If Americans without health insurance were a nation, the population would be bigger than Canada — plus Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire and Vermont. Canada, like other industrialized nations besides ours, provides universal health coverage.

Contrary to myth, the United States does not have the world’s best health care. It has the costliest.

In the words of Dr. Christopher Murray of the World Health Organization (WHO), “Basically, you die earlier and spend more time disabled if you’re an American rather than a member of most other advanced countries.”

The United States is just No. 29 in the WHO healthy life expectancy ranking. We lag Canada by nearly three years and Japan by nearly six.

The United States does worse than 36 countries in child mortality under age five — well behind South Korea and Singapore.

The United States is No. 1 in spending. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports the United States spent 15 percent of its Gross Domestic Product on health in 2003 compared to an average 8.6 percent in 30 OECD countries.

The United States has fewer physicians, nurses and hospital beds per person, and fewer MRI and CT scanners than the OECD average. Health Affairs reports that Americans had more difficulty making appointments with physicians quickly than people in Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, and were more likely to delay or forgo treatment because of cost.

Lack of health insurance is killing many more Americans than terrorism. As the Institute of Medicine documents, uninsured Americans get about half the medical care of those with insurance. They receive too little care, too late, get sicker and die sooner. For example, uninsured women with breast cancer have a 30 percent to 50 percent higher risk of dying than insured women. Uninsured car crash victims receive less care in the hospital and have a 37 percent higher mortality rate than privately insured patients.

Holly Sklar | Common Dreams (read more. . .)

healingarts | August 2, 2005 |

Though generations of dental students have been sold on the dental benefits of fluoride, studies over the last decade in particular have suggested a correlation with cancer. Studies conducted by the National Toxicology Program and the New Jersey Department of Health, have shown higher than normal incidents of cancer in male rats exposed to fluoridated water, for example.

Such studies have helped spawn grassroots opposition to fluoridation, and, since 1999, 70 U.S. communities have rejected fluoridation schemes, according to Fluoride Action Network, a watchdog group.

But fluoridation programs flourished even in the face of questions about health impacts. Kropp says the thrust behind fluoridation “is faceless. Some of the big proponents of fluoridation and some of the original experiments done, and done in faulty ways, aren’t around anymore. But you have new generations of dentists and public health officials who were taught in school that this is fine, so there’s no reason to do to the literature. It just gets passed down that way.”

Nonetheless, more and more scientists are refusing to take fluoride’s safety for granted.

Dr. Hardy Limeback, a leading Canadian expert and head of preventive dentistry at the University of Toronto, said he could not comment for this story because he is involved in a two-year review of fluoride for the National Academy of Sciences.

But Limeback, who once supported but now opposes fluoridation, has written extensively on fluoride’s health risks, and his views are shared by many in the scientific community. He has written that global cavity rates have declined mostly as a result of fluoridated toothpaste and that topical applications rather than widespread applications through community water can prevent tooth decay. Limeback and others also point out that industrial sources of fluoride contain harmful chemicals and have not been tested properly.

“Hydrofluorosilicic acid is recovered from the smokestack scrubbers during the production of phosphate fertilizer and sold to most of the major cities in North America, which use this industrial grade source of fluoride to fluoridate drinking water, rather than the more expensive pharmaceutical grade sodium fluoride salt,” he wrote in a public letter in April 2000. “Fluorosilicates have never been tested for safety in humans. Furthermore, these industrial-grade chemicals are contaminated with trace amounts of heavy metals such as lead, arsenic and radium that accumulate in humans.”

Kelly Hearn | AlterNet (read more. . .)

healingarts | July 21, 2005 |

Kelly Preston | HuffingtonPost

Parents are still largely unaware that these drugs are turning kids into walking time bombs. Eight out of the last 13 school shooters were taking prescribed psychiatric drugs, and only now is the FDA investigating the fact these drugs can cause violence. Legislators are still not waking up to the need for investigation — despite the Jeff Weise tragedy in March when the teen, after being prescribed an antidepressant, shot dead his grandparents and then classmates and school officials.

Now adding to the alarm bell we have the Partnership for a Drug Free America report that teens don’t consider these drugs dangerous because they are prescribed. However, the DEA classifies them in the same category of highly addictive drugs such as cocaine, opium and morphine. At least 10 percent of teens are abusing the stimulants, Ritalin and Adderall. A “troop of drugged-out zombies” is frighteningly real. (Watch for Lawrence Bender’s latest movie, Chumscrubber: Meet Generation Rx — an accurate portrayal of the current epidemic of teen prescription drug abuse.)

The recent controversy over these drugs has also raised another important debate: that parents across America are administering them for conditions they have been led to believe are the result of a “chemical imbalance” in the brain or some sort of brain-based disorder. Yet, the medical doctors in their letter to the FDA make it clear that these “potentially harmful substances” are being prescribed for “disorders that have no neurobiological or physical cause.” Even the president of the APA, Steven Sharfstein, recently admitted that there is no “clean cut lab test” to determine a chemical imbalance can cause “mental illness.” This has prompted concerns about the FDA’s drug approval process and why it approves so many psychiatric drugs for what is essentially behavioral control rather than treatment of medical illness. (read more. . .)

healingarts | July 14, 2005 |

Paul Krugman | NYTimes

The obvious model for those hoping to reverse the fattening of America is the campaign against smoking. Before the surgeon general officially condemned smoking in 1964, rising cigarette consumption seemed an unstoppable trend; since then, consumption per capita has fallen more than 50 percent.

