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

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"For three years, from 1994 through 1996, costs were rising less than inflation, but those days are over. Costs in 1998 seem to have gone up almost five percent, with dire warnings for 1999 and beyond that we might again see double-digit medical inflation. The Center for Survey Research estimates that 1999 health inflation will come in between 4.5 and 8 percent, much higher than regular inflation. At the upper range, that eliminates much of the temporary gains from the HMO "revolution." "It's pent-up cost pressure," says Stephen Karp of Ryder Systems, Inc. " - Martin L. Cross, The Medical Racket (Get the book.)

"We regard inflation as a public enemy of the worst type. But we have not hesitated, either, to ease or restrict the basis of credit when need was indicated. The full force of monetary policy has been made effective more promptly than ever before to respond to natural demands. This has been done by the timely use of monetary policy and credit; by the return to the public of purchasing power through the biggest tax cut in the history of the nation; by cutting unjustified Government spending; by timely encouragement to construction, home building and needed improvements." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"Per-person health care expenditures, adjusted for inflation, more than quadrupled over the following 20 years. Starting in 2001, premiums rose a whopping 43 percent over the next three years alone. Health care costs now account for one-seventh of the total GNP, up from 9 percent in 1980 to an estimated 15.5 percent in 2004. What seemed like a major crisis in 1982 now looks trivial. And as we have seen, all the while our health outcomes are lagging further and further behind those of the other wealthy industrialized countries." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.) "Expenditures for prescription drugs have been increasing seven times faster than the rate of inflation, but the 2003 legislation specifically prohibits the federal government from using its purchasing power to negotiate prices with drug makers, as is done successfully by the Veterans Health Administration and Defense Department (and by Canada and the European countries—which is why their drug prices are so much lower than those in the United States). The U.S." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.) "The increased number of procedures added about $10,000 (adjusted for inflation) to the care of each heart attack patient between 1984 and 1998. During this same time, the life expectancy of the average heart attack patient in the United States increased by about one year. An article in the health policy journal Health Affairs used these facts to argue that the increased number of procedures being done on heart attack patients in the United States was extremely cost-effective?10,000 is a very small amount in terms of medical interventions for an additional year of life." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"The most notable achievement by any of the subsequent Praetorian Prefects is probably the inflation of the imperial currency by the otherwise forgotten Peter Barsymes.* The actions of another enemy who cheered Theodora's death had a rather longer tail, one that led, circuitously, to the final conquest of the Ostrogoths. The antagonist in question was Artabanes, a general from Persian-controlled Armenia who had been responsible for the death, in 538, of Justinian's general—and Theodora's brothet-in-law?Sittas." - William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire (Get the book.)

"According to the New York Times, average worker pay has remained flat since 1990, at around $27,000, after adjusting for inflation, while CEO compensation has quadrupled, from $2.82 million to $11.8 million.24 Our CEOs are in a position in which they can basically use public companies as personal piggy banks. And this is perfectly legal as long as they get someone else to sign their check. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage has remained at $5.15 an hour since September 1, 1997. In fact, after adjusting for inflation, the value of the minimum wage is at its second lowest level since 1955." - Peter Rost, The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman (Get the book.)

"TM adepts have also sought to influence the "misery index"—the sum of inflation and unemployment rates—in the United States and Canada. And indeed, during one concerted effort between 1979 and 1988, the U.S. index fell by 40 percent and the Canadian index by 30 percent. Another group of adepts sought to influence the monetary growth and crude-materials price indexes as well as the American misery index. In this instance, the misery index fell by 36 percent, and the crude-materials price index fell by 13 percent." - Lynne McTaggart, The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World (Get the book.)

"Some of these factors exist in the background of the market, including the advance of capitalism, the increased emphasis on business success, the revolution in information technology, the demographics of the Baby Boom, the decline of inflation and the economics of money illusion, and the rise of gambling and pleasure in risk taking in general. Others operate in the foreground and shape the changing culture of investment." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"Even before executives started charging $100,000 for a single cancer drug, it had become routine for pharmaceutical companies to raise their prices at a rate that was several times that of inflation. The industry flourished as it combined these price hikes with powerful marketing techniques that had Americans taking more and more prescriptions. But as the cost spiraled, prescription medicines became a leading reason why health insurance was no longer affordable. Those lucky enough to have an employer paying for their insurance may not have noticed how much their medicines cost." - 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.) "Between those years overall inflation rose by just 18 percent. Across the United States, many companies had stopped providing health coverage to their employees because of the soaring cost. That meant more Americans either were uninsured or had joined the ranks of those covered by Medicaid, the government program that pays the medical bills of the poor. Nearly 16 percent of the nation's population was without health insurance in 2005, according to the Census Bureau, up from 14.2 percent in 2000." - 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.)

