health
"Caring for health is like gardening, working with Nature to create and sustain life. Health is cultivated by providing the right conditions for Nature's life principle to restore itself. Plants need proper soil, water and sun to thrive. Humans need food, water, air, movement, community, and purpose for health. Toxins, trauma and insufficiency of life's necessities are primary causes of dis-ease."
"A family health tree is like a medical crystal ball, says Erin Michos, M.D., a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. "It's very important because you're able to look ahead at what your risk is for heart disease," Michos says. "A person's risk is much greater when a family member has had a heart attack early in life."
"Anyone with a pulse in the United States has become aware that our health care system is like a runaway train in serious danger of jumping off its track. It's amazing, and confusing, because we are blessed with so much medical innovation"
"Brill highlighted several specific examples of exorbitant prices he uncovered in his research, and he suggested that the current health care system is like "a casino where the house holds all the cards." Brill expressed particular concern about tax-exempt, non-profit hospitals that are the most profitable businesses in many small and mid-sized cities across the nation."
"The only time the country has enacted a large-scale health system change was after a collapse. In 1965, when Medicare was created for the elderly and disabled, some 70 percent had no coverage for hospital costs. We're not that badly off yet. Our health care system is like one of those tumors growing in my patients. The only questions are: When will it become bad enough to make us act? And will that be too late? "
Published: May 5, 2007
"And at this point, the clock is ticking to make Obamacare work and get young people signed up. And they're not. As Goodby said, they don't even know what it is."
"The new health care system is "like the Higgs boson - the God particle," Goodby said. "Everybody has heard of it but nobody knows what the hell it is."
From:
December 23, 2013
"Richter said she strives for a practical approach that will appeal to all audiences. The health care system is like the fire department, she says - something people don't want to use, but want in place, just in case."
"The Canadian health care system is like the leaning tower of Pisa--a fine structure which everyone wants to preserve and improve. The officials in charge are caught between demands from those who want a new escalator for the visitors, and those who say the main priority is to find ways to prevent the tower from falling over "
From:
J Can Assoc Radiol. 1982 Jun;33(2):68-76.
"Our current third-party-payer health care system is like a grocery store without price tags, where customers fill their carts with "free" steaks whether they need them or not. Since patients are blind to prices, the government has only one way to reduce health care costs: provide less of it."
"Well, you know, this may be a bit of an overused analogy, but it's really true. The nation's health care system is like a huge ocean liner, and you just can't turn it very fast. It will literally take several years to build the new infrastructure to get people covered who aren't covered now. You can't require people to buy insurance until there's a place for them to go to buy it. And until you have everyone buying insurance, you can't require insurance companies to accept people with preexisting health conditions because otherwise only the sick people will sign up."
"America's health care system is like an old, drafty house on a hill. Wind pours through the doors and window jambs. Heat escapes through the attic. The boiler works far too hard and the radiators are clogged"
"I must be really stupid because I don't understand the allure of paying extremely high prices for an inferior product. Our health care system is like taking on a Ferrari sized debt for a Hyundai type car. Why are today's conservatives so against the concept of getting value for one's dollar? "
"The US health care system is like GM. It is broken, it can't be fixed, and all the ideological dogma in the world is not going to save the US health care system from implosion. Canada does not have socialized medicine it has nationalized health insurance. Health care costs here are half what they are in the US and we are healthier -and we don't ride bicycles to work. Canada produces 30% of the cars made in North America because labour costs (health insurance) is cheaper. "
"Wow, what a mixed bag of reviews. canada is about as free as the US is today, which is not very. We are not "free" to travel to the US anymore, now its "your papers pleez". Our health care system is like a shiny new car with a blown engine in it. It has as many horror stories as success stories and works very well as long as you don't get seriously ill. The waiting times of socialist medicare alone will kill you. I'd sure like to return to the time of Diefenbaker or better yet, the Constitution. "
"The U.S. health care system is like a gigantic, top-heavy Rube Goldberg machine that should be handed over to the people who run Taco Bell. At least they know how to think outside the bun."
"The broken U.S. health care system is like an old car that at one time was a top-of-the-line muscle car but due to neglect has been reduced to a beat-up wreck that limps along belching blue smoke from its tailpipe. If the owner is a person of means, the remedy is simple enough. If not, the solution is to pour more oil into the engine in the hope that somehow it will continue running. In time, however, the engine will die and the car will stop running. Similarly, we can continue to
pour more money into health care without improving performance as the WHO report suggests and even adopt universal health insurance coverage without making health care affordable as the bankruptcy study indicates. Driven by financialization, the system will limp along until
it collapses and then it will become clear to all that the problem is systemic."
It's an 800 pound hog that wants to eat everything it can get its mouth on. In the case of the medical systems it wants to get as much money from every human being as possible. If you have trouble with this idea, look at the cost of healthcare in the US compared to other industrialized nations. The US spends ~18% of its GDP on medical care. Other countries spend ~10-12%. Where is all that money going?
"O'Kane, of the NCQA, trots out a metaphor that she's heard at health care conferences she's attended over the years. "The American health care system is like buying a car where they come and put the parts on your lawn. What we're all looking for is the entity that puts it all together and that is able to be accountable for the performance of the vehicle, rather than whether you got good spark plugs."
If this is a system, it's not a very
good one.
"Reforming the health care system is like fixing an airplane that is in the air. It's repairing an engine at full speed, and you're not allowed to let the airplane crash."
The link article is lengthy discussion
of healthcare in the US and in Europe.
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