said, explaining why these beliefs might draw those with low intelligence. “Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice.”

In another study, this one in the United States, Hodson and Busseri compared 254 people with the same amount of education but different levels of ability in abstract reasoning. They found that what applies to racism may also apply to homophobia. People who were poorer at abstract reasoning were more likely to exhibit prejudice against gays. As in the U.K. citizens, a lack of contact with gays and more acceptance of right-wing authoritarianism explained the link. [5 Myths About Gay People Debunked]

Simple viewpoints

Hodson and Busseri’s explanation of their findings is reasonable, Nosek said, but it is correlational. That means the researchers didn’t conclusively prove that the low intelligence caused the later prejudice. To do that, you’d have to somehow randomly assign otherwise identical people to be smart or dumb, liberal or conservative. Those sorts of studies obviously aren’t possible.

The researchers controlled for factors such as education and socioeconomic status, making their case stronger, Nosek said. But there are other possible explanations that fit the data. For example, Nosek said, a study of left-wing liberals with stereotypically naïve views like “every kid is a genius in his or her own way,” might find that people who hold these attitudes are also less bright. In other words, it might not be a particular ideology that is linked to stupidity, but extremist views in general.

“My speculation is that it’s not as simple as their model presents it,” Nosek said. “I think that lower cognitive capacity can lead to multiple simple ways to represent the world, and one of those can be embodied in a right-wing ideology where ‘People I don’t know are threats’ and ‘The world is a dangerous place‘. … Another simple way would be to just assume everybody is wonderful.”

Prejudice is of particular interest because understanding the roots of racism and bias could help eliminate them, Hodson said. For example, he said, many anti-prejudice programs encourage participants to see things from another group’s point of view. That mental exercise may be too taxing for people of low IQ.

“There may be cognitive limits in the ability to take the perspective of others, particularly foreigners,” Hodson said. “Much of the present research literature suggests that our prejudices are primarily emotional in origin rather than cognitive. These two pieces of information suggest that it might be particularly fruitful for researchers to consider strategies to change feelings toward outgroups,” rather than thoughts.

http://news.yahoo.com/low-iq-conservative-beliefs-linked-prejudice-180403506.html

“If the Internet has given us anything, it’s some idea of how much psychosis goes undiagnosed.”  – Jan Burke

 

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OpEds: If You Oppose National Health Care, You Are an Idiot

BY JESSE RICHARD, TVNewsLies.org

Argue all you want, call me all the names in the world, like commie, liberal, even though you probably don’t know the definitions of those terms or what aspects of those terms apply here…but the hard fact is that medicine for profit is simply vile and shameful, but worse, it is counter productive…”

Michael Moore’s SiCKO sought to educate Americans about the criminal absurdities of the American health system, but, in the end, the demagogy and betrayals of the Democrats doomed the reform effort to a colossal giveaway to those very responsible for this outrageous state of affairs.

WITH ALL THE DEBATE ABOUT HEALTH CARE REFORM (which is NOT what is going on…see below), the epidemic of American idiocy is being totally ignored. The debate about the state of health care serves to demonstrate how economic overlords have completely destroyed the average American’s ability to think critically or to see the obvious. American’s are fooled into being their own worst enemies on so many levels. But when it comes to the debate on health care, it is absolutely frightening to see how stupid this nation has become.

Let’s talk reality here…

Health Care Reform…

Let me make one thing clear right off the bat…there is no health care reform taking place in this nation. What is going in is health INSURANCE and PROFIT reform! All the reform that is being debated by politicians and echoed by the media has nothing to do with health,  – it is all about the money! That’s it. It is in no way “health care” reform as the media would have you believe  In reality, the only thing being debated  is “medical industry finance reform!”

Health Care…

Let me first correct the definition of this misleading and overused phrase. The “health care” industry is not about health, it is about medical treatment and medical sales. So called “health care” providers, institutions and professionals, for the most part, are in the medical service business and supply the application and distribution venues needed by that business. Your “health” is not an issue with these people. Your symptoms, illnesses, defects, syndromes, diseases, flaws, shortcomings and problems in general, are their “business.”

Ass Backwards Capitalism

The criminals in the corporate media tell you that any form of national medical care is evil. They frighten you by telling you that if health care changes in this nation you will have to deal with terrible conditions like having to wait in waiting rooms for many long  hours at a time. And, of course, the average American simply believes what is said and repeats this mantra over and over. Bravo, FOX News…you have trained the people well. But what never gets discussed are the realities of health care for profit, which is what American health care. excuse me, medical goods and services, are all about. I want you to really think about a few things here.

Understand that the United States has a so-called health industry that has every reason in the world to keep you sick and not one incentive at all to cure any diseases, reduce the frequency and quantity of your medical problems and issues, or keep you from having medical problems in the first place. Medical costs are out of control because the American medical industry is a for-profit business where the profits of investors and owners come before the fundamental ethics and mission of medical professionals. It is a system perverted by predatory capitalism and has grown into the most exploitative industry on this planet.

