Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Twists and Turns: Politics and Your Health

Medicare and Political Antics

I try not to be too political when citing issues for Natural Health News, however I can’t let this one pass.
If you take the time to read these articles you get a clear picture that it’s the party and the dogma that matters. 
People just don’t count.

And the presumptive silliness on the part of these alleged adults and their ridiculous behavior tell you even more.
Might you ask, why did these men (sic) ever get elected?

Back home a lot of voters are speaking out against his folly. In Arizona, constituents demanded to know why there is support for turning Medicare over to private insurers.

Of course you aren’t hearing too much at the same time about the republican handouts to Big Insurance over the Senior Drug Plan, Medicare Part D. Even in its reduced form that Obama dealt out some months back, the handouts and perks to PhRMA and Insurance are just too much for the budget. Cuts can be made here and strictly on the supply side.

Ever wonder where your member of Congress gets financial backing? 

And don’t you think we need responsible elected officials who are willing to stick their necks out to fight for the people who elected them rather than toting party dogma and panting feverishly in wait for the gravy train?

Gingrich lambasted over health care comments
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_theticket/20110517/pl_yblog_theticket/gingrich-lambasted-over-health-care-comments
House Republicans Face Backlash At Home Over Medicare Vote
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/17/house-republicans-face-backlash-medicare_n_863144.html
Gingrich apologizes to Ryan for Medicare comments
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-gingrich-ryan-20110518,0,4926524.story
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-gingrich-mistake-20110518,0,5534984.story

Paul Ryan's Money Sources

Top 5 Contributors, 2009-2010, Campaign Cmte

ContributorTotalIndivsPACs
Northwestern Mutual$24,650$15,650$9,000
Harris Assoc$18,300$18,300$0
American Family Insurance$13,000$13,000$0
Aurora Health Care$12,674$12,674$0
Credit Union National Assn$12,000$1,000$11,000

Top 5 Industries, 2009-2010, Campaign Cmte

IndustryTotalIndivsPACs
Retired$344,200$344,200$0
Insurance$234,352$65,845$168,507
Securities & Investment$229,850$155,550$74,300
Health Professionals$209,773$76,206$133,567
Real Estate$81,000$42,500$38,500

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Interconnectedness: Politics-Finance-Your Health

RELATED ARTICLE, 4/22/10

I sometimes think that everyone should think in the same way I do, but then that may not be a good thing. I'd at least like more people to be able to see things in the interconnected way things are and how the Wall Street fiasco, political maneuvering on the health bill, and the limited perspective on the outcomes of these things can directly effect your health.

Yes, I know that was a run-on sentence, but I'm ok with it. Just trying to make a point...

As I explained recently to someone in health care, I've been in health care all my life except for my first five years. I owe that to my father who was trying to brainwash me into being the next doctor in our family (we have lots of them, dating back to before the Civil War). It makes for an unusual childhood, but perhaps the pay off is the way I closely observe.

This foresight, or hindsight, or whatever sight led me to think about a few things and the following is what I ended up expressing.

Now that it has been published, I'm adding in here for those of you who read Natural Health News to consider and comment -

Politics, Finance, and Your Health

In the late 70s I took a position of Executive Director at an urban tribal health center. There were a ton of problems, if not more. This health program was extremely important because it was the first funded under the Indian Self determination Act, PL 93-638.
With all the politics involved a traditional model of governance was established and the clinic continues to serve today. It also has been a model other tribes have used to develop improved health care delivery.
One day I came to work only to find a poster tacked to my office door; it was Wonder Woman.
I don’t usually like to write too much about politics or economics, but from time to time issues do arise that seem to have a close relationship to health.
In the past few days one or three have come to my attention that touch on issues related to health and to things that have been important to me for a very long time.
I don’t like war. And more of what I don’t like about it is the damage it does to not only our military, but other those serving in other countries, and to innocents.
Currently we are spending an obscene amount of money on war that is really getting us nothing, and moving us nowhere.
Here you can learn for yourself - http://costofwar.com/
This is a project of http://www.nationalpriorities.org/
Learning about what members of Congress vote for who gives them how much money can be found here - http://www.opensecrets.org/
Open Secrets becomes very useful when looking at how the health reform bill came to pass, as it were, especially if you watched a recent Frontline program evaluating it.
Lawrence H. Summers was sworn in as the 71st Secretary of the Treasury in July 1999 after serving as Under Secretary for International Affairs and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. From 1991 to 1993 he served as Chief Economist of the World Bank.
During his first stint in the Clinton administration he basically stopped progressive regulations that would have prevented the most recent problems with ‘bubbles’ and the Wall Street Bailout.
A very astute and erudite woman, Brooksley Born, tried to stop the derivatives mess when Summers was first at the Treasury Department.
He dismissed her to some dark basement of ineffective impact because she wanted strong regulations to halt the derivative nightmare of that time.
Subsequently, Summers again took aim at Born again - http://firedoglake.com/2010/04/09/brooksley-born-raises-an-important-question-but-answers-are-weak/
Another mention of this situation is recorded in a recent program on Bill Moyers Journal - http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04162010/profile2.html
This is not unlike the work of Catherine Austin Fitts who questioned many concerns when she was at HUD.
As usual, the fast printing of money and the recent sell outs to the banksters comes close to the sell out to Big Insurance and PhRMA.
Much of this could certainly have been avoided it male egos weren’t so entrenched and fragile.
Now we’re about to get it again in the proverbial shorts because the real change we need in banking reform is just another watered down deal for citizens and another government handout to Wall Street.
http://www.campaignmoney.org/blog/2010/04/13/sen-mcconnell-takes-financial-industry-cash-opposes-financial-industry-reform
And we still have Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke. No real change!
Should we start panhandling for spare change?
Or do we need more ‘women of steel’?

