“Make the U.S. the envy of several African nations,” he says
Whether you agree with him or not, you have to admit that Bill Maher is the master of acerbic whit and political satire. Here he displays his growing irritation with Obama’s apparent laissez-faire attitude toward right-wing Republicans and the inroads they have made against the Obama administration. He then rips into the healthcare debate in a way that no one we know of can better.
Just a warning: there’s some language partially bleeped out in this one, but you can still tell what Maher is saying.
To counterbalance Maher’s acerbity, we’re following that video with an interview with Bill Moyers, in which Bill Moyers displays the command of language, of history and of the issues that has made him so revered as an observer of the American scene.
If you’re a conservative and not too fond of Bill Maher, we urge you to skip the first video but view the second. Moyers is ever the gentleman. He points out that the big difference between the healthcare fight and the civil rights fight is that the healthcare fight is opposed more strenuously by Big Money. And he points out that the Republicans have every reason to oppose healthcare reform. Not only has there been a conservative revolution in the U.S. in recent decades, but Republicans are reluctant to hand President Obama the biggest political victory since President Johnson established Medicare.
Remember that President Nixon first proposed health care reform in 1974. The Republicans have since lost that initiative. Why should they just hand it to the Democrats and make it easier for the President to seek re-election in 2012?
Below: Bill Moyers speaks to Bill Maher about health care reform and related issues.
This first video, a brief excerpt from a roundtable discussion, focuses on the public option in healthcare. In it, first Robert Reich says a few words, then Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman tells us what’s behind the resistance to the public option in the Senate. Then in the clip below that, Robert Reich, who is a former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton and currently a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, explains what the public option really means.
Krugman is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University; Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics; and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. In 2008, Krugman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography.
Robert Reich (below) is currently Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
The things they try to slip past you. We were catching up on our reading in the general press, in particular reading a piece in the New York Times about New York state requiring its health care workers to get both seasonal and swine flu vaccines, which has the unions of the health workers up in arms. And there it was, in the Times:
Immunologists generally agree that real protection against any disease requires vaccination rates over 90 percent. But because rumors always circulate and many people fear needles, voluntary acceptance never gets that high.
Nice try, NYT. “Real protection against any disease requires vaccination rates over 90 percent”? (Italics mine.) Does that mean real protection as opposed to the illusory protection we get from vaccines otherwise?
Obviously our NYT reporters are confusing issues here. They refer, we think, to so-called “herd immunity,” which, the story goes, requires over 90 percent vaccination rates to protect the remaining 10 per cent or fewer who are unvaccinated from being exposed to the disease. In other words, if you don’t get vaccinated and over 90 percent of the total population does, your chance of getting the disease drops to a rate comparable to that for people who did get vaccinated. That’s assuming, of course, that the vaccine really works and people really do derive immunity from it, both increasingly dubious assumptions these days.
That, apparently, is what the New York Times considers “real protection.” But, as the main thrust of the Times story clearly demonstrates, 58% of health care workers across the country disagree with that analysis and choose not to get vaccinated against the flu—H1N1 or otherwise.
In July, an angry constituent confronted Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) at a town hall meeting. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!” the man demanded. Inglis tried as he could to explain that Medicare was and had been from the beginning a government program, but the voter would have none of it.
That episode illustrates the level of confusion surrounding health care reform in particular and our health insurance system in general. For the record, Medicare is a single-payer system, though in recent years private insurance has made huge inroads in altering the system, aided and abetted by Congress. Since it is not purely single-payer in the broadest sense of “everybody in, nobody out,” it does not achieve the economies of scale a nation-wide all-inclusive single-payer system would. And of course, you have to be 65 to be eligible for Medicare.
Our very own socialized medicine
The Veterans Administration (VA), on the other hand, is an example of socialized medicine, since the providers of the healthcare are government employees and the hospitals are all government facilities. So we do indeed have socialized medicine in this country. It is just (ironically) that it exists where most people least expect it—within and on the periphery of the military.
Neither system is inherently bad, though generally Medicare seems to get higher marks from its constituency. The problem with both systems, contrary to what most people believe, is that they are the poor boys of the healthcare system. Because they cater to two groups that have relatively little power compared, say, to the insurance industry—namely, the elderly and veterans—Medicare and the VA system get relatively little attention from Congress.
… and our single-payer system under attack
Let’s be clear that what makes Medicare single-payer is the formula of a government-sponsored payment plan for privately administered healthcare. To the degree that this model is adhered to, Medicare is popular among those it covers. Most of the problems with the Medicare system stem from its concessions to the prevailing external system of private insurance companies. The best example of this single-payer model gone astray is Medicare Part D, which covers reimbursement for prescription drugs.
This system is so complex even pharmacy professionals were totally confused by it for the first year or so it was in effect. It illustrates the downside of having a health care system dominated by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
For one thing, when Medicare Part D was passed in 2003 to become effective January 1, 2006, it required seniors to purchase insurance to cover prescription drugs. In a good single-payer system, pharmaceuticals would be covered the same as laboratory tests or doctor visits. Depending on the system, there might or might not be a small copay. But all these issues should be transparent to the patient.
Part D is completely different. There is none of the beauty and economy (for the consumer) of universal coverage. Instead, we have an enigmatic system that has both reduced coverage and increased costs at the same time—precisely what happens when private insurance gets the upper hand.
What’s more, once Part D went into effect, enrollees had to sign up for these benefits within a short period of time or be penalized. (All this from a group of patients whose predominant source of income was presumably Social Security!) As one of our senior readers pointed out in a private correspondence,
Obama says [he wants to cut spending on] Medicare, but that delivered benefits to patients will not be cut. Apparently, he wants to get back some of the money the insurance companies have been stealing. (For example, when Medicare-D was introduced by the Bush League, the insurance companies slashed benefits, increased premiums, raised copayments, and just kept all the extra money the government was giving them.)
