THE AFFORDABLE “DISEASE CARE” LAW

With all the fuss going on over “Obamacare,” I’ve just got to get up on my soapbox for this blog post.

While listening to some of the political talking points and patients’ viewpoints on the current health care crisis a few days ago on television, one woman with MS decried the fact that her drugs alone cost her $4400 a month, and I thought: “Oh My God! This is what we’re getting ourselves into with this so-called Affordable Health Care program!” — a misnomer if there ever was one.  It would be more accurate to call it “Affordable Disease Care,” because that’s what it provides: care for those who have diseases, for whatever the reasons and causes, mostly related to unhealthy lifestyles, poverty, and environmental pollution. 

Just for a perspective on how this pans out where the rubber meets the road: it will take 44 of us paying our minimum $115 monthly Affordable Health Care premiums to pay for this woman’s drugs — drugs that do not even “cure” her MS and restore her health, but that merely treat the symptoms of her disease so that she can go on living a lifestyle that has resulted — and continues to result — in MS.  Now, you tell me what’s wrong with this picture.

But, then, that’s why so-called “health insurance” was invented in the first place — by a group of hospitals during the depression, by the way:

It was during the Depression that hospitals banded together to offer prepaid coverage to citizens. Prepaid hospital coverage was a way for hospitals to avoid the financial failure that befell the banking industry. The approach worked so well that doctors followed suit a few years later and Blue Cross Blue Shield organizations were born. Little did anyone know that the seeds for runaway costs eighty years later had been planted. (THE HISTORY OF HEALTH CARE COSTS AND HEALTH INSURANCE — A Wisconsin Primer by LINDA GORMAN, PH.D.)

Read the article. It’s very enlightening. The primary motive was to make sure hospitals and doctors got paid for their services to the sick — not to the healthy.  So it really should be called “sick care insurance.”  And they won’t let any of us real health care professionals in on their racket. Well, after fighting for inclusion and insurance equality, licensed chiropractors are allowed to dip into the money pool, but only to treat backaches and neck injuries along with disorders related to misaligned spinal vertebrae (known as a “subluxation complex”) — in other words, muscular-skeletal disorders. Diseases can only be treated by an MD and then only with drugs and surgery. Natural medicines, like herbs and therapeutic supplements, are not allowed. An MD’s scope of practice is limited to disease care. Therefore, natural medicines that contribute to health are not covered by any insurance policies that I’m aware of, certainly not by Medicare. Medicare will not pay for chiropractic maintenance care either. The chiropractor, in order to get a relatively puny amount of compensation from Medicare, has to say that the monthly spinal adjustment some of us like to have just to maintain our health is for a “new injury,” even though it isn’t.  You see, one has to be a little bit dishonest in order to play the game. 

Oh, yes, the system can be manipulated and is on a daily basis.  It’s a racket on both sides of the playing field.  We even call it the “health care arena.” It’s all a big and expensive game for which the spectators pay premium dollars every month — plus a co-payment — in order to be allowed into the arena.  Of course, they have to have a treatable disease in order to actually get out on the field and get passed around like a football while the doctor-players dip their hands into the insurance pool each time they pass or run the ball.

IT’S A COLLUSION AND UNHOLY ALLIANCE  

Do you actually believe that medical science will ever find a “cure” for all the diseases they’ve invented in order to have a legitimate reason to play in the healthcare “field” — another game term — and collect a fee from the spectators’ pool of insurance monies — not to mention running the risk of cutting off the billions of research dollars it gets in government grants to find a cure for cancer and alzheimer’s ?  Not on your life.

In case you have forgotten, the “government” is US, you and me, whether we’re paying an insurance premium or not. Our tax dollars go towards keeping this game in play — along with all the dollars collected in countless marches against breast cancer, diabetes and every other disease we can think of that lets us believe we are doing something by paying to walk in order to end disease on the planet.

WAKE UP PEOPLE! IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN!

