Quotes about Health Care reform from the world's top natural health / natural living authors
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 "All of which points to one of several weaknesses in the new health care reform movement called "consumer-driven health care." Backed largely by political conservatives and free marketeers, consumer-driven health care is aimed at improving quality and bringing down health care costs by putting more decisions in the hands of patients. In consumer-driven plans, insurers offer lower health insurance premiums in return for high deductibles, on the order of four thousand dollars a year."- Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "This changes the way we ought to be thinking about health care reform. What we want are efficient hospitals, places where patients can be sure they will get high-quality care, care that gives them the procedures and tests and drugs they need—and doesn't give them what they don't need—for the most reasonable cost. That's what markets are supposed to do—create efficiency." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "D7 health care reform had only to point to theVA system and say the words "socialized medicine" to scare Americans into sticking with the status quo. Back then, the VHA's bad reputation was well deserved. Underfunded, overbed-ded, and poorly administered, it was a model of waste and inefficiency Workers were dispirited and patients neglected. In 1992, three decomposing bodies were discovered on the grounds of a veterans' medical center in Salem, Virginia. Two of the bodies were of men who had wandered off a few months earlier." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Most hospitals, writes Jack Wennberg, are the "Achilles' heel of health care reform: disorganized, dysfunctional systems that are neither aware of the problem [n]or capable of implementing strategies for fixing [it]." Getting hospitals like Garfield to act more like the Mayo Clinic will probably require a combination of rewards and punishment. Jack Wennberg proposes using the Mayo Clinic and other efficient hospital systems, like Intermoun-tain Healthcare and the VHA, as benchmarks, models that other hospitals will be encouraged to emulate with economic carrots and sticks." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Yet in politics, overtreatment is routinely left out of any discussion of health care reform. That's partly because getting rid of it smacks of rationing. But rationing is when you deny patients care that could potentially help them. Rationing is when you say to a patient with kidney failure that he can't have dialysis because dialysis is expensive and he's too old. Rationing is when you limit the number of MRI machines in order to discourage doctors from ordering an MRI test for a patient. But getting rid of overtreatment, care that's useless and potentially harmful?" - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "In 1993, the group began compiling data from around the country in order to help the Clinton administration plan health care reform. When reform fell through, the group started publishing their data in The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, selling it to hospitals and health plans to try to cover publication costs. By 1994, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a private organization with an interest in improving the quality of health care, began supporting the group with one million dollars annually." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "All of which points to one of several weaknesses in the new health care reform movement called "consumer-driven health care." Backed largely by political conservatives and free marketeers, consumer-driven health care is aimed at improving quality and bringing down health care costs by putting more decisions in the hands of patients. In consumer-driven plans, insurers offer lower health insurance premiums in return for high deductibles, on the order of four thousand dollars a year." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) |
 "Never before have private interests spent so much money so publicly to defeat an initiative launched by a President," states Thomas Scarlett in an article titled "Killing Health Care Reform" in Campaigns & Elections magazine.41
In 1993, Childs recalled, "The insurance industry was real nervous. Everybody was talking about health care reform. . . . We felt like we were looking down the barrel of a gun." Forming coalitions, he explained, is a way to "provide cover for your interest. We needed cover because we were going to be painted as the bad guy. You [also] get strength in numbers."- John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry (Get the book.) |
 "Although the Carter administration rejected Enthoven's proposal, his ideas were embraced by conservatives who saw in them a way to apply their own free-market, antigovernment theories to health care reform. After Reagan won the 1980 election, the stage was set to implement these ideas in the marketplace.
The nudge from Washington was all Wall Street needed to ignite an explosion of activity to convert nonprofit HMOs into investor-owned corporations. "Word of phenomenal growth and hefty profits has forecasters abuzz," gushed an article in National Journal. "- Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business (Get the book.) |
 "Many Americans feel that when and if we have basic health care reform, people who can afford it should be able to opt out of the system to get "extra" services. Part of this sentiment may come from the fears of people who are satisfied with their current insurance coverage and health care. They worry that a new "national" system may dilute out their benefits. This fear is one of the major stumbling blocks to health care reform. It was the primary reason that the promoters of a single-payer ballot initiative in Maryland changed their universal coverage plan to a multi-payer approach."- Bob LeBow, M.D., M.P.H., Health Care Meltdown: Confronting The Myths and Fixing Our Failing System (Get the book.) |
 "This new health care reform bill was aimed directly at reforming the practices and prosecution authority of the New York health department (OPMC), and passed the Senate in July 2004 by unanimous vote.
While inroads are being made on the state level to allow doctors and physicians the ability to offer CAM services to their patients, many professions are not addressed by any state licensing program."- Leslie Taylor, ND, The Healing Power of Rainforest Herbs: A Guide to Understanding and Using Herbal Medicinals (Get the book.) |
 "The top ten drug companies (which included European companies) had profits of nearly 25 percent of sales in 1990, and except for a dip at the time of President Bill Clinton's health care reform proposal, profits as a percentage of sales remained about the same for the next decade. (Of course, in absolute terms, as sales mounted, so did profits."- Marcia Angell, M.D., The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (Get the book.) |
 "It is consistent with health care reform that we have more primary care physicians that are willing to go into the underserved areas." With about half its practitioners in primary care, Anderson sees the tradition as uniquely in step with the health care reform movement.
Education
Today there are seventeen osteopathic medical schools, for which the AOA is the approving body. The AOA in turn is accredited by the U.S. Department of Education for this purpose. There are also about two hundred AOA-approved teaching hospitals."- William Collinge, The American Holistic Health Association Complete Guide to Alternative Medicine (Get the book.) |
 "TWO KINDS OF WORLD IMPROVERS
Can you really improve the world by telling it what to do? Or does it have to follow its own course to its own destination in its own good time?
We saw the two approaches to world improvement standing almost side by side one weekend in early 2005. The one on the silver screen wore a Nazi uniform. The other, in rural Normandy, wore the simple frock of a priest.
"I have devoted my entire life to making the world a better place," said Adolf Hitler, or words to that effect.
"But, mein Fuhrer," explained one of his generals, "Berlin is nearly surrounded."- William Bonner, Lila Rajiva, Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics (Agora Series) (Get the book.) |
 "Why has the debate about health care reform neglected public health?" asked public health leaders Phyllis Freeman and Anthony Robbins.575 "Health insurance is a necessity for every American. It buys medical services and avoids personal financial disaster. The ultimate purpose of health care reform as currently debated in the United States is to pay for insurance against the costs of illness. This narrow focus on sickness insurance misses opportunities to improve health, yet it is perfectly tuned to the concerns of the public."- Laurie Garrett, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health (Get the book.) |
| "The special-interest groups that promote this myth take every opportunity to exclude single-payer advocates from discussions of health care reform. They assert that we must have a "pluralistic" approach to health care reform, thereby assuring their hegemony. The American people, who have been exposed only to the rhetoric of the vested interests, have not had the opportunity to form any thoughtful consensus on the single-payer approach." - Bob LeBow, M.D., M.P.H., Health Care Meltdown: Confronting The Myths and Fixing Our Failing System (Get the book.) |
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