The National Campaign

      Health Care at Issue

"Have a Happy and a Healthy" is what we hear at holiday times. And, where people used to whisper when talking about dread diseases, they now speak them out loud. Good health and a long and productive life is what anyone would say we all want for ourselves. No one wants to be lingering in sever pain for long periods of time while their relatives watch in silence unable to help. Sickness is so much a part of our society.

My question is: "Is our's a Health Care System or a Sick Care System?"

What is the difference you may ask? It is where the emphasis is placed.

I contest that the way we have allowed our lives to be structured, being sick seems to be the underling though undeclared goal rather than being healthy. Or, perhaps I should say it this way: Keeping patients on the edge of illness is where the heath professionals seem to be focusing their attention rather than helping people stay healthy. Lip service is now paid, and only of late, to the idea of living healthily. Diet and nutrition was never a significant part of main stream medical training and alternative medicine was always foo-fooed as ridiculous quackery by the American Medical Association. That is still mainly true, but it has been embarrassed so often by its own medical inaccuracies and wrong-thinking that it has had to open its organizational mind to acknowledge if not to accept other approaches to wellness.

We feel the system as it is currently structured should be renamed to be a Sick care System. The financial benefits accrue to those who treat you when you are sick rather than to those who keep you healthy. The incentive is to see you stay "on the edge of illness" so that you fall off into illness periodically and wander through their office with all the attached revenues your being there will bring them. Health care, as we know it is an industry that puts the fax in charge of the hen house and assumes we will think it is right. Well it is not right and we would all be better off if it were changed.

It may seem to be so far along that it could not be changed, but it could. It is merely a matter of refocusing the penalty and rewards for services rendered.

The Health Care System, as it exists today, is terrible and should either be renamed to what it truly is; i.e. a Sick Care System, where people are encouraged to live their lives with little care about being healthy and staying safe but rather putting the responsibility on the rest of society to clean up their mess once they’ve made it. For example, people involve themselves in dangerous thrill sports like skiing and expect that their existence as a vegetable on life support systems will be covered by insurance; or people smoke tobacco for decades or do drugs and expect that the government or insurance policies will care for them when they get sick or become a danger to themselves and others; or people eat to such excess and participate in no kind of exercise program to where they become morbidly obese and then expect the system to care for them as they start experiencing heart disease, diabetes and other such diseases, which society currently says is just the luck of the draw and places no responsibility on the person who has chosen to live without care for themselves and, by extension, without concern for anyone else who may later be saddled with having to take care of them.

That being the case in our country, the big money is in making sure that people stay on what might be called “the edge of illness” and then each time they fall into sickness the medical professionals start reaping the financial benefits as do the great insurance and governmental bureaucracies that keep pushing papers and transferring dollars to and from bank accounts while delivering to the people to live their lives attached to machines and dependant upon drugs instead of living lives of intelligent moderation. The medical profession has chosen to put its emphasis on circumvention of healthy life styles in favor of encouraging people to live foolishly and expect a miracle cure when they get what they get hurt or ill.

To deal with this situation and at least make the best of what is a bad situation where people remain ignorant and are encouraged to live their lives influenced by, if not actually controlled by the current “Health Care System”, we suggest the pooling of our communal resources and pay out benefits with an emphasis on health rather than on remedies. If doctors have healthier patients, reward them for that and publicize their effectiveness. If doctors have sick patients, reduce their rewards and require retraining and publicize their failures to encourage patients to avoid availing themselves of their services. The same rewards and disincentives should be provided for patients. Stay healthy and live smart and carefully; receive accolades and nice things. Live dangerously and carelessly and get castigated publicly and be required to attend courses in self control.

We have our communal and individual values in terms of communal and individual health backwards right now and, until our value system is sufficiently moderated to where people start taking responsibility for their own actions, all of us will continue to suffer with the slippery slope of a system we have in place. Once people in general have learned that each of us is ultimately responsible for our own selves and that we are not going to be made whole by the society just because we acted like fools with no care for our fellows, only then will we be able to concentrate on worthwhile medical advances that are truly intended to help people rather than be a means of capturing the bodies and souls of patients for the monetary benefits it brings.