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March 15, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

13:38

The REAL economics of health care reform EXPLAINED

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	Is it really capitalism if your corporate model is to just make money off of poisoning people with medications or poisoning the food supply with herbicides like glyphosate?
	The Health Ranger Report.
	Or is that just freaking suicide?
	Large-scale suicide by fascism.
	It's time for the Health Ranger Report.
	And now, from naturalnews.com, here's Mike Adams.
	I call this podcast The Real Economics of Healthcare Reform.
	This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
	Thank you for joining me at HealthRangerReport.com.
	Most people don't realize that when they're living an unhealthy lifestyle, which most people do, they're eating toxic foods, they're eating pesticides, they're eating cancer-causing chemicals such as sodium nitrite in hot dogs and processed meat products and so on, they don't realize that they're creating a future economic cost that's hidden.
	There's a future cost associated with present, unhealthful decisions.
	So every time you're eating junk food, you are creating future costs in healthcare costs.
	You know, costs to treat the diabetes that you get from drinking soda.
	The cost that you get for treating the cancer that you get from eating the processed meat products or the heart disease that you get from eating trans fatty acids or homogenized, pasteurized dairy products that aren't really natural.
	You'd be better off with raw milk and raw yogurt, that kind of thing.
	Raw cheese, whatever.
	So there's all these future costs that are being created.
	And it's also insane that the food stamp program in America even gives people free money to spend on foods that promote disease.
	Which is going to be covered by, you know, paid for by future government expenditures as well.
	So the government pays people to eat their way to diseases that then the government has to pay to treat later.
	Through Medicare and, you know, Obamacare-style health insurance plans and so on.
	So yeah, it's totally insane.
	It's a completely insane system.
	But most people don't realize that they themselves...
	are creating these extraordinary future costs because of their present day decisions on eating junk food, for example.
	And yet, at the same time that people are creating these future hidden costs the consensus across the population today, the culture Of America, which is sort of the entitlement culture, is demanding that someone else pay for those future costs that they are incurring today due to their crappy lifestyle and health choices.
	You got that?
	So while you've got tens of millions of Americans sitting around on the couch watching TV and eating Doritos and Pop-Tarts, They are, in effect, giving themselves, by consuming junk foods, giving themselves chronic degenerative disease over the long haul, and yet they expect the government to pay for all that treatment that's going to be required for those diseases.
	So how twisted is that, exactly?
	You've got a population of people eating themselves into sickness and disease, but they won't take responsibility for that.
	They demand someone else pay for all their treatment.
	And they don't even shop around competitively and try to pursue something natural, for example.
	They just go straight to the hospital, the cancer clinic, the drug company, prostitutes known as physicians, and they just get the most expensive stuff, whatever, because they never see the price.
	They never have to pay the bill.
	They just forward the bill to the insurance company or forward the bill to the government or forward the bill to their pension plan that covers their health care costs.
	So nobody's price shopping.
	Nobody's comparing the effectiveness of procedures.
	Nobody's trying to save money with prevention.
	You know how much stronger motivation it would be if people had to pay for their own health care costs?
	I mean, if people literally had to write a check for the procedures that they're getting for treating cancer and diabetes and heart disease, that would create a strong incentive for most people to lead a healthier lifestyle and be healthier in their food choice and be healthier in their exercise habits and maybe stop living a sedentary lifestyle for a change, you know?
	But the way it is right now, nobody has any incentive to At least not an economic incentive to take care of their own health because they're not covering their costs anyway.
	And that's the problem with health insurance.
	That's the problem with nationalized health care.
	That's the problem with Obamacare or any similar system that doesn't put people in charge of their own health care costs.
	It doesn't make people responsible for writing checks for their health care treatments.
	What this does is it creates...
	A surrogate, it insulates people from having to make economic decisions in their own interests.
	Instead, it shifts that responsibility to someone else to pay for you, and thus then the individual has no real incentive to take care of their own health and have fewer long-term costs.
	This is the problem with health insurance as it exists today.
	And you might wonder, well, what is a better system?
	I've actually proposed a much better system, and it's a voucher system.
	It's based on the idea that the government, it's kind of a semi-socialized healthcare system.
	The government would provide vouchers to the nation's poorest individuals, or even most individuals, Just provide vouchers, and these vouchers could be spent on any healthcare-related products or services, such as dietary supplements, chiropractic care, hospitalization, cancer interventions of any kind, including alternative medicine.
	And it would be up to the individual to shop around and spend their voucher wisely, get the most bang for their buck.
	Instead of blowing $100,000 at a cancer center, maybe they could spend $5,000 worth of vouchers at an alternative cancer treatment center that works better and is less toxic and a lot more affordable.
	So you see, you've got to put the individual back in charge of the economic decision-making to where they price shop.
	I mean, think about it.
	If the government, if everybody needed a car and the government rolled out a national car program to provide free cars to everybody, just pick out your car, whatever car you want, you get the free car.
