Hallee on the Issues: Government Mandated Health Insurance
No one can deny that there is a health crisis in America. The generation we are raising today is the first generation in history that will not live longer than their parents. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, morbid obesity, autism, Type II diabetes, cancer, heart disease, viral outbreaks, a host of chronic conditions — our hospitals and doctors’ offices are flooded with patients.
However, in my opinion, there is a distinction between a health crisis and the financial crisis caused by mandatory health insurance. Health insurance funded by tax payers and mandated by Uncle Sam is not the answer to the health crisis.
I feel like you must have the benefit of my perspective. First of all — Why are we in such poor health in the first place? Why the crisis? What are our elected and appointed officials doing to help? What is the real answer?
Why Are We in Such Poor Health?
The foundational reason that so many Americans are in such poor health? It all comes back to DIET and LIFESTYLE.
It sounds simplistic, but it’s the truth.
Instead of eating fresh, whole, fruits and vegetables, healthy meats, good dairy, and moving and exercising regularly, we have the standard American diet (aka SAD) of processed, refined, canned, packaged, salted, genetically modified, poisoned with pesticides, bleached, chemical ladened, artificially sweetened, etc., etc., diet and inactive lives of sedentary pursuits that mostly involve remote controls or game consoles.
Rather than chopping fresh veggies and cooking in good oils to make a sauce, we buy a jar or an envelope of “just add water” powder labeled “made with real vegetables” and think that we’re eating something good. In reality, we are consuming massive amounts of salt, carcinogens such as MSG, blood sugar elevators such as high fructose corn syrup, and hormone disrupters such as processed soy.
Instead of drinking pure, filtered or distilled water, we grab a can of chemical laden carbonated drink composed of industrial grade chemicals in the form of artificial sweeteners and fool ourselves into believing we’re making a healthy choice.
Rather than pack a bag lunch filled with homemade, fresh foods, we buy a fast food burger made from low end hormonally stimulated beef (risking a spectrum of toxins and disease such as e-coli) cut with processed soy and served on an “enriched” bleached white flour bun with a side of white potatoes soaked in processed soy oil and drowned in yet more salt. Although rBGH has been banned in every industrialized nation in the world except for the United States, Monsanto continues to claim that rBGH-derived milk is no different from the natural stuff, despite documentation that rBGH milk contains substantially higher levels of a potent cancer tumor promoter called IGF-1.
Genetically modified foods — Frankenfoods — are in almost every food product that is packaged or processed. The long term effects of consuming a cross between a tomato and a flounder are still not known and GMOs are not labeled in the United States. Known harmful by-products such as the industrial grade chemical fluoride, and processed soy waste, are pedalled as “health” products when in fact they’re poisonous and harmful.
Industry can dump millions of gallons of toxic waste, contaminating water and soil for hundreds of years, and pay a paltry $100,000.00 fine if prosecuted. Internal combustion engines power everything that moves and coal is the number one source of energy, so the air is thick with carbon monoxide and other fumes. High frequency radio waves and electromagnetic fields surround us in everything from capacitors to cell phones and our cells are constantly exposed to diverse low grade radioactivity.
In short, our bodies are methodically poisoned on a daily basis. With this junk entering our body constantly, our metabolism just spends so much of its resources battling toxins and poisons, making us sicker and more overweight in the process. We lose energy, we lose sleep, we’re dehydrated, overweight, and slowly dying from the inside out.
How are our Elected Officials Helping?
The Food & Drug Administration – the government organization that is allegedly in charge of approving not only the every food that hits the grocery store shelves, but also the pharmaceutical medications that hit the pharmacies and drug stores around the country, are eyeball deep in the pockets of special interest groups. They’re an unbelievably corrupt organization and quite useless for their intended purpose of serving the public good. They’re not the only ones- the National Institute of Health, the American Cancer Society, the Farm Bureau – they’re all sock puppets of multinational special interest groups.
FDA (Federal Drug Administration), EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), and USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) officials are frequently rewarded with lucrative jobs at the companies they were allegedly regulating. A number of reports by the Edmonds Institute, a nonprofit watchdog which has been researching these relationships for some time, lists names of the possible hundreds of men and women who move in and out of “revolving doors” as Federal regulators and directors, commissioners and scientists at the companies they are supposed to regulate.
One example: Margaret Miller … former chemical laboratory supervisor for Monsanto, … later Deputy Director of Human Food Safety and Consultative Services, New Animal Drug Evaluation Office, Center for Veterinary Medicine in the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Monsanto was required to submit a scientific report on rBGH to the FDA so the agency could determine the growth hormone’s safety. Margaret Miller put the report together, and in 1989 shortly before she submitted the report, Miller left Monsanto to work for the FDA. Guess what her first job was? Strangely enough, to determine whether or not to approve the report she wrote for Monsanto! The bottom line is that Monsanto approved its own report. Miller was assisted by another former Monsanto researcher, Susan Sechen.
Medical schools receive millions of dollars in grants from pharmaceutical companies — provided those schools are “drug friendly” in their approach to teaching how to practice medicine. The mantra is not good nutrition and exercise but rather “a pill for every ill.” Schools that take a more holistic approach lose out on these grants. Doctors who struggle under the weight of medical school loans receive funding from pharmaceutical companies, provided they actively prescribe use of those drugs.
