Re: Whole Foods--health care

[Guest guest]

Everyone has had lots to say on this argument.  BUT...

 

I don't have health insurance as my husband is self employed and we can't afford

it.  He had to go to the ER in March of this year because he got hurt on the

job.  The bill was over $800 and we were there for 45 minutes. 

 

My children have medicaid because they are adopted through the foster care

system and they are entitled to it because they are both special needs.  They

have been treated differently in some situations because they are (or

were) foster children.  This is a separate issue.  It's the payoff for living in

a capitalist society, your info is always being sold so someone else can try and

make a dollar.  The DMV does it, but does that stop us from getting driver's

licenses, hospitals do it when you give birth (see, all those formula coupons

weren't the result of medicaid) but it doesn't stop people from giving birth in

a hospital.  I mean it's unavoidable in our culture.  Magazines sell your info

when you subscribe, but I still get them in the mail.  I don't think it's a

reason to not want to provide medical insurance for everyone.

 

Secondly, there's this argument that the politics of food and medicine will

dominate and people will be denied coverage because they won't take a certain

drug or get a certain vaccine and we'll be flooded with FDA approved advice and

drugs instead of wellness education and that somehow we would lose our

freedoms.  I've not really heard anyone in any media format making those

claims about the health care reform other than it would be the same as it is now

except cheaper and less hassle and everyone can be covered if they get hurt or

sick and not lose their house as the reward for getting cancer.  The politics of

our food is an important issue, but it's separate from the health care

legislation we're all reading about.

 

I mean no disrespect, but this is the issue I have with libertarians. 

Government has a purpose in our society, I mean you can argue about freedoms and

choices but when your house is burning down do you call the local fire dept or

let it burn to the ground?  I mean government can be good for something, right?

 

I am in favor of a single payer system, can we just join the rest of the world

already.  Lastly, coupons aside, medicaid does pay for everything and it works

pretty well.  I take the boys to the doctors I choose all over the state and

beyond.  I have denied vaccines and no one made a fuss.  I turned down an

antibiotic when my son got bit by our cat and no one cared.  Even better, I

don't pay a dime.  It's true the medicaid program is expensive but that's only

because it insures the most expensive people to insure, children, and doesn't

insure enough healthy young adults to offset the young sick ones.

 

I believe that anyone who doesn't not support health care reform is allowing the

insurance companies and big business to continue to make record profits, despite

any political leanings. 

 

I know people will hate my for writing this but oh well,

Joy

 

 

You can drag a horse to water but you can't make them drink, meaning that

From: Dawn <blaidd1@...>

Subject: RE: Whole Foods--health care

Date: Saturday, August 22, 2009, 6:06 PM

 

Very well said, Mike! And some excellent points also.

I would not be opposed to emergency type coverage for broken arms and what

not. I agree they could do so much good just sending out basic educational

material about sugar, soy and other foods. But they won't! The sugar

industry, soy industry etc won't be happy about that and they pay to make

sure policy goes their way.

When I was on Medicaid I received a lot of different " educational " materials

for about 18 months. I wonder how much the government spent to send me all

the drug and vaccine 'reminders' and 'education' that they did. They also

sent me monthly booklets about the development of my baby and what to

expect, what to be worried and call a doctor ect which is good except it was

also full of " Look at all the great soy formulas and be sure to get all

these vaccines " . They also gave out my personal information to the

companies that make soy formulas and diapers, I was getting tons of junk

mail unsolicited as soon as I filled out that paperwork! What will they do

will all our information in a universal health care systems? I bet I'd get

junk mail from General Mills trying to get me buy Sponge Bob cereals.

Besides pushing vaccines and other things the booklets also advocated giving

him full strength apple juice at 5 or 6 months old, starting him off on baby

cereals at a very young age and other things. Creating the new generation

of sugar, soy and cereal junkies.

And Bill? I think it was said our laissez faire economics don't work? Our

economy drowning in government " regulation " and control, it's anything but

laissez faire. And of course when the government interferes with business,

business interferes with government so that the businesses can get what they

want controlled and what they don't not-controlled and create an unfair

advantage for themselves at the expense of others.

