Health Care – Hope and Change or Crash and Burn? Can we fix what has been broken or time to start anew?

Hey Congress how about real health care reform for a change?

Did you ever stop to think, “maybe we got it all wrong?”

Healthcare in America, call it Medicare, Obamacare, Trump Care, Congress Care, Illegal Immigrant Care, or Welfare Care, whatever you prefer.  It might be the greatest hypocrisy in modern politics, and certainly the greatest insult to the revered Hippocratic Oath, the sorry state of our health, and health care system.

It is not just broken, it is disappearing before our very eyes into the mists of political gobble-de-gook.  Sinking into quicksand.  It is time to pull the plug.  Somewhere in our storied history once upon a time not all that long ago someone determined our healthcare system had enormous profit potential.

Now health care in America really sucks.  That is what the system gave us when the money mongers took control and profits became the new standard.  We have the most expensive healthcare in the world, yet it ranks mediocre in performance at best.  Of course, mediocre is the result achieved by accepting that what we have got is good enough.

Truth is, it is not good enough!

Being “good enough” was never a part of the American Dream for our nation, or the peoples in that nation.  People came to America to help make the world a much nicer place for everyone.  They came here for freedom, truth, protection, diversity, religious tolerance, and economic opportunity, among other reasons.  It was quite a noble statement of the mission of this new nation in the New World back in 1776.

We were up to the challenge.  The American spirit was a powerful force for freedom and even exceptionalism.  It carried us through the Revolution where we earned our sovereignty down the barrel of a gun.

It powered us again in the Civil War and helped us heal the wounds of a bitterly House divided.  In the Great War (World War I) and the War to End All Wars (World War II) it carried us toward our destiny of becoming the most dominant force in the world.

We did too.

Then, we hit a plateau.  With the eventual fall of the Soviet Union (December 25, 1991) we were number one in just about everything.  For the first time in our history, we had no competition for leadership of the world.  It has now been about twenty-seven years since we came to dominate the world as the only viable super-power.

Americans seem to get a little soft when they do not have formidable competition.  Suddenly we started to believe all those good things people said about us, and realized it was okay to win.  It was only natural for winners to want to keep on winning, we might just be as great as others say.

Well, that leads to a false sense of self-confidence, we get lax in our diligence, and lethargic in our response when bad things happen around us.  Yet, if everything was so good in our lives, why did the Cold War happen.  Then came Korea and Vietnam wars, with over 58,000 killed in that jungle skirmish.  The questions go on, and on, and on.

It was also a time of miraculous medical breakthroughs in treatment and in prescription drugs, in replacing limbs and organs, rebuilding hearts, and rewiring brains.  The transformation of the medical industry had begun.  From now on the motto of Wall Street would be “Balance sheets and profit Margins, not public health and public safety.

The financial vultures dug up every avenue of profit possible in the medical universe, and put them all in play.  What a vast and diverse range of players entered the game.  Profits could be squeezed out of doctors and hospital services, if the paradigm changed.  Give them rapidly changing new services for all kinds of new forms of diseases, and treatments.

Suddenly health insurance companies exploded on the scene to help you pay the cost of those new services when you get sick.  Then reinsurance companies were needed to prop up the insurance companies.  Public and private health insurance programs exploded. So, did the multitude of integrated steps to achieve superior quality.

Sophisticated testing laboratories with the most advanced technology and toys were needed to keep up with the speed of the changes.  Then there were clinics, emergency rooms, rehab center, and trauma unit needed to support the new treatment methods.

The tentacles of the medical community reach far and wide, but the body and brain for all those tentacles resides on Wall Street, where gold rules.  Here the Captains of Commerce toast the minions of the powerful puppet masters of the world, those few remaining bloodlines who control all.

Which is more important, Capitalism or Democracy?

Odd that a force as powerful as Capitalism and dominant in world affairs is not mentioned in our own founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution.  So, what does that have to do with medical services today?  Today we have achieved the most expensive health care in the world as a result of Capitalism conquering the medical world.  Still our quality of service sucks.

To add insult to injury, health care in America does not even include eye care or tooth care.  What is that all about?  The two medical problems that almost everyone experiences and they do not even count as medical procedures?  Congress let them get away with that and we are left paying the bills.

  

Some leadership in our nations’ capitol.

What we have today, whether under Obama or Trump, are the most expensive services possible to assure you have the latest and greatest diagnostic and treatment equipment in existence.  There are new diseases discovered nearly every week while magically, prescription drug medicine for the new diseases is available at nearly the same time.