In short, doctors unwittingly become glorified pharmacy company reps, trained to write prescriptions and enlist patients into drug studies. They are modern day drug dealers and it is all legal and above board because anyone who dares to take a more holistic approach to health is labeled a quack or worse, prosecuted on trumped up charges while members of the FDA, NIH, and NCI conspire to steal intellectual property. www.burzynskimovie.com
Government funded school lunches consist of processed, packaged, and canned foods. Children develop absolutely no palate for good whole foods, and instead dunk deep fried “chicken” nuggets into high-fructose-corn-syrup drenched “tomato ketchup” and wash it down with a pint of chocolate flavored homogenized milk that contains more sugar than a 12 oz can of soda. They do this 5 times a week at school. All of this screaming for funding and funding for health care, and cooks in schools have to feed children with pocket change and government handouts instead of with real food.
Food stamp recipients have absolutely no limitations on what kind of food they can purchase. I have a woman who babysits for me on occasion, and purchases diet sodas at gas stations every single day with her food stamp card. She is also riddled with health problems that are a result of her processed food, chemical drinks, and smoking.
What are our elected officials doing about the health crisis? Apparently, they are cashing in at every possible turn. Like Frank L. Buam’s mythical wizard, hiding behind the curtain we find special interest groups pulling the government strings including major pharmaceutical companies, chemical companies, biotech companies, and (you guessed it) health insurance companies. These companies aren’t in business to treat or cure – they’re in business to make money and increase the value of their current stock. And, as they know – there is no money to be had from healthy people.
THE ANSWER:
If you read my post on Hallee on the Issues: Government Spending/Debt, you’ll know that I’m not a big fan of government provided anything other than a few select things. I don’t feel any different about health insurance. I do, truly, believe that this is another area where the church, as a whole, has failed and should have stepped forward with more free and reduced cost medical clinics all over the country. The money is there. The doctors and nurses are there.
However, since that is not how it is and we’re in this society where the public screams for the STATE to fix their problems, the answer to this crisis is obviously not federally mandated health insurance – not with a system as corrupt as ours. Not a system where they can pump more drugs into us and create more physical problems that require yet more drugs.
The answer is in education – a broad-based education on whole, organic food. The answer is in campaigns that could rival antismoking and anti-illegal drugs – campaigns against processed food, fast food, genetically modified foods. The answer is federal and state funded medical schools unbiased by private grants offered by pharmaceutical companies — there to teach holistic practices and whole food education as part of the medical curriculum requirements.
If we must provide food stamps to families (since the church as a whole is sadly not helping on any scale in this area), require cooking classes and allow only nutrient dense whole foods to be purchased instead of food products containing harmful chemicals.
In summary, pumping trillions of dollars into a system that is just putting bandaids on the problems and throwing pills at symptoms isn’t going to fix anything. We need to fix the health of our population at the core – at the cause. Throwing health insurance at the health care crisis is not the answer. If the population as a whole were healthy, there wouldn’t be a health care crisis in the first place.
Hallee
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I just fell in love with you all over again. ;) (I see we own the same soapbox! LOL)
:-)
My caveat: there is a difference between radiation and radioactivity. We are in fact surrounded by low-level radiation in the form of electromagnetic waves from radios & cell phones, etc. And there is definitely environmental background radioactivity in the form of radon, K-40, and even radioactive waste released to the atmosphere by coal burning power plants (yep! more radioactive waste from them than nuclear power plants!). But the words are not interchangeable. :-)
Amen, sister!!!
I don’t view our problem as a health care crisis, but rather a food supply crisis. If people stopped eating convenience, frozen, canned, “just add XXX,” type food and returned to a diet of vegetables, fruits, organic meats, and whole grains I can almost guarantee the health crisis would not be there in a generation from now. Oh, and don’t get me started on people who smoke cigarettes and get our tax dollars for their health problems caused from smoking.
I so, So, SO agree with you on food stamp recipients. They should only be allowed to purchase the above mentioned foods with their benefits – fruits, veggies, meats, dairy, and whole grains. They should absolutely not be allowed to purchase soda, cookies, candy, chips, instant this, instant that with OUR TAX DOLLARS!!
People say that food is getting expensive. Ok, sure the cost of items are going up here and there, but once I started a diet of whole foods/real foods diet/cooking from scratch my grocery bill has gone down tremedously.
Oh, and another thing that irritates me is people on welfare who say meat or fruit is so expensive but will pay $2.50 for 8oz of hot dogs. Hello? -That is $5 a lb; more expensive than I pay per organic hamburger or organic chicken, and so much more than any fruit or vegetable per pound, organic or not!
{{Jumping off soap box}}
Also, I am liking your series on “the issues.” I think another great topic for you and/or your hubby to write about would be this Occupy movement. It find it funny as the people protesting look so silly. For instance, there was a front-page article on a guy who was part of Occupy and he was angry at big business, yet he had a Starbucks coffee in his hand! I’m so sick of people who want to complain about big business, but continue to support their products (cell phones, cable, dining out, clothing, gadgets, etc). The biggest statement you can make is to not purchase the company’s product or service.