The primary goal of all businesses is survival. In most cases this produces the most compassionate system; Wal-mart survives because they meet the need of supplying cheap products. Everyone is happy.
What would happen if Wal-mart got a law passed that outlawed all other stores? Would their prices stay so low? No, of course not. If they were the only choice of places to buy food and clothes, they could charge anything they wanted to. Human greed would dictate that to be very high.
Certain rich men of the 1800’s wanted to be richer. Many of them became rich by providing the best service and products at the best prices (Ford). Others, however, became rich by getting rid of the competition.
Pharmaceutical companies recognized their biggest competition to be natural healing methods (herbs, nutrition, elimination of toxins in the environment, chiropractic). They couldn’t buy out all the herb companies because most herbs can be grown in the backyard, or even collected from the wild (i.e. dandelion, the weed in every lawn in the US is a potent detoxifier, diuretic, blood sugar regulator, and vitamin pack. The same with other natural health remedies). Nearly every homemaker had at least a minimal knowledge of these natural remedies. You can’t buy them out.
Pharmaceutical remedies are by nature more expensive. What with all the testing required and everything, they simply can’t beat the cost of natural remedies. (For goodness sakes, you may have a dandelion growing in your yard right this minute!)
So if you have a business and you can’t produce a cheaper nor better product than your competition, how do you make a profit?
Your only course of action is to somehow get the competition eliminated. This is what the Pharmaceuticals have done.
They began with a massive propaganda campaign in the early 1900’s to discredit everything but their products (A note: Pharmaceuticals do produce many products that honestly are better than anything else out there, they just want to control the whole market, not just what they are best at.)
Then they paid for a commission to inspect and grade every medical school in this country, supposedly to see if they were teaching truth or quackery. However, they defined “quackery” as “using natural methods instead of modern drugs and surgeries.” All the schools that taught naturals were forced by public pressure to close their doors.
The Pharmaceuticals then gave money to the borderline schools to start classes in “pill pushing.” Today, one of the biggest donors to medical schools is still the pharmaceutical industry and no medical school teaches anything about herbs, few even offer nutrition and at those it is an elective (optional) course. Your doctor has not been taught anything but pills and surgeries (which require medicines to perform).
Then the Pharmaceuticals sponsored the formation of the AMA (doctor’s union) and the FDA. In addition to standard union behavior, the AMA functions by deciding what is “proper” protocol for a doctor to follow in every case. If a doctor does not follow protocol they can loose their license and will loose any lawsuits brought against them. If they try to practice without a license they will be arrested. So all doctors must follow “protocol,” whether they want to or not, which is set by the AMA which is paid for, (through school donations and direct contributions), by the Pharmaceuticals.
The FDA was set up to “protect” the consumer- supposedly. However, its formation was paid for by Pharmaceuticals and its funding today comes from two sources: government taxes and fees paid by Pharmaceuticals to get products approved. How does the government know what to tell the FDA to do? Why the AMA tells our congressmen what is right, of course.
Add to this, a law was passed, at the insistence of the FDA, that “only medicine and surgeries cure disease.”
So if you claim something cures disease that the FDA has not approved of as a disease-curing medicine, you go to jail for committing fraud. To show how ridicules this is; scurvy is a vitamin c deficiency disease. EVERYONE knows that. However if I own a big orchard and advertise that my oranges will cure scurvy, the FDA can (and will if I am too public and profitable) arrest me for committing fraud and practicing medicine without a license.
Why doesn’t the FDA just recognize that oranges cure scurvy? Because no one has paid for a study to be done to show that they will. Why not? Because you can’t patent oranges and so no one can make a multi-million dollar profit off of selling them.
The final blow to natural methods of healing? All businesses must supply their full time employees with health insurance. All health insurances decide what they will pay for and what they won’t. Who sits on the committees making these decisions? AMA doctors.
So here we are today;
- our employers must buy us insurance which only allows us to see (big pharmaceutical supported) AMA doctors...
- who are taught in schools paid for by big pharmaceutical companies.
- If your doctor dares to do anything not approved by the (big pharmaceutical supported) AMA he looses his license and risks jail and bankruptcy.
- And your employer can’t pay you enough to pay you own bills because he has to buy (big pharmaceutical supported) AMA governed insurance.
It is a great big tree whose roots come right back to Big Pharmaceuticals every time.
Let’s take a woman in our church as an example. There is a good chance that a Kinesiologist in Tahoe could have cured her wrist problems with a few sessions of hand manipulation. But instead of paying her more money, her company has to spend $700-1000 per month to buy her health insurance. So she can’t afford the $200-400 it would cost to go to the Kinesiologist. But the insurance company would pay (I am guessing $5000 or more?) for surgery, so she had surgery.
Now she is having more problems, probably side affects of the surgery. So she will either have to take pain medicine (made by a pharmaceutical company) for the rest of her life or have more surgery (requiring anesthesiology, pain killers, disinfectants, etc all made by Big Pharm.).
Instead of her being well, she is now in chronic pain, possibly for life, while the Pharmaceuticals make thousands of dollars off of her treatments.
Let’s take another example: (I will CAPATILIZE every pharmaceutical profit)
Mr. and Mrs. Smith are going to have a baby. They don’t have a lot of money but his work does provide health insurance (at $1000+or – per month).
