Andrew Weil Predicts Healthcare System Collapse
Image from “Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Health Care.”
Andrew Weil, MD, author of You Can’t Afford to Get Sick: Your Guide to Optimum Health and Health Care, appeared in a CNN documentary that premiered March 10 called “Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Health Care.”
While the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) will provide healthcare coverage to over 30 million Americans who don’t have it, Americans currently spend twice as much on healthcare per capita than any other country in the world, yet have shorter life spans and higher disease rates.
Dr. Weil asks, “How can we improve the medical care so that it’s worth extending it to more people? Making this system more accessible by passing costs to taxpayers will simply spread its failures more broadly.”
Weil notes that we need to turn our healthcare system into health promotion and disease prevention. The current dysfunctional system of disease management generates huge profits for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries and must be changed at the grassroots level through education.
Alternative medicine doctor Joseph Mer cola, MD agrees. “It’s a system that is wholly dependent on expensive drugs and invasive surgeries, opposed to preventive measures and simpler, less expensive treatment alternatives. In short, it’s a system rooted in an ideal of maximized profits, opposed to helping people maintain or regain their health…You’re just paying for overpriced band-aids that do absolutely nothing to fix the underlying cause.”
Both Dr. Weil and Dr. Mer cola promote the use of integrative medicine, which fosters long term health through preventive and complementary health care, as well as general health awareness and lifestyle upgrades. When disease sets in, conventional drug and surgery approaches are used sparingly as a last resort, and not as a first line of treatment.
Health care costs would be reduced dramatically, allowing access to health care for everyone.
Carol Bedrosian is publisher of Spirit of Change, New England’s largest free holistic health magazine. Visit www.spiritofchange.org.
