A Different Perspective on Health Care Reform

8th August, 2009 - Posted by Maude -

If you watch TV news, read newspapers or look at news sources on the web, health care reform is probably the number one topic these days. It’s a big showdown between Democrats and Republicans according to some. It’s Obama’s big test or his Waterloo, depending on who you ask. It’s the threat of a public system ruining everyone’s health and freedom or it’s the threat of not getting a public system and therefore not really having a change at all. Lines are drawn in the sand. But who drew the lines?

Let’s step back and take a look at what we’re dealing with here. First, the reality of the “health care” system in the United States today is that it is not really in the business of promoting health. It is care for people who are sick or injured. To call it health care is a misnomer; what we have is a system for “sick care.” An individual’s health is, for the most part, one’s own responsibility and the freedom to decide how to be healthy also includes the right to make as many unhealthy choices as one wants. Then when a person gets sick or injured and needs help they access their “sick care.”

However, a buffer has now been built between people and the sick care they need - a predatory industry that takes money from people upfront and then makes their money by preventing as many people as possible from getting care when they are sick, thereby making a profit. The primary allegiance of health insurance companies are to their stockholders which means their primary duty is produce a profit to those stockholders. They do this by spending less money on care than they take in through premiums. This is a pretty simple equation. The lengths that insurance companies will go to in an effort to avoid paying is well documented, from repentant executives testifying before congress, to the spike in personal bankruptcies forced by unpaid health care costs of people WHO HAD HEALTH INSURANCE.

Primarily health insurance companies sell their products to employers. Because there is no public option or government system for providing for care, most of the burden for this system is passed on to employers. This wedding of work and health insurance has major ramifications for American corporations and their workers. It is a major consideration in any union negotiated contract and a major reason that many employers can produce their products more cheaply by building factories in other countries. It is also a major consideration for employers trying to minimize their health care costs by allowing workers only part-time work or using mainly contracted employees who do not qualify for the company’s health insurance plan. Employers are left holding the bag on “health care” and have little negotiating powers with health insurance companies who are making unprecedented profits even in the worst of business times.

Increasingly, the hold that health insurance companies have on Americans has created a large number of people who are excluded from the system altogether. The US Census Bureau estimates that 45.7 million people have no coverage whatsoever. This exclusion of people from the sick care system has produced a kind of “health care rationing.” If you think this is not true check out this recent NY Times article. This is hardly an alternative source of information so we’re not really going out on a limb with this observation.

Add to this distance between “health care providers” and their patients an equally predatory legal and insurance system designed to “protect” patients from incompetent doctors and doctors from litigious patients. Malpractice insurance is a major factor driving up costs and controlling what kinds of care people receive from the system.

When seen in this light, it’s amazing that anyone gets any care at all. Increasingly, fewer and fewer people are receiving care, and when they do get care the decisions about what kind of care they get is based as much on protecting providers from lawsuits as it is on the best interest of the patient.

Let’s take another step backward and see this troubled “health care” system in context. Who are these people providing care and why are they doing what they’re doing? In the Western allopathic model of medicine, people can be “saved” from death by this system. Although, everyone eventually does die and this end of life situation is vexing for the system, mostly the approach is to look the other way and not see that fact. Each death is a “failure,” though everyone does die. In most places people do not even have a “right” to die (or be born) until the system decides on the time and method.

In the meantime while people can be saved from sickness, the allopathic system sees the scientist who discovers and develops the drugs or procedures that treat them as a kind of God and the doctors who dispense these drugs and perform these procedures as heros. Each individual’s body is a kind of machine and the “health care” system is a kind of mechanic/benefactor system that can repair the machine. These heros can save you but only if you submit to them utterly.

I’ll never forget a radio ad by a local Blue Cross Blue Shield company that ran frequently for months saying, “Everyone knows the key to good health is finding the right doctor.” It was such an outrageous statement. As if each person is not inhabiting their own body, as if there is no connection between the body and the person in it! Every time that ad played Maude would talk back to the radio, saying, “Everybody knows the key to good health is taking care of your body and loving it.”

