Are You a Knee-Jerk?

The value of the following article is that it brings to the surface deeply embedded ideas and beliefs that are commonly a part of the thought structure of many Americans as it relates to health and well-being. These unspoken, unchallenged assumptions then unconsciously guide health related behavior and decisions. Alternative approaches to healing, or even the notion of healing itself, may make some people extremely uncomfortable due to the presence of these unconscious 'lies' so deeply embedded that we don't realize that they are there. But then when we speak, or decide to take action, there they are silently guiding our every word and deed. We find ourselves ensnared and don't know why. Read through these 'lies' about health and health care and see what your reactions are. Are you free yet, or do these ideas still provoke a knee-jerk reaction in you?
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The Top Ten Lies About Your Health NaturalNews) Mainstream health care isn't based on "health" or "caring." It's actually based on an ingrained system of medical mythology that's practiced -- and defended -- by those who profit from the continuation of sickness and disease. This system of medical mythology might also simply be called "lies", and today I'm sharing with NaturalNews readers the top ten lies that are still followed and promoted under mainstream health care in America today.

Lie #1) Vaccines make you healthy

Vaccines have emerged as the greatest and most insidious mythology yet fabricated by western medicine. The idea that vaccines protect you from infectious disease is blatantly false in the long term because this year's flu shot actually makes you more susceptible to next year's influenza (http://www.naturalnews.com/028538_s...). On top of that, even the theoretical short-term effectiveness of vaccines is dwarfed by the far more effective protection offered by vitamin D and other immune-modulating nutrients. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027385_V...)

Lie #2) Pharmaceuticals prevent disease

The big push by Big Pharma is now focused on treating healthy people with drugs as if pharmaceuticals were nutrients that could somehow prevent disease. This is the new push with cholesterol drugs: Give 'em to everyone, whether they have high cholesterol or not! But pharmaceuticals don't prevent disease, and medications are not vitamins. Your body has no biological need for any pharmaceuticals at all. People who believe they need pharmaceuticals have simply been the victims of "fabricated consent" engineered by Big Pharma's clever advertising and P.R. spin.

Lie #3) Doctors are experts in health

Doctors don't even study health; they study disease. Modern doctors are taught virtually nothing about nutrition, wellness or disease prevention. Expecting a doctor to guide you on health issues is sort of like expecting your accountant to pilot a jet airliner -- it's simply not something he or she has ever been trained in. That's not to say doctors aren't intelligent people. Most of them have high Iqs. But even a genius can't teach you something they know nothing about.

Lie #4) You have no role in your own healing

Doctors, drug companies and health authorities all want you to believe that your health is determined by their interventions. If you believe them, you have virtually no role in your own health or healing -- it's all managed by their drugs, their screening, their surgeries and their interventions.

Lie #5) Disease is a matter of bad luck or bad genes

Western medicine wants you to believe in the mythology of spontaneous disease -- disease that strikes without cause. This is equivalent to saying that disease is some sort of voodoo black magic and that patients have no way to prevent disease through their own diets or lifestyle choices. It's funny, actually: Western medicine claims to be driven by scientific, rational thinking, and yet the entire industry still fails to acknowledge that chronic disease always has a cause and that most of the time, that cause has everything to do with nutritional deficiencies, exposure to toxic chemicals and a lack of exercise. Disease is almost never a matter of bad luck or bad genes.

Lie #6) Screening equals prevention

Western medicine doesn't believe in disease prevention. Rather, the industry believes in screening while calling it prevention. But screening isn't prevention by even the wildest stretch of the imagination. In fact, virtually all the popular screening methodologies actually promote diseases. Mammography, for example, emits so much radiation that it causes breast cancer in tens of thousands of women each year (http://www.naturalnews.com/027558_m...). Imaging dyes used in radiological scans can cause horrific side effects, and psychiatric "disorder" screening is little more than a thinly-disguised patient recruitment scheme disguised as medicine. Real prevention of disease must involve disease prevention through nutrition, patient education about the causes of disease and lifelong changes in eating habits. Yet western medicine teaches absolutely none of these things. Heck, it doesn't even believe in such ideas.

