Thoughts on health care reform, Part 1

We hear a lot of silly nonsense about health care and the best way to improve it, but overhauling the U.S. medical system will do little to improve our overall health.

American medicine is extremely good for acute problems and diseases, but when it comes to health maintenance, it is fairly useless. The key to affordable health care is healthier lifestyles.

We hear that the proposed health care reform will cost about $65 billion a year. In 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion. It was estimated that it would cost $12 billion by 1990, but the actual cost was $107 billion, and last year it was $420 billion.

The space station was estimated at $8 billion at its conception, but it is current cost is more than $100 billion and it still isn’t finished. So when a government official quotes a price, it should be taken as simple government delusion. If we had made an example of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon for being lying crooks, maybe information from the government would be more trustworthy.

One of the interesting ideas about health care is that everybody has a “right” to affordable health care. My right to free speech or to own property does not give me claim to anyone else’s time or property, but if I have a right to health care, someone must be compelled to provide for that care.

In fact, if someone else has to provide it, isn’t that a form of involuntary servitude, commonly known as slavery? Compulsion comes in different forms, but a right to health care leaves society less free.

While talking about rights, how about people’s “right” to reproduce irrespective of their economic circumstances? I think this is where God made a big mistake. We should have been born naturally sterile, needing an operation to become fertile. Sure would have solved lots of problems.

A basic fact being ignored in this health care debate is that a nation cannot afford state-of-the-art health care for everyone, as the resources to make such care available to everyone do not exist. The leadership in Washington, D.C., persists in the fantasy world of unlimited money to spend on unlimited programs to garner unlimited control, but we are fast approaching our limit to borrow, steal and print.

For instance, there are about 20 million people with diabetes, and the number is continually growing. At an estimate of about $100,000 spent per diabetic during their lifetime, this adds up to $2 trillion for diabetics alone, not counting all the other good diseases. It can be readily seen that this approach of solving our “health problems” using expensive drugs is not sustainable.

As an alternative, Dr. Joseph Mercola says on his Web site, www.mercola.com, that doing just three things will basically solve the diabetic problem for most people:

• Eliminate wheat from your diet.

• Eliminate junk food from your diet.

• Exercise.

I contend that we are making a lot of mistakes with our health care, and to help prove the point, I want to go back about 50 years.

Then, the medical model was to remove tonsils because they were useless and irradiate the thymus for acne relief. And strongly adhered to was the idea that science had a product that was just as good — or maybe better — than mother’s milk.

After giving birth, a sister-in-law had to have ice packs on her breasts to help relieve the pain, as nursing was not an accepted solution. In fact, if you can believe this, the standard medical model was not only not to nurse, but to also not touch the child any more than necessary. Anybody suggesting anything different from the standard approach was called a quack.

In fact, I remember a TV talk show where the “quack” suggested that our bread should be made from whole grains rather than white flour. The so-called “expert” said, “White bread is just a good as whole grain. It’s enriched. You are just a food faddist.”

Some health care solutions will follow in Part 2.

• Patterson resident Earl Hiatt is a semi-retired agri-businessman whose major interests are nutrition, economics and religion. His columns appear occasionally on the Irrigator Voice page. His e-mail is ehent@hughes.net.