Belatedly, the Democrats figured out what was happening. But Obama doesn’t say how he intends to stop the insurance companies from stealing the money. The insurance oligopoly just does whatever it wants unless there is a single-payer system or at least a government-run competing option. But unless Obama can straighten out Medicare, I have no confidence he will straighten out the larger system. It is about time for him to stop talking bipartisanship and to start exposing all the whores and thieves. Here is a perfect opportunity to show why we need a single-payer system—to prevent the sort of larceny that occurred with Medicare-D.
Indeed, an essential part of that larceny was a provision passed by Congress that forbids Medicare from negotiating drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies. Medicare has to pay whatever price the drug companies ask. Yet, given its large constituency, the Medicare system is in an enviable position to exact savings on the part of the seniors it represents. (The VA, in fact, does do this for veterans.) But for Medicare, that practice is strictly forbidden by law, costing taxpayers billions annually.
Given these shortcomings in our existing single-payer system, it is easy to see why so many citizens throw up their hands and shy away from health care reform altogether, even if they have managed to figure the whole system out. But Medicare could be made much better by keeping it to the pure single-payer model rather than saddling it with all the trappings of our private insurance system.
Private delivery of publicly paid care
What’s good about Medicare is that it leaves the healthcare delivery side of the equation alone. You can go to your existing doctor or find another one if you like. (Not all doctors accept Medicare, but then they aren’t all in the same “networks” of existing private PPOs, either. So for those who think they’ve just found a major shortcoming in the single-payer system, nice try—but it’s a wash.)
Walking away from healthcare reform just leaves the thieves and liars to run the show. Far better to exclude them altogether. A pure single-payer system is the only option that makes total sense, because it stands to save the public $4 trillion over the next 10 years, while simultaneously extending coverage to the 47 million or so Americans who are currently uninsured.
That’s why it becomes the least expensive way to cover everyone. By absorbing the money now taken by the insurance industry for overhead and profits and putting that money towards health care, we can add the uninsured to our rolls without increasing overall costs. Suddenly, you don’t have to worry about losing your insurance should you lose your job or about becoming uninsurable because of a prior illness. The current private healthcare system makes it a practice to remove people from its rolls once they begin to need its services.
Choices aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be
Adding a vague “public option” into the mix of private plans providing meaningless choices such as HMO vs. PPO, deductibles vs. copays, should be considered only as a fall-back position in the event that all else fails. We envision a single-payer system in which you get care from your hospital or doctor and the government pays the bill—a healthcare system that is privately administered but publicly funded.
The halfway measure of adding a government-sponsored insurance alternative to the current bewildering array of private plans is not only unnecessarily complex and inefficient, it will simply cost more compared to straightening out Medicare and extending it to all U.S. citizens.
We suggest you write your Congressman and tell him that.
While writing this editorial, we have noticed a few interesting things happening in the media. One is an exchange between CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo and Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) captured on MSNBC.
We had always respected Bartiromo as a business journalist, though we haven’t watched CNBC in years. So we were surprised when she began spouting shop-worn platitudes in the course of this discussion. The notion, for example, that the availability of Erbitux is the barometer by which we judge a healthcare system is totally bonkers. And how many people in this country have access to it via private insurance anyway? We would like to know. (If you have been given Erbitux and had it paid for by your private insurer, please use our comment form below to let us know about it.)
I was a guest on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to talk about health care and Bartiromo, who used to work closely with a relative of mine at CNN, was friendly before the segment started. So I was surprised when the show started and Bartiromo went on the attack, asking me how I could say America didn’t have the best health care in the world. Everyone, she said, would choose to be treated in America if they could.
I was staggered for a moment, I admit it, because I thought she was kidding at first. We were probably a full minute into the debate before I realized it wasn’t a joke. And here’s the really funny part: toward the end of my appearance, I said something about how health care in America is great, if you’re an executive at Goldman, Sachs. Then I left the set and… guess who they brought right afterward on to rip me and praise the American health care system? Bartiromo’s colleague at CNBC, Erin Burnett, a former Goldman, Sachs executive.
Bartiromo, both with me and in this spot with Weiner, has been hammering home the same point, that the proof that a public option won’t work can be found in the fact that the public health care system in England will not pay for the colorectal cancer drug Erbitux. I guess she is trying to say that there is rationing of health care in a single-payer system — that the fact that the government will not pay for the most expensive non-generic cancer drug on the market is proof that we shouldn’t have a public option in the U.S.
It drives me crazy when people make this argument. [A] fancy boutique drug like Erbitux[!] I have a very expensive private plan and I can’t even go to a doctor, not even to ask a simple question, unless it’s an emergency. I can’t get a routine checkup, can’t find out what that weird lump in my left foot is, can’t have the pleasure of a routine proctological exam unless I want to pay cash for it, and, well, forget about getting a filling replaced or seeing a therapist to deal with my incipient nervous collapse/burgeoning mid-life crisis.
Hell, forget about paying for Erbitux, if I wanted to get a colonoscopy to find out if I needed Erbitux, I wouldn’t be able to — I’d probably have to wait until I was a fully symptomatic cancer patient before I could even have that conversation on my insurer’s dime. And I’m one of the lucky ones, I actually have money to pay for care out of pocket, if I had to. No country in the world rations care more than the U.S. There are whole generations of Americans (20-40 year-olds in particular) who don’t know what it is to be able to go to a doctor for preventive care or routine checkups. Erbitux, for Christ’s sake! Give me a break.
To watch this short interview and see what your take on the whole thing is, click here. Don’t forget, then, to tell us all what you think about it by clicking on the red text, “leave a comment” in the grey box that marks the end of this posting. That will open up the comment box (if it isn’t already visible) below the posting itself.
Franken, the senator
Another video that hit the wires recently was of Al Franken calming down constituents at the Minnesota State Fair. This impromptu discussion is well worth watching, because Franken gives a generally good primer on health care reform issues.
