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Quotes about Medicare from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"As a category, mental health issues are searched for more often than immunizations, dental health, medicare or Medicaid, sexual health information, or problems with drugs and alcohol.29 In July 2006, of the ten most popular online searches for pharmaceutical and medical products, six concerned psychiatric drugs or psychiatric disease. (They were, in order, Lexapro, Cymbalta, Zoloft, Wellbutrin [an antianxiety agent], Effexor, and the illness of depression itself.)30 Among people who have visited a medication site, depression is by far the most researched medical condition, with 2." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.) "The real problem for Big Pharma is not declining profit margins or loss of political clout—although the Democratic victories in late 2006 sent shockwaves through the industry, for fear that the government would negotiate lower prices of drugs for medicare. The real concern is the lack of new and innovative drugs. Only twenty new drugs were approved by the FDA in 2005, as compared to fifty-three in 1996.65 The "pipeline problem," as it is called, speaks to the serious lack of creativity on the part of the industry." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.) "Collectively, the entitlement programs of Social Security ($488 billion), Medicaid ($300 billion), and medicare ($176 billion) now make up almost half of the federal budget. Feeling entided to all this, we think we are also entided to happiness." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"Costs medicare less rhat way, too!" She glared at me, readjusted her expression, and continued. "I saw what your clinic did for Bill a few years back. Near at death's door, now he's out working the yard, fixing the roof, and he's 3 years older than I am. When I first got this congestive heart failure 5 or 6 years ago, he told me to come see you, but medicare won't cover your type of treatment and the co-op won't either. Bill says he's tired of me complaining about not sleeping flat and if I'm too cheap he'll pay for it himself." - Jonathan V. Wright, M.D. and Alan R. Gaby, M.D., Natural Medicine, Optimal Wellness: The Patient's Guide to Health and Healing (Get the book.)

"But in 2006, at age sixty-one, he had four more years until he was covered by the federal medicare program. And so he continued to serve up lunches of steak sandwiches with potatoes on the side for the reasonable price of $6 to afford health insurance that was anything but reasonable. In 2006 the monthly premium for him and his wife, Mary, was $957, as much as he paid to rent the small restaurant on Seventh Street and up 27 percent from the year before. "They're killing me," he said, "and everybody else who has to pay for his own. If I quit work, I wouldn't be able to pay the bill." - Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (Get the book.)

"David Walker, who is the nation's top accountant—the comptroller general of the United States— said the following about the new medicare plan. "The prescription drug bill was probably the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s." He perceives it as the most powerful force driving the United States toward bankruptcy. With one stroke of the pen, Walker says, the federal government increased existing medicare obligations nearly 40 percent over the next 75 years. " - Andreas Moritz, Timeless Secrets of Health & Rejuvenation: Unleash The Natural Healing Power That Lies Dormant Within You (Get the book.)

"The fees paid by medicare for coronary artery bypass surgery, for instance, range from about $26,000 for nonteaching hospitals to between $30,000 and $40,000 for academic medical centers. According to an article in the Boston Globe, the profit margin on these procedures is more than 40 percent. Despite the aura of medical progress and public service, this is business, pure and simple. Finally, Dr. Kevin Grumbach wrote an editorial that accompanied the article documenting the oversupply of neonatologists and neonatal intensive care beds in many parts of the United States." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"The 1997 Balanced Budget Act requires Medicaid and medicare Programs to reimburse hospitals for what is called "reasonable care." Thus, although it was never planned that way, emergency departments have emerged as "the ultimate safety net for those whom other providers turn away,"4 as well as "the most important and least recognized federal health care safety net program."5 The most frequent visits to emergency departments were from the traditionally disadvantaged population.6 Those 75 and older, and African Americans, had a use rate about 75% higher than that for whites." - Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea, What If Medicine Disappeared? (Get the book.) "One-year mortality among medicare beneficiaries has been reported as high as 4.6%.24 Cigarette smoking and obesity are generally conceptualized as a personal behavioral problems. In a limited sense, this is obviously true. Changing personal behavior can and does benefit one's health. Such change should be encouraged in myriad ways. Yet some ctitics have gone further, suggesting that personal responsibility for health should be imposed by outside authority." - Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea, What If Medicine Disappeared? (Get the book.)

"We are also paying a lot of money for health care we may never even receive, as a result of the rising costs of individual health insurance, health-care benefits that drive companies into the ground, expensive medicare drug benefits, and uncontrollable Medicaid costs. Many of the aforementioned expenses are related to expensive drugs that we often don't need, that are no more effective than older alternatives, or that are simply not as valuable as drug companies make them out to be." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.) "A study of children in Tennessee's Managed Care program for medicare showed that the number of prescriptions for antipsychotics doubled in a five-year period ending in 2001. During this time, one in every one hundred children became a new user of an antipsychotic. The proportion of atypical (newer and more expensive) antipsychotics went from 7% to 96% of antipsychotic prescriptions. The number of children treated for psychotic disorders or Tourette's did not change; the increase was accounted for by children treated with attention deficit disorder, conduct disorder, and affective disorders." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.)

