The American Medical System is Broken…

May 27th, 2004

Opinion by Consumer Advocate Tim Bolen

 

Everybody knows that the US MEDICARE System will go belly-up in the year 2011.  It’s going to be, at that point, so costly that the United States simply won’t be able to afford it anymore. Foreign owned “Big Pharma”is bleeding us to death.

American corporations, right this moment, are cutting back their health care offerings.  No one can afford the skyrocketing costs.  Foreign owned “Big Pharma” is bleeding us to death.

Health Insurance companies are desperately trying to reduce provider expenditure – and because of that, Americans are being offered a poorer, and poorer, quality of health care.  Everything NEW is being banned.  Foreign owned “Big Pharma” is bleeding us to death.

But, more shocking, is that the system itself is a deadly rip-off of gigantic proportion.  A new study, a compilation of most recent studies, called “Death by Medicine,” says:

“It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States. The total number of iatrogenic deaths shown … is 783,936. The 2001 heart disease annual death rate is 699,697; the annual cancer death rate, 553,251.^“. 

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.^“

And that’s only the “deaths.”  The Lazarou study on Hospital ADR also showed that, besides the 106,000 “deaths,” twenty times that number of people had health problems caused by that same hospital Adverse Drug Reaction.  There were an additional 2,200,000 health problems caused by Adverse Drug Reaction to drugs in hospitals.  It would be reasonable to assume, then, that that factor of twenty times the number of deaths could be applied to all of the death statistics – meaning that in addition to the total 783,936 deaths there were 15,678,720 serious health problems caused by the American Medical System.

Shocked?  It gets worse…  Wait until you read who slovenly our system actually operates.

The top three causes of Unnecessary Deaths in the United States are related to our health care system…

The number one cause of unnecessary death in the United States, called Iatrogenic deaths  (783,986) is shown in the table below, re-printed by permission of the authors:

The number two cause of unnecessary death in the United States is Heart Disease. Statistics show “The 2001 heart disease annual death rate is 699,697.”

The number three cause of unnecessary death in the United States is Cancer.  Statistics show “the annual cancer death rate, 553,251.”

The total number of known unnecessary deaths, per year, directly due to the American Medical System is 2,036,884.

The government regulatory systems “we the people” put into place to make sure this didn’t happen have been compromised…

Does anybody, for a minute, believe that the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is working for “we the people?”  Don’t be absurd.  The FDA is managed, completely, by “Big Pharma.”  Doubt that?   Then you aren’t watching the drug pricing scam, where prescriptions drugs are marketed in the United States from 2 to 20 times their cost in other countries – and the FDA, literally, is with guns-drawn, raiding companies attempting to import those SAME prescriptions from Canada, Mexico, etc.

Does anybody, for a minute, believe that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is working for “we the people?”  Don’t be absurd.  The FTC is manipulated, completely, by “Big Pharma.”  Doubt that?  Then why has the FTC manufactured a different standard for “health claims” for supplements, herbals, electro-medicine devices, etc – those things that compete with drugs in the health market?  And, how is it that the covert FTC “Operation Cure-All” exists at all?  Congress never authorized the FTC to run covert operations – only the CIA, and other “intelligence” groups can do that.  So, how is it that “Operation Cure-All,” which I believe is actually run out of a New York ad agency, and has no offices, phone numbers, directors, employees, accountability, etc., is allowed to use the FTC name?

State Licensing Boards have been given the responsibility for regulating health care in America, State by State.  Do they do anything to solve the problems listed above?  NO, they do not.  There is NOT ONE STATE in the United States that has a program to do something about the problems described as the number one killer of Americans – Iatrogenic deaths  (783,986).  Not one State has a program to put a stop to, or even look at, the problems of Hospital Adverse Drug Reactions (106,000 deaths), medical errors (98,000 deaths), bedsores (105,000 deaths), infections (88,000 deaths), malnutrition (108,800 deaths), outpatient Adverse Drug Reactions (199,000 deaths), unnecessary procedures (37,136 deaths), surgery related (32,000 deaths).