But it may be hard to match that success when it comes to obesity. I’m not talking about the inherent difficulty of the task - getting people to consume fewer calories and/or exercise more may be harder than getting people to stop smoking, but we won’t know until we try. I’m talking, instead, about how the political winds have shifted.

Public health activists were successful in taking on smoking in part because at the time corporations didn’t know how to play the public opinion game. By today’s standards, the political ineptitude of Big Tobacco was awe-inspiring. In a famous 1971 interview on “Face the Nation,” the chairman of the board of Philip Morris, confronted with evidence that smoking by mothers leads to low birth weight, replied, “Some women would prefer having smaller babies.”
(more…)

healingarts | July 8, 2005 |

Lindsey Tanner | Salon

A leading group of pediatricians says teenagers need access to birth control and emergency contraception, not the abstinence-only approach to sex education favored by religious groups and President Bush.

The recommendations are part of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ updated teen pregnancy policy.

“Even though there is great enthusiasm in some circles for abstinence-only interventions, the evidence does not support abstinence-only interventions as the best way to keep young people from unintended pregnancy,” said Dr. Jonathan Klein, chairman of the academy committee that wrote the new recommendations.

Teaching abstinence but not birth control makes it more likely that once teenagers initiate sexual activity they will have unsafe sex and contract sexually transmitted diseases, said Dr. S. Paige Hertweck, a pediatric obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Louisville who provided advice for the report.
(more…)

healingarts | July 5, 2005 |

Paul Krugman | NYTimes

The Center for Consumer Freedom, an advocacy group financed by Coca-Cola, Wendy’s and Tyson Foods, among others, has a Fourth of July message for you: worrying about the rapid rise in American obesity is unpatriotic.

“Far too few Americans,” declares the center’s Web site, “remember that the Founding Fathers, authors of modern liberty, greatly enjoyed their food and drink. … Now it seems that food liberty - just one of the many important areas of personal choice fought for by the original American patriots - is constantly under attack.”

It sounds like a parody, but don’t laugh. These people are blocking efforts to help America’s children.
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healingarts | July 4, 2005 |

According to Dr. Geier, “the current epidemic of autism may well be the greatest iatrogenic epidemic in history. The damage already done to our society is already in the trillions of dollars. The damage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and that of the AIDS epidemic pale when compared to the current epidemic of autism.”

Or put another way, “To cling to a purely genetic explanation for autism is a desperate attempt to maintain the illusion that one lives in a comfortable and rational world where new chemicals and technologies always mean progress; experts are always objective and thorough; corporations are honest; and authorities can be trusted,” says Harvard’s Martha Herbert, “That human actions, rather than genes, might be responsible for compromising the health of a significant proportion of a whole generation is so painful as to be, for many, unthinkable.”

The vaccine makers, along with their complicit government scientists and policy makers, have a lot to lose. If they don’t find a way to keep the public from finding out that they knowingly allowed an entire generation of children to be damaged, the ensuing litigation will spread through the nation’s court system like wild-fire and push tobacco and asbestos law suits down into small claims court.

The evidence presented in Kirby’s book forces readers to face the unthinkable and leads to one conclusion: a generation of innocent and defenseless children were poisoned for profits by a greedy segment of society mistakenly entrusted to protect the common good of children all over the world.

Evelyn Pringle | Online Journal(read more. . .)

healingarts | June 29, 2005 |

John Hanchette | Niagara Falls Reporter

Even casual readers of newspapers and watchers of TV know the nation’s health care system, if you can call it that, is broken. Americans who get sick know they’ll pay plenty for it, even if they’re lucky enough to have insurance.

Yet, while President George W. Bush and his sycophants dither about trying to “reform” a Social Security system that isn’t half as dilapidated as health care into a windfall gift for Wall Street fat cats, the numbers predict a national disaster if health insurance isn’t looked after soon.

The ranks of the uninsured swell by 100,000 each month. Huge companies that once viewed health insurance for workers as a no-problem benefit are going broke partly because of the premiums; General Motors — which just announced a layoff of 25,000 full-time workers — is an example. Some firms encourage lower-wage workers to sign up for Medicaid, which is drowning in so much red ink that governors in many states, such as New York, offload much of the cost on already-poor counties and already-burdened taxpayers.

In just three years, if current trends hold true, government-sponsored programs such as Medicare and Medicaid will spend more insuring retired Americans than on the already-immense defense budget. Now, that’s going some.
(more…)

healingarts | June 22, 2005 |

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | Salon

When a study revealed that mercury in childhood vaccines may have caused autism in thousands of kids, the government rushed to conceal the data — and to prevent parents from suing drug companies for their role in the epidemic.

In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Ga. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. The agency had issued no public announcement of the session — only private invitations to 52 attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva, and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly “embargoed.” There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left.
(more…)

healingarts | June 16, 2005 |

Paul Krugman | NYTimes

Harry Truman tried to create a national health insurance system. Public opinion was initially on his side: Jill Quadagno’s book “One Nation, Uninsured” tells us that in 1945, 75 percent of Americans favored national health insurance. If Truman had succeeded, universal coverage for everyone, not just the elderly, would today be an accepted part of the social contract.

But Truman failed. Special interests, especially the American Medical Association and Southern politicians who feared that national insurance would lead to racially integrated hospitals, triumphed.

Sixty years later, the patchwork system that evolved in the absence of national health insurance is unraveling. The cost of health care is exploding, the number of uninsured is growing, and corporations that still provide employee coverage are groaning under the strain.
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healingarts | June 13, 2005 |