Quotes about Health Care industry from the world's top natural health / natural living authors
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 "Much lip service is paid to the importance of prevention, but the health care industry, being an industry, stands to profit more handsomely from new drugs and procedures to treat chronic diseases than it does from a wholesale change in the way people eat. Cynical? Perhaps. You could argue that the medical community's willingness to treat the broad contours of the Western diet as a given is a reflection of its realism rather than its greed. "- Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (Get the book.) "So we turn for salvation to the health care industry. Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick. Doctors have gotten really good at keeping people with heart disease alive, and now they're hard at work on obesity and diabetes. Much more so than the human body, capitalism is marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into new business opportunities: diet pills, heart bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery." - Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (Get the book.) "The mainstream media is full of advertisements for new gadgets and drugs for diabetics, and the health care industry is gearing up to meet the surging demand for heart bypass operations (80 percent of diabetics will suffer from heart disease), dialysis, and kidney transplantation. At the supermarket checkout you can thumb copies of a new lifestyle magazine, Diabetic Living. Diabetes is well on its way to becoming normalized in the West—recognized as a whole new demographic and so a major marketing opportunity." - Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (Get the book.) |
 "Scully announced that he had accepted a position with a law firm that, according to the Times, represents many companies in the health care industry affected by the new prescription drug bill, and is a registered lobbyist for Johnson and Johnson and the National Association for Home Care.
An article published in Health Affairs in February 2004 shows that once coverage for prescription drugs for Medicare patients becomes effective, prescription drug costs are likely to increase even more than predicted."- John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.) "As the leaders of the Commonwealth Foundation wrote in Health Affairs at the end of 2003, "The inability of the health care industry to improve care sufficiently on its own and to increase the value that Americans receive for their dollars is an indication of private market failure." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.) |
 "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. Some hospitals have put in systems only to pull the plug when doctors rebelled. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles, installed a thirty-four-million-dollar computerized physician ordering system to streamline drug prescriptions and reduce error rates."- Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Maybe that's because talking about costs means talking about overtreatment, and bringing up overtreatment means facing the fact that reducing unnecessary, wasteful care would lead inevitably to a smaller health care industry. The seven hundred billion dollars we currently spend on unnecessary care doesn't just go down the drain—it goes toward paying for drugs and medical devices, which are manufactured by American workers. It helps pay the salaries of doctors, hospital administrators, nurses, orderlies, and pharmacists." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "And nobody would want to put thousands of people who are currently employed by the health care industry out of a job, unless it was absolutely necessary But it is necessary, because the alternative to rightsizing health care is worse. Some economists, notably Harvard's David Cutler, claim that we should stop worrying so much about rising costs, that we can afford to spend 20 percent of the gross domestic product on health care, because there's so much "good stuff," as he puts it, to be gained from medicine. Besides, says Cutler, it's too hard to get rid of the bad stuff." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) |
| "But though fast food may be good business for the health care industry, the cost to society—an estimated $250 billion a year in diet-related health care costs and rising rapidly—cannot be sustained indefinitely. An American born in 2000 has a 1 in 3 chance of developing diabetes in his lifetime; the risk is even greater for a Hispanic American or African American. A diagnosis of diabetes subtracts roughly twelve years from one's life and living with the condition incurs medical costs of $13,000 a year (compared with $2,500 for someone without diabetes)." - Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (Get the book.) |
| "Growth industry
Medicine itself was also setting out on a new course, one that would lead to the dramatic expansion of the health care industry, to more cases like Orabilex, and to many of the problems that would reach crisis proportions by the turn of the next century. In 1965, Congress passed the Medicare Act, which for the first time provided the elderly with free hospital insurance and coverage for physicians' fees." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) |
| "THE PRICE OF BLIND FAITH