	Would people price shop for the most affordable or cost-effective car?
	Of course not.
	They would go for the most luxurious, most overpriced, expensive car they could find.
	If the government's going to pay for it, somebody else is footing the bill.
	So there's no incentive to be efficient in your car price shopping.
	The only reason people price shop when it comes to cars today is because they have to pay for those cars themselves.
	So people are making economic free market decisions.
	Trying to get the best value, the best, even the long-term operating cost of the car is considered by, well, at least some people, some of the more intelligent people, not everybody.
	Some people just look at the upfront costs and don't consider the long-term operations costs, but intelligent people consider the cost of ownership, or what's called the total cost of ownership.
	And that's what we should be doing with healthcare.
	We should be considering the total cost of ownership of our own health.
	And if that decision were put back into the hands of the individuals, we would have a completely different situation from what we see right now.
	Because what we see right now is a total mess, where again, nobody has any incentive to make good economic decisions.
	But you put vouchers into the hands of those people, where they can shop around, and they're going to go shop for the best system they can, the best solutions.
	So vouchers are the answer here.
	Just like school vouchers give parents a choice of what school to send their children to, and it encourages competition among schools to bring in the parents with the vouchers.
	You know, that system, it's a free market competition-based system, but it can also be partially subsidized by the government because the government can hand out vouchers to the nation's poorest people.
	And there could still be a layer of insurance for the really catastrophic interventions if somebody has a horrible accident or somebody's diagnosed with an extremely rare form of cancer requiring very expensive treatments and so on.
	There can still be catastrophic, you know, you need a lung transplant or something.
	That coverage can still be built in at a very low premium, but the day-to-day stuff should be covered by vouchers.
	I mean, if you have a voucher, Are you really going to go blow all your money, your voucher money, on an antidepressant drug when you could go get, let's say, fish oil supplements with omega-3s or other happy mood-enhancing supplements for like one-tenth the cost?
	Maybe one-twentieth the cost, depending on the supplement?
	See, vouchers put people back in charge and let the free market go to work where there's competition.
	And people can then buy what they want.
	I've even got an idea for an online system.
	Every time you spend voucher money through this system, you can then rate the thing that you spent it on, like one to five stars, let's say, and rate its effectiveness.
	How happy are you with your investment in that thing?
	So everybody, let's say they go to a chiropractor.
	And they spend voucher money at the chiropractor's office.
	Then they can go online in their account and they can rate that chiropractor.
	Or they can go rate a cancer clinic if they go there and spend money.
	Wherever they spend money, they can rate their experience there.
	And what this would do is over time, very quickly in fact, you start to build a database of which healthcare ideas or treatments are the most effective.
	What's solving people's problems?
	You know, this kind of rating system would answer that question very, very quickly.
	And you would also find, by the way, that people are not happy with their regular doctors.
	People are not happy with the cancer clinics.
	They're not happy with the pharmacies.
	People are not happy at all with conventional mainstream chemical-based medicine.
	It's like poison it, burn it, cut it out.
	That's all they do is like surgery and radiation and pharmaceutical poisoning.
	That's That's what the system is built on.
	So, if given the chance, most people would reject that and spend their money on something else that works better and is less toxic and is a whole lot more affordable, and the net result is that we could save literally hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
	All across America, hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
	Oh, and by the way, In my voucher system, I should explain this more in another podcast.
	In my voucher system, if you don't use your voucher points, you still own them?
	Let's say you get $500 worth of healthcare voucher points every month.
	If you don't use them, you can save them up.
	They're saved.
	It's like an online account with the government.
	And you can, not only can you save those up and use them later if you have something more catastrophic, you can also transfer them to friends.
	So you could donate them to a local church, for example.
	You could donate them to a family member that's having a more catastrophic health issue that they need to deal with.
	You could donate that voucher points, almost like Bitcoin.
	You could transfer or donate voucher points to other people.
	And so it becomes a currency as well.
	But the currency can only be spent on certain things, which has to include complementary medicine, alternative medicine, nutritional supplements, disease prevention.
	Even gym memberships, by the way, should be covered.
	Even yoga classes.
	Even meditation classes.
	You know, counseling.
	All of the healing arts have to be included in this for people to be able to make a comparison.
	So that's the system that can solve all of this.
	I kind of doubt that the government is going to implement that system because it's not in the interest of big pharma.
	So since that's the case, I don't know.
	We'll see where this goes.
	But if you like the idea, share this podcast.
	My name is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
	I'm the editor of naturalnews.com.
	And I want America.
	I want to help make America healthy again.
	And it has to be approached through an economically sane approach.
	Rooted in free market principles and individuals making choices about what works for their own health and their own long-term investment in health interventions or nutrition or things that work.
	That's the answer.
	Thanks for listening.

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