The Problem With Health Insurance

There are a lot more problems with health insurance and our so-called "health care" than meets the eye. What you don't know can harm you and your family. I have created this lens to bring awareness to all people and hopefully help those of us with or without health insurance.

First I have to say, our entire health system is set up to take power away from you and my goal is to change that. At the moment, health care means finding the right drugs or the right surgery to save your life. Prevention means taking tests only to catch an already contracted disease before it gets too out of control. Funny, I thought prevention meant to prevent getting the disease in the first place.

The problem is that we have learned to rely on this type of treatment, to let the disease happen then try to eradicate it. There is no mention that your body has the power to heal itself under the right circumstances. Forget the fact that our bodies do not have to get the disease in the first place.

We are told that we have no control over the many diseases that ravage our population, while at the same time the media is full of messages of "anti-cancerous" foods and nutrients. Then we get another talking head telling us that we have no power over our immune system. But we are supposed to eat right to stay healthy. Which are we supposed to believe?

I was once a believer in medicine. Actually I still believe in it. I know it exists. If my daughter breaks her leg, I'm taking her to the emergency room. But at the same time, I know there are things I can do to be proactive when any illness strikes. I will not rely on medicine for my or my family's health. Here is an excellent example of why...

I once had a holistic health center in the Los Angeles area of California. I am a Nutritional Counselor and my sister is a Doctor of Chiropractic who shared the office with me. We had a visitor in the office and she was telling us how she was fed up with the doctors and hospital practices. She told us a story of how she suspected her son had strep throat. He was feeling sick so she took him to the emergency room at the local hospital. She and her sick son waited.... and waited.... and waited. She spent the next four hours trying to get a doctor to come look at her son. She knew he had step throat, but she needed a doctor to confirm it.

Emergency rooms are staffed for emergencies. They may be health issues that need to be dealt with immediately such as injury from a car accident. An emergency may be life threatening, such as heart attack or stroke. Strep throat hardly falls under the "life threatening" label. Yet there was this poor child, sick and sitting in an emergency room waiting for any doctor to come along and confirm what Mom already knew.

Finally, four hours later, a doctor did confirm it. Note that because of the health insurance policy rules, a nurse or any one else who may know he had strep throat could not tell the mom this. Only the doctor who is already over-burdened. Here's my beef with this and the problem with health insurance.

There are products that you can buy at your local pharmacy or health food store that will work just as good, or even better, than any antibiotic. I use these on my children all the time. They are 13, 11 and 6 years old and none of them have ever taken an antibiotic. I don't want them to. In fact, studies done in Europe proved that something like 85% of bacteria strains tested mutated against pharmaceutical antibiotics so they could resist them. They could not do this against natural antibiotics.

If this route were promoted by health insurance companies, there would have been less burden on the doctor and all around lower cost. There would be no emergency room bill, no pharmaceutical bill and the child would have been home in bed where he belonged.

So, this is a problem. Why don't the majority of people know this? I don't know. Ask the American Medical Association. I know it sounds crazy, but consider the following scenario.

I once had Hepatitis C and was very sick with it. I took regular blood tests to monitor the progress of the disease. I didn't have health insurance, but I did save money. When I believed I had enough saved, I asked the doctor for the cure, or shot or whatever I needed. He told me there was none. At this point in my illness, I could not hold down food. My doctor told me there was a little hope, that when I could not hold down water I could be checked into the hospital and be fed intravenously. At that point we would hope something better than interferon comes along.

During this time, some colleagues were telling me that I could be proactive. For a couple months I told them not to worry, my doctor was taking care of things. Finally I realized he wasn't. There was nothing he could do. I did not want to slow the disease, I wanted it gone. So, I tried my colleagues' approach.

A month later I felt nearly 100% better. I went for my doctor's appointment and he was happy to see my blood tests come back so good. I was elated at my progress so tried to share with him all I was doing. I started telling him about drinking fresh vegetable juice, changing my diet, and cleansing my body. Much to my dismay, he covered his ears and told me that was nice, but he didn't really want to hear it. I was shocked.

Move ahead ten years and now I'm working in my own holistic health office. I had been collaborating with a medical doctor who had retired early to open his own practice that included herbs and acupuncture. Together, we worked out a holistic regimen for those with Hepatitis C.
This doctor was attempting to hold lectures for people who had come together to form help groups for those with Hep C. His goal was to share that there was hope, a way of being proactive and how we can empower ourselves to heal. He was turned down by the doctor in charge of the help group. He explained that he could not risk getting the patients' hopes up.

I had another client who was an oncologist (cancer doctor) for seven years before retiring to set up his own holistic practice. He affirmed that this was common practice - don't get the patients' hopes up because you could get sued if the patient does not get better. But, he said, at the same time doctors have the power to give people a death sentence. Apparently telling people they have only three months to live is okay, but telling them there is a chance you could heal was out of the question. Talk about a death panel.