Lie #7) Health insurance will keep you healthy

This is a favorite lie of those who recently pushed for the Big Pharma-sponsored health care reform that has swept across America. The lie supposes that merely having health insurance will provide some sort of magical protection against disease. But in reality, health insurance doesn't make you healthy! It is only YOU and your choices about foods, exposures to toxic chemicals, pursuit of exercise and time in nature that can make you healthy. Health insurance is, in effect, a wager that you will get sick. How does gambling on your sickness provide any protection whatsoever for your health? It doesn't. Personally, I'd rather bet on health than sickness, and the way to do that is to invest in nutritional supplements, organic produce, superfoods, physical fitness and non-toxic personal care products.

Lie #8) Hospitals are places of health and healing

If you want to stay healthy or get healthy, a hospital is the very last place you want to find yourself: They are unhappy, unhealthy places that are infested with antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Hospitals usually serve disease-promoting foods and lack health-enhancing sunlight, and potentially deadly mistakes with pharmaceuticals or surgical procedures now appear to be frighteningly common in U.S. hospitals. Certainly, emergency rooms in hospitals play an important role in urgent care for injuries and accidents -- and emergency room physicians do an amazing job saving lives -- but for people with chronic, degenerative disease, a hospital is a very dangerous place to be. Unless you really need immediate critical care, try to avoid hospitals.

Lie #9) Conventional medicine is "advanced" state-of-the-art medicine

Even though doctors and health authorities try to pass off western medicine as being "advanced" or "modern," the whole system is actually pathetically outdated and stuck in the germ theory of disease. Western medicine has yet to even acknowledge the role of nutrition in preventing disease -- something that has been scientifically documented for at least the last several decades. Western medicine fails to acknowledge mind-body medicine and hilariously believes the mind plays virtually no role in healing. Neither does western medicine acknowledge the bio energy field of living systems, nor that organ transplants carry memories, nor that living food is qualitatively different from dead food. Seriously: Conventional doctors still believe that dead food is exactly the same as living food! (And the USDA food pyramid still makes no distinction between the two...) "Modern" medicine isn't so modern, it turns out. It is, in fact, hopelessly outdated and desperately needs to upgrade its approach to health and wellness if it hopes to survive the next hundred years.

Lie #10) More research is needed to find "cures"

This lie is especially hilarious because western medicine does not believe in any "cure" for any disease. They aren't even looking for cures! This lie has been repeated since the 1960's, when cancer scientists claimed they were only a few years away from curing cancer. Today, four decades later, can you think of a single major disease that western medicine has cured? There aren't any. That's because drug companies make money from sick people, not cured people. A patient cured is a patient lost. It is far more profitable to keep patients sick and pretend to "manage" their disease through a lifetime of pharmaceuticals. So when drug companies and disease non-profits claim to be searching for a "cure," what they're really doing is taking your money to fund more drug research to patent more medications that don't actually cure anything. Remember this the next time you're asked to donate to some search for "the cure." The cures already exist in nutrition, herbal remedies and naturopathic medicine, but Big Pharma and the conventional medicine cartel isn't interested in real cures -- they only want to promote the idea of a cure while pumping patients full of drugs that don't cure anything.

Beyond the ten lies

When it comes to western health care, there are more than 10 lies, of course, but these big 10 lies are perhaps the most relevant to your own health decisions. By avoiding being suckered in by these lies, you can take charge of your own health and avoid the health care scam by staying healthy! Staying healthy isn't as difficult as you think, and it doesn't require health insurance or disease screening. It only requires making informed, intelligent decisions about what to eat, what to put on your skin and how to get more sunshine and physical exercise. Once you do these basic things, you'll find that you are no longer held victim by a western medicine health care system based on lies and outdated medical mythology. It's time for a revolution in medicine... A revolution that finally advances past the mental roadblock of a system of medical mythology stuck in the 1940's. Don't get me wrong, 1940's medicine was great in the 1940's. But this is no longer the 1940's, and the germ theory of disease is hopelessly outdated when it comes to the primary diseases that are striking the population today. Yet the profiteers of our dishonest, outmoded health care system are doing everything in their power to keep us all stranded in the past, a past based on treating the body like a chemical battleground and attacking every disease with a patented pharmaceutical. That whole approach to health care is so far outdated that it's hilarious it can still be pushed with a straight face. No wonder doctors only spend an average of two minutes with patients these days. That's the limit of how long they can hold their faces without breaking out in laughter at how stupid this whole "treat the symptoms and forget the causes" approach to health care really is. Even they know it! That's why most doctors actually eat superfoods and take vitamins themselves, even if they never dare suggest it to patients. True fact: It is illegal in every U.S. state for a doctor to recommend any vitamin, nutrient or food for the prevention or treatment of any disease. Doing so can cause a doctor to have his medical license permanently revoked. How crazy and outdated is that?

