The root of all evil

April 26th, 2007

Yes, the love of money — profit, gain, plunder, yadda. So to find evils minions, you have to look around to see who’s shutting down the market to garner all the goodies. Why, look! Today, it’s PharmCo, isn’t it! Assisted by an understaffed, inefficient and crony-inspired FDA.

Codex is back on our plate — which promises to [eventually] deny you all alternative health substances — herbs, vitamins, essences, etc. I posted on this way-back-when, years ago, and it continues to hang just out of sight, threatening to gobble our health options. It’s picking up speed now, with a compliant UN and Europe in the mix, so we need to make our position clear NOW — you’ll find activist op’s below — and DO open the link to Consumers Reports; too tough to post, but packed with stats and info.

The pet food scandal has put pressure on the FDA to look at ingredients — since the offending substances came from China, there’s been negotiations to take a look at their production, just recently granted by their government. I heard that factoid drop out of a pundits mouth, in passing — it wasn’t in the headlines or even mentioned on the news shows. The Codex issue is getting NO play, so pass this around if you want to keep your Goldenseal and Vitamin C handy for cold season.

Obviously, with pet and possibly human food in jeopardy, oversight seems more than sensible — but we’re damned if we do and if we don’t, with these guys. They have too much power already. They cherry pick their issues, their scandals go underreported and the citizens are the ones that suffer. Meanwhile, the bee’s may have disappeared partly because of engineered agriculture and declining oversight on unsafe pesticides, our food supply is hideously endangered and so, now, is our use of supplements.

One more time — THESE GUYS WORK FOR US, no matter what the elitists in Washington say. Protect your freedoms by speaking up now, and read this entire post. The only way we can, rationally, NOT consider ourselves victimized every time we turn around is to ACT. And the good news is, on this issue the numbers are on our side — if we can get the word out.

You’ll find a Krugman piece on Bush’s corporate boot-licking Medicare folly — there is no doubt … none … that we will eventually have a universal health care program in this country, although we’ll be the last on that train in civil society. Globalization and free trade, no matter it’s wrinkles, is here to stay — the workers of this nation have depended on health care through their workplace, and that bucket can’t hold water any more. Unless we want to move further down the scale toward being a third-world country, we will have to make the citizens safe when their jobs go to India — we do an exceedingly poor job of caring for our own, here.

The most effective health care plan I ever had came to me in the form of “cafeteria” funds — I could decide on my own providers. A chiropractor/kinesiologist and food supplements took my health where thirty years of mainstream medical attention had failed to. Universal health care must come first … and wellness programs, alternative treatments, must come right behind.

To sweeten the pot, I’ve popped in news of Mike Moore’s new docudrama, Sicko, last. Mike is not a journalist, he’s a film-maker. He shows us what’s wrong — if there was more right, we wouldn’t buy a ticket to his latest offering, would we. Mike’s comparison of US health care to Cuba’s will make the Old [Better Dead Than Red] Guard swallow their tongues, I suppose, and Fidel is no doubt basking in the PR — but I’ll not forget that Cuba was the first in line to offer medical assistance and supplies during Katrina, while our own government did nothing at all. NOTHING, for days on end — except refuse to acknowledge their offer.

Jude

Comments on FDA Guidance for CAM Products and Regulation
FDA Regulators Using Legal Trickery to Jeopardize Alternative Procedures and
Products
Democracy in Action
[open link for activist op]

The FDA has been known to use legal maneuvering to try to end your access to natural health products (like vitamins, minerals and herbs) and natural health therapies of all sorts. We believe they are at it again. This time, their ploy is to issue a “Guidance” that implies these therapies can be “Medicine,” which creates the risk that any non-physician who uses them could be held to be practicing medicine without a license. Since these practices could be considered “Medicine” any products intended for such use could be considered untested drugs and could therefore be forbidden.