"Medicare recipients. The American Cancer Society was at the heels of health insurers to the same end. The general consensus has evolved to cut to the chase, to forego fobt and flexible sigmoidoscopy and go directly to colonoscopy with a periodicity based on some guess at the dwell time. The zeal is such that the medical community is downplaying the iatrogenic downsides. Fortunately, a paper has appeared that makes the case for sparing all average-risk people under age fifty this right of passage. Fortunately, as well, the 2002 recommendations of the U.S." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"Medicare system [11]. Nutrition appears to be a primary means to substantially reduce the burden of age-related cataract; it has been estimated that if preventive measures could delay cataract by only 10 years, the visual and surgical burden would be cut in half [12]. Cataracts develop as opaque regions in the lens of the eye (Fig. 1) as a result of either acute metabolic insults or, Vitreous gel FIGURE 1 Anatomical features of the human eye. (Courtesy of National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health.) slowly, as a result of the gradual accumulation of damage with age." - Ann M. Coulston and Carol J. Boushey, Nutrition in the Prevention and Treatment of Disease (Get the book.)

"Shockingly, the number of people on medicare being treated simultaneously for four or more medical conditions has doubled from 1987 to 2002.30 During this same period, the rate of obesity in the United States also doubled-a one to one correlation.31 Another study of 500,000 "healthy" nonsmoking people aged 50 to 70 over a ten-year period recently found a direct correlation between the degree of overweight and early death, with the more excess pounds, the sooner the grim reaper appears." - Dr. Steven R. Gundry, Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution: Turn Off the Genes That Are Killing You - And Your Waistline - And Drop the Weight for Good (Get the book.)

"Revise Medicaid and medicare regulations to provide incentives to health care providers for nutrition and obesity counseling and other interventions that meet specified standards of cost and effectiveness. Transportation and urban development ?Provide funding and other incentives for bicycle paths, recreation centers, swimming pools, parks, and sidewalks. ?Develop and provide guides for cities, zoning authorities, and urban planners on ways to modify residential neighborhoods, workplaces, and shopping centers to promote physical activity. Taxes ?" - Ann M. Coulston and Carol J. Boushey, Nutrition in the Prevention and Treatment of Disease (Get the book.)

"By the middle of this century, spending on medicare alone will consume an estimated 40 percent of the U.S. budget. This is unsustainable, and its effects are already showing up in a variety of painful ways. Even as I write, General Motors—once the biggest, most powerful corporation in the entire world—is announcing draconian plant closings and workforce cuts that will eliminate more than 30,000 jobs in North America over the next few years." - Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D., Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease (Get the book.)

"Analysis of medicare data documents that excess spending and excessive care transfers considerable wealth but does nothing for the well-being or satisfaction of the elderly. All they gain is the hazards of iatrogenicity. Beware of medical schemes that are offered to prolong your life. For octogenarians, the goals of self-effectualness, independence, interaction, and comfort are primary. Besides, the goal of prolongation of life by medical interventions for anything but acute intercurrent events is even more ephemeral at eighty than it was at sixty." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"At the end of a ten-year phase-in, providers that were not participating in an organized, accountable P4P plan would no longer receive reimbursement for caring for chronically ill medicare patients. They would be paid for emergency services only. Fewer than 1 o percent of hospitals in the country have instituted electronic medical records, and the health care industry as a whole spends less than 3 percent of its revenue on information technology, far less than the 10 percent that other information-intensive industries, like the airlines, spend." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "With an incentive from medicare to organize care, and their share of the savings, they would have a reason to do it. One of the problems facing hospitals that do want to install electronic medical records is ensuring their system will be compatible with the IT that doctors in the surrounding community install. There are at least twenty-five different proprietary electronic medical-records systems in various stages of development, but no standard exists to ensure they can talk to one another." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Between 1970 and 1975, medicare reimbursements to hospitals doubled, and then doubled again by 1980, far faster than anybody had anticipated at the start. Total health care spending went up an average of 12.7 percent a year throughout the 1970s, in large measure because hospitals had no reason to be efficient and every reason to run up the bill, which they did by keeping patients around for as long as possible and by buying equipment and expanding the number of beds and staff." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"The ecological study of the Seattle and Connecticut medicare cohorts was by Lu-Yao et al. (2002). An editorial by Patrick Walsh accompanied the Scandinavian experiment (Walsh 2002). Walsh, a urologist on the Johns Hopkins faculty, pioneered a "nerve-sparing" prostatectomy that reduced the dismal complication rate of earlier approaches and drove the procedure to the forefront of options. His quarrel with the Scandinavian trial is that "nerve-sparing" was not routine, and that patients older than sixty-five are the most likely to have complications." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"In addition to the imposition of interest atop the amount demanded, HHS has the authority to refer the debt for action by the IRS, causing the IRS to withhold tax refunds, and the authority to suspend medicare reimbursement payments. Moreover, HHS can place the accused physician on a national database accessible to insurance companies, licensing authorities in the states and the general public, displaying the unadjudicated charges against the physician without regard (or liability) for their defamatory impact." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.)