Bio-engineering has brought you artificial limbs, replacement parts for organs, even replacement organs.  Of course, that means more antibiotics, to keep you well, and prescription drugs, to keep you going.  All the new services, diseases, drugs, and diagnostics along with the clinics, rehab centers, hospitals, hospices, assisted living, retirement living centers, offices, and pharmacies made medicine and the prolonged treatment of patients the fastest growing profit centers in capitalism.

All of these profit centers are necessary for the profiteers to get their tentacles beyond your checking account, and beyond your health insurance, to your retirement funds and remaining assets such as property, in other words, they are now into all parts of your nest egg.  Often the result is bleeding your assets dry.

Did I mention the health care lobbyists throwing big bucks at the doctors and politicians desperate to get a few bucks for their campaigns?  All of these factors combined to feed the new and massive profit centers of medicine and Wall Street fell in lock step to protect this new and ever-expanding profit center extravaganza.

We remain sicker than ever, more out-of-shape if not downright obese, more dependent on prescription drugs, and more willing to accept chronic pain as long as big pharma could provide the prescription pain relief.  Now depression and mild altering prescriptions have opened the floodgates to prescription drug addiction (opioids) becoming the leading cause of heroin addiction.

Our healthcare system is designed to manage our health maintenance, not cure our health issues.  An entire industry has developed to provide permanent dietary supplements to keep us addicted to even the more harmless revenue streams as well.  We are led to believe that our immune system will never work without the endless bottles of dietary supplements.

It does not matter if we choose to support the Obama or Trump medical solution, or the Democrat or Republican solution, the politicians and the people are slaves to a system that cannot and will not work.

We deserve a system that makes us healthy and keeps us healthy, not makes it more comfortable to stay sick.  Doctors should be given an incentive to heal patients, not send them on an endless round of referrals throughout the failed health care system.

Western Medicine in America is a convoluted maze of conflicts of interest, ethical violations, black market subsidies, off the books prescription sales, over-prescribing and under-performing throughout the world’s most expensive health program.

At the same time the pharmaceutical industry, which first cooped Obama and now seems to have the entire Congress at their beck and call, also used every trick in the book to discredit and stop the use of folk medicine, Chinese traditional medicine, Druid herbology, Greek and Egyptian treatments for diseases that were successfully used for thousands of years before western medicine ever existed.  

Most of those incredibly successful techniques are as valid today as when they were popular but they are not profitable today.

Finally, there is incredible progress made by Tesla and Raymond Rife, to mention just two people in the use of frequency machines to analyze the human boy, isolate diseases, and use the proper frequency to destroy them.  They were forced out of the market between 80 and 100 years ago when there were clinics coast-to-coast curing people.

Today the work by Tesla and Rife and others is finally being brought back, but far from the level it achieved more than half a century ago.  It is the key to proper nutrition, becoming health consciousness, and using medicine to rebuild the immune systems and break the dependence on our western medical system.  The rest of what we need is in the mind.

Diet does not work without food, fasting, and prayer or meditation.  Medical care does not work without proper diet, fitness, and health consciousness.  None of it works without freeing your mind of addiction, freeing your body of unhealthy junk, treating your body as a temple, and kicking yourself in the ass for allowing something as important as your personal health and happiness to be dictated by others.

We do not need a broken system patched up yet again, we need a viable alternative to what does not work.  That alternative is to embrace all the wonderful gifts God gave us in terms of herbs, food, awareness, and prayer, and do what makes sense for us, not Wall Street.

Healthy people are the only way to drive down health care costs and nothing being considered by our esteemed Congress, no matter what the blabber-mouths say, promise or claim, makes sense.  Send a little love to Washington along with a little light and maybe the dark mist that currently shrouds our nation’s capital and stunts their creative actions might just begin to be lifted.

.

Your Twenty-first Century “New” New Year’s Resolutions

Come on, most everyone is a slacker when it comes to New Year’s resolutions.  Since New Year’s Resolutions are a practice run for Lenten resolutions, and Lent is when you are supposed to help heal your body, mind and soul, not just your ego, it is time you had some new, more creative, much more imaginative resolutions for both occasions.

As for the annual New Year's resolutions, you might as well call them your Fantasy Game Resolutions, like fantasy football.  Playing fantasy football does not put you on the field or in the game, you just pretend.  It is the same with most New Year’s resolutions.  For thousands of years we have celebrated New Years.

