What the heck is wrong with healthcare in America today

What the heck is wrong with healthcare in America today.

There are 3 main issues and all of them are important. All 3 issues play into each other.

At the top, of course, is education.People are not educated as to what practices allow for a healthy body. Everyone says exercise and eat right but what does that mean? There are too many variables in exercise and in diet that make that statement useless. In the absence of education, people do what feels good to them and are easily manipulated by interests that are financial not health oriented. There is an appalling lack of responsibility on the part of the average American. There is a mind set of living how ever a person wants and then laying it at the feet of the medical doctor to “fix” it when they have symptoms.

The medical industry is the second issue. It completely plays into the ignorance of the typical American by dispensing drugs as a primary therapy instead of education and advice. Dominated by the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance industry, it is easy to see how doctor’s mindset about health does not serve the populace as well as it could. The current health care model, as anyone who has been in it recently can attest, is one symptom: one drug and 20 minutes with the doctor if you are lucky. There is simply not enough time spent with patients to educate and to investigate. This is because the managed care system is based on saving money. Therefore, a maximum number of patients are seen and a minimum number of diagnostic tests are performed all in the name of cost savings. If one HMO doc sees 1000 patients and orders 20,00 dollars of tests and another doc sees 1,000 patients and orders 4,000 dollars of tests, can you guess which doc will be let go?

The last and third issue has to do with food in America. Because we live in a capitalistic society, there is always a financial incentive to cut corners to make a buck. Do you really want the manufacturers of food cutting corners with substances you put in your mouth? For that matter, do you want food manufacturers?  Food should be real and live, not packaged and dead.

Americans ate 68 Billion dollars worth of packaged snack food in 2008, up from 60 Billion dollars in 2004. Packaged food is rarely compatible with optimum health. The main reasons for this mind boggling statistic is that Advertisers appeal to the public based on image and taste and have a vested interest in Americans being ignorant about the preservatives, colorings and chemicals that masquerade as food. As long is there is a buck to be made with cheap inferior product ingredients and as long as the public does not cry out for better quality, the free market system in America will deliver more of the same garbage that Americans will consume, much to their detriment.

So, as you can easily see, the healthcare paradigm in America is severely flawed and the primary elements needing change are education about what constitutes health,what constitutes real, healthy  food and the medical/pharmaceutical system. All have their part and are interrelated to one another.