Copyright©2010 Gayle Eversole, DHom, PhD, MH, NP, ND. All rights reserved.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Politics, HIV/AIDS and GMO Drugs

The AIDS epidemic has been a world wide environmental and public health issue wince the concept was thrown out in the Nixon Administration by Henry Kissinger. It was Kissinger that led the Department of defense to a plan for bio warfare contaminants that have brought about HIV/AIDS issues.

This has been a boon to Big Pharma with an avenue for creating a profit stream with genetically engineered pharmaceuticals. It has become a political issue too as many reports address the difficulty some groups and nations have in obtaining the drugs.

In some way the drugs have helped, in others the drugs have harmed. This is similar to the interferon use that has been problematic for people with Hep C, MS and correlated "auto-immune" disorders.

For some time we have tried to get funding for an approach to HIV/AIDS that involves the use of supplements to prevent the conversion of HIV to AIDS. (Hope Bill and Melinda are reading this; Sir Elton and Oprah too!)

We also would like to see more respect for groups in Africa that are getting very good response to a mixture with garlic, cayenne, and some other natural ingredients. Beet, especially raw grated beet, is an excellent anti-cancer remedy, so it should encourage mainstream medicos to get a little more open-minded on the cultural approach to health care and healing. (Recall that the AIDS vaccine trial failed.)

Others are questioning the SOP. Could this be that there seem to be some anti-HIV/AIDS nutrients that can probably cure the "dis-ease".

There are four and they involve the glutathione peroxidase mechanism. The key core components are selenium, cysteine, glutamine and tryptophan.

Certainly this is a simpler, safer and very less expensive approach. It is not, however, expedient to Big Pharma, Bill Clinton or politics as usual, and perhaps not the UN agendae.

Recently the Well Being Journal, a publication that has printed a number of my articles, reported on this nutritional supplement regimen and its positive effects. You might find the material interesting reading and very useful. (Additional data)

Other non-SOP approaches are retained at Keep Hope Alive, where I have served as a medical advisor.

With all the benefits to so many from orthomolecular approaches over the past 60 or so years things might be opening up as chemical treatments fail and options dwindle to nothing.

This is just one quark of understanding the benefit of Chaos theory as applied to health and healing.
Universal HIV tests would have big impact: studyBy Michael Kahn Michael Kahn, Tue Nov 25, 2008
LONDON (Reuters) – Near-universal HIV tests and immediate drug treatment for people who test positive would almost eliminate transmission of the deadly virus within a decade, a computer model showed on Wednesday.

Doing this would cost more initially but then save money down the road because there would be fewer HIV-infected people to treat, Reuben Granich and colleagues at the World Health Organization wrote in the journal The Lancet.

The researchers emphasized their findings do not represent new WHO policy or any other guidance but rather stand as a call for discussion on how to better tackle the AIDS epidemic and the role of so-called antiretroviral drugs.

"Although other prevention strategies, alone or in combination, could substantially reduce HIV incidence, our model suggests that only universal voluntary HIV testing and immediate initiation of antiretroviral drugs could reduce transmission to the point at which elimination might be feasible by 2020 for a generalized epidemic, such as that in South Africa," they wrote.