In 1998, the President's Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the health care industry provided a concise statement of the proper goal of a nation's health care system: "The purpose of the health care system is to reduce continually the burden of illness, injury, and disability, and to improve the health status and function of the people of the United States." About 70 percent of the health care in the United States is directed toward meeting this goal." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.) |
 "And nobody would want to put thousands of people who are currently employed by the health care industry out of a job, unless it was absolutely necessary But it is necessary, because the alternative to rightsizing health care is worse. Some economists, notably Harvard's David Cutler, claim that we should stop worrying so much about rising costs, that we can afford to spend 20 percent of the gross domestic product on health care, because there's so much "good stuff," as he puts it, to be gained from medicine. Besides, says Cutler, it's too hard to get rid of the bad stuff."- Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Growth industry Medicine itself was also setting out on a new course, one that would lead to the dramatic expansion of the health care industry, to more cases like Orabilex, and to many of the problems that would reach crisis proportions by the turn of the next century. In 1965, Congress passed the Medicare Act, which for the first time provided the elderly with free hospital insurance and coverage for physicians' fees." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "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. Some hospitals have put in systems only to pull the plug when doctors rebelled. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles, installed a thirty-four-million-dollar computerized physician ordering system to streamline drug prescriptions and reduce error rates." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) |
 "Finally, the health care industry plays a big role in validating and perpetuating psychosomatic disorders. As I mentioned earlier, medical school training and, therefore, medical practice does not understand or acknowledge psychosomatic disorders. Thus, physicians can only explain pain based on the structural model. This has several important implications. First, treatment strategies can only be derived from this model. Second, validating one's psychosomatic pain disorder as a structural problem reinforces the reason the pain is there in the first place, to distract one's unconscious emotions."- John E. Sarno, M.D., The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders (Get the book.) |
| "Maybe that's because talking about costs means talking about overtreatment, and bringing up overtreatment means facing the fact that reducing unnecessary, wasteful care would lead inevitably to a smaller health care industry. The seven hundred billion dollars we currently spend on unnecessary care doesn't just go down the drain—it goes toward paying for drugs and medical devices, which are manufactured by American workers. It helps pay the salaries of doctors, hospital administrators, nurses, orderlies, and pharmacists." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) |
 "Actually they are not deadbeats after all, but your neighbors, your friends, your relatives—people who have faced real hardship only to be fleeced by the banking This country industry, the health care industry, and the federal govern- cannot afford to ment. The average person filing for bankruptcy holds a job ^ material I but earns just $22,000 per year. Eighty-five percent of eld- . ^ ^ erly debtors file due to medical or job-related problems. , .
The Consumers Union states that single moms trying to SP""' ua Y poor, make ends meet make up a large portion of bankruptcies. John F."- David H. Rippe, Jared Rosen, The Flip: Turn Your World Around (Get the book.) |
 "My issue is with those companies in the health care industry whose shareholders demand higher and higher profits regardless of how they are attained. This creates extraordinary pressure — and a conflict of interest — for companies who profess to have the public good in mind, but are really beholden to the stockholders.
This brings us to the drug approval process."- Craig Pepin-Donat, The Big Fat Health and Fitness Lie (Get the book.) "Rather than create a viable model that actually benefits all Americans, our politicians, operating under the narcotic influence of health care industry lobbyists armed with tons of cash, have allowed the creation of the costliest health care system in the world. Despite the high cost, the World Health Organization ranked the U.S. 37th out of 191 countries. We are not getting what we paid for, or we are paying for the wrong things. It is enough to give one a migraine." - Craig Pepin-Donat, The Big Fat Health and Fitness Lie (Get the book.) "The health care industry's solution to ADHD is to prescribe antidepressant drugs that have a history of causing "suicidal attempts and other self-injurious destructive behaviors." It is shameful. Studies and real-world examples in schools show that eliminating these harmful additives from children's diets results in clearer focus, higher test scores and fewer classroom disruptions. So the next time your "hyperactive" kid starts to get out of control, don't reach for the Ritalin, look at his or her food intake." - Craig Pepin-Donat, The Big Fat Health and Fitness Lie (Get the book.) |
 "Although direct contact with sunlight has prevented cancer and many other diseases for thousands of years, it is discouraged and even warned against by today's health care industry.
