An interesting study on U.S. health care -- worth reading

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HOW HEALING BECAME A COMMODITY - PART I: The Story of Soap

http://www.citizens.org/how-healing-became-commodity-part-i-story-soap

What we spend on health care now represents 17 percent of the U.S. gross

domestic product. It is the single largest sector of the U.S. economy.

The Congressional Budget Office says that health care costs will

reach 25% of GNP by 2025 under current trends.

Health wasn’t always such an article of commercial consumption. Once

upon a time, health was less a “thing”, and more of a deeply personal,

even spiritual practice. In many realms of natural health, these

features remain today.

We’re curious about how health became such a fundamental commodity in

the marketplace. As silly as it may seem, let’s consider the history of

soap as a metaphor of sorts that sheds some light on how this happened.

Beginning with the American Revolution, and continuing with the westward

move across the continent, the American spirit was fiercely independent

and self-reliant. An especially simple example was that family soap was

made and used almost exclusively at home through most of the 1800’s. In

a sense, soap-making was one of the simplest forms of autonomous health

care.

Advertising changed this. Few people know that the soap business was one

of the first industries to use large-scale advertising beginning in the

late 1800’s. Soap manufacturers set out to mold the American experience

so that consumers needed to buy – not make their own – soap. They built

an advertising strategy centered on the connection between physical

health and spiritual wellness, with an embedded message that only

industrially-produced pure soap could provide that connection. For

instance, one early advertisement featured cherubs bathing with a large

bar of soap. Another included a testimonial from the Rev. Henry Ward

Beecher in 1870: “If cleanliness is next to Godliness, then surely soap

is a means of grace.”

The rest is history. Now, we’re not suggesting that we return to the

days of making our own soap as a way of escaping the advertising matrix.

Yet, this story shows how advertising deeply penetrated one of the

simplest forms of personal health care and transformed it forever. It

also reveals that the fundamental goal of advertisers is not just to

sell a product. It’s to create a need, to establish that commerce holds

the expertise to meet that need, and to maintain consumer dependence on

that expertise.

This is Advertising 101. In fact, next time you’re watching t.v. or

flipping through a magazine, keep an eye out for health care ads – drugs

ads especially. The basic method hasn’t changed much. Instead of

cherubs washing, you’re apt to see people waltzing through pristine

fields. It’s just another way of connecting physical health to inner

wellbeing.

We’re all for the connection between physical health and inner

well-being. But we serve ourselves by paying better attention to whose

hand controls that connection. And we have to ask whether turning

health into a commodity is the best way to foster that connection.

The advertising business hasn’t accomplished the task of turning health

into a commodity all by itself. Orthodox law and science have helped.

We’ll explore that in Part II coming up soon.

In the meantime, be well.

HOW HEALING BECAME A COMMODITY - PART II

http://www.citizens.org/how-healing-became-commodity-part-ii

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Whoever coined that

phrase didn’t have healthcare in mind, but it certainly applies,

especially when it comes to the role of orthodox science and law. We

gave you one piece of the puzzle last time with the story about soap.

Here’s another piece of the puzzle, more complex and compelling:

Imagine that for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, you and your

ancestors used nature for your health. You grow and use plants and

other life forms for healing. You share with friends and family.

Perhaps you even trade with or sell to others. In fact, through the

wisdom and experience handed down over the years, you’ve become quite an

expert on the healing properties of herbs, foods and other properties of

nature. You are devoted to helping humankind with a method of healing

that has been proven with time and experience.

Not everyone resonates with what you offer, but many do. Many are

helped, some a great deal. Few, very few if any, are ever harmed. And

the cost of what you offer is reasonable.

Your neighbor is a scientist. Her work is also in the healthcare field.

She is also devoted to helping humankind. She does not draw from

nature, per se, but from new discoveries in science, biochemistry and

technology. The success of her work is not based on centuries of

experience and use, but rather on the novel outcome of objective

measurements and testing. Many are helped, some a great deal.

Her work carries a different set of risks and rewards than your work.

Not better or worse – though certainly different. Indeed, you are both

in the healthcare field. But that’s where the similarities end.

Your neighbor can get a patent on her work. You cannot. Patents are

only available for “any new and useful process, machine, manufacture or

composition of matter.” Nature does not qualify, nor should it.

Because your neighbor can get a patent, she has an exclusive monopoly

for her healthcare product for a significant period of time. You do

not. That exclusive monopoly allows your neighbor to collect what are

often called “monopoly rents” for her products (a/k/a “darn high

prices”). You cannot. You work in a marketplace where competition is

the rule.

But it’s not just competition that rules in this story. There’s also a

deeper perception that’s become locked in place. We’ve been largely

blind to it, but the consequences are becoming evident.

Let’s explore further:

The reason your neighbor gets that exclusive monopoly, according to the

system of law and public policy, is because it costs her so much to make

her product and to get it approved. Those scientific tests and

measurements are very expensive. American policy says that your

neighbor and people like her need the incentive of patent protection.

That incentive will motivate her to invest the large amount of money it

takes for R & D and the Regulatory Approval process.

Law and public policy place a lot of value on the R & D process, as well

as the Regulatory Approval process. That’s probably a good thing,

especially considering the unique risks and rewards attendant with your

neighbor’s product.

In any case, let’s restate the obvious: without patent protection for

your neighbor’s health care products, no one could afford to make them,

study them, sell them or improve them.

Once your neighbor has a patent, for the duration of the patent, she

owns the healing property of her product, in a manner of speaking.

Within reason, she can say anything and everything that is truthful

about the healing property of her product, especially if it’s been

proven in the lab and approved by the government. She also has to

disclose any known risks.

