Liberty Starts At Home ( Part IV ) Health, Community Medical Programs and Patent Reform

[evought 0]

This is part IV of a serial publication of my Essay, "Liberty Starts At Home--- Secure People Make Secure Community. In the previous posting, we discussed securing a community food supply. In this posting we discuss issues with communty medical programs, access of lower class workers to healthcare, and practical programs to improve our healthcare systems.

 

Health care is perhaps one of the biggest issues that faces our small communities today. Just under 12 percent of Missourians and about 14 percent of Illinoisans lack health insurance, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Frighteningly, this is less than the national average of 15.7%, or some 45 million people. That is one in six Americans without access to health care and yet eight in ten of the uninsured come from working families according to a Kaiser Commission report on Medicaid.

 

Employers are increasingly dropping health coverage while private insurance premiums rise and Medicaid programs raise their threshold for entry. This squeezes lower class workers out of the health care system and that is not all: Medicaid coverage has been steadily shrinking to exclude items like dental care and durable medical equipoment. The last item is the most disturbing; while, for instance, Governor Roy Blunt of Missouri rationalizes Medicaid cuts as encouraging the unemployed to get jobs--- which deny them health benefits anyway ---these same people cannot get the assistive devices they need to work.

 

The uninsured often do not have regular access to doctors, but even when they do, they generally cannot afford follow up care, such as prescriptions, tests, or surgery, even for serious conditions. Drug patents and more sophisticated medications bring ever increasing prescription costs. Controled substance laws like those against medical marijuana or FDA bans which dissallow sassafras (later retracted) but allow Vioxx (later found to kill people) prevents access to less expensive local remedies in use for centuries. Of course, few in lower class Urban neighborhoods have space or leisure for herb gardens anyway.

 

Doctors must go through years of expensive training. The cost of medical school and certification fully justifies their high cost. As HMOs attempt to force these prices down, it simply results in Doctors being squeezed out of the market. For people who cannot afford doctors, there is no lower tier to act as an alternative. Many states dissalow certification of Naturopaths or dissallow the above-board practice of naturopathy or herbalism entirely. People without adequate access to Doctors should have access to other professionals such as midwives, naturopaths, and apothecaries, even if they dot meet the full standards of the AMA. At the very least, lower level profesionals should be able to provide preventative care, prescribe certain classes of drugs or herbal remedies (which should tax deductible), and decide when a patient needs more serious care.

 

In order our workforce to remain healthy, communities must take charge of their own healthcare, growing medicinal plants, trainig a lower tier of medical professionals and banding together to change laws which prevent access to adequate care and local control. These changes include allowing the open practice of professionals who are not Doctors, redesign of the Drug Enforcement Agencies nonsensical categories for controled substances, tax deductibility of prescriptions and medical equipment prescribed by a lower tier of medical professionals and mandatory licensing of critical patented drugs on Reasonable And Non-Descriminatory (RAND) terms, and low-cost subsidized insurance programs.

 

There is a distinct lack of quality control for many commercial herbal medicines and supplements, including adulteration of harmless herbs with deadly ones either through misidentification or sloppy harvesting and processing. Nearly all illnesses or deaths caused by herbal remedies are caused by poor quality. Lawsuits against these companies are expensive and must often be in remote jurisdictions. Instead of imposing certification which will just drive up herb prices, communities and local professionals must take charge of medicine production with their own quality control accountable to the local community.

 

The United States has among the worst healthcare for a developed nation. The system is fixable, however, through increased local control, low cost middle-tier helth programs and reasonable patent reform.

[organicbmx 0]

for a start i live in england and we have the nhs. which people constantly complain about but in all honesty is absoluty brilliant seeing how little funding it gets.i really feel sorry for those without a proper state healthcare system, as i do for someone without a proper welfare state. as i once heard someone say a free healthcare system is one of the basics of civilized society.i recently saw the morgan spurlock documentory about living for a month on minimum wage. i was plainly shocked by how the minute he stepped into a accident and emergency he owed $500. it seems crazy and certainly a discrace when i know anytime i can go into my local hospital with anything wrong and have someone sort it out for free. admitedly i will have to wait for an age if it is non life threatening, but at leasts i wont owe £300 after it.are there any people in america campaining for free healthcare?

[evought 0]

for a start i live in england and we have the nhs. which people constantly complain about but in all honesty is absoluty brilliant seeing how little funding it gets.

 

That is the really sad part. You folks spend much less on health care and get more than we do. We pay more than any other country and yet still get crappy care and have many people uninsured.

 

[qoute]

i really feel sorry for those without a proper state healthcare system, as i do for someone without a proper welfare state. as i once heard someone say a free healthcare system is one of the basics of civilized society.

 

i recently saw the morgan spurlock documentory about living for a month on minimum wage. i was plainly shocked by how the minute he stepped into a accident and emergency he owed $500. it seems crazy and certainly a discrace when i know anytime i can go into my local hospital with anything wrong and have someone sort it out for free. admitedly i will have to wait for an age if it is non life threatening, but at leasts i wont owe £300 after it.

 

are there any people in america campaining for free healthcare?

 

Yes and no. I have no confidence that the current government could implement a system half as good as UK's right now. I think it would turn into a big handout to corporate lobbyists. I think the best we could hope for as a revival of the idea that low-income workers could pay to get Medicaid (where as no-income non-workers would get Medicaid free). This would at least cover the gap between the non-workers and workers who get insurance as a benefit without costing the (dramatically underfunded) Medicaid programs more. Better yet, I would like to see anyone be able to purchase Medicaid as an option, regardless of income. That would mean that commercial health plans would actually need to be competitive.

 

For Non-US folks, Medicaid is for the poor, Medicare for the elderly (or disabled).