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Health care reform: the alternatives
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As the House of Representatives takes up Speaker Nancy Pelosi's monstrous health-care "reform" bill, one point repeatedly gets lost in the debate: alternatives to socializing the current health-care system do exist. But our government officials in Washington are belittling some, and totally ignoring others. Any taxpayer interested in preserving or reclaiming his liberty must ask himself "Why"?
Conventional alternatives
The conventional alternatives fall into four main categories:
- Allowing interstate competition among insurers
- Establishing special "high risk pools" to take care of the sickest patients
- Tort reform
- Promotion of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs).
In fact, the Republicans did introduce their own plan, discussed here at the Heritage Foundation. The Pelosi bill runs to 1990 pages; the "Amendment in the Nature of a Substitute" runs to 230. This bill addresses items 1 and 2 above. But the Republicans, especially our own Rodney Frelinghuysen, have not ignored 3 and 4. Rep. Frelinghuysen said so in his September Town Hall meeting.
But of course, the President and the current majority leadership in the House and Senate aren't interested in any of these alternatives. The health insurers became their villains of choice when they came out against socialization of coverage. In any event, their looked-for future is that of complete government control, not only of health care, but of all other aspects of our lives, on the theory that their superior education, if not superior intellect, qualifies them to make decisions for everyone else. They also must believe that money grows on trees.
Unconventional alternatives
But for all that, a rather interesting group of theorists and practitioners have proposed ideas of their own, that both parties have ignored. The problem with even the Republican alternatives is that, while they promise to reduce the size of insurance premiums, they do nothing to address the base costs of health care. American medical care remains the most expensive care in the world, and while it can save some lives in rather dramatic fashion, it does nothing to produce a higher quality of life for everyone.
This other group of theorists and practitioners--the alternative medicine movement, for lack of a better name--think they know why.
A sickness-care system
Alternative-medical practitioners and theorists (including a number of Examiners on this very site) don't always agree on the most effective approaches to health, or even on the role of government. But they all seem to agree on one thing: Conventional medicine, whether in America or in any other society where it dominates health-care thinking, is not a health-care system, but a sickness-care system. Joe Mercola, DO, has said several times that conventional medicine is good for diagnosis and for the management of acute trauma--and little else. His attitude is quite typical of alternative practitioners.
Why, these people ask, has every generation, particularly as it gets older, since the famous Abraham Flexner Report defined itself in terms of the particular disease that plagues more of its members than any other? Forty years ago that disease was degenerative joint disease, or "arthritis"; today it is Type 2 diabetes mellitus, with senile dementia (Alzheimer type) running a close and tragic second. (The difference between SDAT and "Alzheimer's Disease" is merely the age of the patient, that is, whether the patient is 65 years old or older, or younger than 65.) And why has cancer, of all types, risen steadily in prevalence and incidence with every passing decade? And above all: why has humanity, especially in the developed world, accepted these trends as inevitable and intractable, and never once stopped to consider how these trends got started, and how to stop them?
Joe Mercola blames the drug and agricultural industries--the former, for offering their often noxious preparations as some sort of magic talisman for the treatment of disease, and the latter, for making our food far less nutritious (and sometimes, he says, chronically or even acutely poisonous) for us to eat. He specifically says that any form of health insurance (which, he says, should remain private, not public) should cover "major emergencies" (presumably acute trauma more than anything else) and not substitute for a program of good and sensible eating, which shouldn't require a doctor's consultation anyway.
George Malkmus, of Hallelujah Diet fame, spreads the blame somewhat further: on a wide variety of toxic substances that are used in conventional farming and included in virtually every type of product that the average person uses on his or her body every day. His statement about prescription drugs is priceless:
Health care reform really should be about getting people off drugs, not making sure that drugs are affordable, so that they can buy and take more.
And he's not talking about marijuana or methamphetamine or LSD or heroin, though he wouldn't advise taking any of those substances, either. He's talking about the wide variety of conventional drugs that patients accept as necessary, when they ought to be looking at ways to do without them, by directly attacking the problems that those drugs are "designed" to "treat" or "manage."
What to do
Many other alternative-medical practitioners seem to think that government-sponsored health-care reform would work much better if it paid for alternative therapies on the same basis as it proposes to pay for conventional ones. Mercola and Malkmus flatly disagree. Mercola isn't interested in any subsidies; he wants to be free to lead his own patients to the sort of lifestyle changes that he is sure will lead to better health. (He is also worried that health-care "reform" will lead to the outright prohibition of alternative medicine, an outcome he warns would be disastrous for freedom, health, and livelihood.) Malkmus states that health-care reform can only succeed if it tells people to stop doing certain things, whether on medical advice or otherwise, that either create a problem that wouldn't exist otherwise, or make an already bad problem worse.
But more to the point: both these men, and many others who think as they do, suggest that people have to take responsibility, not only for getting treatment for disease, but also for preventing disease. This might mean radically altering one's own lifestyle, and also as much of the infrastructure of society as they can materially affect. But the result would be a truly healthier society, without the expense of the present system, and definitely without the draconian governmental control being debated in Congress today.
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