NaturalPedia > Health Care spending

Quotes about Health Care spending from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

 Email this page to a friend   |  Click here for FREE email alerts

"First, Americans take an unprecedented amount of prescription drugs, more than ten per person in 2002, a dollar amount approaching one-fifth of total health care spending in the United States. In 2001, prescription medicine expenses accounted for 18.5% of total health care spending in the United States. Second, the most commonly prescribed drug is Vicodin, which makes no contribution to mortality reduction. In 2003, 15.7 million Americans had used the substance, of whom 5 million—according to official estimates—abused it. Third, our most commonly prescribed drugs are ineffective." - Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea, What If Medicine Disappeared? (Get the book.)

"Together, the drug and device industries took in more than three hundred billion dollars in 2006, roughly 1 c percent of our total health care spending. Implantable devices, defibrillators, artificial knees, cardiac stents, and other bionic body parts amounted to thirty-six billion dollars. Spending on drugs and devices is the fastest-growing sector of health care costs. Outlays for drugs doubled between 199 c and 2003, owing in part to more prescriptions but also to rising prices, which went up 7.2 percent, nearly three times the inflation rate." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "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. Hospital expansion had already been encouraged by the Hill-Burton Act, passed in 1946, which provided funds to states to build new hospitals and expand existing ones." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "We devote nearly a third of our health care spending to administrative costs—paper pushing, in effect. In 1999, that amounted to $1,000 per capita. Canada's single-payer system, by contrast, was a model of efficiency, spending only about 16 percent of its health care dollars on administrative overhead, which means our system wasted nearly $160 billion. Then there's the $30 billion in after-tax profits earned by health insurance companies. As economist Henry J. Aaron puts it, "I look at the U.S." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"Based on health care spending in the United States being 42 percent higher than predicted by the median per-person expenditures in the other OECD countries (corrected for per-person GDP). Even 70 percent is an overstatement, though, because Americans' health is inferior to the health of the citizens of the other OECD countries. Fletcher received her treatment. The much-awaited results of five randomized trials of bone marrow transplantation for women with advanced breast cancer were presented. The four largest trials reported no benefit." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.) "They appeared to have solved the problem of rising health insurance costs in a uniquely American way. health care spending budgets that would have been unacceptable coming from the government were created by competing independent health plans, with employers choosing which to offer and employees usually (but not always) given a choice of several from which to choose. Positive coverage of the new plans by the media contributed to the enthusiasm. In 1990, stories about the new types of health insurance were twice as likely to be positive than negative." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.) "Yet almost all (95 percent) of our health care spending is directed at biomedically oriented medical care. Assuming that the primary goal of our health care system is to improve our health, this allocation of our resources is simply not rational. It is not a lack of scientific evidence that keeps us locked into the narrow paradigm of biomedicine. Few diseases can be reduced to a single biochemical, genetic, or cellular etiology. Certainly one factor contributing to coronary heart disease is LDL cholesterol particles entering the coronary artery walls and setting off an inflammatory cascade." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.) "But the broader coverage offered by the new plans turned out to have the most profound unintended consequences: Instead of containing health care costs, HMOs and managed care plans facilitated the almost unrestrained increases in health care spending that followed. The captains of the drug and other medical industries certainly hadn't planned this, but they knew how to take advantage of opportunity when it came knocking on their door. After a brief period of clear skies, dark clouds could be seen gathering on the horizon." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"Walker to sound an alarm in his January 2008 testimony before the Senate Committee on the Budget: [T]he federal government's obligations for Medicare Part D alone exceed the unfunded obligations for Social Security. health care spending systemwide continues to grow at an unsustainable pace . . . . Medicare and Medicaid spending threaten to consume an untenable share of the budget and economy in the coming decades. The federal government has essentially written a "blank check" for these programs.....In fact, if there is one thing that could bankrupt America, it's runaway health care costs." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.)

