Integrative Care? The Door is Open to Doom

Year's ago, what is now known by some buzz words like 'alternative', 'complementary', or the most recent 
'integrative', used to be the norm.

We had what was really collaborative health care.

People knew what they could do and when they could not do something that was best for a patient they automatically collaborated with another health care provider, professional or ancillary.

Then along came HMOs and managed care, and now here we are.  Another "back to the future" moment.

While it may be a little better for those with health insurance to get some out of the mainstream care, it will still be the Big Insurance providers wielding the pen.  And the pen will say 'yea' or 'nay'.

Now for example, chiropractors are allowed to bill for a limited number of visits.  Other "integrative " approaches are in the same category.  And it seems a doctor has to refer you, so you really don't have a choice of your own making.  Because of the referral charges your cost will be higher.

It has been interesting to watch over the decades that I have been involved with providing natural health care as a nurse practitioner in hospitals and other settings.  I've always stayed outside the insurance framework in private practice so that has been interesting too because what I do hasn't been limited or controlled.   And, consider too that with my focus on public health, I have always relied on the collaborative model.  Referrals are good.


One thing for sure, all this will soon be controlled under doctors as they are scrambling to get certified in "integrative" care, to keep the market place in their hands.


And just as standards of care for pharmaceutical treatment for your condition is now the cookie cutter approach you get, believe me, this will come along in some form to the "integrators".

Only now it will become Cookie Cutter integrative medicine with "condition specific supplements".

By the way, that model is NOT natural health care!


Your best insurance, get some good education from a true expert.

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Posted in: alternative care,complementary care,integrative care,learn natural health care,natural health news

NO to Forced Purchase of Health Insurance

While I am strongly committed to health care access for all as is available in most countries outside the US, I think this ruling is one to be strongly evaluated.

First of all why must insurance, especially in a plan largely written by the insurance and pharmaceutical industry be rammed down the throats of selected groups of people?

Secondly, most media outlets are not giving much coverage to the groups that are exempted from this proposal.  Members of Congress are excluded and to me this is the most flagrant abuse in the legislation.

There are other concerns too but I want to stick with an example of employment based insurance.

In an NPR report related to the court ruling there was a discussion of the "boomers" in age 50-64.  Right now many are unemployed, lacking coverage, and lacking employment opportunities because so many of the Republicans in Congress sent jobs from their political crony corporations out of the country, and for the most part are responsible for NAFTA and GATT.

A health policy instructor at a California university mentioned in the report that it is just the 50-64 age group that is at highest risk of developing chronic health conditions like the heart attack that left a 59 year old man with $94 thousand in debt.  He'd also been unemployed for 5 years.

This college instructor also mentioned that most chronic health conditions start appearing around age 64.

Certainly a better way to see this is to see that there is no inclusion of natural health options in the health insurance reform bill.

There is talk about "integrative" care but this model  has quickly become a copy cat of the AMA model, only the "prescriptions" are a bit different, but it is still a tightly controlled arena.  They want this limited to the few who have 'licensening'.

What you hear so little about is prevention and true natural therapies.

The traditional natural health care approach has been keeping people well for h undreds of years.  You can find out more here. We have been helping people be well and stay well in a toxic world for decades naturally and during the decades as a nurse practitioner.

Key healthcare provision voided by federal judge

A requirement that Americans buy insurance — the central provision of Obama's signature domestic achievement — is unconstitutional, the ruling says.


December 13, 2010
By Noam N. Levey and David G. Savage, Tribune Washington Bureau Reporting from Washington — Declaring a core part of the new healthcare law unconstitutional, a federal judge in Virginia has launched President Obama's signature domestic achievement into a gantlet of conservative-leaning courts that will almost certainly conclude at the Supreme Court just as the 2012 election is cresting.

In the first such decision since Obama signed the law in March, U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson ruled Monday that Congress had overstepped its power in requiring Americans to get health insurance by 2014.

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Posted in: health insurance reform,learn natural health care,natural health care

Health Care Reform Has Hefty Price Tag

As the ball park figure for health care reform creeps up not-to-slowly, not unlike the Wall Street-Banking Bail Out fiasco, from $634 billion to $1.5 trillion, maybe you'd better make plans to sign up for our on-line classes or get our list of recommended books, so you can start reducing your health prevention and maintenance learning curve....

Maybe this goes along with that agenda item for your employee health benefits to be taxed as income.

Where's the Beef? or should it be asked. "Is it real or Memorex?"...

Health care overhaul may cost about $1.5 trillion
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – Guaranteeing health insurance for all Americans may cost about $1.5 trillion over the next decade, health experts say. That's more than double the $634 billion 'down payment' President Barack Obama set aside for health reform in his budget, raising the prospect of sticker shock at a time of record federal spending. Administration officials have pointedly avoided providing a ballpark estimate, saying it depends on details to be worked out with Congress. The White House had no immediate response to questions Tuesday.

Still, the potential costs are raising concerns among Republicans and some Democrats as Congress prepares to draft next year's budget. "We shouldn't just be throwing more money on top of the present system, because the present system is so wasteful," said Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee.

The health care plan Obama offered as a candidate would have cost nearly $1.2 trillion over ten years, according to a detailed estimate last fall by the Lewin Group, a leading consulting and policy analysis firm. The campaign plan would not have covered all the uninsured, as most Democrats in Congress want to do. But it is a starting point for lawmakers.

John Sheils, a senior vice president of the Lewin Group, said about $1.5 trillion to $1.7 trillion would be a credible estimate for a plan that commits the nation to covering all its citizens. That would amount to around 4 percent of projected health care costs over the next 10 years, he added.

The cost of covering the uninsured is "a difficult hurdle to get over," Sheils said in an interview.

"I don't know where the rest of the money is going to come from," he added.

Some of the leading advocates of coverage for all are using cost estimates of around $1.5 trillion.

"Honestly...we can't do it for the $634 billion the president put in the reserve fund," John Rother, public policy director for AARP told an insurance industry meeting in Washington last week.

"In all likelihood, it will be over $1 trillion," he added, citing his own estimate of $1.5 trillion.

Economist Len Nichols, who heads the health policy project at the New America Foundation, said he calculates that guaranteeing coverage will cost $125 billion to $150 billion a year, when fully phased in.

Nichols said the Obama administration is not being "cagy" but "strategic" in refusing to be pinned down on an estimate. Taxpayers will get a better idea when congressional committees try to draft legislation later this year. "Until that gets revealed by the Congress, it would be highly premature for the president to assert that sort of number," Nichols said.

White House budget director Peter Orszag told the House Budget Committee earlier this month that the president's $634 billion fund is "likely to be the majority of the cost." Roughly half of the money would come from spending cuts, and the other half from tax increases.

But whether the $634 billion represents 50 percent, 60 percent, or 70 percent of the cost "will depend on the details of whatever is finally done...as we move through the legislative process," Orszag added.

The overall cost matters because the expansion of health coverage is meant to be a permanent reform. That means future generations will have to bear the cost.

"We are dealing with huge numbers," said David Walker, a former U.S. comptroller general and now head of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a group that promotes fiscal responsibility. "We need to have a much better sense of what we are talking about doing, and whether or not it's affordable and sustainable over time."

The costs could force the administration and Congress to make unpopular decisions on where to cut the nation's $2.4 trillion health care tab.

"Nobody disputes the fact that there's going to be some startup costs," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. "But to have credibility in terms of going to the public, you've got to show you are making some savings in the existing system."

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press

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Posted in: 2009,health care reform,learn natural health care,natural health news,printing money out of thin air,rising cost of health care