The Daily HIT

First, a 1000 square foot organic garden on the White House grounds. Now, possibly, a farmers’ market just outside the gate, with produce from that garden and from other local farmers. What a breath of fresh air!

Read Full Post »

This is the reason that private health insurance companies must be regulated. Efforts to exempt them from state laws (which UHC violated in this case) without substituting federal regulations that are as strong or stronger, constitute a recipe for continued injustice. A pair of St. Louis, Mo-based subsidiaries of UnitedHealthcare will pay $536,000 in fines and [...]

Read Full Post »

For decades, I’ve read stories about U.S. corporations plying their wares in Third World countries when health or environmental regulations limited their ability to do so here at home. Historically, governments in many such nations (particularly those with weaker democratic traditions) have been more accepting of toxins in their air, water and food than the [...]

Read Full Post »

This one is about finding truly effective and cost-effective models of health care, based on the places in the United States where it’s actually working. Both of these steps stir heated argument, not to mention lobbyists’ hearts. But what creates the deepest unease is considering what we will have to do about the system’s exploding [...]

Read Full Post »

It turns out that the idea for these voluntary end-of-life issues consultations came from a conservative Republican senator. I was not aware until a couple of days ago that the senator whose efforts led to inclusion in the health reform bills of Medicare coverage for the voluntary consultations (which has brought fears of “death panels” [...]

Read Full Post »

Dr. Dean Ornish’s new article at Huffington Post offers a clear-minded explanation of why lifestyle-based prevention is the key to making our health care system work. Absent that, what we have is little more than a disease management system. And the world’s most expensive one,  at that. Many people tend to think of breakthroughs in medicine as a [...]

Read Full Post »

Good news from an unexpected source. Last year’s contaminated-milk scandal reinforced fears about China’s food supply, a legitimate concern in a country where most farms rely on toxic sewer sludge to fertilize fields, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday. Fearful of the sludge, pesticides and chemical fertilizers, a small group of growers have established organic [...]

Read Full Post »

I post this story from Afghanistan not as a political commentary on the war there, but as an example of the interplay between the health, economics and the national security/military sectors of human society. Afghanistan grows virtually the entire world supply of opium, the raw material for heroin. While in power, the Taliban dealt with the drug [...]

Read Full Post »

The health blog at the Wall Street Journal has news from France (new drug co-pays), China (massive new investment in clinics) and Switzerland and the Netherlands (which both have individual mandates of the kind that U.S. reform may require). Here’s a quick look at what’s been happening in a few other countries around the world, [...]

Read Full Post »

My editorial on health reform, first published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, is online at the Adjust the Vote website of the International Chiropractors Association. It was distributed to all members of the House and Senate, and all health policy makers in the Obama Administration, as part of the push for including [...]

Read Full Post »