We admit we had our doubts about Franken as a serious lawmaker before, but he shows here that he has the “people skills” it takes to show and earn respect in politics. So far as we’re concerned, that and the level of sensitivity and intelligence he demonstrates here is all he needs. We predict good things to come from this senator and wish him well. The exchange is here.
And to show just how ugly things can get (without even going into the incident in which a man had part of his finger bitten off) here’s a tape from the Star Ledger in New Jersey showing the shoddy treatment given a disabled woman in a wheelchair who tried to speak up about her situation in a New Jersey town hall meeting. There’s much more to it than that, but we’ll let you see for yourself here. Excellent work by the Ledger reporter, Brian Donohue.
There’s one misconception in this video that you should be aware of: Medicare is not socialized medicine, though the VA system is. Medicare, as we said before, is primarily a single-payer system, though private insurance, through its agents in Congress, is making inroads into corrupting that system. And while the narrator is certainly entitled to believe in tort reform, in reality that is a side issue completely unrelated to health care reform. As a pseudo issue, it’s been cleverly planted, we believe, by the opponents of health care reform. We agree with him about the importance of disease prevention and health maintenance in general, but again—those issues are not directly related to health care reform, if by that we understand the matter of reforming health care insurance, or in other words, the ways that we pay for and distribute health care.
Maria Bartiromo and Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) mix it up on MSNBC.
Al Franken (D-Minn.) shows his stuff in calming down a potential angry mob.
Wheelchair woman tries to speak at New Jersey town hall meeting, gets heckled by unruly crowd.
There’s so much confusion out there about health care reform, and it’s all to the detriment of consumers. For one thing, the very phrase “health care reform” is a misnomer. What we really mean when we talk about health care reform is “health insurance reform,” because the real problem with our system is how we pay for health care.
You see, it’s just too expensive for the average person to pay health care costs given today’s system. Someone we know recently had to spend the night in the hospital for tests when he thought he might be having a heart attack. At the time, unfortunately, he was uninsured.
When he went in, he was told that he could apply to the hospital for charity forgiveness of a portion of his bill. He filled out the necessary forms to establish that he was uninsured and unable to pay. After he was billed separately by both the hospital and the doctors for each individual test and diagnosis, he received a response to his charity application, which was really a summary bill from the hospital. For his one night stay, he was shown a “charity care amount” of $10,626.00. The hospital said it only expected him to pay $3,542. Keep in mind that this was after he had already been billed almost $2,000 for various tests, services and doctor’s fees.
$3,542 for what?
What did he have done? A test of blood enzymes to determine whether he’d actually had a heart attack, limited additional blood tests (primarily a lipids panel), a chest x-ray and a stress test to determine how strong his heart was.
Had he been insured, however, the insurance company would have put a limit on what it would pay for each of those services, as well as for his bed and so on. We’re certain that same night in the hospital would have cost the insurance company less than half what it cost someone who had just proven he was destitute! An amount on the order of $10,626 would never have been mentioned.
In this case, the issue wasn’t with the health careper se. It was the manner of payment—the same thing we’re proposing to fix when we talk about health care reform.
Ideally, someone thinking he’s having a heart attack in a strange city shouldn’t be faced with a dilemma about how to pay. He shouldn’t have to pay more for being out of state (which was a factor in this case) and he certainly shouldn’t have to pay more for being uninsured when it was not his choice to be so. After all, he’d been dumped by his insurance company.
Choice of hospitals and doctors wasn’t really much of a factor in this case. Our hero went to the closest hospital and was treated by the doctors on duty—absolutely no choosing for him at all. But had this not been an emergency, he would have had the option of shopping around for a doctor under a single-payer system.
Why should there be “out of network”?
By contrast, most private insurance plans expect you to pay more for a doctor who is “out of network” if they will cover such visits at all. And if you belong to an HMO, good luck! Your choices are highly proscribed and you are very likely to be told you can’t have certain treatments, just because giving them to you will have an adverse effect on the HMO’s bottom line. We’ve seen it happen in real life.
Insurance companies tell you they’re giving you choices, such as whether to pay a higher premium and get a lower deductible, or vice versa. But the meaningful choice in health care isn’t getting to choose an insurance plan, which merely determines how you pay. Meaningful choice is about who treats you, where you go for treatment and which treatment you will receive. You want to have control over those things, as well as over what conditions you think merit treatment. Since a single-payer system provides private delivery of health care (just like we have now) it wouldn’t change the meaningful choices. The only part it changes is how the bill gets paid. A single-payer system centralizes payment so that it is done either by the government or by a publicly owned agency. There’s no insurance company middle man.
Australia and Canada, for example, have single-payer health care systems. Those two countries rank 7th and 8th, respectively, in life expectancy among nations, according to CIA figures. The U.S. ranks 50th. In 2003 (the latest year for which we could find the figures, calculated in U.S. dollars) Australia spent $2,886, Canada $2,998 and the U.S. $5,711 per capita on health care.
What choices best serve the consumer?
As we go through the debate about health care reform, one of the issues informed consumers should watch closely is whether or not a single-payer option is put on the table. This is the solution least likely to be offered because it is the most beneficial to the public and therefore the least profitable for industry. In fact, a bill in Congress—H.R. 676—represents just such a single-payer system, based on expanding Medicare coverage to cover all. (The bill, introduced by John Conyers of Michigan, is called “Expanded and Improved Medicare for All,” not so surprisingly.)
You won’t find many in Congress or the Senate standing up to push H.R. 676, though, because it is precisely the bill the health insurance industry does not want to see enacted under any circumstances. If it passes, over $400 billion in annual profits will disappear from the health insurance industry, along with a lot of perks for congressional supporters.
And what’s worse, the CEO of United Health Care will have to give up making $120,000 an hour, or at least find some other industry in which to make it.