The heroes trying to save us are not all Western doctors. Many alternative health care providers, including naturopaths, homeopaths, acupuncturists and practitioners of various kinds practice in the heroic tradition. We come to them, head’s bowed, to receive their special knowledge of plants, of the spiritual world, of exotic practices of various sorts. They can cleanse us and heal us if we follow complicated directions. Not all alternative health care providers practice in the heroic tradition but many do. If your care provider sees your body as inherently unhealthy and in need of cleansing or fixing, make a mental note of that. They will offer to save you, for a price.

Our herbal goddess, Susun Weed, enlightened us greatly on this issue. She has some excellent writing on this topic that she calls The Three Traditions of Healing which we’ve drawn on to describe our current health care system. Here is an excellent synopsis you can access. You can also read more about this topic in her wonderful book, Breast Cancer, Breast Health which we recommend for all women.

Besides the Scientific Tradition and Heroic Tradition, Susun describes what she calls the Wise Woman Tradition. The Wise Woman Tradition is a completely different way to think about health and healing. Many women have found this way of looking at health and thinking about their own bodies and lives entirely liberating.

To quote Susun:

The Wise Woman tradition is the world’s oldest healing tradition. It envisions good health as openness to change, flexibility, availability to transformation, and groundedness. Its symbol is the spiral. In the Wise Woman tradition we do not seek to cure, but focus instead on integrating and nourishing the unique individual’s wholeness/holiness. The Wise Woman tradition relies on compassion, simple ritual, and common dooryard herbs and garden weeds as primary nourishers, but appreciates (and uses) any treatment appropriate to the specific self-healing in process.

The Wise Woman tradition sees each life as a spiraling, ever-changing completeness. Disease and injury are seen as doorways of transformation, and each person is recognized as a self-healer, earth healer: inherently whole, resonant to the whole, and vital to the whole. Substance, thought, feeling, and spirit are inseparable in the Wise Woman tradition. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Spiralic and amazing, the Wise Woman tradition offers self-healing options as diverse as the human imagination and as complex as the human psyche. The Wise Woman tradition has no rules, no texts, no rites; it is constantly changing, constantly being re-invented. It is mostly invisible, hard to see, but easier and easier to find. It is a give-away dance of nourishment, change, and self-love. An invitation to honor yourself and the earth. An admonishment to trust yourself.”

What if “health care”meant you loved and trusted your body AND took good care of and nourished it?

This would be true health care reform for most of us. What if you owned your body? What if you knew what made it feel better and feel worse? What if you listened to it and nourished it, giving it what it asked you for? What if you liked your body? What if you trusted it? What if you knew what was happening with it better than anyone else?

Now we’re talking about a true shift!

How would you make this shift? A lifetime of not trusting does not usually get reversed in an instant. Maybe the most basic way we can start learning to trust and CARE FOR the health of our bodies is by LISTENING to how it responds to WHAT WE EAT and HOW WE MOVE.

Nourishment comes on several levels. There is the nourishment of the nutrients we take into our body - through food and nourishing herbal infusions. There is the nourishment of activity that invigorates and replenishes us. There is the nourishment of proper, regular sleep - the amount our own body needs. There is the nourishment of love - in relationships with people we can trust, with nature and with ourselves. There is nourishment of the mind - through a relaxed, positive mind we can think clearly and make good decisions. And there is the nourishment of the spirit - once we start to listen to our spirit it is often uncanny how just what we need shows up at just the right time.

For Americans, one of our problems with health and nourishment often begins with the seeming ambiguity of it. Many of us automatically seek the answer to two questions - what is the right way to do this (what are the rules) and what do I need to buy? In true health care reform your answers come from within. There are as many ways to be healthy as there are bodies in this world. Only you can know what is right for you. You don’t need to buy any special equipment or products to find out the answers or to take good care or yourself. Once you know what you need you can access resources, including doctors when needed, to care for yourself. Of course sickness and accidents can and do still happen and Western medicine can be indispensable when called for. But when we come to the system generally healthy and in touch with our bodies, empowered to make decisions that are right for us, that system can ideally become an ally instead of a savior.

If you want radical health care reform love, accept, listen to and care for your body! It is wiser than you know. As you practice self health care you are likely to come across amazing resources that can support you on your way. Health can be yours regardless of what politicians and corporations do, even whether you have insurance or not. You have power in your body and in your decision to care for it. You can use your power. You really can.

No Comments

No Comments

Leave a reply

Name *

Mail *

Website