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A Closer Look at Obama Care

Just a week ago the Health Reform Legislation passed Congress and was signed into law by the President. Most of us do not understand the implications of this bill. On the surface it sounds good. Who could be against 'Health Reform' that ensures the uninsured? But as often is the case, "The devil is in the details". The following article is written by one of the students in the Power Study Group at Howard University who has taken a closer look at what the bill actually says. It may be far different from what you think it says.

On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 1:55 AM, Jalil Muhammad wrote:

ASA Doc,

Below is an article, inspired by our most recent Study Group regarding health care, written by Brother Jericho X.

"The following statements are taken from Sec. 1501. Requirement To Maintain Minimum Essential Coverage which is part of H.R. 3590 more commonly known as the “Health Care Reform Bill”. Let me first explain what this section is referring to. Requirement to maintain essential coverage is a government mandate that requires all U.S. citizens to have health insurance, that is, citizens are required by law to purchase health insurance from a private company. The exceptions being if you have employee-based health coverage or if you can’t afford minimum coverage. However, to viably say you cannot afford minimum coverage means at the very least that you are living 100% below the poverty level. Currently the poverty level for a family of 4 is set at $22,050 a year. So let’s be very clear, the United States government and the Obama administration is not providing health care for anyone, they are simply ordering everyone to buy health care. Let’s also remember that Medicaid and Medicare have been around since the 1960’s so don’t try and use the argument that “oh, if you can’t afford it you can just get on Medicaid”, that was true before the passage of this bill. And so to counter any arguments that this is just conspiracy theory or crazy talk let’s look at what the bill says about itself:

Sec. 1501. (a) The individual responsibility requirement provided for in this section is commercial and economic in nature. The requirement regulates activity that is commercial and economic in nature: economic and financial decisions about how and when health care is paid for, and when health insurance is purchased. Health insurance and health care services are a significant part of the national economy. The requirement, together with other provisions of this Act, will add millions of new consumers to the health insurance market, increasing supply of, and demand for , health care services.

Now please tell me where in this passage does it actually mention the health of the people? As a matter of fact show me where it actually refers to people and not to consumers. What is it that these health care companies are selling to these consumers? Drugs, drugs, and more drugs. The United States, unlike every other civilization in history, practices Allopathic medicine. Allopathic medicine is a system of medical practice which treats disease by the use of drugs which produce effects different from those produced by the disease (we call them side-effects). However, if given to healthy people these drugs are capable of producing the same effects as the disease itself. Now let’s look at this situation another way using the example of the police, the drug-dealer, and the junkies. The drug-dealers use to discriminate against some of the junkies and wouldn’t get them high so the junkies had to resort to robbing and stealing or they would die in the street. When the police had to deal with the junkies it consumed valuable time and money so they got an idea. The police decided to force the drug-dealers not to discriminate anymore and make them sell their drugs to everyone, but there was a problem some of the junkies were trying to get clean. So not only did the police have to force the drug-dealers to stop discriminating but they had to force the junkies to continue to buy the drugs. So now the junkies are oppressed by the police and in debt to the drug-dealers but they don’t care cause they’re high as the skyyyy and we all applaud a so-called victory for the people.

You see the problem isn’t people being uninsured, the problem is that the medical system in this country is not designed to cure disease only to treat the symptoms. The system itself is flawed and so forcing people to buy into a broken system is not a solution, especially when considering the shortage in the amount of doctors and nurses who are charged with treating the supposedly 38 million newly insured people. However, this goes far beyond health care, because congress has just set a precedent. They have passed a law mandating the public to buy a service from a private corporation, this is a power they do not have and according to the constitution any power not given to congress is delegated to the states. So across the nation are scores of people cheering and applauding as America takes it’s first steps into fascist communism by blatantly infringing on state’s rights and defecating on its own constitution."