Argue all you want, call me all the names in the world, like commie, liberal, even though you probably don’t know the definitions of those terms or what aspects of those terms apply here…but the hard fact is that medicine for profit is simply vile and shameful, but worse, it is counter productive. I am not saying that doctors, nurses, EMTs, and everyone in the medical industry do not deserve to be financially rewarded handily, but the system that exists now, here in America is immoral. Nurses and first responders don’t drive up health costs, – investors and executives do! And do not for a moment leave out Big Pharma…the evil among evils…where even drug salespeople earn more than E.R. nurses. If you don’t see a problem with that you should check your soul.

Imagine standing on a dock and falling into a river. You scream for help to a person on the dock who is holding a life preserver, and that person asks for payment before throwing it to you  Or, imagine that person telling you that you can’t have the life preserver at all because he does not accept your insurance. Or, imagine that you can have the life preserver, but you will owe them everything you have in the world. Well there it is…American ‘health care’. The only thing missing in this story is the fact that you were pushed into the river, and the guy with the life preserver knows all about the gangs who push people into the rivers but it really does not help his business to acknowledge or address that little reality. That’s America.

Getting Your Business – What Makes You Sick?

The truth is that Americans are sicker than ever. We have more problems, more diagnosable diseases, and take more medicine than ever. Nobody asks why? Well, the regular readers of TvNewsLIES.org do, as so many of us in the reality based world…you know…the ones who don’t live in the fantasy world created by the establishment media.

There are 2 reasons why Americans are sicker than ever.

  1. We are being poisoned. Any toxin or health threat that can be thought up or invented is being ushered into our lives without our consent. From the detonation of nuclear weapons (over 2000 have been detonated on our planet), to adding deadly neurotoxins and undisclosed chemicals into our drinking water (can you say “fluoride and hydrofracking?), to genetically modifying our food supply, to bombarding us with every kind of cellular, radio and microwave transmission…our bodies are under attack down to their DNA levels…and the terrorists attacking us are corporations and their government accomplices.
  2. Wordsmithing. Redefining “symptoms” as diseases has allowed the medical industry to prescribe treatments and medications where no real single identifiable medical issue can be found. Natural age-related problems are now diseases, as are symptoms that can not be linked to any real disease. These new conditions are given nice marketable names and acronyms and sold to society in a way that is intended to make you feel abnormal for not being ill. COPD is just one example. By the way…how is “your RA?” Did you get your RA Fit Kit? If not you can ask UCB Inc for one…they are behind the My RA campaign. And don’t forget to tell your doctor to prescribe that pretty purple pill and never mind the deadly side effects. We need your money.

Keeping Your Business – Treat, Don’t Cure – How can anyone expect a system, or a business (like the medical industry) to work when accomplishing the objective results in less profits and possible ruin? How can anyone in the cold and flu industry sincerely work towards a cure when finding one would put them out of business? The same can be said about every single illness and condition. ALL the incentives to treat patients with profitable medications and procedure ensure that cures are never found.

Not Good For Business – The business model of the medical industry requires that it keeps you sick. It is like any business…if a car company made a car that lasts a lifetime you would never need to buy a new one, buy new parts, or pay for regular service and repairs. Businesses can never consider the consumer’s true best interests because it is in direct conflict with business interests and a threat to its own survival. The so called “health care industry” is a business, designed to create more business, and that’s all it is.

Destroy Competition From Mother Nature – The Mafia-like enforcer for the medical industry, the FDA, has made sure that mother nature has nothing to do with your health and well being. According to them, any natural food or substance that can improve or maintain good health is considered a drug and falls under their jurisdiction. It is amazing that they have not declared water to be a drug because it cures dehydration. Give them time…they will.

Let’s take cholesterol as a typical example. There are two major reasons so many Americans have ‘bad’ cholesterol problems:

  1. Bad diet.
  2. We kill our livers. Unnatural foods and virtually ALL medications destroy or burden our livers. You liver is the key organ involved in blood health. One (among many other) important function of the liver is regulating cholesterol . It produces cholesterol and purges the body of bad and excess cholesterol. The problem is that when harmful cholesterol is purged (via bile pumped out of our gall bladders into our intestines), it does not make it out of the body fast enough and gets reabsorbed as it sits in the large intestine. Fiber absorbs cholesterol like a sponge and carries it out of your body…quickly.  This is why Cheerios, among other healthy foods, lowers cholesterol. The FDA has warned the makers of Cheerios about letting the public know about this. The FDA is claiming jurisdiction over the natural workings and health of your body when it comes to nutrition and nature. As a result, Americans are assaulted with ads for Lipitor, and Big Pharma makes out like the bandits they are.

