While the term “healthcare” is popular, it misrepresents health in every possible way. Health is supposed to refer to being “healthy” – free of disease, physically fit, productive and happy. Healthy people do not need to spend money on doctor visits, drugs, hospitals and surgery.
So what is a more accurate term than healthcare? Medicalcare is the proper term. Medicalcare is a heterogeneous collection of products and services provided by MDs, drug suppliers and hospitals that deal with people who are not healthy. Sometimes medical intervention is merciful, humane and lifesaving. Most of the time, medical care is wasteful, inefficient and potentially dangerous. Healthy people do not seek medical care.
Lundberg, Editor of MedGenMed stated that: “The US medicalcare system is immensely complicated, almost inexplicable, costly beyond belief, seriously discriminatory, and often unsafe. The money expended from all sources in American medicalcare is extraordinarily large, some $1.7 trillion in 2004, one seventh of the total US economy, and larger than the total economies of most countries of the world.” Lundberg suggests that the marketplace" determines how much money is spent on what and how many people of what types work in medicalcare but it is not a free market. “
People in the US and Canada are less than healthy because they eat too much of the wrong food and exercise too little. The mechanisms of bad-food diseases are numerous and complex. Profit can be made by attempting to manage the consequences of eating too much and exercising too little. Marketing chemicals to reduce the negative effects of eating too much of the wrong food is unbelievably profitable, even though none of the drugs are really required. Canada is the third-highest-per-capita spender on drugs among industrial countries after the United States and France. Canada spent $3,003 US per person in 2003 lower than the U.S. at $5,635. Norway and Switzerland were next in line at $3,800 per capita. All affluent countries are spending more on drugs, increasing 32 per cent between 1998 and 2003 to more than $450 billion annually. Growth in spending on pharmaceuticals outpaced the rise in total health-care expenditures in most countries, including Canada. In the U.S. and Australia, spending on drugs grew more than twice as fast as total health expenditures.
The real solution is not taking drugs, but removing the causes of disease, by, for example, eating less, choosing the right foods and exercising more.
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