In this case, we see more complex features of how healing becomes a

commodity. For large parts of our health care system, healing is a

patented commodity. Is this right or wrong? Fair or unfair? In many

ways, the law and public policy that governs your neighbor’s product

makes sense. But let’s compare your neighbor’s situation with your own

situation in this hypothetical.

Unlike your neighbor, you can’t talk about the healing property of your

natural product. You’re breaking the law if you share the generations of

knowledge and experience that you’ve gained about your product. Oh,

you can talk about the general “healthy” nature of your products, but

you cannot talk about specific health claims like your neighbor can.

Well, actually that’s not quite true. You could talk about specific

health claims for your products if you go through an R & D process and

gather “significant scientific agreement” about the health claims of

your products. But you’ll never get the same patent protection that

your neighbor gets. And so, absent a large very large trust fund or

massive donations from the public, there’s little chance you can ever

afford to conduct the R & D necessary to speak about the healing

properties of your products, or to speak about their history and their

effectiveness as proved from hundreds or even thousands of years of

experience. You certainly cannot speak in the same way as your neighbor

can.

And in a world where so much information, perception and even meaning is

communicated by the media and by advertising, this difference between

you and your neighbor is pretty stark. Go read the Soap Story again.

The knowledge and experience attendant with natural products does not

have the same value in our system of law and public policy as does

technical R & D for patentable products. This is because ownership of

health care as a commodity is more valuable than health itself.

Read that sentence one more time: ownership of health care as a

commodity has become more valuable than health itself. Not by a lot,

but by enough to create a systemic flaw in our system that’s becoming

more evident and relevant day by day.

This is not just a question of health freedom and health choice. This

is also very much a question of health access and health cost. These

components - health freedom and health choice, health access and health

cost - together constitute what we call health justice.

What do you think?

More on the question of Health Justice in Part III soon.

HOW HEALING BECAME A COMMODITY - PART III

http://www.citizens.org/how-healing-became-commodity-part-iii

How You are part of Health Justice.

The framers of our republic were obsessed with avoiding what they called

dependency. But what they meant by this word is likely lost on most

Americans today. Most of us think of dependency as addiction – to

alcohol, to drugs, to foreign oil. The framers had a much more basic

idea: A citizen was considered dependent when he was not free to act in

the public good because his own well-being depended on a particular

result. " Nondependency " meant being able to choose what was right,

without worrying about personal consequences – no agenda other than a

democratic one.

Of all the things that have not gone according to the framers' plan,

perhaps this is the most significant. . . [The] losers are the future;

the winners, the past. And it takes an extraordinarily perverse view of

progress to think that protecting the past is the best path to the future.

-Constitutional & Technology lawyer Lawrence Lessig in Wired Magazine,

November 2006

Our small 3-part series on Health as a Commodity is only the tip of the

iceberg, designed to impress upon you the very existence of the iceberg

– nothing more, nothing less. It’s an iceberg with which we must contend

if true health care reform is going to take place.

We’ve paid a large price for a broken healthcare system. The symptoms

are well known. We own the most expensive healthcare system in the

world, by a large margin. Yet, by all conventional measurements, we own

one of the least effective systems among “modern” nations. And in

reference to all the features of Health Justice – freedom, choice, cost

and access – our system is failing.

Discrete legislative and policy battles over specific products,

modalities and regulations are part of our mission. We will continue to

alert you about, and fight with you on, these fronts. However, we are

prepared to embark with you on a systemic challenge, a mission to bring

natural health to the table of health care reform now.

2009: The Year of Natural Health – Challenges & Opportunities

You’ve heard all about the “changes” that are coming. We want to reframe

that conversation. What’s coming are challenges and opportunities. We’ve

alerted you to some of the challenges that are right around the corner.

We want to meet those challenges, and turn them into opportunities by

declaring 2009 to be the Year of Natural Health. Many of you have

suggested this. It’s a great idea whose time is now.

Your Role in the Innate Healing of the Body Politic

We’ve said before that the same natural health principles that create

healing for us individually apply to the health of The Body Politic. It

is time to bring those same innate resources to the reform of our health

care system.

In a democracy, silence = agreement. Now is not the time to remain quiet

in the promotion of natural health as a fundamental piece of health care

reform. Without you, there is no Citizens For Health. Without you, there

will be no healing of the Body Politic. Without you, there will be no

sustainable health care reform that incorporates natural health principles.

It’s true, of course, that your donations keep us going. But we need

something even more valuable than your money over the coming days and

months. We need your action, in two ways. First, we need you to respond

to the upcoming Action Alerts without fail. Second, just as important,

we need you to share these Actions with as many people as you possibly can.

The Two Most Important Action Alerts We’ve Ever Issued

Over the next 10 days, we will announce and explain two unique Action

Alerts, both designed in very different ways to establish the strength

of our voice and the power of our numbers. We will need your help with

these Alerts like never before. We urge you to act, and share our

message with as many friends and family as possible.

Above all, we thank you for your support, and for your recent

encouraging emails and donations. Godspeed!

About Us

Mission statement

Citizens for Health is the national nonprofit consumer advocacy group

working to broaden health care options, create an integrative health

system based on wellness, and advance the freedom to make health

choices. We promote the fundamental policies needed to improve health

choices and information in the U.S. and the world. We work with

grassroots and education organizations and the private sector to insure

consumer access to a wide range of therapies, a healthy environment,

safe foods, and the dietary supplements of their choice. We foster

active citizen leadership and organize natural health consumers to

create political solutions that support these rights.

--

ne Holden, MS, RD

" Ask the Parkinson Dietitian " http://www.parkinson.org/

" Eat well, stay well with Parkinson's disease "

" Parkinson's disease: Guidelines for Medical Nutrition Therapy "

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