"We devote nearly a third of our health care spending to administrative costs—paper pushing, in effect. In 1999, that amounted to $1,000 per capita. Canada's single-payer system, by contrast, was a model of efficiency, spending only about 16 percent of its health care dollars on administrative overhead, which means our system wasted nearly $160 billion. Then there's the $30 billion in after-tax profits earned by health insurance companies. As economist Henry J. Aaron puts it, "I look at the U.S." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "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. Hospital expansion had already been encouraged by the Hill-Burton Act, passed in 1946, which provided funds to states to build new hospitals and expand existing ones." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Together, the drug and device industries took in more than three hundred billion dollars in 2006, roughly 1 c percent of our total health care spending. Implantable devices, defibrillators, artificial knees, cardiac stents, and other bionic body parts amounted to thirty-six billion dollars. Spending on drugs and devices is the fastest-growing sector of health care costs. Outlays for drugs doubled between 199 c and 2003, owing in part to more prescriptions but also to rising prices, which went up 7.2 percent, nearly three times the inflation rate." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"Managed care companies, with their lock on the health care spending of most big firms, were proving fierce negotiators over the price of pills — something the industry had never had to confront. Slowly but surely — and it didn't take an advanced degree in accounting or forecasting to fathom — such negotiating was coming right out of the hide of big pharma. The managed care phenomenon cut hard another way: now consumers, once known as patients, were restive over the issue of price." - Greg Critser, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Get the book.)

"US health care spending reached $1.6 trillion in 2003, representing 1 4% of the nation's gross national product."92 • Pharmaceutical companies spent over $39 billion on domestic 217 n > — -— sC Staggering Statistics About Modern Medicine and Pharmaceutical Drugs (contd.) drug research and development in 2005 alone. Incredibly, this figure represented less than 16% of sales for that same year!93 21! 0 c u w x :- pb x f— < U Aren't Prescription Drugs Supposed to Fix What's Wrong with You?" - Dr. Edward F. Group III, DC, ND, DACBN, Health Begins in the Colon (Get the book.)

"United States.5 What is obvious and significant and central to this book is that in the brief period of seven years Americans are taking more drugs and spending more—much more—for them. As of 2003, more than 40% of all Americans—half of all women—take at least one prescription drug, and 17% take three or more.6 We are, it would seem, a drugged-up society." - Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea, What If Medicine Disappeared? (Get the book.)

"The problems will grow even more intractable if health care spending exceeds the nearly 10 percent annual increases of recent decades, or if Washington adds other entitlement programs, such as the Medicare prescription benefit, which alone contributed more than $8 trillion to the total. These numbers do not even take into account that Social Security has not been treated as the discrete "trust fund" many assume it to be." - Michael J. Panzner, Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes (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.)

"In 2001, the cost of health care in the United States exceeded the $1 trillion mark, and in 2004, total health care spending amounted to $1.9 trillion. That represented 16 percent of the nation's GDP, and there is no end to this trend in sight. Healthcare spending is projected to double to $4 trillion over the next decade. Good health care cannot be measured by how much money is being spent on treating symptoms of disease. Treating the symptoms of an illness inevitably requires further treatments, because the origins of disease are ignored and become worse if left unattended." - Andreas Moritz, The Liver and Gallbladder Miracle Cleanse: An All-Natural, At-Home Flush to Purify and Rejuvenate Your Body (Get the book.)

"United States. Second, the most commonly prescribed drug is Vicodin, which makes no contribution to mortality reduction. In 2003, 15.7 million Americans had used the substance, of whom 5 million—according to official estimates—abused it. Third, our most commonly prescribed drugs are ineffective. Despite all their hype, Statins have little effect on the prevention of second heart attacks; ACE inhibitors are no more effective than common diuretics. Finally, many commonly prescribed drugs are not only ineffective, but dangerous." - Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea, What If Medicine Disappeared? (Get the book.)

"How to radically change the priorities in our health care spending is a question that needs a lot more attention. Down in Orlando, Florida, Leonore Tiefer has just received a prestigious award for "Distinguished Scientific Achievement" from her academic peers.34 By way of acceptance, she delivered her "Not tonight dear, the dog ate my testosterone patch" speech. The night before she'd appeared at a small local theater, where her colleagues had organized a fundraiser for the coming New View conference in Canada where she plans to close the five-year campaign." - Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients (Get the book.)