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The Facts Behind the Health Care Bill

Want to know how the Health Reform Act passed into law will effect you and yours? Watch this video to find out the main facts. You be the judge as to whether or not this is a great victory.

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True Health Care Reform Would Include a Public Option (video)

There probably is no hope that true and effective health care reform will ever take place in America.

The controlling big insurance companies and their pals Big Pharma won't have it. They like their extremely profitable monopoly.

And make no mistake about it: FOR THE LIFE OF YOU, THEY WILL NOT GIVE IT UP!

They will have their pound of flesh.

The whore house in Washington called Congress is full of 'ladies of ill-repute' who have been bought and paid for and as 'honest businesses persons' are giving the John what the John paid for.

And the John did not pay for true health care reform.

The following video shows what could be done quite easily and quite simply even under these circumstances. IF there were just a little decency on Capital Hill - and there's not- we could get something like Congressman Grayson of Florida is proposing. Will we get it? Not if the whores have to get it done. They are just not up to the task.

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What's In That Health Care Bill?

I must here and now confess that I am less than well informed about the pending Health Reform legislation currently before Congress. The whole 'debate' has been confusing and mostly behind closed doors with deals being cut with who know who and for what reasons. Murky reports do come on a consistent basis in the media, but no clarity as to what is what and how much the whole thing will cost. It has been clear that the government mandated insurance will go in everybody's pocket whether you want what they are selling or not. That sounds like fascism to me. We wonder who has actually read the bill which stretches into the thousands of pages. Maybe the victory by the Republican candidate in Mass. will throw and monkey wrench into the Health Reform Bill juggernaut underway in the Congress. Below is the best short summary of some of the provision of the bill that I have seen. I can not verify the interpretations given, but at least the video is raising the right questions. We should and must demand answers.

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Is Obama Care Fascist?

What is your opinion about government mandated health insurance as found in the health reform legislation before Congress on its way to becoming law with the expected signature of President Obama? How does it work? The government will fine you and have the IRS come after you if you don't purchase from a private insurance company health insurance. As it stands now, you will not have an option to buy a plan from the government, or more importantly, the option not to buy! Free choice is out the window. Government power will be used to coerce citizens to buy form a private company something that they may not want, or that they may not be able to afford. This is a sign that corporate power has taken the reins of government and is using government power to ensure private profits. And their doing it in the name of Health Care Reform! What do you call this kind of partnership between government and business? It is called fascism! Is that why some people are putting a Hitler mustache on Obama?

Read the details below.