New Year's Day was first celebrated in 45 B.C. on January 1 for the first time in history as the Julian calendar took effect. Soon after becoming Roman dictator, Julius Caesar decided that the traditional Roman calendar was in dire need of reform.

The earliest recorded festivities in honor of a new year’s arrival date back some 4,000 years to ancient Babylon. For the Babylonians, the first new moon following the vernal equinox—the day in late March with an equal amount of sunlight and darkness—heralded the start of a new year.

They marked the occasion with a massive religious festival called Akitu (derived from the Sumerian word for barley, which was cut in the spring) that involved a different ritual on each of its 11 days.

In addition to the new year, Atiku celebrated the mythical victory of the Babylonian sky god Marduk over the evil sea goddess Tiamat and served an important political purpose: It was during this time that a new king was crowned or that the current ruler’s divine mandate was symbolically renewed.

With such significance put on the New Year and thanks to Roman Emperor Julius Caesar changing the calendar, we have celebrated on the same day, New Year’s Eve, for a couple of thousand years.  One can only assume mankind has evolved since those early days and we now indulge in a rather benign series of dos and don’ts called New Year Resolutions.

In other words, kinder and friendlier stuff that will not add too much stress to your already stressful life.  Do eat healthier food.  Do not eat sugar saturated junk food.  Do get more exercise (as if that defines any real obligation).  Do not eat candy and sweets, as if about everything you eat did not have sugar.  Join the latest diet fad.  Give up smoking.  Do not drink so much booze.  Do go to church more often.  Do not pile up so much credit card debt.

You get the message.

If we ever really did do any of those resolutions the world would be a much kinder, gentler, yes benign place to live.

So, look around you.  Do you see any evidence of success, or sustained success?

We have the most expensive health care system in the world yet we are sicker, fatter, more out of shape, more stressed out and more over-medicated to legal drugs, illegal drugs and other synthetic poison than ever before.

Perhaps there is a reason our automobile manufacturers keep announcing they are no longer building normal passenger cars, but adding new lines of behemoth SUVs and light trucks to replace cars.  We no longer fit in passenger cars, we need bigger and bigger mechanical monsters to bear our weight.

Sometimes it seems we have a self-defeating attitude about picking resolutions that often try to address our real problems or flaws or addictions that have not been solved in our lifetime.  We hope to accomplish something good to feel good about failing at another resolution.

Maybe we take solace in the fact “trying” to do something is better than doing nothing at all but is it really?  I suspect it just lets us get away with the fantasy approach to discipline.  Six months later after the resolution is broken and nothing changed in your life.

So where do we start?

Seek out the truth in all things.

Our first resolution should be to seek out the truth about how to get healthier.  There is so much untruth in labelling it is often confusing, if not downright deceptive.  Just saying something is true does not make it true.  Eating less sugar does not mean just the granules you put in coffee or tea, or on cereal.  Most everything you consume has sugar or salt intended to get you addicted to the food, and boy is that ever a friendly addiction.

Sodas, sweets and salt are the real sources of addiction because at a very early age it is thrown at us to shut us up, bribe us, make us feel good or simply teach self-indulgence.  Of course, no one is to blame for the primal addictions we force on our children that will eventually kill you but that is beside the case.  There are a lot of people who contribute to this childhood addiction including parents, grandparents, doctors, teachers, coaches and, believe it or not, you.

Heal yourself first.

Jesus once said to heal yourself before you can heal others as he said to forgive yourself before you can forgive others.  What he was saying to us is God created us and gave us gifts but we must take responsibility to use them as God intended.

In other words, we must take responsibility for our own self, for our body, mind and soul.  You must take responsibility through knowledge.  Use knowledge to learn about your addictions.  Learn why you let yourself be a repeat victim to habits that are self-destructive and sometimes fatal.

By learning you gain knowledge, with knowledge you might gain wisdom.  Accumulating knowledge is the first step, knowing what to do with it is wisdom.

   

God gave you a body and mind, and the free will to make choices.

These choices can either help or hurt you.  Only you, not your doctor, priest, rabbi, minister, imam, monk, teacher, shrink or family knows you like you do.

Take responsibility, do not delegate to an outside source because it only gives you someone else to blame for your woes.  Besides, by now you should be asking yourself if those outside sources have really helped you eliminate the addictions they were treating, and without prescription drugs.