Your Comments are Vitally Important

Public, professional and industry comments are being accepted by the FDA on the proposal, that we view as a sly maneuver to “capture” alternative procedures and products as “medicine” and then make them illegal. The history of these repressive attacks by the FDA makes it clear that public outcry, IN HUGE NUMBERS, is the only effective tool that natural health supporters have to change this potentially disastrous outcome. Comments will be accepted until April 30. By contacting everyone you can reach to ask for their participation in this comment campaign, we can kill this assault on personal health freedom.

While we do not expect our alternatives to be taken away from us immediately, we know it is easier to stop or change a bad guidance before it is finalized, rather than ever getting it repealed afterwards. FDA has given us an opportunity to let them know we want them to respect our right to choose the type of therapies we want for ourselves, including alternatives to pharmaceutical treatments.

Please send the link to this page to everyone you can reach with a brief explanation of the issues. Urge everyone in your personal and professional circles of influence to protect their health freedom — their personal right to make their own health choices.

It is important to take a moment to email the manufacturers of the health care products you take an ask them to alert their suppliers and customer base to protect their businesses. Your natural health care providers need to alert their patients and colleagues, too.

Thanks for your activism!

Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director, Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org

FDA WANTS TO ELIMINATE NATURAL HEALTH CARE
Tom DeWeese, NewsWithViews.com
April 25, 2007
[thanks, Eileen]
[open link for activist op]

The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) has launched another sneak-attack, trying to regulate your health freedom into oblivion. Through FDA’s unholy partnerships with Big Pharma and the Codex Alimentarius Commission (an offshoot of the UN), we are very close to losing alternative health care in America. This is a crisis, and needs your immediate action.

In 1994 Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Heath and Education Act (DSHEA), voting unanimously to protect your health care choices, in response to 2.5 million ordinary citizens demanding dietary supplements stay on the over-the-counter market.

The FDA is trying to end-run the DSHEA, and regulate you out from under Congress’ severe limitations on the authority the FDA has over items currently classified as “food” (and therefore presumed to be safe) including dietary supplements and herbs. DSHEA currently provides the FDA with plenty of legal authority to remove any herb or supplement from the market anytime the agency can show REAL evidence of REAL harm to the public.

The Codex Alimentarius Commission is working to “harmonize” food and supplement rules, pulling our American health care system down to the level of Third World nations. Under Codex rules, even basic vitamins and minerals will require a doctor’s prescription. As Europe moves ever closer to adopting Codex standards, it becomes more likely that the World Trade Organization will attempt to force those standards on the United States. This is yet another example of how the WTO threatens American sovereignty. By cooperating with Codex, the FDA is blatantly ignoring the will of Congress and the American people, hoping to overpower both through their fascistic “partnerships.”

If the FDA adopts this proposal, all natural health care would be illegal even for medical doctors; all natural health care would be criminal in one way or another. Anyone else who advises, advocates, counsels, distributes, markets, recommends or suggests anybody use “medicine” is practicing medicine without a license. This is a felony in the USA punishable by fines and incarceration.

You can read FDA’s proposed Draft Guidance for Industry on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Products and Their Regulation by the Food and Drug Administration (.pdf), or view the document here [open link].

This guidance document details PDA’s plans to regulate virtually all herbs and supplements as drugs if they actually benefit a medical condition of a man or other animal. Believe it or not, the FDA has even targeted juice! If you plan to drink it “to promote optimal health”, juice would be a “food subject to…the Act and FDA regulations.” If you plan to drink juice “as part of a disease treatment regimen” juice would be “subject to regulation as a drug under the Act.”

You would no longer dare recommend anyone drink cranberry juice to help with a bladder infection. And please remember, water cures dehydration!

Follow the Money!

The FDA wants to put your wallet, and your throat, within reach of Big Pharma’s greedy, fat fingers. According to the National Institutes of Health, over 1/3 of all American adults use some form of alternative therapy, spending tens of billions of out-of-pocket (read, not refunded by insurance) dollars annually. Americans now spend more on “Complimentary and Alternative Modalities” than they do on standard (allopathic) healthcare professionals. Consumers know that readily available vitamins, minerals, herbs, and supplements are often just as effective (if not more so) as the drugs without the harmful side effects.