We bet you’re going to lie awake nights now, worrying about him.
Yes, we’re being ironic. There really is no Republican health care reform plan, as you probably already know. Unless, of course, you count the prattle trotted out by McCain and others who talk about needing to enact tort reform whenever they are cornered and forced to say a few words on the subject of health care reform.
We might have voted for McCain in 2000, given the opportunity, but his policies are looking a bit long in the tooth these days. How times have changed!
Unfortunately, rather than doing something constructive such as joining with the Democrats for bipartisan reform, most Republicans in the House and Senate have settled for blowing smoke and repeating platitudes, most of which are not only shop-worn, but inaccurate.
Recently, one of them ran afoul of that process: a freshman senator in the second district of Kansas, Lynn Jenkins. Confronted with a respectful but persistent 27-year-old constituent who is the single mother of a 2 1/2-year-old boy, Jenkins saw the crowd turn against her after she essentially attempted to blow off the waitress’s question, which the crowd happened to think was a reasonable one: what was wrong with a government-run plan for Americans who are currently uninsured?
Having already stated that she was against any “public option,” Jenkins seemed to think answering that question was beneath her. Then she volunteered that a public option wouldn’t cover just Elizabeth Smith, the 27-year-old hard-working waitress, but would cover everyone in the room. That drew howls from much of the rest of the room, which sported quite a few gray heads. Cries of “what’s wrong with that?” rang out.
So, putting down the notion of a public option can backfire even in a conservative state like Kansas. It’s funny how people are beginning to catch on that maybe they do, after all, deserve health care. Watch it here.
Death panels
Meanwhile, over at Huffington Post, Jamie Court has government statistics uncovered by the California Nurses Association showing that Pacificare Health has a procedure kill rate of 40%, while CIGNA’s is 33%. That means, quite simply, that these companies routinely deny 40% and 33%, respectively, of procedures ordered by doctors caring for their patients.
Why should you care?
Well, Natalie Sarkisyan’s parents had CIGNA health care, and Natalie Sarkisyan fell within that 33%. Wendell Potter, the former VP of Communications at CIGNA, was obviously choked up as he recounted in this video the final days of the Sarkisyan family’s campaign to obtain Natalie a liver transplant. Watch it here.
Overall, the California statistics show, one in five requests for treatment is denied by California health insurers regulated by the California Department of Managed Health Care. That’s a 20% denial rate for procedures ordered by private doctors throughout the state. Remember those apocryphal warnings of “faceless bureaucrats” coming between you and your doctor? To us, it looks like all of California is covered by a private insurance death panel.
Sadly, California is not alone. It’s no doubt happening in your state as well.
Finally, we have a video for those who might like help separating myth from fact. Alison in Rome supplies palliative facts in this video. Did you know that over 18,000 die each year in our country because they don’t have medical coverage? That’s six times as many as died in 9/11, or 50 people every day.
To Representative Lynn Jenkins from Elizabeth Smith: “Why shouldn’t my government guarantee all of its citizens health care?”
Wendell Potter, former CIGNA exec, recounts the story of Natalie Sarkisyan.
AlisoninRome dispels 3 healthcare reform myths. Were you misinformed?
This excellent video combines many of the themes we have discussed here at Health Spectator. We have warned about the dangers of genetic modification (The allure of genetic modification) and extolled the virtues of organic and locally grown foods.
All in all, the movie gives excellent coverage of the range of issues (political, economic, social and technological) involved in growing and distributing our daily bread—or virtually any other food, for that matter.
With a tip of the hat to David Corthell, who pointed this one out to us.
We came across a post on the autism site Adventures in Autism by Ginger Taylor claiming that former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) chief Julie Gerberding, who stepped down from that agency in January of this year, has since accepted a position with public relations giant Edelman.
The Edelman website confirms this, and we quote:
Edelman has created the Global Task Force on H1N1 Influenza to help its clients and partners navigate the communications challenges associated with the potential outbreak of H1N1 flu. The task force comprises a network of public health and crisis communications specialists, including former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Julie Gerberding, who are ready to help organizations engage their internal and external stakeholders early and protect their reputations.
Perhaps this is vindication for those Gerberding critics who claimed that while she was head of CDC, her interest was more in protecting careers and reputations than in saving lives. We don’t know.
We do know that the transition back and forth between agencies in the public sector and such major industries as the oil, chemicals, food and pharmaceuticals industries supposedly regulated by those corresponding agencies has been an easy one to make of late, a situation that we find mildly upsetting. We say “mildly” because, while we could easily work ourselves into a sleepless frenzy over this, it happens all the time. That would leave us sleepless for life were we to agonize over it too much.
Gerberding has every right to represent the same large pharmaceutical companies she was accused of representing all along, and at least now her paycheck does not come directly from our taxes. (It is siphoned off, instead, via the extra healthcare costs we pay for healthcare we may or may not receive, depending upon our ability to pay for it after having supported with our taxes massive government agencies that are supposed to be guarding us. For more on these issues see the interview with a CIGNA exec and Michael Moore’s Sicko.)
Corporate vs. public interests
We wouldn’t mind the job security conferred upon the ruling elite by these arrangements nearly so much if only those public servants were more diligent in their defense of the public (as opposed to corporate) interests while serving their brief tenure in public posts. But so few of them have actually been able to switch off the defending-corporate-interests part of their personalities while allegedly serving the public.
If you read Ginger Taylor’s references to Gerberding it becomes clear that she feels intense frustration at Gerberding’s frequent calls for more research that were then followed by total inaction in instigating such research.
Taylor, meanwhile, is a Maine housewife living the daily frustration and horror of parenting a child disabled by autism. It is one thing to sit and read countless papers (as we do) trying to decipher the contradictions among research reports to arrive at some sort of informed opinion on the subject and quite another to have witnessed, as Ginger Taylor and too many other parents have, the transformation of a formerly healthy child to a sick and damaged one after receiving a shot or a series of shots.