Let's look at the FDA. Most people are surprised to hear that there is a

revolving door with Monsanto and other large corporations and the FDA. But

it's not surprise to me when the FDA is basically doing their very best to

run small businesses out of business, harassing them with unfair regulations

because the companies don't even know what the rules really are! It's all a

matter for interpretation. But they fast track this swine flu vaccine

despite the debacle in 1976, they fast track drugs then WOOPS people are

dying and getting sick time to recall it. I wonder how many people have

died from eating coconut oil vs. Vioxx (55,000 dead??).

http://www.organicc onsumers. org/politics/ corrupt21705. cfm

Now, back to the " health care " . I have serious doubts it's going to help

anyone. What it is going to do is prime up more consumers to buy these

drugs and vaccines, eat these " diabetic " and " heart patient " diets that

actually cause the conditions to worsen and can kill people. We won't be

given options to get insurance, or instead put our money into say

catastrophic and pay out of pocket to see an ND instead.

But you can be sure m y address will be sold and I will get Quaker Oats and

Cheerios coupons in the mail along with the free samples of soy infant

formula and pampers.

When I was on Medicaid for my childbirth I was grateful in part but also

aggravated and not a little worried. It was wonderful to have the prenatal

care, c-section, as well as recovery fully covered. But if my husband

wasn't paying outrageous taxes already we could have gotten insurance

through his work. Do to my health issues it's not possible for me to buy

insurance myself. While on Medicaid when I wasn't in the OB/GYN office I

was treated pretty roughly. The pediatrician' s office was a nightmare and I

was told I had to take my son for ANOTHER check up 24 hours after discharge

from the hospital despite the fact he was checked every day for 3 days at

the hospital and was pronounced extremely healthy. While there they had no

where for me to sit, and I was still very anemic and in a lot of pain from

the c-section they didn't care until I started crying in the office

(hormonal too!).

I have little faith that our already corrupt government who is forcing NAIS

down our throats, is letting the FDA run amok and ruin people's lives (or

kill them), and gives our soldiers untested vaccines will be able to provide

universal health care and make it worth a damn. Instead we'll be paying a

ton for increasingly poor service and the crooks will infiltrate it very

quickly and who knows what criminal rules they will make. If you have high

cholesterol you HAVE TO go on Lipitor or we won't treat you anymore. I can

totally see that happening and then the news will say " All these

irresponsible people are expecting our tax dollars to be used on them for

critical care because they won't take their Lipitor. We need to make it

mandatory " .

I mean come on!

Dawn

From:

[mailto: ] On Behalf Of Mike

Sent: Saturday, August 22, 2009 5:48 AM

Subject: Re: Whole Foods--health care

Connie:

" Ancient, how can other people's service be a right of mine? "

Ancient:

" That question makes no sense whatsoever. How can someone else's right of

free speech, or whatever right we consider ourselves to have, be considered

OUR right? Isn't the logic the same? Does it need to be drawn out? I mean,

it sounds rather silly (not the way that language works) to say that it is

MY right that x has freedom of speech. We say that we all have these

rights. "

Mike (me):

I don't have a opinion on the single-payer issue because I don't know or

care much about it, but reading threads like this do keep me abreast of

current events, for which I'm grateful. I haven't had any kind of health

insurance or medical treatment in many years, and I don't really think about

this topic because I've learned how to stay healthy through simple lifestyle

choices. I'm also too poor to consider buying insurance, but I find it

pretty cheap to eat foods that make allopathic healthcare unnecessary. If I

had to choose between spending $100 a month on local, biodynamic, free-range

eggs or spending $100 a month on health insurance, I'm pretty sure I'll live

a much healthier life by eating the eggs.

With that context, I just wanted to say that Connie's question does make

sense to me, and it's not obvious or even very plausible to me that

treatment by doctors is a universal human right. On the other hand, after

reading Ancient's paragraph about three times, I still can't make sense of

the convoluted attempt at an analogy with free speech. My opinion is that

Ancient is dismissing a very reasonable point of view with hasty, empty

rhetoric.

I can vaguely imagine an argument for healthcare as a basic human right in

some kind of abstract society where the basic premises of sustainable human

life were present, but our society is so extremely upside-down when it comes

to diet and body usage that the " healthcare " in question is an absurd

proposition. To be more specific, it seems to me that at least 90% of the

healthcare in question would be totally unnecessary if people weren't

victimized by the industrial food culture created by unethical corporations

and their governmental bedfellows. Bodily malfunctions like type 2 diabetes,

heart disease, cancer, arthritis, osteoporosis, bad backs, etc are mostly

very easy to prevent with simple lifestyle choices. While I recognize the

blame for people's bad choices has to be split between the individual and

their culture, and the division of blame will be subject to sharp debate,

I'm very hesitant to support a system in which huge amounts of resources are

used to give free treatment to all the people who have type 2 diabates or

heart disease because they spent a few decades overdosing on sugar and

suffering an obvious decline in basic physical vitality during that time.