As is so often the case, the purely symptom-oriented medical theories fall short in explaining the causes of disease. In fact, they are likely to make you ill. Beware of any advice given to you by any doctor, company, or organization who wants to protect you against a supposed threat while at the same time trying to sell you something else, such as sunscreen lotions.
Pittas—Watch Out!"- Andreas Moritz, Timeless Secrets of Health & Rejuvenation: Unleash The Natural Healing Power That Lies Dormant Within You (Get the book.) |
 "Besides knowing her own body burden load of the chemicals — three different types of phthalates were in her body at the time of her biomonitoring test — she had been following the science on phthalates for years in her job as executive director of Health Care Without Harm, an international coalition that works on reducing the environmental impact of the health care industry.
The group was founded in 1996 after the US Environmental Protection Agency named medical waste incinerators as the leading source of dioxin, one of the most potent carcinogens."- Stacy Malkan, Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry (Get the book.) |
 "Savvy as they are on health care, it's hard to believe that the economic powers of our health care industry do not realize, deep in their hearts, that a single-payer type of universal coverage, with "one risk pool," is what America needs. A parallel situation might be that of the tobacco industry, which for years denied that smoking caused cancer—even though they knew all along that it did. Like the tobacco industry, the health care industry knows that it is to their own economic interests to milk the system for as long as they can."- Bob LeBow, M.D., M.P.H., Health Care Meltdown: Confronting The Myths and Fixing Our Failing System (Get the book.) |
 "The Investors' Guide to Health Maintenance Organizations" provided an introduction to the far-flung health care industry and assurances that "effectively managed H.M.O.'s are good investments."
HHS sponsored workshops in New York, Washington, and Chicago to show investors the profit-making potential of health care. Frank H. Seubold, director of HHS s office of HMOs, said that federal funding had proven the feasibility of HMOs. "Now it's time to shift gears," he said."- Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business (Get the book.) "But in the health care industry, that information is difficult, often impossible, to come by. Health care providers can—and do—charge one .4 " I customer five times, in some cases even ten times, as much as another. At least in the supermarket you have a choice of whether to pay the going price. When it comes to the cancer treatment you need to live or the emergency care your sick child requires in the middle of the night, you have no choice. Welcome to health care in America, a system in which the person you work for, or don't, determines what you pay for medical services." - Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business (Get the book.) "He or she is either suffering from a condition that did not exist before they came in contact with the health care industry, or they're dead. We will use "mistake" and "error" as broad, inclusive terms to mean that someone did something they were not supposed to do. It's not a matter of casting blame. Many more mistakes can be attributed to systems errors than to human frailties. Fix the system, and those mistakes and deaths that follow are prevented. Health care has become impossibly fragmented." - Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business (Get the book.) "The diversity of participants in the health care industry and the complexity of their relationships with each other have frustrated the voluntary adoption of industry standards." Doctors and hospitals deal with the consequences of this every day. For them, it means spending more time and money on administration and paperwork, and less time on patients. It also markedly increases the risk of patient mistakes. OVERRULING THE PHYSICIANS Musette Batas was six months pregnant when she suddenly felt an all-too-familiar pain." - Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business (Get the book.) |
| "You listen to your body because it knows best; you are not a statistic or a population average but a unique person with an individual genetic endowment and a very personal health history requiring personalized attention. The health care industry, being geared to mass production as the car industry, understandably finds that an inconvenience. Living things are characterized by diversity; even our sufferings are not created equal.
Without the birth of fundamental doubt and the growth of critical thinking health is not possible, nor is advance in medicine. Doubt is the beginning of the cure." - Helke Ferrie, Dispatches From the War Zone of Environmental Health (Get the book.) |
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