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Right and Left Agree: Mandates are the Road to Neo-Feudalism
By: Jane Hamsher
December 30, 2009
There is tremendous fear rising on both the right and the left that the announced intention of Congress — to force every American to pay tribute to private corporations, with no government alternative — sets a dangerous and frightening precedent with implications far outside the scope of health care.
If the health care bill written by the Senate is passed, middle class Americans will be mandated to pay almost as much to private insurance companies as they do to the federal government in taxes, with the IRS acting as a collection agency for penalties of 2% of your annual income for refusing to comply.
This is just one of many recent measures that have brought liberal progressives and conservative libertarians together to join forces in opposition:
Democrat Alan Grayson worked successfully this year with Republican Ron Paul to pass legislation to audit the Federal Reserve, with 317 cosponsors as diverse as Dennis Kucinich and Michelle Bachmann.
On December 3, the liberal Campaign for America’s Future wrote a letter to the Senate opposing the reconfirmation of Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke until such an audit has been conducted. The letter was signed by James Galbraith, Robert Weisman, Chris Bowers and myself on the left, and Grover Norquist, Phillis Schlafly, and Larry Greenley on the right. Financial blogger Tyler Durden and young organizer Tiffiniy Cheng joined them.
Also on December 3, conservative Jim Bunning joined liberal Bernie Sanders in placing a hold on the Bernanke nomination until the Fed had been audited.
On December 15, CAF again sent a letter to the Senate Banking Committee, asking them to delay the vote on the Bernanke confirmation until Audit the Fed received a stand alone vote in the Senate. It was signed by Matt KIbbe of Freedomworks, John Tate of the Campaign for Liberty, and Grover Norquist on the right, and David Swanson of AfterDowiningStreet, Dean Baker and Robert Borosage on the left.
On December 21, a letter was written opposing the mandate in the health care bill. It was signed by Bob Fertik of Democrats.com, Howie Klein of DownWithTyranny, Brad Friedman of Velvet Revolution, Tim Carpenter of Progressive Democrats of America on the left and Grover Norquist, Jim Martin of 60 Plus Association, Duane Parde of the National Taxpayers Union on the right.
On December 23, Grover Norquist and I sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder calling for an investigation into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s conflicts of interest before the White House could lift the cap on the commitment to them from $400 billion to $800 billion with no Inspector General in place.
The individuals on both sides of the political spectrum who signed these letters agree on very little, but they do share both a tremendous concern for the corporatist control of government that politicians in both parties seem hell-bent on achieving.
In 2003, the Democrats railed in opposition when the Republicans passed Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage that didn’t allow for negotiated drug prices. And in 2006 when Democrats took over Congress, one of the hallmarks of their first hundred days was passing legislation allowing Medicare to do so, supported by both Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama. Of course, it had no chance of passing with George Bush in the White House.
Candidate Barack Obama said the ability to negotiate for drug prices would save $30 billion a year in medical costs. Yet when President Obama got to the White House, one of the first things he did was negotiate a secret deal with PhRMA that prevented drug price negotiations in exchange for $150 million in political advertising to help vulnerable Democrats in the House and in support of the health care bill.
In the Senate, Tom Carper said that because PhRMA had paid for the deal with political advertising, they were obligated to abide by it.
Jeff Sessions railed against the corrupt PhRMA deal that didn’t allow for prescription drug price negotiation. He didn’t mention that he voted for the 2000 bill without it, and when he had the chance to vote for it in the Senate in 2006, he voted “no” himself. Both parties are equally blameworthy — the only difference is who is in power and taking PhRMA’s money.
The PhRMA deal is one of many negotiated by the White House this last summer which formed the underpinnings of the health care bill. From then on, it just became a matter of which member was going to extract what deals for their votes, and who was going to take the blame for cutting popular elements from the legislation that the corporate “stakeholders” didn’t want.
As FDL’s Jon Walker wrote recently, if the ability to cut health care costs hadn’t been auctioned off to private corporations in exchange for political patronage, there would have been no government subsidy necessary to make insurance coverage affordable.
We are ceding control of the government to private corporations, not figuratively but literally. When the Senate Finance Committee bill was released earlier this year, the “author” was a former VP of Wellpoint. Liberals, conservatives and independents alike are all justifiably alarmed at what this represents.
It is tragic that health care for the poor is being held hostage to the corporatist agenda, a fig leaf to buy public support and disguise this bill for what it is. As blogger Marcy Wheeler noted in a piece called Health Care and the Road to Neo-Feudalism:
I understand the temptation to offer 30 million people health care. What I don’t understand is the nonchalance with which we’re about to fundamentally shift the relationships of governance in doing so.
Just as those on the libertarian right were demonized by the Republican establishment for opposing the Iraq war during the Bush years, so progressives on the left are being pilloried for “damaging the cause” by joining with Republicans to oppose these extreme measures. It’s ironic that the most virulent supporters of a President who ran on “bipartisanship” should reject it so vehemently when it becomes critical of the policies pursued by his White House.
This “right-left wraparound” is happening because politicians in both parties have become so unresponsive to popular sentiment: public support for stifling investigation of the bank bailouts just to protect the President are infinitesimally small, and fortunately Dennis Kucinich announced today that he would commence an investigation into the Fannie/Freddie bailout. But it’s a testament to the extreme nature of what is happening to our government that such traditional political foes could find common cause in opposing it.
It’s foolish to say that only those who agree with you on every issue are allowed to share your opinion when it comes to opposing something like the mandated bailout of Aetna — it isn’t necessary to achieve health care reform. As Jon Walker notes, removing the mandate would reduce the CBO score and its inclusion in the health care bill with no government alternative is unacceptable for moral, political and policy reasons.
Candidate Obama himself opposed the mandate. Keith Olberman and Howard Dean concur.
As Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos said, “remove the mandate or kill this bill.” We’ve opened a “war room” at Firedoglake with information about calling your member of Congress to demand that this provision to bail out the insurance industry be removed from the health care bill before they agree to cast their vote in favor of it.
And nobody needs to pass an ideological purity test before they can use it.Join us to oppose the mandate. Enter the war room.

