Here are some fascinating stats about our health care system (below). With a 14 trillion dollar (US) gross national product, the U.S. is on its way to spending WAY, WAY too much in medical health benefits, as you can see. The model of "symptom-->drug-->side-effects-->more drugs-->repeat" is highly problematic since the CAUSE is never addressed. People aren't sick because they have a deficiency of pharma drugs (as the tagline for this blog openly declares). They are sick because they don't understand that symptoms are merely CLUES to a deeper issue--one that must be uncovered and addressed if the symptoms are to stop.
Drugs MASK the symptoms which a) makes it almost impossible to get to the bottom of the situation and b) gives the patient the false idea that the deeper cause/disorder has been resolved. It hasn't. Now it's just hiding. So a few more days/weeks/months later, up it pops again only now it's worse. What was once a bad case of hemmorhoids (symptom) is now a major vascular disorder requiring expensive surgery to save the life. Not even the surgery has addressed the actual problem (probably dietary).
We are on track as a country for a total breakdown in this health care system. There are $900 TRILLION in unfunded but promised Medicare and Social Security benefits right now [1]. If that were distributed to every American, regardless of age (even infants), we would all have to come up with $300,000 or 25x the current household income.
What does this mean?
It means the situation described in the article below is just the tip of the iceberg. It means that, unless we all want several generations of our kids and grandkids, etc. to inherit the mother of all debts and a lot of barely alive sickoes who are dependent on drugs for which they can't pay (and so the rest of us must), we had better rise up to recognizing there is a problem and begin facing what must be done to handle it.
Minimally, that should include spreading the word.
If you want more information on this, go see the movie I.O.U.S.A. now in many theaters around the country. This is your country people. Do no nothing now and we may very well lose it and what's left of our liberties.
Link: Mercola.com Article
Ten years ago, Professor Bruce Pomerance of the University of Toronto concluded that properly prescribed and correctly taken pharmaceutical drugs were the fourth leading cause of death in North America. More recently, Johns Hopkins Medical School refined this research and discovered that medical errors and prescription drugs may acutally be the LEADING cause of death, outpacing cancer (which is now our deadliest disease).
This year the U.S. will spend $2.5 trillion dollars on health care, but by 2017, health care spending is projected to exceed $4 TRILLION. (This is largely due to the costs of drugs and surgery and a reliance on a medical system that treats only symptoms and never the cause of disease.)
I wouldn’t mind it one bit if spending two and half trillion dollars provided major health benefits, but as recent studies have shown, this large multitrillion dollar investment is an unmitigated failure.
The 2008 Scorecard by the Commonwealth Fund commission confirms that the U.S. health system is in a continual downward spiral – something I’ve been warning people about for more than two decades -- and despite the ever-increasing amounts of money invested, your chances of attaining good health through it are only getting worse.
The U.S. now ranks LAST out of 19 countries for unnecessary deaths – deaths that could have been avoided through timely and effective medical care. Additionally, one-third of adults with health problems reported mistakes in their care in 2007, and rates of visits to physicians or emergency departments for adverse drug effects increased by one-third between 2001 and 2004.
In essence, what we have here is a trend of health care costs rising, mistakes increasing, and pharmaceutical drug-induced side effects and deaths skyrocketing.
