Three, 3, Three: Part I - Health

Three questions on the topic of:

Health

1. When you buy car insurance, or home owners insurance, do you look for the absolute "least expensive" policy on the market, or do you look for the policy with the maximum coverage you you can afford at the time?

You, like I, choose to get the policy with the best coverage within your budget.

The Great American Health CARE Debate has been turned into the Great American Health INSURANCE Debate.

We are no longer talking about the health, well-being, sanity, care and comfort that every person in this nation should have as a natural birth-right. The discussion started there, most certainly. We are now talking about every person in this great country of ours getting a the gift of an insurance premium as a birth-right. Yes, you cannot be denied coverage anymore, but the flip side is you can no longer deny coverage. Just as every 16 year-old new driver in the country is met with the demand of being insured to drive, we will all be met with the demand of health coverage. . .upon being born.

I can recall being told insurance premiums would drop upon passage of the bill requiring all Illinois drivers to be covered in 1990. My first premium, pre-passage, was $79 per month, with a $350 deductible. My insurance premium today, without an accident in 19 years, is almost double.

The Bill being celebrated by the Congress today will hand the Insurance companies a new crop of 50-75 million new customers, who can no longer refuse their services. This has been a high-jacking and this high jacking was done by the only person with enough cache to pull it off on an angry nation, Barack Obama.

2. If you need a prescription to put "medicine" in your mouth, why are there no set limits to what "food" you can put in your mouth?

These are not mutually exclusive issues.

Upon admittance to ANY hospital, the first thing you can expect to happen is, your being put on a restrictive, guardedly-watched diet. Health care professionals know, you cannot bring the body into balance without a healthy diet, the medicine will not do the job on it's own. If such thinking applies to an unhealthy body, how can it not apply to a healthy body.

You would not allow your friend Willy to write you out a pill combination for that pain in your chest, why then are his recipe or restaurant suggestions taken as the gospel?

There is not one person , well actually there is ONE person, that understands the highly-chemicalized ingredient labels on the products we eat for nourishment. Few know that, in order to allow more products to reach the shelves for consumption, a new category that could go around the food laws had to be created. That category is called "Foodstuffs."

The word is old, but the category is relatively new, dating to the late 1970's. The problem with foodstuffs is they have, since their introduction, become an increasingly larger part of the food supply and American diet. Well in excess of 60%, on average, of every Americans diet is a foodstuff of some sort. Those wanting to test this theory are free to pick up the item closest to them (barring the miraculous occurrence that item might be a fruit or vegetable) and read the ingredient panel. If you understand the entire label, you are eating food. If not, FOODSTUFF ALERT!

This obviously doesn't include the staple item of almost every American meal, meat. This product has no ingredient label whatsoever. You are only able to ascertain whether this animal "passed" or not. Meat is not raised in a uniform fashion, the way corn, beans, wheat and rice are not raised in a uniform way. Each farm uses their proven (or experimental) method for producing carrion at the highest possible (I bet you think the next word will be quality, but sorry it's) profit. This, literally, smacks of FOODSTUFF.

I think we should start requiring prescriptions for eating because we need to have such an important facet of our existence in the hands of "trained professionals." No?

3. Why do so many people shun alternative health altogether?

Nobody is telling you to turn your back of your understanding of medicine up to this point in your life (well, actually. . .), but why is there such a hard and fast aversion to anything offered in the field of alternative medicine? It is really like telling me you can't stand peanuts, but love Snicker Bars.

The peanut, many times, is what the alternative health field is offering you. For example, many people need help falling asleep. These people would never consider a chamomile tea (for mild assistance), massage therapy to re-balance the body and help blood flow (medium-level assistance) or melatonin (hard core assistance), all of which are non-threatening, highly-effective and carry no (or few) side effects.

No you would rather have the Snickers because it's packaged beautifully, you saw it on television and in US Weekly, your friends eat them, they are readily available in every store and it tastes great. You would rather have Nytol, Unisom, Sominex, ProSom or Rozerem, which all have the peanut (natural product), to produce the desired effect, and the the chocolate (for flavor), nougat (for bulk in the hand and to the eye) and caramel (for digestive assistance) which produce the side-effects associated with the drug.

Why not just eat the peanut? Or at least stop cursing the peanut and find out more about it, which is usually far less expensive than it's mainstream counterpart. Maybe you might like your peanut in a different fashion, say peanut butter? By opening up our minds to all the possibilities involved with keeping ourselves healthy, we can only improve the odds with which to produce a desirable result.