Past attendees of recent Freedom21 conferences have heard Dr. Carolyn Dean, Dr. Madeleine Pelner Cosman (now deceased), and Henry Lamb talk about the little-known aspect of Agenda 21 known as Sustainable Medicine. If you don’t yet understand Sustainable Medicine, you had better educate yourself, as the UN expects you to accept their “lowered expectations” for your health care. You see, it’s just not fair for Americans to have better health care than the rest of the world.

If you value your health freedom you have only very little time to raise your voice. If you wait for someone else to protect your health freedom, you risk losing the freedom you now enjoy – freedom that is the envy of the world.

FDA food safety failings
Reuters
Thu Apr 26, 2007

WASHINGTON - U.S. congressional leaders on Wednesday threatened to make sweeping changes to the Bush administration’s food safety system in light of fresh concerns over contaminated pet food.

A key U.S . House leader said she might “zero out” the salaries of some Food and Drug Administration officials on because of recent food safety failings that have included bagged spinach and peanut butter. And in the Senate, the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee called for a comprehensive audit of the U.S. food safety system “to determine how to remedy breakdowns in the system.”

The Agriculture Department and the FDA oversee much of the food production and processing network in the United States. But some lawmakers say one agency should be given control of food enforcement.

Connecticut Democrat Rep. Rosa DeLauro, whose House Appropriations subcommittee has jurisdiction over FDA, said her panel may cut off salaries for directors of some FDA centers and offices unless there is rapid improvement.

DeLauro said “it has become all too clear that a lack of commitment for management” was a factor in FDA’s “disjointed food and drug safety system.”

Senate Agriculture Committee chairman Tom Harkin asked the inspectors general of USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services to jointly examine the food safety system.

“I am concerned about the marked increase in cases of adulteration of food over the past six months,” wrote Harkin, an Iowa Democrat. “From human food-borne illness cases caused by microbial pathogens in spinach, tomatoes and peanut butter to kidney failure in companion animals caused by the chemical melamine in pet food, the widespread effects of these events are alarming.”

He suggested eight topics for the review, ranging from food production practices overseas to how often U.S. plants are inspected and whether USDA and FDA have sufficient power to respond to food adulteration.

Americans fed up with drug industry influence, FDA corruption, reveals remarkable Consumer Reports survey
Mike Adams
Monday, April 16, 2007
[must read -- stats and info
http://www.newstarget.com/021795.html
Cut 'n Paste this link!!]

The Plot Against Medicare
PAUL KRUGMAN
Thursday, April 19, 2007

The plot against Social Security failed: President Bush’s attempt to privatize the system crashed and burned when the public realized what he was up to. But the plot against Medicare is faring better: the stealth privatization embedded in the Medicare Modernization Act, which Congress literally passed in the dead of night back in 2003, is proceeding apace.

Worse yet, the forces behind privatization not only continue to have the G.O.P. in their pocket, but they have also been finding useful idiots within the newly powerful Democratic coalition. And it’s not just politicians with an eye on campaign contributions. There’s no nice way to say it: the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens have become patsies for the insurance industry.

To appreciate what’s going on, you need to know what has been happening to Medicare in the last few years.

The 2003 Medicare legislation created Part D, the drug benefit for seniors — but unlike the rest of Medicare, Part D isn’t provided directly by the government. Instead, you can get it only through a private drug plan, provided by an insurance company. At the same time, the bill sharply increased payments to Medicare Advantage plans, which also funnel Medicare funds through insurance companies.

As a result, Medicare — originally a system in which the government paid people’s medical bills — is becoming, instead, a system in which the government pays the insurance industry to provide coverage. And a lot of the money never makes it to the people Medicare is supposed to help.