The FDA can not allow mother nature or natural health knowledge to interfere with their crime family profits. Cholesterol is just one of thousands of examples. Want to cure strep throat in a few hours? I have done this several times…but if I tell you how to do it…I can get in trouble. But you guys are smart…and you read this entire article…you may find the clue that I left for you. Or maybe you can figure out how to contact me…and I am NOT SELLING A CURE…I can tell you what you need, though…and you can get it on your own.

No Profit, No Product – Stop running for the cure, stop sponsoring your friends walk-a-thons, stop donating to research and the MD telethons. Here is the deal: if, for the first time in history, one of these “charitable” organizations actually used the money to find a cure for something…for anything…(and they never have), who do you think will benefit? Not the patients. They will still have to hope that they can afford the cure or have the right insurance or be lucky enough to have access to the treatments. Your cash will help the investors and owners of the drug company or medical body that has the rights to the cure. And you can be certain that they will exploit their knowledge to no end.

Here is another little reality…if a cure or treatment for something is showing promise, and the active compounds (or approach in general), can not be patented, it will never see the light of day. Very simply, if you discover that the common spice called turmeric, kills cancer cells on contact (throat cancer), it will never be used, applied, subscribed, or suggested for use until some way to manipulate it into a unique patentable form is achieved. A cheap, real, working, widely available substance that cures or helps deal with a disease or medical ailment will never be permitted under the system that exists. No profits…then you can’t have it, especially if it interferes with the profits of existing treatments.

Cancer Free? Then We Will Try to Give You Cancer –  Imagine, the primary screening process for diagnosing cancer, along with one of the primary treatments…GIVE YOU CANCER! How on earth, with all of our technology (MRI’s), do we allow ourselves to be exposed to diagnostic techniques that use cancer causing radiation for the purpose of finding cancer? Are we all insane? Am I wrong, or are MRIs the state of the art medical imaging technology? Why are we not using MRIs to detect cancer? At least they don’t use radiation! Why are we regularly exposed to radiation? And why are we are told to screen more often starting at a younger age! Are we nuts?

The answer, of course, is money. Insurance companies will not pay for expensive, safer diagnostic measures until all less expensive forms of diagnosis have been exhausted. For example: the cost of a radiation emitting mammogram is around $250.00.  The national average cost of a one breast MRI is $5,100. Why the hell does medical imaging cost this much? Who is making all the money on this technology? What are the profit margins? Why is this not discussed anywhere?

I don’t care how much you trust your doctors…their entire approach towards “health” has been taught to them by the same people who sell you this nonsense. Who do you think funds medical learning institutions in the first place? The same people who own this planet…and this planet is nothing more than a business to them.

Quack a Doodle Doo – According to the FDA, and most medical business institutions, anyone who makes a claim regarding a health breakthrough or discovery, that does not fall in line with the profit business model (no cure, only treatment, patentable), is a quack. People who talk about natural remedies, preventive health practices or cures and treatments to diseases that can not be patented, can not produce huge profits, or pose a threat to the profits of an existing medical treatment industry, are quacks. Regardless of the results…if you are helping people live, and your method for doing so threatens the establishment, you will be attacked relentlessly by the medical establishment.

Flex Spending Accounts (FSAs) – Another Way to Rob You – How do we not see the entire flex spending accounts program as a vile exploitative immoral practice? You are supposed to gamble your money against your future health costs? If you get too sick you lose because you did not gamble enough money and will therefore not be able to get a tax break on your costs. And if you are healthy and don’t need the money that year…YOU LOSE YOUR MONEY! What the fuck!!! Why not make all medical costs tax exempt. Or just set a limit as to how much can be tax exempt…why make us risk losing our money at all? Why make us hope that we will neither lose our money or our tax break? How did we allow this to even come into existence? The existence of FSAs is a prime example of how stupid Americans are. We are schmucks for falling for this idiocy.

  1. You are supposed to estimate what your out of pocket medical costs will be for the next year.
  2. If you spend all the money you estimated, and you have no additional medical costs, you win.
  3. If you spend less…SOME COMPANY GETS TO KEEP YOUR MONEY…and then you have to put more money down to play again next year.
  4. If you have unforeseen medical expenses (and they are almost ALWAYS UNFORESEEN), and you have to spend more than you had deducted from your salary, you are out of luck and you have to still pay taxes on your hard earned money (another scam in itself.)

I mean really folks…this is nothing more than a Las Vegas gambling game where, as it is always the case in Vegas, the odds overwhelmingly favor the house and the players always lose.