The food corporations are to blame for selling dangerous food; the

governments are to blame for the lack of education and public policy

required for all citizens to have accurate information about the dangers of

these foods; and the individuals are to blame for letting themselves spend

years and years getting more obese, lethargic, and uncomfortable without

finding a solution to their problems.

I'm talking about extreme surreal absurdity on the level of the Town of

Allopath essay and video. I really believe that's what's happening in the

USA (and most other industrialized societies). Here's an analogy. If

millions of people have wounds caused by operating a kitchen appliance that

was poorly engineered and makes it very likely for the user to come into

contact with sharp blades spinning at high speeds, then we have two

problems, treating the cause and treating the symptoms. (Notice how obvious

and alarming it is when we wreak havoc on the outside of our bodies, while

pouring huge amounts of sugar, wheat, weird chemicals, etc into our body and

wreaking even worse havoc on the inside of our bodies is so easy to ignore!)

It's obvious to anyone that fixing the cause is the only sustainable

solution, but treating the symptoms is still a valid concern. However, the

current debate about large-scale public healthcare policy isn't addressing

causes or symptoms. In our analogy, if treating the symptoms means covering

the wound with a bandage, we could debate what kind of bandages would work

best, how often to change them, etc. That would be a debate about treating

symptoms. On the other hand, we could debate the problems of where the

bandages are manufactured, how our country's economy is affected by

different approaches to manufacturing bandages, whether the factory is using

sustainable energy, whether the factory is polluting, how the factory

workers are treated, whether the factory is practicing equal opportunity

employment, fair trade, etc, and other complicated, challenging issues.

These debates address neither the cause nor the symptom of the wounds. They

are tangential political and economic problems. All this grandiose, heated

debate about the economic and governmental structure of healthcare is

totally detached from the essential problems of health and healthcare.

In other words, our society is just being distracted by an artificial debate

about tangential problems. The USA government (via its current articulate,

smart and soothing figurehead) is spinning its wheels telling people " I know

you're poor and sick and all that bad stuff, so I'm going to help you afford

more of what we have for sale that might make you feel better " . The first

priority of the government right now should be to say " Look, our healthcare

system has serious problems and nobody knows for sure how various approaches

will pan out, so we're going to work hard on this long-term project, but

there are some simple things we can all do right away to dramatically

improve the situation. First of all, avoid refined sugar and never eat a

lot of it at once because it impairs your basic bodily functioning and

regular overdoses gradually create life-threatening health conditions like

diabates and heart disease. Try to eat fresh, whole foods instead of stuff

that's been highly processed in factories. While you're at it, try to get

most of your food from local, small-scale farmers and fishers to solve many

of our economic and environmental problems. One out of every three

Americans is genetically disposed to suffer bodily damage anytime they eat

wheat gluten, so find out if you're sensitive to wheat gluten and never

touch it for the rest of your life if you are. A similar common problem

comes from milk foods, especially when the milk is from Holstein cows, which

most commercial milk producers use. Make sure your body works well with milk

if you are going to rely on it as a staple food. Another common problem is

soy foods, which can impair your thyroid, so be careful if you eat more than

small amounts. In general, try to eat a variety of foods and find a balance

of fat, protein and carbohydrates that works for your individual body.

Always eat plenty of fat and ignore all the stuff people used to say about

fat and cholesterol back in the 20th century when the corn/soy/wheat

industry hijacked the food supply. Beyond your diet, don't sit on chairs for

long periods of time without taking breaks to do simple breathing and

stretching exercises. Move around a lot. Don't slouch or lean to one side.

Keep your back straight during all of your everyday activities. Go outdoors

for midday sun as often as possible to make vitamin D. If you follow these

simple lifestyle habits, you can avoid most of the problems that will result

in healthcare expenses, and there's lots of other simple, solid information

you can learn about taking care of your health, so take one small step at a

time and keep taking small steps. "

The most important word there is " say " , because the government can easily

afford to communicate this type of information to everyone. I'm not

advocating any particular economic or social system like socialism or

libertarianism. Even a tiny, libertarian government would have plenty of

resources to wage public information campaigns about the dangers of refined

sugar and industrialized foods. I think that 0.1% of the government's

healthcare budget would be more than enough to disseminate enough basic

knowledge about health to eliminate 90% of society's healthcare expenses.

Now that would be a budgetary proposition all political persuasions could

agree with.