I have lived, studied, trained in, breathed, and experienced the power of holistic health and the power our bodies have to heal. I have seen people heal themselves of brain cancer, stomach cancer, breast cancer, testicular cancer, Lupus, rheumatoid arthritic, multiple sclerosis, Hepatitis C, and a lot more. I have seen this right before my eyes and my business was only a tiny one in the whole of Los Angeles. No wonder holistic practices are multiplying.

Yet, the medical community refuses to acknowledge this power. They call it quackery, hoaxes, snake oils, dangerous and more. Only science can cure, yet there is not one drug that cures anything. And health insurance providers still prefer to pay the billions of dollars in pharmaceutical costs, surgical costs and expensive tests. Is this really in our best interest?

If health insurance providers were in our best interest, they would be helping us cut costs. Not just by lowering their own costs, but by paying for preventive therapies that work instead of expensive drugs and surgery. Some health insurance providers are wising up and realizing they save not only their customer, but their stockholders money by using true preventive therapies that even reverse heart disease, so are covering more alternative therapies. And even though these therapies are more sensible than cutting your chest in half, they are still called quackery by many in the medical industry.

"Most cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon or lung cancers. This fact has been documented for over a decade. Yet doctors still use chemotherapy for these tumours. Women with breast cancer are likely to die faster with chemo than without it."-Alan Levin, M.D.

"...chemotherapy's success record is dismal. It can achieve remissions in about 7% of all human cancers; for an additional 15% of cases, survival can be "prolonged" beyond the point at which death would be expected without treatment. This type of survival is not the same as a cure or even restored quality of life."-John Diamond, M.D.

We must ask ourselves why. Why are these deadly and expensive treatments shoved down our throats? Why is something so powerful and healing as nutrition, herbs and other holistic therapies called "voodoo" and dangerous when they have no side effects and make your body more powerful?

This is my problem with health insurance - they keep our costs up by advocating the most expensive and least customer empowering treatments. They do not pay for true prevention. The medical industry, in general, is still rewarded by sickness through the consistent sales of drugs, tests and surgeries while never rewarding true prevention. Now read the following for how dangerous standard medical treatment can be:

"A definitive review and close reading of medical peer-review journals, and government health statistics shows that American medicine frequently causes more harm than good. The number of people having in-hospital, adverse drug reactions (ADR) to prescribed medicine is 2.2 million. Dr. Richard Besser, of the CDC, in 1995, said the number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections was 20 million. Dr. Besser, in 2003, now refers to tens of millions of unnecessary antibiotics. The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million. The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million. The total number of iatrogenic deaths shown in the following table is 783,936. It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States. The 2001 heart disease annual death rate is 699,697; the annual cancer death rate, 553,251.
Nutrition Institute of America

Why are we still falling for this? Many of us live in fear because we have no health insurance. For me, it was a life saver. I thank God that I did not have insurance when I was diagnosed with Hep C. If so, I would have taken their drugs, let the disease advance, and never found out that my body was so powerful it could eradicate the disease without drugs or surgery. My body is a powerful, healing machine and I believe we all have that power.

This is why I have dedicated my life to teaching others how to be your own health insurance provider by taking charge of their health. One way is body cleansing. I even wrote a book to teach what I have learned about body detoxing. This is the same info I have taught for the last 17 years to clients including nurses, other nutritional counselors, various therapists and even medical doctors who took the power of nutrition seriously.

If you have health insurance or not, learn to take charge of your health. While it is a fact that we all need health insurance - it should be for the right reasons.

Back in the very early '90's, or possibly even the late '80's, I got hepatitis C. It was a curse and a blessing at the same time, as the saying goes. Here's why;

If I would have had insurance, I would have used the standard treatment. This involves using the drug, interferon. Side effects include; fever, muscle aches, chills, headaches and other various pains. These are common in at least half of the patients treated with interferon. Other side effects include; suicide and depression, increased heart rate, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, joint pains, back pain, dizziness, hair loss, cough, difficulty breathing and low white blood cell count. That's odd because you need white blood cells to fight disease!

The good news is that there are more drugs for the side effects. The bad news is that interferon, or any drug for that reason, rarely eradicates disease. They only prolong suffering and many times cause more damage than the original disease would have done if left untreated.

Because I did not have the money or insurance for drug therapy or treatment, I turned to alternative health. I was extremely skeptical at the time, but it worked in spite of my skepticism. So much for working because of my power of belief.

I have since learned how strong our bodies are. I have also learned how we can prevent many things. Now, if only the insurance companies would work with people like me instead of drug companies that keep jacking up the cost of so-called health care.

You can read more of my personal story, my battle with Hep C and how body cleansing changed my life.