"Such subtle grade inflation results, no doubt, from "controversies sparked by several guidelines," in the words of the Task Force. In other words, powerful vested interests cannot be ignored in the preparation of guidelines which have the imprimatur of the government. That complaint notwithstanding, this chapter could not be written, or not written with as much authority, without these valuable reports. Even if we occasionally differ with the Task Forces, we applaud their efforts." - Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea, What If Medicine Disappeared? (Get the book.)

"Labor unions are discovering that they cannot negotiate contracts that keep wages apace with inflation because the cost of health care is severely eroding corporate profit margins. Companies are closing down factories and jobs at home and relocating them overseas, where wages and health costs are much lower. All the while, increasing numbers of American workers are sliding into the ranks of the uninsured. What can we do? I have a fairly radical answer for that question: We should aim at eliminating chronic illness. That is not an unattainable goal." - Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D., Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease (Get the book.)

"Prices of the best-selling drugs routinely go up at two to three times the rate of inflation. Uninsured patients in the United States pay more for drugs than people who are insured, who have the large FIMOs to bargain for them. The United States is unique among Western countries in that it does not limit drug costs in some way.27 Big Pharma has the largest lobbying contingent in the country— there are more drug lobbyists than members of Congress28—which has helped create an extraordinarily regulation-friendly environment for the industry." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.) "But current forces are creating a new kind of "misery index," beyond the fiscal one invented by the Yale Economist Arthur Okun in the 1970s: Economic Misery Index = Unemployment Rate + inflation Rate." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.) "Reimbursement rates have systematically been cut or have not kept up with inflation, causing a number of psychotherapists to leave the field. The New York Times ran a story about a social worker who took on work as a seamstress on the side in order to get by.14 Denying claims for arbitrary reasons, cutting back on the number of authorized sessions, paying late: these are all standard fare. More than these actual hassles, what is so unsettling to many mental health professionals is the general message of managed care: that the work they are doing is not consequential or clinically robust." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"Nutritional inflation seems to have two principal causes: changes in the way we grow food and changes in the kinds of foods we grow. Halweil cites a considerable body of research demonstrating that plants grown with industrial fertilizers are often nutritionally inferior to the same varieties grown in organic soils. Why this should be so is uncertain, but there are a couple of hypotheses." - Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (Get the book.) "The result is the nutritional equivalent of inflation, such that we have to eat more to get the same amount of various essential nutrients. The fact that at least 30 percent of Americans have a diet deficient in vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamin A, and magnesium surely owes more to eating processed foods full of empty calories than it does to lower levels of nutrients in the whole foods we aren't eating." - Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (Get the book.)

"AARP conducted a survey of prescription drug manufacturers' prices and discovered that they have been accelerating for years, dramatically outpacing the overall rate of inflation.8 Its analysis of 150 popular products shows that price tags on these brand-name drugs rose an average of 35 percent between 1999 and 2004. That's almost three times higher than overall inflation during that time, which amounted to 13.5 percent.9 The result of this trend is per-pill prices that take your breath away. The cost of the sleeping pill Ambien (Zolpidem), which is advertised directly to consumers, jumped 11." - Joe Graedon, M.S. and Teresa Graedon, Ph.D., Best Choices From the People's Pharmacy (Get the book.)

"With medical costs rising much faster than inflation or state tax revenues, Iowa government officials had no choice but to reduce other services. At first, officials took hundreds of millions of dollars from a fund meant to help keep elderly Iowans living in their own homes rather than in nursing homes. When that wasn't enough, the state officials turned to college students. They sharply reduced funding to Iowa's three public universities, causing a spike in tuition and fees between 2001 and 2005 of more than 60 percent." - 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.)