The fundamental problem of our healthcare system is unethical food

corporations, unethical pharmaceutical corporations, and an unethical

government (really just another kind of corporation in itself) that puts the

interests of these corporations ahead of the public interest. In other

words, the government needs to fix its own corruption instead of playing

around with the economics of hospitals and insurance companies. Of course,

if the health insurance industry is corrupt, we should deal with that like

any other corruption.

The government works by taking tiny steps around a tiny circle in the

middle. The best way to maintain the status quo is to zoom in on the middle

and make a big fuss about every tiny shift to the left or the right. As many

people have observed, there is only one political party in the USA,

informally called the " business party " and Democrats and Republicans are

just factions of this single party with different public relations

strategies to create an artificial tension between two points in the middle.

I'm not suggesting that this politicians are doing this on purpose or that

it's the result of anyone's planning or intentions. I'm not suggesting

there's a conspiracy against the general public. I'm just describing the

actual structure of the government, which is not the way it's portrayed by

mass media. The mass media is essentially a suffocating smokescreen to keep

people's attention away from the extreme greed and unethical practices of

mega-corporations. Again, I'm not suggesting there's a conspiracy. The

governments of large-scale industrial societies like the USA are immensely

complex system with emergent properties that result from millions of small

components cancelling or reinforcing each other. The individual components

(e.g. a single corporation or a single public official) have very little

control over the system as a whole. Basically, thousands of conflicting

interests make it hard for large changes to take places in the entire

system. Instead, we see lots of tiny changes, and people wind up perceiving

tiny changes as huge changes, and very tiny changes as small changes. Most

importantly, we fail to see the true options available to us, the

fundamental changes that solve fundamental problems.

All these debates about single-payer healthcare are part of this tiny dance

around the middle. It seems like a radical change might take place, but

Washington doesn't work that way. It works by shuffling around soundbytes

and money to massage the status quo. Obama is basically the chief

advertising executive for a massive public relations corporation that

creates a veil of institutional propriety around the military-industrial

complex that siphons money from all possible sources. The side effects of

this greed is that the military-industrial complex either kills its own

citizens with slow poison (e.g. dangerous food, pollution, soil/water

destruction, etc) or kills people in other countries by direct murder (e.g.

war) or various strengths of poison (e.g. extreme economic subjugation that

forces deforestation, hyper-pollution, sweatshops, loss of

self-sustainability , etc). The USA government, like most others, is

basically a sprawling organized crime syndicate that does lots of charity

work.

Single-payer healthcare? Seriously, who cares? The government needs to

promote the truth about the dangers of sugar instead of pandering to huge

food corporations. The government needs to expose the cholesterol scandal

instead of pandering to huge pharmaceutical corporations. When I say " the

government needs to do x, y, and z " I'm not arguing for big government or

socialism. Nothing I've said here favors bigger or smaller government. The

debate between libertarianism and socialism is totally irrelevant to my

points. I don't hold any absolute beliefs about which system is better. I'm

simply saying that the government has been complicit in massive public

health policy fraud and it needs to tell the truth about the things it has

placed itself in the position to have authority on. For example, I'm not

saying government agencies like the USDA or FDA should or shouldn't exist,

but in our current reality they do exist and they have existed long enough

to do profound harm to public health, so their crimes need to be exposed and

the tides of public policy they created need to be reversed.

Healthcare as a universal human right? Interesting question for sure, but

there's no black-and-white answer that suits the sloganeering I'm seeing. I

think it depends on the kind of society and the kind of healthcare. If we

start with the basic small-scale society model where people's lives are

regulated by traditions that encode sustainable adaptations to their local

environment, then preventive medicine is primary and everybody has fair

access to the " village witch doctor " or other healers, whose methods and

limitations are accepted as part of shared cultural adaptation. When we try

to extrapolate that type of universal healthcare to large-scale societies

and then compare to the USA circa 2009, there are obviously many differences

in many variables, so I wouldn't say healthcare is a basic human right in

our society without making a lot of qualifications about the meaning of

" healthcare " and " society " . At a practical level, as a taxpayer, I really

don't want my money going to pharmaceutical executives (generals) or medical

school graduates (soldiers) because millions of people load their bodies up

with soda, bread, candy, etc, and spend most of their lives in chairs or on

couches. If " healthcare " just means covering broken arms, genetic variation,

rare diseases, etc, then we'd be talking about a tiny fraction of the budget

and infrastructure being debated in the current episode of the

government/media soap opera, so there wouldn't much debate and the problem

would've been solved a long time ago.

-Mike