Granich and colleagues used data from South Africa as a test case for a generalized epidemic in their model, which assumed all HIV transmission was through heterosexual sex.

This showed that voluntary screening in which at least 90 percent of the population took part, and immediate drug treatment for those testing positive, could reduce HIV transmission by more than 95 percent within 10 years.

The AIDS virus infects an estimated 33 million people globally, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, and has killed 25 million. There is no cure.

The advent in the 1990s of combination drug therapy called highly active antiretroviral therapy, or HAART, has extended the lives of many HIV-infected people, particularly in developed countries.

About 3 million people worldwide had received the drug cocktails by the end of 2007, far short of the estimated 6.7 million infected people still in need of treatment, the researchers added.

There are, of course, drawbacks which the researchers and other scientists pointed out. One is how health systems in poor countries can cope with widespread testing, and whether people can stick to the drugs they must take for life.

"At its best, the strategy would prevent morbidity and mortality for the population, both through better treatment of the individual and reduced spread of HIV," Geoffrey Garnett, a researcher at Imperial College London, wrote in a commentary in The Lancet.

"At its worst, the strategy will involve over-testing, over-treatment, side effects, resistance, and potentially reduced autonomy of the individual in their choices of care."

(Reporting by Michael Kahn; Editing by Will Dunham and Mark Trevelyan)
Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited

Faulty AIDS policies caused 365,000 early deaths in SAfrica: study

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The failure to provide anti-retrovirals to AIDS patients in South Africa led to the premature deaths of 365,000 people between 2000-2005, according to a new Harvard university study.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) said the policies of Thabo Mbeki, who was heavily criticized during his 1999-2008 presidency for the denial of scientific remedies for AIDS, contributed directly to the deaths.

"Many lives were lost because of a failure to accept the use of available (antiretroviral drugs) to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS in a timely manner," researchers said.

Mbeki's health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, was widely discredited for proposing lemon juice, olive oil, garlic and beetroot as AIDS treatments as the country battled one of the world's worst AIDS epidemics.

Some 5.5 million of the 47 million population are infected by HIV -- over 18 percent of the adult population.

The study, published online last month and available Monday in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, said the country lost at least 3.8 million years of life from the 330,000 adults who died for lack of proper treatment and the 35,000 babies who died after they were born with HIV.

For the study's model researchers compared the policies of the South African government with those of neighbouring Botswana and Namibia, which are suffering from comparable epidemics and did enforce a policy of treating patients with appropriate drugs.

According to the World Health Organization, 33 million people around the world are infected with the AIDS virus, mostly in the sub-Sahara Africa.

Some two million people died worldwide of AIDS in 2007.
Copyright © 2008 Agence France Presse

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Big Insurance Seeking Spoils

While the Obama transition team wields the ugly power of spoils for the victor, all those with vested interests are jockeying viciously for position.

And while everyone seems to have been spoon fed on the idea of national health insurance, Big Insurance is seeking an eye on profits as it uses ploys that are trendy and seem to get them a big payoff for superficial pandering with their manipulated media statements in line with what their pundits think COngress will swallow.

Of course Hillary is back in this fray, trying to cut deals, hubby Bill trying to cut deals, and Teddy Kennedy seemingly blocking some of them.

Kennedy has been wheeling and dealing with the big players on a health plan, but you can be sure it isn't with Joe and Jane Six-Pack in mind.

Maybe its more like roulette, le juet sont fait!

I'm not against everyone having access to care, but the question has to be who really is controlling the care.

The Hillary Plan was dead before it started in her husband's administration. Has she really kept in touch with the "outside" over all these years to allow her to start on this with a clean slate?

We need reform on many levels. Reform requires new ideas and fresh folks who aren't mired in the Beltway Bandit band and their tunnel vision.

If you haven't been keeping up with the G8 that is now the G20, you do need to know what their plan is and how it will effect your health. If you dare to risk reading much more truthful interpretations of their actions than what you'll ever read or hear in the media as it is today start here.
Insurers make pitch for health coverage mandate
By KEVIN FREKING, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – The health insurance industry says it will support a national health care overhaul that requires them to accept all customers regardless of pre-existing medical conditions.

In return, the industry said Wednesday, it wants Congress to require that everyone buy coverage.

Lawmakers have signaled their intent to craft health care legislation early next year, and the insurance industry's support would make passage much easier. That legislation is expected to closely track the proposals of President-elect Barack Obama.

Karen Ignagni, president of the board of directors for America's Health Insurance Plans, says she hopes the endorsement will help members of Congress fashion their proposal.

 
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