For one thing, it would collapse the nation’s economy. Yes, I’m being deliberately facetious and critical. But,then, critical thinking is what we all need to exercise these days if we are to affect real changes in health care.  First, let’s call it what it is: disease care. Then let’s start demanding that insurance companies start including honest and real health care in their coverage.  I’ve heard that the state of Washington has been requiring insurance companies to pay for alternative health care for several years now. I don’t know how their doing with their law or even if it is still being enforced. Any of my readers know?

Now, let me get real here.  After all, we live in a less-than-perfect world. Disease is a fact of life as life is now lived by humans on the planet, and I am truly thankful we have developed coping methods and technology to help us traverse the toxic and dangerous terrain we have created on the surface of our planetary home among the stars. We simply could not make it without the help of our wonderful and dedicated ER doctors and nurses who get us through traumatic crises we would otherwise not likely survive. Every time I think of my by-pass operation of 2003 I thank God for the blessed surgeon who held my heart in his hands and grafted new veins and arteries into it so that I could live to see another day, another year, another decade now. God bless him and his team.

I tell my patients to be thankful for their doctors and the drugs they are taking to help them through their health crisis while they embark on a new path to health and wellness with alternative health care and lifestyle changes.  But they know and we all know that taking drugs is not the way to go in our health care. I certainly hope the young lady with MS finds her way to an alternative health care practitioner so that she can let go of her expensive drugs and toxic lifestyle.

HEALTHY ALTERNATIVES ARE ABUNDANTLY AVAILABLE 

We’ve got to find another way, and we have in fact made huge inroads into healthier lifestyles and natural healing technologies. Real health care is abundantly available today.  It’s just not covered by medical insurance, and I’m sure it won’t be covered by the Affordable Health Care Law. For now, we have to pay for it out of our own pockets. But, after all, isn’t my health my responsibility? It’s certainly not yours, nor the government’s, nor the insurance industry’s for that matter. Nor is it my doctors’ responsibility. It’s mine and mine alone. If we each took care of our own health, there would be no need for disease care insurance. 

A RADICAL SHIFT IN CONSCIOUSNESS IS UNDERWAY

What I am really talking about here is the need for a radical shift in the way we think about and go about the care of our health, of our precious and faithful bodies. It’s a change in consciousness that is required so that, as we each one awake and contribute into the mass consciousness our own enlightenment and perspective, we help blaze new paths to freedom from disease.

There is an awakening taking place in human consciousness and it will continue to expand and fill the collective human mind and heart with light and love for truth so that those in positions to offer collective leadership and assume responsibility for collective programs that facilitate whole-health care and healthy lifestyles will continue to have realizations that open up new and affordable ways of doing things on the planet. It’s already happening, as my wife and I were acknowledging at the dinner table just yesterday. It’s just happening “under the radar” of today’s media. It’s all over social media and the web. The new paradigm is now well in place. 

THERE’S NO MIND-MADE SOLUTION TO THE MIND-MADE PROBLEM

Is there a solution to the problem we’re facing with our current health care delivery system? I don’t see one. Every new solution seems to produce only more problems in this mind-made world. The ultimate solution is individual assumption of personal responsibility. Until that happens, we can, at best, create stepping stones and bridges to the other side, away from sick care and toward true health care. All it takes is a little interest and education.

I would make one suggestion, and that would be to put in place a requirement in our Affordable Health Care Law that, in order to engage the system, a person would have to show that he or she has first engaged a healthy lifestyle and is doing something to educate him/or herself about alternative health care and sound nutrition. Even then, it would only work in an honest world where people are awake to the way the natural world works in according to natural laws.

“NOTHING’S WRONG. EVERYTHING MATTERS.”

A friend penned those words in a poem. Disease is the body’s natural adaptation to the insults and injury brought on by an unnatural lifestyle. There’s nothing wrong with it. It keeps our species from extinction by helping us adapt to an increasingly toxic and anti-life environment. It is we with our toxic lifestyle who are out of harmony with Natural Law, and we reap the consequences and pay with our good health and very lives to maintain that disharmony. At the rate we are going, we may not be able to adapt fast enough and our species may yet go extinct unless we make radical changes soon.

