I just read a fascinating article from the January edition of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, as it documents the massive increase in costs for medical management of chronic back pain, while no significant increases in patient outcomes or disability rates have been observed, and increases in post-intervention complications (including death) are on the rise.

Thanks to Dan Murphy, D.C. for emphasizing these points!

Source The Guardian
America’s healthcare industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to block the introduction of public medical insurance and stall other reforms promised by Barack Obama. The campaign against the president has been waged in part through substantial donations to key politicians.

Supporters of radical reform of healthcare say legislation emerging from the US Senate reflects the financial power of vested interests ‑ principally insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms and hospitals ‑ that have worked to stop far-reaching changes threatening their profits.

The industry and interest groups have spent $380m (£238m) in recent months influencing healthcare legislation through lobbying, advertising and in direct political contributions to members of Congress. The largest contribution, totalling close to $1.5m, has gone to the chairman of the senate committee drafting the new law.

“It’s a total victory for the health insurance industry,” said Dr Steffie Woolhander, a GP, professor of medicine at Harvard University and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Programme (PNHP).

“What the bill has done is use the coercive power of the state to force people to hand their money over to a private entity which is the private insurance industry. That is not what people were promised.”

Robert Reich, the labour secretary in the Clinton administration, says the Obama White House, mindful of how the health industry killed off Clinton’s attempts at reform, has grown so fearful of industry money that it has quietly reached agreement to pull back from price caps and public health insurance.

Read the the full article.

The news media has been having a LOT of fun reporting on the Congressional Health Care Overhaul lately, so I will too.

Chiropractic’s *scientific critics* state we don’t have the kind of statistics they (grin) rely on, so we shouldn’t toot our own horn like they do. Hmmm? Well, let’s take a closer look at them. Here’s some amazing scienticic statistics about modern medicine:

1. The total number of iatrogenic deaths caused by conventional medicine is an astounding 783,936 deaths per year at a cost of $282 billion dollars. That is a mind-boggling 2147 people killed every day. That’s as if 7 jumbo jet planes crashed every day. That’s a 9-11 incident, happening every other day…FOREVER. God help us all. [1]

2. A report by the British Medical Journal correlated a strike by medical doctors with lower death rates during the strike. Hmmm?

3. Recent surveys suggest that “45% Of Doctors (MDs) Would Consider Quitting If Congress Passes Health Care Overhaul.” [3]

So, if we put that all those facts together, supporting Congress’s new Health Care Plan could reduce the medical population by up to 45%, thus significantly reducing the incidence of medically-induced iatrogenic illness and death, and all the money that would save could help to pay for the new Plan.

And, perhaps with some of those savings, they might consider adding conservative chiropractic care as another cost-saving option. [4, 5]

REFERENCES

1. http://www.chiro.org/LINKS/FULL/Death_By_Medicine.html

2. http://tinyurl.com/lzdq7a

3. http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=506199

4. http://www.chiro.org/LINKS/Cost_Effectiveness.shtml

5. http://www.chiro.org/LINKS/Safety.shtml

PBS.ORG has produced a documentary describing 5 countries’ challenges delivering universal health care to their citizens; the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland, and what the United States might learn from these countries.