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America’s Health Care Crisis
Read by co-author Dr. Jason A. Deitch

A perfect storm has been brewing just over the horizon
and is heading this way, bringing with it a torrent
that has the power to ruin the lives of all those it
touches. The leaders of our nation have seen the forecasts and
are wringing their hands not knowing what to do about it. This
storm will wreak more havoc than any natural disaster in history,
leaving millions of Americans sick and unprotected—at least
the lucky ones. The unlucky ones will not survive.

The name of this storm is not a common name like Katrina,
Andrew, or Wilma. It is called “America’s Health Care Crisis.”
Most people are completely unaware of how big this storm is,
but as with other disastrous events in our history, the day will
soon come when the world as we all know it will end. Early
signs of the looming storm have already begun to reach us. Just
consider these facts:

• Every 30 seconds in the United States someone files for
bankruptcy due to a serious health problem.1 According
to a recent study by Harvard University, 50 percent of all
bankruptcy filings in the United States are the direct result
of excessive medical expenses.2

• Health care spending in the United States is $1.8 trillion,
which is more than four times the amount spent on
national defense and almost forty times the amount spent
on homeland security.3

• Although nearly 47 million Americans are uninsured,4
the United States spends more on health care than other
industrialized nations which provide health insurance to
all their citizens.5 In 2003, the United States spent 15.3
percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on health
care. It is projected that the percentage will reach 18.7
percent in 10 years.6 By contrast, universal health systems
in other countries consume much less of their GDP:
Canada - 8.4 percent; Sweden - 9.1 percent; Germany
- 8.2 percent; Japan - 6.8 percent; United Kingdom - 6.2
percent.7

• According to the Kaiser Family Foundation and the
Health Research and Educational Trust, premiums for
employer-sponsored health insurance in the US have
risen five times faster than workers’ earnings since 2000.8
How Staying Healthy Can Make You Rich
In fact, most people are shocked to find out that Starbucks
Coffee spends more money on health care costs than they
do on coffee, and General Motors spends more on health
care costs than they do on steel!9

• Experts predict retiring elderly couples will need
$200,000 in savings just to pay for the most basic
medical coverage.10 Many others believe that this figure
is conservative and that $300,000 may be a more realistic
number.

The overall cost of health care—everything from hospital
and doctor bills to the cost of pharmaceuticals, medical
equipment, insurance, nursing homes, and home health care
—doubled from 1993 to 2004, according to a report from the
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In 2004, the
nation spent almost $140 billion more for health care than the
year before. In fact, more than 15 percent of America’s Gross
Domestic Product is spent on medical care, or $6,280 per
person.3

That means that $15 of every $100 of our economy
goes toward covering the cost of being sick. According to the
National Coalition on Health Care, the US health care spending
is expected to increase at similar levels for the next decade,
reaching $4 trillion in 2015, or 20 percent of the GDP!11

It’s important to remember that the money to cover these
costs does not come from thin air. It has to come from all of
our pockets. We all pay for these costs in the form of increased
taxes and increased cost for all of the stuff that we buy on a
daily basis.

Consider this. Every time you spend:

• $1.95 at Starbucks for a cup of coffee, approximately $.30
goes to cover medical costs.

• $10 for a movie ticket, approximately $1.50 goes to cover
medical costs.

• $20 for a pizza, approximately $3 goes to cover medical
costs.

• $50 for a tank of gas, approximately $7.50 goes to cover
medical costs.

• $250 for an airline ticket, approximately $37.50 goes to
cover medical costs.

• $1,000 on auto repairs, approximately $150 goes to cover
medical costs.

• $2,500 on a plasma television, approximately $375 goes
to cover medical costs.

• $25,000 on a new car, approximately $1,666 goes to cover
medical costs.

When you consider how many things you buy each month,
you can see how quickly the cost of health care adds up!
The incredibly high cost of health care in this country could
almost be justified if the enormous expense led to better health
among the population, but this hasn’t been the case.