SUGAR: The Enemy of Life

The number one enemy to your and my health is SUGAR in all its forms and manifestations. I have learned that if I can not get a patient off the Sugar, I cannot get that patient well. We are fighting a sugar conspiracy that can be traced all the way back to the African slave trade. One of the major reasons we were brought as slaves was to produce sugar! It was an evil then that had the power to enslave. It is exactly that today - only, due to modern "food science" it has become a monster that is destroying the health of the whole world.
One hundred years ago, the average person in America consumed from all sources 4 lbs. of sugar per year. In the year 2001 that amount had reached 129 lbs.
Today it is over 141 lbs per person per year.

The following video is a long lecture by endocrinologist Dr Robert Lustig. He is going to go through all the science concerning sugar and health at a very high level. Get out your notebook and get prepared to take a medical school level course in the relationship between Sugar, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Obesity, Diabetes, etc.

This is serious information for the serious student of health.

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Don't Count on True Health Reform

Read this piece by Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor, on why the Health Care Reform bill pending before Congress is a sell-out and will not solve the problem. In fact it will ensure that the rich get richer and the poor and the sick get poorer and sicker.
Fraud by any other name is - well- fraud.
It raises the fundamental question: Can America reform itself in any meaningful way, in any important area of the life of the people, or has the American government become the complete captive slave of the global corporate elites? If we, the People, cannot count on government to help us to enjoy a better life, then what must we do to give a better life to ourselves?

Robert Reich's Blog

How a Few Private Health Insurers
Are on the Way to Controlling Health Care

The public option is dead, killed by a handful of senators from small states who are mostly bought off by Big Insurance and Big Pharma or intimidated by these industries' deep pockets and power to run political ads against them. Some might say it's no great loss at this point because the Senate bill Harry Reid came up with contained a public option available only to 4 million people, which would have been far too small to exert any competitive pressure on private insurers anyway.

To provide political cover to senators who want to tell their constituents that the intent behind a robust public option lives on, the emerging Senate bill makes Medicare available to younger folk (age 55), and lets people who aren't covered by their employers buy in to a system that's similar to the plan that federal employees now have, where the federal government's Office of Personnel Management selects from among private insurers.

But we still end up with a system that's based on private insurers that have no incentive whatsoever to control their costs or the costs of pharmaceutical companies and medical providers. If you think the federal employee benefit plan is an answer to this, think again. Its premiums increased nearly 9 percent this year. And if you think an expanded Medicare is the answer, you're smoking medical marijuana. The Senate bill allows an independent commission to hold back Medicare costs only if Medicare spending is rising faster than total health spending. So if health spending is soaring because private insurers have no incentive to control it, we're all out of luck. Medicare explodes as well.

A system based on private insurers won't control costs because private insurers barely compete against each other. According to data from the American Medical Association, only a handful of insurers dominate most states. In 9 states, 2 insurance companies control 85 percent or more of the market. In Arkansas, home to Senator Blanche Lincoln, who doesn't dare cross Big Insurance, the Blue Cross plan controls almost 70 percent of the market; most of the rest is United Healthcare. These data, by the way, are from 2005 and 2006. Since then, private insurers have been consolidating like mad across the country. At this rate by 2014, when the new health bill kicks in and 30 million more Americans buy health insurance, Big Insurance will be really Big.

In light of all this, you'd think the insurance industry would be subject to the antitrust laws, so the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission could prevent it from combining into one or two national behemoths that suck every health dollar out of our pockets (as well as the pockets of companies paying part of the cost of their employees' health insurance). But no. Remarkably, the Senate bill still keeps Big Insurance safe from competition by preserving its privileged exemption from the antitrust laws.