They check it out and the insurance won’t pay for a midwife (European countries use midwives for 80% of births and lose half as many moms and a third as many babies by percentage), only a DOCTOR (remember it is Pharmaceutical sponsored, AMA doctors on the committee that decides what gets paid for).
So that is where they go to have their baby.
AMA protocol says the doctor must badger tell her to take many pre-natal TESTS (using Pharmaceutical products). Midwives don’t have any tests done unless they see a real need for them.
Some of the tests come back iffy requiring more TESTS.
If something shows up to likely be wrong, the doctor has been trained to encourage her to ABORT (aborted babies are used by the Pharmaceuticals for testing), never mind the thousands of babies with “definite birth defects” that are born perfectly healthy every year nor the millions of infertile couples who can’t adopt because there just aren’t enough babies, even handicapped ones.
The Smith’s second round of tests are normal, however, so they proceed to the due date.
When they get close to the due date, the doctor talks them into inducing (standard protocol) using PITOCIN (an artificial hormone.)
The induction hurts more than natural labor so she begs for PAIN KILLER.
The painkiller causes labor to slow down so they give her a more powerful drug, CYTOTEC, to push things along.
She gets close to the time limit set by the hospital lawyers for how long a woman can labor without danger of loosing lawsuits so the doctor ups the MEDS.
The baby shows distress (caused by the meds of course) so they rush her to surgery, give her an EPIDURAL, and do a C-SECTION (1/3 of babies in the US are born by c-section).
The baby is born in distress and not breathing (epi drugs slow baby breathing) so they give him STIMULANT DRUGS to get him started. And c-section babies are far more likely to have ASTHMA for the rest of their lives.
He starts breathing and everything is OK but they will put him in NICU for observation (standard protocol for a distressed baby).
Because of the separation this causes, he never really gets the hang of nursing so he is put on FORMULA.
The law requires him to be injected with VITAMIN K and a couple of VACCINES plus have ANTIBIOTICS put in his eyes. The VACCINES are to continue every two months at four SHOTS or more per visit (way way more than Europe requires).
Mom gets an infection from the surgery and needs ANTIBIOTICS to get over it.
Several months later everyone is healthy and mom is so glad they had baby in the hospital because “they saved his life.”
All future babies will be delivered by C-SECTIONS because hospitals won’t allow vaginal births after c-sections anymore due to too many uterine ruptures caused by CYTOTEC.
(For comparison- a couple gets pregnant and comes up with the money for a midwife.
The midwife only orders those tests she feels are necessary for this couple; all of them for some and none for others (most).
They wait until mommy’s body goes into labor by itself, stay home where infections are less likely, use natural methods of pain relief (such as showers, tubs, different positions, etc.), and deliver the baby without instruments of any kind except a midwives or hubby’s clean hands.
Baby is put to the breast immediately, making breast feeding much more likely to succeed as well as releasing all natural hormones in the mommy that prevent excessive bleeding.
Because the birth is so much gentler, there are no tears.
The midwife makes sure the parents know they have the right to refuse any vaccines they want to and since this is a monogamous couple, they don’t bother with the anti-biotic in the eyes (to prevent blindness due to venereal disease).
They watch baby very closely to make sure he doesn’t need the Vit K shot instead of giving it to him no matter what.
In all, this type of birth may actually bring no money whatsoever to Big Pharmaceuticals. It will almost assuredly bring far less than the norm.)
Solutions:
Socialization- This would complete the monopoly. All decisions would be made, directly or indirectly, by the Pharmaceutical industry. Natural remedies and actual cures will NOT be allowed as they bring no profit. The only way to counter this would be to have the government take control of the whole industry.
Government control removes the profit incentive to keep prices down so we would eventually be in worse condition than we are now. Eventually some alternative practitioners, such as midwives, might be allowed because they are cheaper and often more effective, but they would be under the thumb of the AMA.
Outlaw insurance- Businesses could give that extra money to their employees (and would have to or risk losing them to businesses that do). The employees could take that money to midwives, herbalists, chiropractors, naturopaths, reflexologies, etc. to get the treatment they need. In some cases they could simply plant their own garden to grow their own “medicine” (dandelion, purple cone flower, plantain, garlic, alfalfa, oat straw, etc.)
Big medicine could no longer make obscene profits. They would have to lower their prices.
The AMA would have to allow a wider protocol or their doctors would go out of business.
Hospitals would have to charge less and relax their rules or lose customers to “sanitariums,” (alternate places of healing focusing on more natural methods.)
Change the laws regarding drug approval- definitely needed, though this is a hard one to accomplish. It should not be illegal to tell someone an orange a day would cure scurvy.
Put caps on law suits- again, needed. A big reason for many of the laws and polices in the medical industry is fear of bankrupting lawsuits. Many good doctors would fight the status quo if they could afford to take the chance.
Encourage people to save money to pay for their own health care- This can be accomplished by providing tax-free medical savings accounts. Individuals can save money for a “rainy day.” If we allow employers to contribute to these accounts instead of buying insurance, we begin to wean ourselves off of insurance dependence.
If we allow a certain amount to be withdrawn tax-free after a certain amount of time (say, the amount you save for one year), we encourage people to be frugal and find the best deals with their healthcare and we reward them for being healthy.
In short;
- get rid of the pharmaceutical monopoly and you get rid of the price gouging.
- Follow that with lawsuit caps, lowering malpractice insurance costs.
- Everyone could afford to pay their own bills again, especially if they could save the money to do so tax-free.