Are you joyful?  Are you happy?  Are you healthy?  Do you set a good example for others?  Or are you just passing on your own hang ups to your children?

In Truth addictions are just another way of giving up.  They are the modern-day rationalization of explaining away your own inattention and lack of responsibility for your own choices, actions and failures.  Additions are the modern-day form of slavery.

Modern-day slavery.

All forms of addictions from health to digital to financial lead to obsession and depression.  Once you accept them as real or try to ignore them as not reflecting you, they seem to take possession of your mind and your life.

Modern addictions like the digital addiction are the twenty-first century form of slavery, perhaps even far more dangerous than those we carried over from the twentieth century like prescription drugs, pain killers, anti-depression drugs, illegal drugs, alcohol and smoking.

Digital addiction runs counter to everything we, as living and breathing creations of God are meant to be.  It stops natural contact and communication with other people, real people.  It often leads you to the creation of false identities hiding behind the Facebook, Instagram, Twitter ad other social media forums.

It depersonalizes us into mere false identities in a virtual world where no rules, ethics, orality, or common sense guide our actions.  We do not take responsibility for the alter-egos we create nor the consequences that result.  Hiding behind them on the Internet we can accept fake news, lies, distortions, and create chaos, bully and character assassinate others.  It is all part of our detached fantasy world.

In Truth it is no more real than the fantasy we create for our alter-ego.

Artificial Intelligence is the God of technology and machine world.

Artificial Intelligence is the God of technology and the machine world, because it knows everything there is to know that is available and it has the processing speed to instantly compile, analyze and make decisions.  The algorithms of AI are taking away your mind, your creative thinking, your imagination, and your ability to communicate with others.

Digital addiction is the result when you delegate all decisions to the machines and their clever algorithms.  It creates a new you guided by fantasy and not fact.  But the AI God creating it has no ethics, no morality, no common sense and no concern for you or your mind and body beyond profiling you from your dependence on them.

AI overwhelms you with choices, while it saps your energy, shuts down your creativity and imagination, and blocks you from direct, old fashioned face-to-face communication with real people.  All the while it is telling you how to think, what to think, what you need to buy, where to go, and how to get there.

It is your very own Godless Puppet Master and you are dancing on the stage at the end of those Wi-Fi links and endless apps.  You are living the destiny decided by the Puppet Master, not your own destiny, your own path.  You have weakly succumbed to delegating a substantial part of your life to a machine-made set of rules and principles based not on right or wrong, but trends and habits.  Yet you are responsible for what it told you to do, not the Godless One.

Truth about health, life and destiny.

Your twenty-first century resolutions should be to seek out the Truth about your health, life and destiny.  You should take responsibility for identifying your addictions and for overcoming them.

You should especially address regaining control of your body, mind, spirit and soul from the ever-expanding tentacles of Artificial Intelligence with their seemingly harmless algorithms.

Only humans, with their knowledge, moral and ethical standards, and a dose of common sense know what is best for other humans because AI was created by humans, while we were created by God.

Communicate with real people.

Vow to communicate with real people more, face-to-face, because only humans can express and demonstrate how emotions and passion, not found in the AI digital world, can transform those around us.  We can share joy, spread good cheer, be kind and nice, none of which the God of the Virtual World can duplicate.  No algorithm has been able to recreate the Perfect Love of God or Jesus, essential to empowering our life on Earth.

Laugh, love and live joy while encouraging and energizing those you encounter.

Use this information as a basis for your resolutions and you might actually become human again.  In all things ask not just “What Would Jesus Do (WWJD), but ask What Would God Do (WWGD), and you will be accepting your responsibilities as one of God’s creations.

Forsake the darkness and embrace the light and finally have a real Happy New Year.

What Happened to the News Media in America? Part 2 – The Golden Age of News – Destroyers of the Truth

Finally, I get to Part 2, the “Destroyers of the Truth.”  Turn your clock back to the 1970’s, the twilight of the Golden Age of news.  Events starting in the early 1960’s like the Cold War between the USA and Soviet Union, the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, then Watergate shook the news business to the bone.

Instead of a fifteen-minute national news broadcast, they expanded to 30 minutes with additional “news” shows like 20/20 or Sixty minutes among others added to the line-up.  This and a demand for real time coverage of events like the Kennedy assassination in 1963, where network coverage pre-empted regular programming, changed the face of media forever.