"I now have a $2 million extortion attempt by medicare simply because I use alternative therapies at my clinic. "Are there risks to other physicians that might prevent them also from speaking up?" Dr. Whitaker: "Yes, there are risks, and those risks keep physicians from speaking out against Big Pharma even if they're inclined to do so. You wonder why conventional doctors are lockstep in their scorn of natural therapies and dependence on pharmaceuticals. All you have to do is look at what happens to physicians who step outside of the norm." - Kenneth W Thomas, Ron Gilbert, Gerd Schaller, Side Effects: The Hidden Agenda of the Pharmaceutical Drug Cartel (Get the book.) "Co-pays for Medigap policies (policies designed to cover medical expenses not covered by medicare) are tending not to cover drug costs, or have higher deductibles and less coverage.78 The focus of the AARP lobby is to get the government to pay more for drugs for 76 Kathy Jones, "Drug Prices Increase Under Part D Plan," Families USA, June 21,2006 77 AARP, http://www.aarp.org/research/health/drugs/aresearch-import-656-DD77. html 78 http://www.aarp.org/research/health/drugs/aresearch-import-656-DD77.html the elderly and to encourage government oversight and control of drug pricing." - Kenneth W Thomas, Ron Gilbert, Gerd Schaller, Side Effects: The Hidden Agenda of the Pharmaceutical Drug Cartel (Get the book.) "Citizens for a Better medicare," "United Senior Associations," "Consumer Alliance" and others have been accused of being financed by the pharmaceutical industry, while giving the impression of being independent, a grass-root-organization. At the same time, lobbyists included 26 former members of Congress, and another 342, who had been on congressional staffs or otherwise connected with government officials. Some lobbyists, such as Scott Hatch, were actually related to members of Congress. Scott is the son of Senator Orrin Hatch." - Kenneth W Thomas, Ron Gilbert, Gerd Schaller, Side Effects: The Hidden Agenda of the Pharmaceutical Drug Cartel (Get the book.)

"Elected officials have proven themselves willing to sell their governing power to industry either directly (as in the case of the medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003) or indirectly as when members do nothing (other than complain in hearings or in letters to the agencies concerning indus- try favoritism and related internal corruption) to stop industry takeover of regulatory commissions and agencies." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.) "Through that system, physicians accused of improperly billing medicare are presumed guilty until proven innocent, are forced on pain of exorbitant interest penalties, withholding of tax refunds, and blacklisting on a national database, to pay the amounts in dispute long before a final and binding order, and are made to seek vindication in a five layered appellate review system virtually guaranteed to exhaust their resources in legal fees before they are ever permitted to seek vindication in a court of law." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.)

"In fact, statistics show that antipsychotic medications are being prescribed for one quarter of the medicare beneficiaries in nursing homes. In spite of the fact that these drugs should not be used to treat dementia in the absence of a psychotic disorder, only one quarter of elderly patients on antipsychotics actually have a psychotic disorder. In other words, the majority of those antipsychotic prescriptions currently being written are inappropriate for elderly patients without an indication for treatment with an antipsychotic, namely hallucinations or delusion." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.)

"Medicare's P4P plan for hospitals won't either, because it focuses too narrowly on individual aspects of a web of events that must happen in order for a hospital to care properly for a patient. Focusing on a few discrete measures is like saying you are going to make a building earthquake-proof by bolting the furniture to the floor, or reform Social Security by switching to a cheaper brand of ink for writing the checks. The question is, how can we move the five thousand hospitals and eight hundred thousand physicians in this country to organize themselves into cooperative groups?" - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"It is the system used by medical insurance companies and medicare to decide who gets paid. Doctors have to "name" the disease they are treating based on the ICD-9 to collect their money from these agencies! The book contains the name of every single disease known. There are more than 12,000 diseases listed. The ICD-9 gives the impression that all these diseases are separate and distinct. There is only one problem. They are not. A very few fundamental problems exist that explain nearly every disease. It doesn't matter what specialty your disease falls under." - Mark Hyman MD, The UltraMind Solution: Fix Your Broken Brain by Healing Your Body First (Get the book.)

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