"Medicare costs per recipient rose from under $£oo per person in 1965 to $5,000 in 1995—a rate of increase more than double the rate of inflation. Not all parts of the country were getting an equal share of Medicare dollars. Wennberg's team spent three years sifting through Medicare records to replicate for the nation what Wennberg and Gittelsohn had done for Vermont. They figured out which hospitals Medicare patients were most likely to be admitted to and then divided the country into 306 "hospital referral regions," each of which was a little bigger than the average county." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Even as inflation chilled in the early 1980s, an ominous thing happened: Medical costs, unlike most other prices, kept on rising. With its ideological preference for market-driven solutions, the Reagan administration was not about to approve price controls on hospital payments. Instead, the president signed a plan to impose the DRG system, an entirely new, draconian payment plan intended to create incentives for efficiency and reduce the number of details over which government and hospitals could quibble." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "He is counting out the balloon inflation pressure inside the stent. "Down!" The technician turns off the pump with a loud click, and Altschuler quickly extracts the balloon and wire from Crofton's blood vessel leaving the stent behind. At the next puff of contrast, everyone looks to the screen. In the spot where the last picture showed nothing, not a branch or a twig below the blockage, Crofton's arteries are once again filling and emptying rhythmically with each beat of her heart." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"The new law will creare inflation whenever the trusts want inflation. From now on, depressions will be scientifically calculated." Contrary to popular belief, the Federal Reserve is actually owned by the banks. Chase and Citibank own 53 percent of the Federal Reserve. If they want higher interest rates, they go up. If they want lower rates, they go down. In essence, they dictate their profit margins to the government—at our expense. We the people are not in charge of our money or our own economy. It may seem that all this is quite esoteric and there is little we can do to alter this reality." - David H. Rippe, Jared Rosen, The Flip: Turn Your World Around (Get the book.)

"But this is still nearly double the rate of increase of inflation, which is currently at 3.2%.75 69 Source: AARP Public Policy Institute. TRENDS IN MANUFACTURER PRICES OF BRAND-NAME PRESCRIPTION DRUGS USED BY OLDER AMERICANS - 2006 YEAR-END UPDATE: http://assets.aarp.org/rgcenter/health/ ddl54_drugprices.pdf 70 While the vast majority of people in the program are the elderly, it also serves the disabled and, oddly, those with end-stage kidney disease. The latter was added because a USA lawmaker had a daughter with an end-stage kidney disease." - Kenneth W Thomas, Ron Gilbert, Gerd Schaller, Side Effects: The Hidden Agenda of the Pharmaceutical Drug Cartel (Get the book.)

"The new law will creare inflation whenever the trusts want inflation. From now on, depressions will be scientifically calculated." Contrary to popular belief, the Federal Reserve is actually owned by the banks. Chase and Citibank own 53 percent of the Federal Reserve. If they want higher interest rates, they go up. If they want lower rates, they go down. In essence, they dictate their profit margins to the government—at our expense. We the people are not in charge of our money or our own economy. It may seem that all this is quite esoteric and there is little we can do to alter this reality." - David H. Rippe, Jared Rosen, The Flip: Turn Your World Around (Get the book.)

"FACT: The cost of drugs to the elderly is increasing faster than the rate of inflation. FACT: It is expected to maintain this increase. FACT: Efforts to control prescription drug costs have not been successful. FACT: The projected drug savings costs, if any, for Medicare Part D are unknown. 79 Source: information contained in the report "Enough to Make Your Sick: Prescription Drug Prices for the Elderly" from Families USA 80 http://www.therubins.com/geninfo/eldpresc.htm VIAGRA, CONTINUED So far we just discussed the money. But we didn't talk about the side effects of all those drugs." - Kenneth W Thomas, Ron Gilbert, Gerd Schaller, Side Effects: The Hidden Agenda of the Pharmaceutical Drug Cartel (Get the book.)

"Costs in 1998 seem to have gone up almost five percent, with dire warnings for 1999 and beyond that we might again see double-digit medical inflation. The Center for Survey Research estimates that 1999 health inflation will come in between 4.5 and 8 percent, much higher than regular inflation. At the upper range, that eliminates much of the temporary gains from the HMO "revolution." "It's pent-up cost pressure," says Stephen Karp of Ryder Systems, Inc. "Insurers will take a deep breath and pass on some of their increased costs to consumers." - Martin L. Cross, The Medical Racket (Get the book.)

"In fact, after adjusting for inflation, the value of the minimum wage is at its second lowest level since 1955.25 At the same time, the pharmaceutical industry spends over $100 million on lobbying activities to stop lower drug prices, according to the Center for Public Integrity. There are 1,274 registered pharmaceutical lobbyists in Washington, DC. During the 2004 election cycle, the drug industry contributed $1 million to President Bush.26 For an industry that makes $500 billion on a global basis, spending 1 million on a president or $100 million on lobbying is pocket change." - Peter Rost, The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman (Get the book.)

"The pressure group Families USA had shown the prices of the top 50 drugs prescribed for the elderly had gone up by around 6% in 2002 when the inflation rate was only l^Yo.1 This wasn't a major hike in itself but doctors were also saying the elderly needed more drugs, as were the ads on the TV. Many prescriptions cost more than $ 1,000 a year, and some people needed several. Even if they had taken out private policies, there were limits to what they could have because insurance companies were also being squeezed." - Jacky Law, Big Pharma: Exposing the Global Healthcare Agenda (Get the book.)

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