"GMIS saw itself as an agent to control health care spending, albeit at the expense of doctors. In annual reports, the company spoke of "preventing unnecessary care, eliminating inappropriate payments and identifying patterns of inefficiency" as well as "eliminating inefficient providers" and "preventing physicians from providing expensive, unwarranted procedures." ClaimCheck was an immediate success. GMIS turned a profit the year it came on the market and recorded progressively higher earnings." - Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business (Get the book.) "Drugs and health care spending represent a massive pool of cash—larger than the gross domestic product of many countries. Thomas L. Harrison, DAS chairman and chief executive officer, said it was Omnicom's desire "to grow its healthcare and pharmaceutical marketing business in a new, strategically sound direction that led [it] to SCIREX. "What we were searching for was a clinical research firm that would be a strong partner for our marketing companies," Harrison said. " - Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business (Get the book.) "Control costs by getting to the root causes of health care spending, which varies widely among the residents of different states. Even after taking into account disparities in living costs, there is no medical reason that Medicare should spend, as it has, 48 percent more money on seniors in Mississippi than seniors in South Dakota, or 43 percent more on seniors in Florida than seniors in Minnesota, or 31 percent more on seniors in the District of Columbia than seniors in California." - Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business (Get the book.) "Redirect health care spending by allocating money for disease prevention as well as treatment. It would curtail out-of-control prescription-drug costs. It would rein in those doctors who have never met an expensive drug they didn't like and who practice medicine by prescription. Provide critically important drug information to consumers to balance the promotional hype of advertising. The council could insist that the results of all clinical drug trials be made public, so consumers may better assess both the upside and the downside of certain medications." - Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business (Get the book.)

"Since it is well known that the bulk of health care spending goes towards pesticide and radiation-triggered cancer, environmentally mediated chronic illness and so-called age-related diseases (e.g. heavy metal-induced Alzheimer's, pesticide and diesel fuel triggered asthma etc.) it is hardly unfair to ask which industries should be sent the nation's health care bill. The video, They Speak in Whispers, features parents whose children died or are dying from the effects of chemical exposures acquired through their parents' occupations." - Helke Ferrie, Dispatches From the War Zone of Environmental Health (Get the book.)

"In 2001, the cost of health care in the United States exceeded the $1 trillion mark, and in 2004, total health care spending amounted to $1.9 trillion. That represented 16 percent of the nation's GDP, and there is no end to this trend in sight. Healthcare spending is projected to double to $4 trillion over the next decade. Good health care cannot be measured by how much money is being spent on treating symptoms of disease. Treating the symptoms of an illness inevitably requires further treatments, because the origins of disease are ignored and become worse if left unattended." - Andreas Moritz, The Amazing Liver & Gallbladder Flush: A Powerful Do-It-Yourself Tool To Optimize your Health and Wellbeing (Get the book.)

"Reinhardt says, "Given what is at stake, would asking a 'Health Care Fed' to be funded with, say, one percent of total health care spending be that outrageous?"28 That 1 percent of health-care spending would amount to several billion dollars—a good start for such a monumental task. Most other developed countries now have medical technology assessment agencies. Some have argued that these agencies might provide models from which to create an American agency. There's an irony here: Most of the agencies in other countries were modeled after our own now-defunct Office of Technology Assessment." - Richard A. Deyo M.D. M.P.H., Donald L. Patrick, Hope or Hype: The Obsession with Medical Advances and the High Cost of False Promises (Get the book.)

FAIR USE NOTICE: The research quoted here is provided under the protection of Fair Use provisions and published by the 501(c)3 non-profit Consumer Wellness Center for the purposes of public comment and education. Authors / publishers may submit books for consideration of inclusion here.

TERMS OF USE: Read full terms of use. Citations of text from NaturalPedia must include: 1) Full credit to the original author and book title. 2) Secondary credit to the Natural News Naturalpedia as a research resource and a link to www.NaturalPedia.com

This unique compilation of research is copyright (c) 2008, 2009 by the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center.

ABOUT THE CREATOR OF NATURALPEDIA: Mike Adams, the creator of NaturalPedia, is the editor of NaturalNews.com, the internet's top natural health news site, creator of the Honest Food Guide (www.HonestFoodGuide.org), a free downloadable consumer food guide based on natural health principles, author of Grocery Warning, The 7 Laws of Nutrition, Natural Health Solutions, and many other books available at www.TruthPublishing.com, creator of the earth-friendly EcoLEDs company (www.EcoLEDs.com) that manufactures energy-efficient LED lighting products, founder of Arial Software (www.ArialSoftware.com), a permission e-mail technology company, creator of the CounterThink Cartoon series (www.NaturalNews.com/index-cartoons.html) and author of over 1,500 articles, interviews, special reports and reference guides available at www.NaturalNews.com. Adams' personal philosophy and health statistics are available at www.HealthRanger.org.