In the case of the drug benefit, the private drug plans add an extra, costly layer of bureaucracy. Worse yet, they have much less ability to bargain for lower drug prices than government programs like Medicaid and the Veterans Health Administration. Reasonable estimates suggest that if Congress had eliminated the middlemen, it could have created a much better drug plan — one without the notorious “doughnut hole,” the gap in coverage once your annual expenses exceed $2,400 per year — at no higher cost.

Meanwhile, those Medicare Advantage plans cost taxpayers 12 percent more per recipient than standard Medicare. In the next five years that subsidy will cost more than $50 billion — about what it would cost to provide all children in America with health insurance. Some of that $50 billion will be passed on to seniors in extra benefits, but a lot of it will go to overhead, marketing expenses and profits.

With the Democratic victory last fall, you might have expected these things to change. But the political news over the last few days has been grim.

First, the Senate failed to end debate on a bill — in effect, killing it — that would have allowed Medicare to negotiate over drug prices. The bill was too weak to have allowed Medicare to get large discounts. Still, it would at least have established the principle of using government bargaining power to get a better deal. But in spite of overwhelming public support for price negotiation, 42 senators, all Republicans, voted no on allowing the bill to go forward.

If we can’t even establish the principle of negotiation, a true repair of the damage done in 2003 — which would require having Medicare offer seniors the option of getting their drug coverage directly, without involving the insurance companies — seems politically far out of reach.

At the same time, attempts to rein in those Medicare Advantage payments seem to be running aground. Everyone knew that reducing payments would be politically tough. What comes as a bitter surprise is the fact that minority advocacy groups are now part of the problem, with both the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens sending letters to Congressional leaders opposing plans to scale back the subsidy.

What seems to have happened is that both groups have been taken in by insurance industry disinformation, which falsely claims that minorities benefit disproportionately from this subsidy. It’s a claim that has been thoroughly debunked in a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — but apparently the truth isn’t getting through.

Public opinion is strongly in favor of universal health care, and for good reason: fear of losing health insurance has become a constant anxiety of the middle class. Yet even as we talk about guaranteeing insurance to all, privatization is undermining Medicare — and people who should know better are aiding and abetting the process.

Controversial Michael Moore Flick “Sicko” Will Compare U.S. Health Care with Cuba’s
Don Hazen, AlterNet
April 23, 2007

To state that controversy and Michael Moore go hand and hand is to utter the obvious, and Moore’s latest film Sicko will clearly be no exception.

Sicko, which will be premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in May, is a comic broadside against the state of American health care, including the mental health system. The film targets drug companies and the HMOS in the richest country in the world — where the most money is spent on health care, but where the U.S. ranks 21st in life expectancy among the 30 most developed nations, obviously in part due to the fact that 47 million people are without health insurance.

The timing of Moore’s film is propitious. Twenty-two percent of Americans say that health care is the most pressing issue in America. Health care will clearly be a major issue in the upcoming presidential campaign, as the problems with America’s health care system have mushroomed during the Bush administration. For example, between 2001 and 2005 the number of people without health insurance rose 16.6 percent. The average health insurance premiums for a family of four are $10,880, which exceeds the annual gross income of $10,712 for a full-time, minimum-wage worker. In addition, the lack of insurance causes 18,000 excess deaths a year while people without health insurance have 25 percent higher mortality rates. Fifty-nine percent of uninsured people with chronic conditions such as asthma or diabetes skip medicine or go without care.

Under wraps, but one surprise out of the bag

The details of Moore’s new film are being kept under tight wraps. According to inside sources, only a handful of people have seen the film, and both the film maker and Harvey Weinstein — the film’s distributor, who also distributed Moore’s hugely successful Fahrenheit 9/11 — are remaining tight-lipped about the film’s contents.