Suddenly national and local news became a big deal which led to an explosion of media innovations including the live broadcast of events, field reporting, live inter-active reporting between news anchors and field reporters, and a digital revolution in the collection, processing and distribution of news.

The second major shift taking place simultaneously was the wild and wacky decade of the 1960’s, as the post-World War II baby boomers became the dominant force.  Suddenly the youth of our nation faced crisis after crisis as they filled secondary and college educational institutions with their thirst for a new world.

The Baby Boomers, born in the shadow and deadly radioactive fallout of the only two atomic explosions ever used in war, which were dropped on Japan and ended World War II.  It would take a book to describe the impact the 1960’s had on this new generation and so far, none have done it justice.

“Within the span of a single decade the greatest revolution in world history took place…”

Within the span of a single decade the greatest revolution in world history took place as the Boomers faced civil rights bloodshed, demands for academic freedom, the threat of a Cold War, the added threat of biologic or chemical warfare, death in Viet Nam, death on college campus’s protesting the war, political assassinations, bloody peace protests, and so much more.

The entertainment industry also reached their Golden Age as Broadway, movies, and television all exploded before they would settle into bitter rivals in the battle for the hearts, souls and pocketbooks of the people.  How appropriate the end of the decade would result in Woodstock, a rock festival and anti-war protest drawing over 400,000 concert-goers to a muddy field in the other New York, meaning upstate from NYC.

“I call it the Second American Revolution.”

This amazing decade is what I call the Second American Revolution.  What emerged at the end of the decade showed little, if any, resemblance to what began the decade.  There was not an institution, idea, principle, or political policy that was not tested, tried and trampled over.

At this point I will offer you multiple choices of what caused such a venerable and respected institution like the news media to pretty much self-destruct in the ensuing decades until today.  Decide for yourself which were most responsible as the “Destroyers of the Truth” here in the American. News media.

Causes of the Collapse of the News Media

Cable News? Competition

Internet Technology

Changes in news media valuation from viewers to profits

Profit-driven companies bought news interests as investment

Astonishing increase in political spending for media

Courts rejecting campaign finance laws

Failure of government to regulate Internet

Proliferation of media advertising revenue

Blurring of the distinction between news and editorials

Apathy of a disenfranchised population

Reporters becoming advocates of causes and politics

A general public seemingly disinterested in the truth

Conflicts of interest between media and politics

No enforcement of News Media Code of Ethics

Lack of media accountability for sources and stories

Government abuse of classifying information

To sum it all up, greed, a lust for power, and exorbitant advertising revenue from politics and the private sector fueled the demise of the news media.  Once again, the pendulum has reversed itself and the credibility and believability of the news media by the public has gone off the cliff.

What was once intense competition between news groups has morphed into an insidious and ruthless effort to not only dismember and destroy those of opposing views, but to trample on the free rights of everyone but yourself.  Respect for our Constitutional rights to individual freedom, opportunity and free speech are spit upon by ego-centered, celebrity-driven news media.

“A new, more powerful special interest has cast a long dark shadow over our world.”

A new, more powerful special interest has cast a long dark shadow over our world, the digital answer to control.  Dominated by greed and the lust for power and fueled by an explosion of ad revenues from even more special interests, the news media of today, have no code of ethics.

When it comes to the Internet news providers and news aggregators, stories being pursued are no longer of broad interest but serve their own agenda.  Fake news is highly successful because, quite frankly, the reader is lost in the abyss of power and control.  People have willingly become pawns, because they have no backbone for the truth.

The news media embraces polarization, character assassination, and political agendas which are a violation of the Journalism Code of Ethics.  They are caught up in a tangle of special interests whose interest may be the enslavement of the general public to technology.  We are data-driven fools whose every thought, action, purchase, interest, and personal health and wealth are already under the microscope of Big Brother.

The Internet changed the dynamics.  The loss of integrity, absence of fairness, and failure of news groups to take responsibility for their stories or actions has undermined any hope for credibility in the news media.

“Social media news organizations and so-called news aggregators for the Internet services have become the new overlords of the news media…”

Social media news organizations and so-called news aggregators for the Internet services have become the new overlords of the news media, and the new censors for determining news media content.

I suspect somewhere along the line the institutions of higher learning who once defended the freedom and fairness of the news media decided corporate underwriting of the academic endowment funds was more important than telling the truth.  Or, perhaps they were just taking care of their university graduates in the private, “capitalism” sector.

In summary – the truth has been checkmated, the game is over.