President-Elect Obama & his healthcare team are asking for public input on health care reform during the month of December...make your voice heard!

Date:   12/14/2008 7:39:05 PM ( 16 y ago)

CUREZONERS! NOW'S YOUR CHANCE!!

Received the following email today on healthcare reform and an EXCELLENT sample letter--please take a moment of your time to register YOUR comments on President Elect Obama's website Change.gov regarding Health Care Reform

go to
http://change.gov/page/s/healthcare
and register your comments!

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"We are writing you now to urge you to register your comments about health and wellness to President-Elect Obama, and Health and Human Services Secretary-Designate Tom Daschle. This team is requesting public commentary during the month of December, as they draft a proposal for health care reform. This is the time to speak out about the importance of holistic health as a vital component of health care reform in the USA.

Here is a sample of issues and recommendations. Feel free to cut and paste, add and delete or just copy and post to their website:


RE: Health Care Reform

Dear President Elect Obama, Vice-President Elect Biden, & Human Services Secretary-Designate Tom Daschle:

1. Humane, appropriate health care, including alternative choices, should be the right of all citizens of the United States, including pregnant and birthing women, children, people with disabilities, the elderly and those at the end of life.

2. Health care must promote health and wellness, not merely manage disease symptoms. Preventive health care is not more immunizations. Preventive health care means paying for screening tests to identify EARLY MARKERS of disease process. American health care is a disease management model. It is the ALTERNATIVE and INTEGRATIVE models that address the causes and maintenance of HEALTH and WELLNESS and the PREVENTION of disease. Include coverage for ACUPUNCTURE, CHIROPRACTIC and NATUROPATHIC licensed health care providers. Ask an oncologist how to help a patient restore robust health and they will not have a plan.

3. Preventive care is more than screening for symptoms. It includes a positive program of wellness, including healthy diet, exercise, mental and emotional health, and natural therapies that support the body’s inherent self-healing powers.

4. Health care must include full freedom of choice regarding health care options; herbal medicines, homeopathy, and flower essence therapy as well as massage, acupuncture and other innovative therapies should all be freely available in any health care program. Each individual should be free to choose from the full spectrum of health care modalities, without interference from the government restricting particular methods.

5. A diversity of health care options, especially those that are holistic and preventative in nature, would actually lower our nation’s cost for providing universal coverage and result in a far healthier population.

6. We must champion the needs of children in any health care program. Of particular concern is the increasing use of pharmaceutical drugs with children, rather than preventative measures such as good diet, counseling and assistance for at risk-children, and a full spectrum of educational programs that include artistic expression, physical exercise and creative play.

7. Our national school lunch program needs major reformation, including increased funding and mandate to provide fresh and vital regional foods that support local farmers and their communities, rather than the poor quality corporate farm subsidy food currently used for these programs. With the epidemic of childhood obesity and diabetes, teaching healthy food habits to our children should be given a priority for all age groups.

8. The use of mandatory childhood and other vaccinations (i.e., HPV, flu, etc.) should be closely examined, as increasingly there are vaccine reactions with tragic consequences and with great impact on the health care system. Vaccine reactions include vaccine-induced neuroimmune dysfunction, including chronic inflammation. Additionally, there can be grave ill-effects from toxic components added to vaccines.

9. Holistic health care choices should be available for anyone experiencing mental illness of any kind, providing a range of safe, supportive care services particularly if one were to choose not to use pharmaceutical medications.

10. Disease management is expensive and profitable for the drug companies, insurance companies and medical specialists. Primary and holistic care is cost-effective and leads to a healthier population. Ordinary citizens and the community-based organizations that represent them should have a vital and authoritative role in any new health care system. These new programs should not be designed to funnel billions of dollars into a high-overhead, for-profit health care industry.

11. Many doctors over-prescribe invasive procedures and testing out of fear of being sued by patients or their families, thus unnecessarily driving up health care costs, and often resulting in additional health complications. Our national health care program should not award financial incentives for the use of unnecessary and invasive medical procedures.

12. It is a matter of social justice that every citizen have access to basic health care regardless of financial status. However, universal coverage without reforming the way health care is delivered will endanger the economic health of the country. Cost containment is not simply a matter of eliminating waste and profiteering. It also requires a de-emphasis on high-tech "sickness care" and a new emphasis on health promotion.

13. Health care reform requires strict environmental rules to reduce toxins and pollutants in our environment.

14. Health care reform depends on reforming our agriculture policy, to promote healthy, whole foods and organic, sustainable farm practices. More than two out of every three Americans are overweight and consume one of the worst diets in the world, one that makes our nation both overfed and undernourished. A health care program must include integration with a revitalized agricultural policy at all levels.

For example, high fructose corn syrup, a major contributor to the epidemic of diabetes, is added to numerous processed foods and is subsidized and promoted through billions of dollars of taxpayers subsidies to corn farmers through the current Farm Bill. Another example of the need for an overhaul of our agricultural policy is the increasing rate of allergies and hyperactivity in children that has been traced definitively in numerous scientific studies to chemical contamination in our food supply as well as the over-use of additives and preservatives.

15. Health care reform means ending medical discrimination against holistic health practices and natural health supplements, to allow truthful health information to be freely given in regard to the health benefits of natural remedies, to allow holistic health practitioners to freely practice without fear of prosecution.

16. Government and government-regulated insurance reimbursement programs must fully cover licensed holistic practitioners such as chiropractors, naturopaths, acupuncturists, homeopaths and herbalists, and allow hospitals and clinics to have full access to their services and treatments.

17. Research funding for the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (National Institutes of Health) should be massively increased.

18. An Integrative Medicine Advisory panel should be created to advise legislators and policy-makers on ways to bring holistic and integrative medicine practices into any Health Care Reform legislation that is drafted. Such a panel should draw on the expertise of such organizations as the Preventative Medicine Research Institute (Dr. Dean Ornish), the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine (University of California in San Francisco), Duke Integrative Medicine Center, The Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine (San Diego), and other similar centers.

Feel free to expand upon, amend, delete or add your own ideas to this list according to your own research and values, or simply copy all or parts of it into the online form provided at the link above.


Nalini Chilkov, Lic.Ac., O.M.D.
Doctor of Oriental Medicine
Licensed Acupuncturist"




http://change.gov/page/s/healthcare



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Change American Agriculture!
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Agriculture in the U.S. contributes to greenhouse gasses--second only to transportation in this country. Read Michael Pollan's great article on this and other ills of American agriculture/food industry and his solutions of how to change it! Write to Obama/Biden and let them know YOUR ideas of how to change agricultural/food industry practices in the U.S.!






 

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