Nevertheless, one aspect of the film will not be a total surprise. One of the film’s segments, an increasingly controversial boat trip to Cuba, exploded onto the pages of The New York Post, the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid, when at least one 9/11 cleanup worker who had been invited to participate in a trip to Cuba for Moore’s Sicko went to the press.

The boat trip, according to sources who spoke to both the NY Post and The Daily News, took ailing rescue workers to Cuba for health treatment for respiratory ailments which they suffer as a result of working at Ground Zero, and for which a number of the workers have no health insurance. The purpose of the trip, according to some, was to show that the free health care in Cuba is superior to the health care system in the U.S. Those invited on the trip, as described by Janon Fisher in the Post, were told the “Cuban doctors had developed new techniques for treating lung cancer and other respiratory illnesses,” and that health care in Cuba was free.

Health care advances in Cuba

According to the Associated Press as cited in the Post article, “Cuba has made recent advancements in biotechnology and exports its treatments to 40 countries around the world, raking in an estimated $100 million a year. … In 2004, the U.S. government granted an exception to its economic embargo against Cuba and allowed a California drug company to test three cancer vaccines developed in Havana.”

Although trip participants signed confidentiality agreements prohibiting them from talking about the trip, some thought the trip a success. From the NY Post:

“From what I hear through the grapevine those people who went are utterly happy, said John Feal, who runs the Fealgood Foundation to raise money for responders and was approached by Moore to find responders willing to take the trip. “They got the Elvis treatment.”

According to staff writer Bill Hutchinson from the Daily News, Moore was praised for seeking medical alternatives. Retired Firefighter Vinnie Forras, 49, said he’s been going to Ecuador and Bolivia for experimental treatments for lung damage and severe headaches which he suffered at Ground Zero. “For me, anyone who’s looking to try to help the guys and women who are sick is a good thing. I don’t care where you go for that treatment.”

On the other hand, some balked at the idea of going: “I would rather die an American than go to Cuba,” Joe Picurro told the NY Post. Picurro, an ironworker with a laundry list of respiratory and other ailments, said, “I just laughed. I couldn’t do it. ”

America’s second-class health care system

Clearly one of the themes of Moore’s films, highlighted by the trip to Cuba, is to challenge the myth that the U.S. has superior health care when compared with other countries. In a recent AlterNet article, attorney Guy Saperstein explained,

“The World Health Organization ranks health care systems based on objective measures of medical outcomes: The United States’ health care system currently ranks 37th in the world, behind Colombia and Portugal; the United States ranks 44th in the world in infant mortality, behind many impoverished Latin American countries. While infant mortality in the United States is skewed toward poor people, who have rates double the wealthy, the top quintile of the U.S. population has infant mortality rates higher than Canadians in the lowest quintile of wealth.

“The United States has fewer physicians, nurses and hospital beds than most developed nations. In the United States, 28 percent say it is “difficult to get care”; in most European countries, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, 15 percent say that. In terms of continuity of care ( i.e., five-plus years with the same doctor), the United States is the worst of all developed nations. By every objective measure, the United States has a second-rate health care system.”

It is unclear how soon after Cannes Sicko will open in U.S. theaters. But with the aggressive and often Oscar hungry Weinstein at the distribution helm, there is little doubt that the movie will make a big splash, bubbling up many more controversies. Moore’s film has been a long time coming — three years since his huge success with Fahrenheit 9/11, which was awarded the Palme d’Or (Golden Palm), the festival’s highest award, by an international jury in 2004.

Legend has it that while Moore has been critical of Cuba, he became a hero there after a pirated version of Fahrenheit 9/11 was shown on government-controlled TV. It’s ironic that Cuba showed a free version, because the film has made boatloads of money. According to the Wikipedia, “As of January 2005, [Fahrenheit 9/11] had broken all box office records for a documentary grossing nearly US $120 million in U.S. box office, and over US $220 million worldwide, an unprecedented amount for a political documentary; Sony reported first-day DVD sales of two million copies, again a new record for the genre.”

Only time will tell if Moore can duplicate his success.

Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

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