Some people say alternative health care is expensive. No it isn’t. Sick care is what’s expensive, increasingly so. That’s why that hand-full of hospitals and doctors invented sick insurance back along the way. Their’s was a vision of things big and far. Real health care is affordable and far less costly than drugs and surgery. It’s safer, too. One simply has to get beyond the fear barrier and let go of one’s false sense of security and dependence on drugs. All insurance salesmen know that fear is the driving force that closes the sale in the absence of wisdom and informed decision making. That’s why I have never in my working years bought health insurance, nor professional liability insurance for that matter. I simply would not buy into a fear-based system. The only two so-called “malpractice” law suits ever filed against me in my early years of practice were suddenly dropped when the assailants found out I didn’t have liability insurance. And the only health care insurance I’ve ever owned and used is Chiropractic and wholistic health care. My heart by-pass surgery was a gift from God. Thank you, God, and Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado. For that matter, all doctors are gifts from God.

Now, of course, I have Medicare to cover any catastrophic health crises I may encounter in my ageing body. It was a blessing to have when I had a worn out knee replaced a few years ago. I take no medications. Nada. Instead, I take a handful of Mother Nature’s medicines of wholefood supplements every day prescribed by a colleague in Houston whom I visit regularly for my health care. I also exercise moderately and eat sensibly. Don’t need much food to maintain my level of activity anyway. “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Not too many of my clients even do that. I also sleep eight hours at night and do things I enjoy — like writing these blogs, reading a good novel, singing with the Masterworks Chorale, cooking, gardening and traveling with my wife and traveling partner. Above all, I find it essential to maintain a spiritual practice to nurture my Soul’s inner life, such as meditation and attunement. After all, physical substance is shaped, nourished and maintained by spiritual substance. “As above, so below. As within, so without.” A conscious working connection with Source within is essential to the health of the whole person.

ABUSE IS INEVITABLE

Abuse is inevitable in systems where billions of dollars are pouring in from the masses. Even Medicare is abused by doctors who know darn good and well that an old person is not going to benefit that much by a hip replacement. My own ageing mother was a case in point. She had hip replacement in her 80’s at the expense of the taxpayers but was too weak to go through rehab and never really walked well again after the surgery, which was, at best, but an expensive aspirin. Between a pace maker and joint replacement, Medicare paid out over thirty-thousand dollars to her doctors and the hospital before she finally used up all her physical substance just surviving to the over-ripe old age of 90. Did her doctors take advantage of Medicare? It appeared so to me. She could have easily been allowed to end her earthly journey honorably at 80 and avoid her last decade of medical disease management. It seems we do things nowadays just because we can and because it’s covered by insurance. What ever happened to allowing the natural process of dying as an honorable way of leaving this world? Does medicine have the right to interfere with that process? Does it have the right to a monopoly on health care, and now to a government subsidized protection plan for that monopoly? Because that’s exactly what the Affordable Health Care Law is. This law says that Americans must have sick care insurance or pay a penalty. Given the current dietary habits and lifestyles of most Americans, it’s really not a bad idea.

The insurance industry itself will eventually collapse, as all dishonest and abused systems must. I think it’s a telling sign that unless the young and healthy sign up for it, Obamacare will not be adequately funded by the people. Many young Americans are apparently opting for the penalty in lieu of the monthly premium. Makes good sense to me. We may yet be forced to return to embracing an honorable death as an alternative to a life of disease management. It is, as one health author put it some years back, “cheaper to die.” Of course, the best alternative by far is health and wellness care.

Well, that’s my contribution to the current conversation on health care. Just one doctor’s viewpoint. You’re welcome to share yours. Until my next post, here’s to your health and healing!

Anthony Palombo, D.C.

Visit my HealingTones.org blog for more thought-provoking articles on transformation and spiritual ascent.

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