Those Socialistic Waiting Lists and Waiting Lines – So the bastards who call themselves mainstream media news casters help to scare you into fearing changes in the health care system by telling you that you have to wait in long lines for health care in other nations. Here are some questions about THIS NATION for you frightened folks…

  1. When was the last time you tried to get an appointment with a doctor in this nation? How long did you have to wait for an appointment? Weeks? Months?
  2. How long did you wait in the waiting room when appointment day arrived?
  3. Have you been to an emergency room lately? How long did you have to wait until you were actually tended to? Was your answer given in minutes, hours or days? In NYC you better be on your way to dying or you will be waiting a VERY long time…and I am talking about nice rich hospitals in great neighborhoods like Park Slope or the upper east side.
  4. Were you able to see any doctor you wanted to, or just those who accept your insurance?
  5. Did you ever try to get an alternative treatment only to be told that it is not covered?
  6. When you were waiting in the waiting room, and it is two hours and fifteen minutes past your appointment time, and a well dressed pharmaceutical sales person walks in and hands a business card to the reception person…what are the odds that you will get in to see the doctor before the drug pushing pharma-hooker?
  7. Are you the 1% of the public who can actually afford to go to any doctor you want and get any treatment you prefer? If so…stop reading this…you are probably part of the problem with society. Reading this won’t help you anyway.

Our medical care, for the majority of Americans, is dictated by the death panels known as the insurance companies. And this has been made possible by the death panel co-conspirator known as Congress.

Vermin – Actors Selling Medicine – There are a lot of bad people in society. There are a lot of people who prey on the poor, helpless, hopeless and less intelligent. The list of these people is endless, and their goal is all the same, to take your money. And I can think of no more shameful vermin than one who pretends to be a doctor or a patient on television in order to sell you drugs. An actor pretending to be an ill person for the sake of selling drugs is simply vile. You can thank Ronald Reagan for this byproduct of transposing the practice of medical arts into nothing more than a business.

We are told every day, by actors, to ASK OUR DOCTORS if the drugs they are selling are right for us. Aren’t the doctors supposed to know what is right for us? Aren’t the doctors supposed to TELL US what the BEST ways to treat our ailments are? We have lost our minds people…this is outrageous. Every other nation in the world laughs at us when it comes to this…this one is so obvious…prescription drugs advertised on TV!!! Shameless…and shameless is American.

American Pride – Embarrassing. – Americans continually insult the world with the insensitive and insulting claim of being the greatest nation in the world (how do you think other proud people around the world feel when you, or a US president says that?) Yet we are embarrassingly stupid people. We are blind to the most obvious disconnect between what is claimed and what actually is. Our health care industry has so obviously been completely taken over by profit driven parties yet we allow our leaders to continue this farce. We watch medical costs climb yet we ask not who is raising the prices and what exactly is costing so much? American pride has blinded this nation to almost all of reality. Words need not match facts or history. The flag remains religiously draped over the eyes of our nation as the people continue to eat the rancid garbage that is fed to them daily.

SO WHAT IS THE ANSWER? Here is one thought...When a country is established, one of the first things it does is set up an organized militia, or military. Why? To protect the people from harm and keep them safe from those who would seek to harm them. Well, isn’t that the mission of the true medical professional? Shouldn’t the nation set up a national medical establishment that dedicates itself to the well being of the citizens, to protect their lives, just like the military? I think is should. We should have a health care “foundation”, not industry.

If the “health care” industry was really about health care…the people would want it to serve them to their best ability. The people would want all the brilliant minds to work together to combine efforts for maximum results. We would not want to have to speculate about guarded secrets and hidden cures that may interfere with profits. Could you imagine what could be accomplished if all of the medical professionals combined efforts? This can be said for lots of things, not just health care!

A real health care foundation would also protect us by objecting to the things that harm us in the first place. They would fight against pollution, nuclear power, food DNA manipulation, messing with our planet and eco-systems. They would very simply care for our health. And by the way, it would not be an industry…it would be a foundation of society, as it should be.

And any real health care foundation would stand wholeheartedly against a government taking part in any type of bio-weapons programs where threats to life on earth could be accidentally or purposely set loose on civilization.

The goal of a real health care foundation would be to keep people out of hospitals, off medications and free of their medical problems. The American system however, thrives on the sick, and needs more customers all the time. It’s a bad model for the citizens, a good model for the business owners.

It is just a shame that Americans have been conditioned for generations to shut down their own critical thinking mechanisms and simply accept supposed truths (or nonsense), from authority figures. You can thank religion for that  – for it is the first and foremost tool in the destruction of critical thinking, conditioning your mind to accept all truth from some designated authority, regardless of how little reality supports that “truth.”

What is obvious is that Americans can not see the obvious. And because of that they have in large part become their own worst enemies, supporting those who use and abuse them, simply because their authority figures convince them that all is well. Well folks…it is time to see reality for what it is…and finally realize that the authority figures you trust are simply the owners of the businesses for which you are the unwitting customer.

Think about it.

Jesse Richard  is the editor in chief and founder of TvNewsLIES.org

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