From the start, opponents of the public option have wanted to portray it as big government preying upon the market, and private insurers as the embodiment of the market. But it's just the reverse. Private insurers are exempt from competition. As a result, they are becoming ever more powerful. And it's not just their economic power that's worrying. It's also their political power, as we've learned over the last ten months. Economic and political power is a potent combination. Without some mechanism forcing private insurers to compete, we're going to end up with a national health care system that's controlled by a handful of very large corporations accountable neither to American voters nor to the market.

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Killing Women Softly

The recent back to back recommendations to cut back mammograms and pap smears limiting them to older women should be viewed for what it is - health care rationing! These are murky waters to be sure, but the bottom line is -well - the bottom line. These recommendations are floated as evidence based science. Well, maybe. But, why did this evidence based science suddenly become so irresistably heavy? These evidence based 'facts' about mammography and pap smears have been known for years, even decades. Why the rush now? Why the big noise about it now?

Could it be because millions of previously uninsured women will suddenly be in a position to demand what others have had all along? And this time somebody else has to pay for it? And that somebody else - the government- is really all of us. So now, mammograms are wasteful and unnessessary until age 50. Besides, they only save 1 life out of 1900 women. The following excerpted article shows the fallacy in that argument.

The reason pap smears and mammograms were done willy-nilly in the past is because lots of money was being made by private care givers: pathology labs, radiology and OB-Gyn practices.

In the past many women only went once a year to their OB doctor for a pap smear. This gave the doctor a chance to take an overall look at other health issues as well serving in many cases as that woman's primary care doctor. Once a year doctor visits are not optimum care by any strech, but how about once every three years!

So women were herded in and their private insurers were fleeced for all they would tolerate which was a lot. Now the game is changed. Rationing is the new game being played. Rationing or care denial killed when practiced by HMO's and it will do the same as practiced by the government. HMO's were up-holding share-holder rights, and care denial was good for the bottom-line even if it wasn't too good for patients. Any CEO who didn't mind the bottom line was going to be sacked. But can government operate by the same demented free-market logic? I think not, because government is Constitutionally bound to protect the 'General Welfare'. The government is on doubtful legal and moral grounds to deny care because of cost. But, of course, the government, all of us really, is busted and subject to moral temptations. What has to be fixed first is the economic crisis if that is possible. If it is not possible you can forget health care anyway.

Cost-benefit analysis can kill. The failure to distinguish statistics from arithmetic can kill. In the current debate over mammograms, the number of women projected to be at risk of death due to cost-benefit analysis is about 47,000.
That is the approximate number the United States Preventive Services Task Force projected to die if its recommendations on scaling back mammograms had been accepted. It is their number, if you do the arithmetic, which they apparently did not.
Their statistics say that the life of "only" 1 woman in 1,900 will be saved if mammograms start at age 40 instead of age 50. In other words, a 40-year-old woman's "risk" of dying from breast cancer in the next ten years is only 1 in 1,900. That seems like no risk at all: 1 divided by 1,900 equals .000526. About half a woman per thousand. Minuscule, right?
Now, how many women in America would be affected?
The most recent (July 2008) census figures say there are about 304 million Americans, of which 50.7 percent are female. That's about 154 million females. Roughly 80 million of them are under forty and about another 20 million between 40 and 50. Of the 80 million under 40, each one, under the proposed guidelines, would not get a mammogram until age 50. If "only" 1 in 1,900 die as a result, that would be .000526 times 80 million, which equals about 42,000.
In short, moving the mammogram age from 40 to 50 would result in the deaths of 42,000 women now 40 or under, according to the statistics of the United States Preventive Services Task Force. Of the 20 million between 40 and 50, it could mean the deaths of as many as 10,500 women, though the figure may be somewhat lower because half are more than halfway through the critical period. There might be as few as half - say, 5,000 deaths. Adding 42,000 and 5,000, we get a ballpark figure of 47,000 currently alive American females who would die needlessly under the proposed task force restriction on mammograms. Of course, as more are born, the absolute numbers would go up.