And, what about those 15,678,720 serious health problems caused by the American Medical System?  Those numbers INCREASE every year because our State regulatory agencies ignore their responsibilities.

The “Support System” has been compromised…

What’s the common thread that wends its way through the American Cancer Society, the AIDS network, the local “Run-For-Whatever?”

Drug money.  All of those above are primarily funded, directly, or indirectly, by “Big Pharma.”  So the so-called “War on Cancer,” the “War on AIDS,” the “War on whatever.” is ONLY about promoting new expensive drugs – NOTHING ELSE.

But, Worst of All…

Worst of all is that the American Medical System KNOWS it’s broken, and is taking steps, not to fix its problems, but to destroy those trying to make changes for the better, those trying to make, and keep, people healthy, those focusing on finding cures for Cancer, AIDS, heart disease, etc..  It is trying to maintain the status quo.

Not only have the agencies “we the people” put in place intentionally ignored the problems in health care, but they have been carefully re-focused to attack solutions that compete with the drugs-surgery paradigm.

There is a real war, with large stakes, going on in North America.  It’s way bigger than the “war on terrorism.” I call it “the war between health and medicine.”  The FDA, the FTC, some of the State Regulatory Agencies, and a large part of the “Support System” have knowingly, or unknowingly, joined ranks against solutions to the problems.

The FDA, as we know, raids supplement manufacturers, electro-medicine installations, using battering rams, automatic weapons, asset seizure – all the tricks to stop competition against their “big pharma” masters.  The FTC runs the covert “Operation Cure-All,” targeting American citizen’s attempts to communicate new ideas in health care.

But, that isn’t all.   There’s more.  For instance, the “Quackbusters,“ we know, are a subversive organization formed, and funded by twenty-six drug companies, after the American Medical Association (AMA) was ordered by the Federal Court to cease its covert operation against the Chiropractic profession.  Their job is to harass market competitors to the drug treatment paradigm.  I believe they are run out of a New York ad agency.

The “bible” for the quackbusters, the place where all the “quackbusters” send their unsuspecting victims for allegedly “good information,” is the website “quackwatch.com,” run by a de-licensed, failed MD out of his basement in Allentown. Pennsylvania.

The quackbuster “flagship,” the so-called National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF) is currently being run out of the office of its current president, a hair removal and ear-piercing specialist in Braintree, Massachusetts.

The biggest “quackbuster” success was in 1996 when they took over the Federation of Medical Board (FSMB)’s conference in Chicago, and used that meeting to re-focus all of the State Medical Boards away from the Federal Government’s definition of “health fraud,”  (overbilling, un-bundling, etc.).  There, they were able to to insert their own definition – that “alternatives” to the drug/surgery paradigm was “health fraud.”

The FSMB, for all of it’s high sounding goals, has NEVER addressed the issue of its individual State members coming down hard on the number one cause of deaths (783,986) – Iatrogenic deaths – in the United States.  In fact – they have NEVER brought up the issue at all – and obviously have no intention of doing so. Certainly, they have NO INTENTION of suggesting that their members DO SOMETHING about the problem.

The State of Wisconsin, where I’m working on a problem with the State’s Department of Regulation & Licensing (DRL), for instance, has a population of  5,461,710.  Extrapolating that to the US population of 284,000,000 we find that Wisconsin has 1/52 of the US population.  Dividing 52 into the total number of deaths (2,036,884), and the 15,678,513 health problems, shows that Wisconsin’s share was 39,170 total deaths, and 301,513 health problems.  And, Wisconsin’s DRL prosecutors, I’ve found, won’t prosecute anything BUT alternative practitioners.  The over-druggers, the bad surgeons, the bedsore ignorers, the malnutrition deliverers, etc. are perfectly safe in the cheese State.

Foreign owned “Big Pharma” is bleeding us to death.

Can We Do Something About It?

Of course we can.  And, we are…

Stay tuned…

Tim Bolen – Consumer Advocate