You
can have Obamacare. Or you can take the current Republican re-do.
Have you read it? Do you know exactly what's in it? Of course not.
I can tell you this. Every possible healthcare bill has the same flaw.
It's called death. I'll explain in a moment.
But first I want to mention that, for the past decade, as a working
reporter, I've taken many actions to put a piece of medical information
in front of mainstream news media, and they won't bite. No matter
what. I've published the information, backed it up seven ways from
Sunday, and it doesn't matter. No dice.
Here it is. Again. Every year, like clockwork, the US medical system
kills 225,000 people. That's a mainstream conclusion. A conservative
conclusion. By extrapolation, that means the US medical system kills
2.25 MILLION people per decade.
Therefore, any new law that places more Americans inside the medical
system through insurance plans will increase those death numbers. The
death numbers will rise to new heights.
Where does the 225,000 death figure come from? A review in the July 26,
2000, Journal of the American Medical Association, titled:
"Is US Health really the Best in the World?" The author was Dr. Barbara Starfield, a revered public health expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
When I interviewed her in 2009, not long before her death, I asked
whether the federal government was doing anything to comprehensively fix
the medical horror show, and whether any official from the government
had approached her to consult on that fix. To both questions, she
emphatically answered:
"NO."
In her Journal review, Starfield broke down the ongoing medical tragedy
this way: annually, 106,000 Americans die from the effects of
correctly prescribed, FDA approved, medicines. 119,000 Americans die as a result of mistreatment and errors in hospitals.
Again, it doesn't matter what kind of national health insurance plan you
prefer. As long as it puts more Americans under the umbrella of the
medical system, the death figures will rise.
Starfield was not the only person to blow the whistle. I'll give you two more examples.
Consider this article,
"The Epidemic of Sickness and Death from Prescription Drugs."
The author is Donald Light, who teaches at Rowan University, and is the
2013 recipient of ASA's [American Sociological Association's]
Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology. Light is a
founding fellow of the Center for Bioethics at the University of
Pennsylvania. In 2013, he was a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for
Ethics at Harvard. He is a Lokey Visiting Professor at Stanford
University.
Donald Light: "Epidemiologically, appropriately prescribed, prescription
drugs are the fourth leading cause of death, tied with stroke at about
2,460 deaths each week in the United States. About 330,000 patients die
each year from prescription drugs in the United States and Europe. They
[the drugs] cause an epidemic of about 20 times more hospitalizations
[than the deaths: 6.6 million hospitalizations annually], as well as
falls, road accidents, and [annually] about 80 million medically minor
problems such as pains, discomforts, and dysfunctions that hobble
productivity or the ability to care for others. Deaths and adverse
effects from overmedication, errors, and self-medication would increase
these figures." (ASA publication, "Footnotes," November 2014)
One more. The journal citation is: BMJ June 7, 2012 (BMJ 2012:344:e3989),
"Anticoagulants cause the most serious adverse events, finds US analysis." Author, Jeanne Lenzer.
Lenzer refers to a report by the Institute for Safe Medication
Practices: "It calculated that in 2011 prescription drugs were
associated with two to four million people in the US experiencing
'serious, disabling, or fatal injuries, including 128,000 deaths.'"
The report called this "one of the most significant perils to humans resulting from human activity."
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