Cause and effect are total abstractions in the first case and heartless assassins in the second. If you watched your child or spouse regress from a healthy state to an autistic or demented one, wouldn’t you too be bitter or at least hostile towards the vaccine and mercury amalgam manufacturers who continue to claim there is no relation at all between these afflictions and their products?
As for Gerberding, she probably makes the sort of next-door neighbor you would visit with for hours given the opportunity. But we can understand Taylor’s feelings towards her. That frustration comes through in the interview below of Julie Gerberding by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, with text insertions provided by Ginger Taylor. Following that, we have also posted an interview with John F. Kennedy, Jr, who has performed extensive research on the thimerosal issue.
Thimerosal and vaccines
Thimerosal, in case you’ve forgotten, is a preservative used in many vaccines. Kennedy’s article Deadly Immunity, published in Rolling Stone and Salon.com is a must read on that subject.
While we’re on the subject of mercury and autism, we would like to add that we don’t think the thimerosal in vaccines (or that in mercury fillings, for that matter) is the sole cause of autism and other apparently mercury-related injuries and illnesses. We do believe that many individuals have been injured by the mercury in vaccinations and in mercury fillings, don’t get us wrong.
But the body is a complex organism and there are often multiple paths to the same result. A lack of vitamin D, for example, might induce similar disorders and certainly does induce asthma, Alzheimer’s and diabetes, to name just three among many. Pregnant mothers and infants have grown increasingly deficient in this important vitamin in recent years (See our piece Vitamin D, the versatile vitamin for more on that.)
Holistic approach works best
But there are other culprits as well. Aluminum not only exacerbates the presence of mercury, but can fill in for it as a damaging agent. Fluoride is another toxin that can cause untold damage, particularly when combined with aluminum. Even monosodium glutamate, aspartame and other excitotoxins may play a role. All these toxins—mercury, aluminum, fluoride, glutamate and aspartame, as well as vitamin D deficiency—have been implicated in the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. They can also cause, in various combinations or singly, childhood-onset disorders such as autism.
For many individuals, the sheer number of vaccinations given to children these days may be the cause. Not only are the additives such as thimerosal cumulative in their effects, the assault on a young immune system that each of these vaccinations represents has to be considered cumulative as well. Then too, the measles antigen suppresses the immune system for up to several months. During this period, another vaccination that might otherwise be tolerated by a given individual may cause disastrous results.
So a holistic approach to this problem works best. For the sake of argument, if you consider health to be the absence of disease and its contributing factors, you could define health, in this context as adequate vitamin D and other vitamins in the absence of mercury, aluminum, aspartame, MSG and fluoride from the diet and the environment.
Start adding any of these toxins back in, and you dramatically increase the risk of any given child displaying autism.
So, while a given parent may witness a child becoming autistic after, say, a flu vaccination (most flu vaccines still contain mercury) that doesn’t mean another parent may not witness either a different result from mercury or a different cause of autism.
The heartbreak of autism
In any case, it certainly does not mean that any of these parents should have to put up with ridicule or indifference on the part of the medical establishment and even less so on the part of our government. And it certainly does not mean that the CDC should continue to allow thimerosal and other forms of mercury to remain in vaccines. Nor should the FDA continue to allow it to be used in tooth fillings, for that matter.
Whereas in Europe the phrase “First, do no harm” is paramount, the United States has developed a different set of standards. Ours is more along the lines of “Do not interfere with business.” The health and welfare of our citizens, sadly, takes a back seat to the profits of corporations.
That situation has got to change.
As the Kennedy interview makes clear, autism is a disease with a well-defined history. It was first described in 1943 by Dr. Leo Kanner of Johns Hopkins University. Kanner had studied 11 children between 1938 and 1943, to which he ascribed this new disease.
Thimerosal was invented in the 1920s and first put into use in vaccines in the 1930s. So those who equate autism with the use of thimerosal have a solid base on which to stand. In fact, the House Government Reform Committee that studied the history of autism and thimerosal concluded in its final report, “This epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a known neurotoxin.” The FDA and other public-health agencies failed to act, the committee added, out of “institutional malfeasance for self protection” and “misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry.”
Editor’s note, August 13, 2009: We have added the following video (The Truth About Vaccines) from the Shoot ‘Em Up website. The clip can also be found on the Maryland Coalition for Vaccine Choice website. The people who shot the Shoot ‘Em Up documentary from which this video clip is derived produced a feature-length film on the subject. You can purchase that film on DVD from their website. Meanwhile, watch the clip here by clicking on the image below.
Dr. Julie Gerberding Autism interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN – March, 2008, edited by Ginger Taylor.
Below, the Kennedy interview with Joe Scarborough is about Kennedy’s research on autism and thimerosal, a preservative used in many vaccines. This is a subject that both Scarborough and Kennedy know much about. (Scarborough has first-hand experience with autism.)
Keep in mind too that Scarborough is an ultra-conservative, while Kennedy is—well, a Kennedy. You might also like:
In honor of Earth Day, we thought we’d re-visit a subject that has been dear to us in the past: organic and natural foods. This time, rather that emphasize the benefits of wholesome foods, we thought we’d spend some time telling you where to get them.
If you’ve been paying attention, you are no doubt aware that not all organic foods are created equal. You may also know that Whole Foods, the largest “health food” retailer in the United States, has increasingly come under fire for being more interested in profits than principles. For about the past seven years, Whole Foods has been largely focused on taking over its remaining competitor—Wild Oats. The antics of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey in this regard have been anything but amusing.
Readers may or not be aware that Mackey’s actions made headlines in July 2007 when the U.S. Federal Trade Commission revealed that the executive had posted messages on a Yahoo! chat forum under an alias for years. In those posts, Mackey extolled the virtues of his company while trashing Wild Oats in an attempt to lower Wild Oats’s stock price. Wild Oats had turned down a buyout bid from Whole Foods in 2001.
