posted on Feb, 12 2010 @ 10:07 PM
There's definitely growing pill-popping culture in America: If you're sad, there's a pill. If you're too fat, there's a pill. If you eat a poor
diet, there's a whole rack of pills at the supermarket. If you watch American TV, every commercial break is packed with "Ask your doctor about..."
followed up with a list of side-effects rattled off like an auctioneer. Doctors get flooded with patients wasting their time for prescriptions to cure
"erectile dysfunction" and "restless leg syndrome". Making everyone reliant on their services is the fantasy of corporate healthcare providers –
so like any good (dis)honest business, they sell you needs rather than solutions to real problems.
We can't expect the government to be our only safety-net; but just the same, the last thing we want is a whole population of pill-popping
hypochondriacs. So what type of healthcare scheme can solve these problems? Ideally, we can dream about a non-corporate private health care system, in
which the poor can rely on their communities for support rather than the government, and everyone receives the high quality of care that private
competition provides. But given the socio-economic climate we have to work with, we need to work on correcting the problems with the systems we
have.
It would be overly presumptuous to try and propose a fix-all here, but we have a pretty good idea what the first step ought to be for the public and
private sectors alike: Take control away from the corporations and bureaucrats and put it back into the hands of doctors and nurses. They care about
our health, not our provider, and certainly aren't going to work overtime just to write Viagra prescriptions. It won't solve all our problems, but
it would be a move towards a healthier lifestyle all-around.