We mention all this just to make readers aware that there is nothing sacrosanct about buying organic foods. We wholly endorse buying organic, but don’t think that just because the label says organic—or because a vendor sells a large quantity of food labeled organic—that you can close your eyes and just assume that all is well.
We ourselves shop at Whole Foods and have long been concerned at the quantity of conventional produce and products the store carries. Since not all produce is available as organic at any given time, this does make sense for a store whose main function is selling groceries: if you go to the store looking for beets, for example, you may well accept conventional beets if organic beets are not available. We have also outlined a way by which consumers can limit the expense of converting to organic foods by avoiding the most contaminated conventional varieties and purchasing their organic counterparts instead.
So, we accept that not all produce available at Whole Foods is necessarily organic. You simply have to pay attention to the signs and labeling to make sure you know what you are purchasing.
Buyer beware
Of greater concern to us is the assertion that Whole Foods may carry products that contain MSG, for example, when MSG is on the store’s list of unacceptable ingredients. The same source also points out that rBGH (genetically engineered bovine growth hormone) is not on the Whole Foods list of unacceptable ingredients. This is particularly alarming in light of the fact that “conventional ” grocers such as Kroger and even WalMart have taken a stance against stocking dairy products that contain rBGH. Safeway, Chipotle and Starbucks have also jumped on this bandwagon. For Whole Foods not to ban rBGH seems unconscionable.
Dairy cows injected with this artificial hormone are forced to produce more milk than they would normally (on average, a gallon a day per cow) with dire consequences to their health. Cows injected with rBGH are far more likely to need treatment with antibiotics and to end up as “downer” cows entering the meat supply. Not only is it inhumane to subject cows to this treatment, it shows a flagrant disregard for the health of consumers.
At any rate, you get our point. If you are at all concerned about your health, you have to be concerned about what you eat. In order to assure that you consume the highest quality foods, you should not be limited to your local supermarket, and not even to your local Whole Foods. The truth is that the supply of truly healthy food in this country is so limited that there is not enough to supply the major outlets. So you need to line up your own sources as soon as possible.
As consumers have become increasingly aware of the importance of securing sources of healthy dairy, meats and produce, the demand for such foods has increased dramatically. If the supply of these healthy foods does not increase phenomenally, the enforceable standards—particularly for organic foods—will be sacrificed. Therefore as a consumer you must be increasingly vigilant as you make your purchases.
WalMart, the world’s largest retailer, recognized at least two years ago that organic foods were the place to be. Because WalMart exerts so much pressure on suppliers, the large food manufacturers such as Kraft and Kellogg are ramping up fast to supply organic-labeled products. For the most part, this is silly. Will packaged organic macaroni and cheese be that much healthier than the non-organic varieties currently available? We suppose we should support any effort to produce food that results from sustainable agriculture, but we cannot help but question how sustainable such efforts are.
Remember, organic foods are produced without resorting to pesticides, herbicides, artificial fertilizers or artificial hormones, as well as being free from irradiation and genetic modification. The idea is to produce food that is entirely natural not in some legalistic sense, but in the most wholesome way possible. Manufactured food is not healthy food. Chips made from organic ingredients are no doubt preferable to those made from conventional ingredients, but we do not believe that is enough to classify them as health food. They simply have become marginally less unhealthy. So while simply re-manufacturing current manufactured foods with more wholesome ingredients is laudable in some ways, it totally misses the point. The end result should always be greater health for us and for the environment, which is, ultimately, the same thing. We cannot remain healthy without a healthy environment.
Groups such as the Weston A. Price foundation have recognized these principles and make them the cornerstone of their practice and teachings. But before we go on to discuss such organizations, let’s review one other basic tenet of healthy living that has become of concern much more recently: consuming locally grown.
A rose is a rose is a rose…
In principle, it matters not where your food was raised if it is nutritionally dense. That is, for the immediate purposes of your health, an organic apple from, say, Nicaragua is no different from one from Oregon or from a farm ten miles from your home, assuming each was raised in healthy soil and so on. The problem arises when we consider sustainability and the very practical matter of transporting that apple to your home.
Foods that are transported long distances are less likely to be equally ripe and fresh. Fruit that is to be transported long distances will likely be picked earlier in the ripening cycle so that it will not be over-ripe when it arrives at its destination. What is more, the carbon footprint of an apple that travels thousands of miles is necessarily greater than that of an apple that you buy at the farm and then take home. The notion of a carbon footprint is normally applied to humans or groups of humans, but our point here is that transporting food necessarily contributes to environmental deterioration as well as contributing to the deterioration of the food itself.
Viewed in this way, the apple from ten miles away may look a lot better. If the farmer avoids pesticides and the soil is reasonably rich, the local apple picked when ripe will be your best bet. But what if instead of a relatively small apple orchard, the farm in question has hundreds or thousands of acres of apple trees that are maintained using mechanized techniques so that trucks or airplanes apply pesticide sprays and powders at regular intervals? Now your local apple doesn’t look so good, does it?
Research has shown that conventionally grown produce has only about 83% of the nutritional value of the organic equivalent. What’s more, rats fed an organic diet fared better than other rats fed the same foods of non-organic origin.
Farming on a smaller scale
One of the primary differences between locally grown and distantly grown food is that you yourself have the option of inspecting the farm. Or you can rely on the sticker “certified organic” to do that inspection for you. Farming in the United States has become an operation performed increasingly on a large scale. Even family farms seem more likely to be large, industrial-scale farms these days. To some degree, this is an inevitable result of consumers’s priorities. The average consumer is probably still more concerned with the price of the apple than with its pedigree or nutritional content. In the United States, we have become accustomed to our food being relatively cheap, and the food price inflation of recent years has been a scary experience for most of us.
At the same time, it is easy to see that as the scale of the operation becomes larger, the involvement of the farmer with any individual element becomes drastically reduced. A farmer with a dozen hens will likely recognize them all and might even give them names. A farmer with a thousand hens or more isn’t even going to interact with them all directly. It is easy to see why those who are concerned with the fruits of the farmer’s labors favor farming on a smaller, more personal scale.
Having said our piece (for the time being, at least) on the issues involved in the way our food is raised and distributed, let us go right to the main subject here: where you can find sources of meat, dairy, poultry and produce that inspire confidence in the nutrition you will receive.
And the winners are…
One of the organizations that emphasizes healthful local sources of food is the Weston A. Price Foundation. Weston A. Price was a dentist who spent his vacations traveling the world and studying the traditional diets of indigenous peoples. He reasoned that the best way to determine what constituted a healthy diet was to examine people who enjoyed good health and see what they ate. The foundation that bears his name was founded by Sally Fallon, a writer and nutrition researcher, and Mary G. Enig, PhD, a nutritionist and expert on fatty acids (lipid biochemistry). Enig, the Foundation’s vice president, has authored over 60 technical publications and serves as President of the Maryland Nutritionists Association.
The second, Eat Fat, Lose Fat: The Healthy Alternative to Trans Fats might be considered a manifesto for the nutritionally impaired. It not only informs the reader on the principles of nutrition embraced by the Weston A. Price Foundation, it contains a wealth of recipes, including how to make your own condiments and such healthful tonics as ginger beer and Kombucha. The more standard fare of the everyday diet is not neglected either, but enhanced.
We highly recommend visiting the Weston A. Price website. It is full of information and links and you can find out there how to join or start a local chapter, which will enable you to obtain organic food delivered to your area by an organic farmer. One of the primary goals of the Foundation is to make raw (unpasteurized) milk, butter and cream available to its members. If you’ve never had coffee with real (raw) cream, we highly recommend trying it. You will probably never resort to Half and Half again, except in emergencies.
We have found the organic meats available through sources we contacted via Weston A. Price chapters to be the best meats we have eaten. The commercially available product—including those we’ve purchased at Whole Foods—simply did not come close in overall quality.
To find a family farm near you or to explore the local farmer’s markets—care to start your own?—check out localharvest.org. Here you can also find a list of local farms participating in Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs) which allows you to establish a relationship with a farm to receive or pick up weekly deliveries of groceries during the growing season. You can also find lists of farmer’s markets, restaurants and co-ops in your area and other useful information. This site belongs on your bookmark list unless you grow all your own organic food yourself. Even then, if you ever like to eat out, this site will tell you where you can go to find food that is up to your standards.
The USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service also maintains an online list of local farmer’s markets you can peruse. This site is not so user-friendly as the local harvest site mentioned above. However, it does provide additional information and we list it for the sake of completeness.
Beef the old-fashioned way
For those who want to sample grass-fed beef and haven’t yet found a local source, check out Tallgrass Beef, which supplies grass-fed beef by mail order. We can’t say we’ve tried it—we’ve found a local source for naturally raised beef, pork and poultry—but this looks like the real deal. We were lucky enough to grow up with grandparents who raised livestock the old-fashioned way, and we think it’s the only way to go. The quality and taste of the meats we obtain direct from the farm simply is not like anything we’ve found in a store. And since grass-fed, free-range livestock provide meats much higher in vitamins, minerals and omega-3s, they’re much healthier, too. You simply can’t beat it.
Remember that the spirit of organic farming is really more important than the USDA certification. A local farm that you can see for yourself uses de facto organic farming techniques may serve you better than a certified farm hundreds of miles off.
And what better time than the week of Earth Day to make a commitment to better health for yourself and your family through eating more wholesome, sustainable food? That is the best way to support the spirit of Earth Day year ’round.
It is one of history’s greatest ironies that had Richard Nixon not run afoul of the Watergate scandal, Americans might long ago have obtained universal health care. But thanks to Watergate, Nixon found himself on the path to impeachment and resigned his office. His “sweeping new program” for “comprehsive health insurance” lay dead on the table.
It is another of history’s ironies that Nixon’s successor, President Jimmy Carter, did not have the clout to push through a similar program. We recall sitting with a friend in a bar in New Jersey the same night that John Lennon was shot. A German was expounding on an issue we had never considered before.
“The thing you have to understand about American presidents,” he intoned in his Teutonic accent, “is that they always do the opposite of what you expect them to do. It was Nixon who opened the door to China, and Kennedy and Johnson who got us into the Vietnam war.”
He was claiming, in effect, that a Democrat could get away with sponsoring a program or course of action that, were a Republican to attempt it, would arouse cries of “Nazism.” And a Republican—such as Nixon—is more likely to be successful pushing through a program that, were a Democrat to attempt it, would be called “socialized medicine.”
A tale of two presidents
We happen to think that he was right. And as a consequence, both Jimmy Carter and Hilary Clinton were doomed in their attempts to change our healthcare system. We personally were opposed to Hilary’s attempt and wonder if it is the times that have changed, or have we merely begun to see through the smokescreens that hid the truth from our eyes in former years?
Certainly we have become wiser by experience. We no longer view with suspicion government-sponsored health insurance. In fact, along with a growing majority of healthcare professionals, we have come to see it as the only realistic recourse for a system that is badly broken. Treating health care as a privilege available only to the few who can afford it is simply not a reasonable course of action, in our opinion. We would hope that a humane approach to health care would be an acceptable alternative to a majority of Americans.
We should mention too that we are entirely sympathetic to those who fear that government involvement might bring lowered health care standards. Indeed, we would heartily agree were it not for the fact that private industry has already set the bar so low that even the government can provide better bang for the buck.
Like many conservatives, we wax queasy when others speak of “Medicare for all” as if Medicare were some sort of laudable standard for heath care. Indeed, it is not. There is much to be improved in Medicare, and most of the incursions by Congress into that realm in recent years have been disastrous. (Investigate Medicare Part D if you doubt us.)
Everybody in, nobody out
But getting back to the stated theme of this piece, the essence of a single-payer system is the motto, “everybody in, nobody out.” This is the crux of the matter. When everyone—congressman, senator, doctor, lawyer, president, tax-payer, homeless war veteran—becomes entitled to the same health care, we think government health care standards will markedly improve. Certainly the care meted out by Veterans Administration hospitals is no standard to emulate for the rest of us. But who more deserves the kind of coverage and care afforded to Federal employees and elected officials than those who gave their bodies to defend those same exalted healthcare standards while defending our freedoms? Should we deny any veteran—whether or not she can now afford a home—the very best health care?
We think not. But our system does, daily. And this is unfair.
Health care for patients, not profits
Unfortunately, those who stand to profit from the status quo—mainly health insurance and pharmaceutical companies—have sought to address the discussion of this issue by kicking up dust. They have filled town meetings with loud lackeys who seek to block meaningful discussion.
But this does not mean that the rest of us cannot both study and discuss the issues. The billions of dollars of industry profits are not fiction and they are not funny. If that money were going towards health care in a single-payer system, we would all be receiving better care without higher taxes.
Keep in mind that those industry profits are paid for by those of us who pay out for health care, whether through health insurance premiums for policies we don’t use or through emergency-room visits that we pay for out of our own pockets. If you pay any money at all towards health care, whether you use the healthcare system or not, you are supporting it. Your taxes go towards Medicare and Medicaid, systems for people that private insurers do not cover because it is not in their best economic interest to do so.
Insurance coverage for the rest of us
A government system that cares for everyone, on the other hand, would operate the way insurance companies should in theory, but don’t in practice. That is, the premiums paid by the healthy would go to pay for the needs of those who are sick. Most of us are lucky enough to start out our lives healthy, though most of us gradually develop more need for health care later in life.
Real insurance systems are designed to deal with these disparities among individuals and could do so quite well, we think, were not billions of dollars annually drained from the coffers to pad the pockets of health-insurance CEOs.
A Harris poll taken last fall showed that only 1 in 14 Americans trusts health insurance companies. Yet, Obama and the Democrats in Congress seem to be trying to put together a system that everyone—including Republicans and the insurance companies—will feel good about. We think that goal is as impossible as it is unwarranted. So long as some of those billions in excess profits floating around the health care industry are donated to politicians to get them to support the existing system, there will be those who are not aligned with our common interests. We can’t expect them to be happy about eliminating all that waste when they are the beneficiaries. Obama himself has received massive amounts of money from the healthcare industry, which might explain his recent restraint in pushing for a single-payer program.
Eliminating unnecessary costs
costs
We need a system that provides everyone good and equitable health care. That should be our first priority. Dr. Sidney Wolfe, a physician and acting president of the non-partisan group Public Citizen, has stated repeatedly that eliminating the current healthcare industry would save $4 trillion over the next 10 years. That’s in contrast to offers from the health insurance industry—now faced with possible extinction—to save up to $2 trillion in costs over the same period.
Why would we want to pay an additional $2 trillion to sustain current inequities? What is intrinsically desirable about paying high premiums and high deductibles for health care, much less having a significant portion of our population under- or un-insured? Are we really afraid that going to the doctor will surpass going to the mall as a form of family entertainment in our society?
It is time to set aside emotion in dealing with this issue. Shouting and name-calling are simply not constructive. Now more than ever, Americans need to focus on what is truly desirable in a healthcare system and to stop thinking in terms of what we have done in the past. We have the opportunity to create something new, a system that is designed to serve all our people. We should not waver from that goal just because it will require some politicians to roll up their sleeves and do some work.
Stop the interference
“There’s no way we are ever going to have good health insurance for everyone so long as there’s a health insurance industry in the way, obstructing care,” says Dr. Wolfe.
“In Canada, you can go to any doctor, any hospital you like,” explains Dr. David Himmelstein of Harvard University, founder of Physicians for a National Health Program. “Canadians have better choice than we do,” he adds, while “[they] spend half as much per person as we do on health care.” Himmelstein admits that if we wanted to cut our healthcare expenditures in half to match the Canadians, we would have to put up with longer waits than we do now. But, he says, if we are willing to maintain our current per capita level of spending on health care, “we could cover everybody with terrific access to care” and still not have to pay copays, deductibles, or insurance premiums. (In other words, our health care would be covered by our current level of taxes and would be better care than most of us receive now.)
His statements have been confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO). These are solid figures, not empty promises.
Keep your doctor, keep your hospital
And note that there is nothing here about having to give up your favorite doctor or be refused procedures your doctor legitimately thinks you need. That is one of the primary reasons distinguished physicians such as Drs. Wolfe and Himmelstein are behind single-payer. It simply promises us a better system of healthcare for a given amount of money.
Perhaps the best part is that we can eliminate thereby interference in healthcare decisions by non-doctors who are simply trying to amass profits. Insurance companies currently hire hundreds of individuals whose job it is to say “no” to legitimate healthcare decisions made by doctors simply because the insurance company would have to pay to cover those benefits. In a healthcare system in which doctors have the final say on medical decisions, patients are better served. In such a system, doctors are not trying to set aside money to be paid out as profits to CEOs and shareholders, they are simply trying to provide healthcare to their patients.
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is a cookbook that challenges what you may think you know about nutrition, drawing upon the research of Weston A. Price and more recent experts such as Enig.
might be considered a manifesto for the nutritionally impaired. It not only informs the reader on the principles of nutrition embraced by the Weston A. Price Foundation, it contains a wealth of recipes, including how to make your own condiments and such healthful tonics as ginger beer and Kombucha. The more standard fare of the everyday diet is not neglected either, but enhanced.