According to a study by the World Health Organization, the United States
ranked a pathetic 15th among 25 industrialized nations based
on a wide variety of health measures including infant mortality,
the percentage of the population who has access to health care,
and the incidence of degenerative disease. The United States
ranks behind the entire European Union and countries such as
Cuba, South Korea, Singapore, Aruba, Greece, and the Czech
Republic.12

To make matters worse, the current state of our medicine based
health care system actually contributes to an increase in
disease and disability! There is a lot of talk about the devastation
of AIDS, which claims the lives of less than 20,000 people per
year, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).10 Yet
199,000 people die unnecessarily from medical care every year,
according to a recent article published in the Journal of the
American Medical Association (JAMA).12

In the JAMA article,
Dr. Barbara Starfield of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene
and Public Health listed the negative health effects of the US
health care system itself, including:

• $77 billion in unnecessary costs
• 116 million unnecessary physician visits
• 77 million unnecessary prescriptions
• 17 million unnecessary emergency department visits
• 8 million unnecessary hospitalizations
• 3 million unnecessary long-term hospital admissions
• 199,000 unnecessary deaths
• 20,000 deaths per year from other errors in hospitals
• 12,000 deaths per year from unnecessary surgery
• 7,000 deaths per year from medication errors in hospitals

Many experts, including those from the Food and
Drug Administration (FDA), agree that these statistics are
a conservative estimate because of the “culture of secrecy”
regarding medical error and the enormous malpractice risk that
goes along with admitting error. The incredible cost and less than
optimal outcome in modern health care occur because we are
spending too much money in the wrong place. We have focused
far too much attention on exciting new drugs and therapies in
the belief that they will lead to better health. But they have not.

In fact, they have only served to divert our attention away from
the very thing that can help us avoid developing most disease
in the first place: living a lifestyle that promotes wellness. That
is not to take anything away from the incredible advances that
medical research has brought to the treatment of disease. What
our country needs, however, is not more medicine, but rather
more people who are less sick.

Bankrupting Americans

The high cost of health care and the associated costs of
being ill are responsible for half of all personal bankruptcies
in this country, according to a study published by the journal
Health Affairs. This was confirmed by an independent study
done by Harvard University. This is true even though most of
those filing for bankruptcy had health insurance when they first
became sick! But because they either lost their coverage or
because they had to pay for expensive treatments not covered
by their policy, these people were left financially unprotected.

According to the Harvard study, most people filing for
bankruptcy due to medical costs were middle class; 56 percent
were homeowners, and 56 percent had attended some college.
In some cases, the family’s breadwinner was forced to take time
off of work, which caused a loss of income and job-based health
insurance, compounding the problem.2

According to experts in the field, there are several reasons
for this trend. Many employers no longer offer a full range of
health care benefits, and most now require employees to pay
more for coverage out of pocket, or else costs are passed on to
employees in the form of policies with higher deductibles.
With co-payments, requirements to pay certain percentages
of medical bills, and services that simply aren’t covered, even
people with insurance have a hard time coming up with the
burdensome out-of-pocket health care expenses, and they
wind up in debt. A significant percentage of those turn to the
bankruptcy courts for relief.

As quoted from a recent article, Jeff Morris, resident
scholar at the American Bankruptcy Institute says, “There is
a trend toward insurance being viewed as sort of catastrophic
protection…. The problem, of course, is it doesn’t take a lot
of hours at a hospital to generate a bill that is very difficult to
pay.”

Other health care and social science professionals were
interviewed for that same article, and they agree. “I think the
message that we take away is, really, nobody is safe in our
country. Short of (Microsoft Chairman) Bill Gates, if you’re
sick enough long enough, you’re likely to be financially ruined,”
cautions Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor of
medicine at Harvard Medical School, “We’re all one serious
illness away from bankruptcy.” Carol Pryor, a senior policy
analyst at The Access Project in Boston, has studied the issue of
medical debt and its numerous affects on people’s lives, and says
that the problem is only likely to escalate due to ever-increasing
premiums, deductibles, and co-insurance payments.

The Harvard University study mentioned earlier concluded
that financial hardship caused by medical bills affects everyone,
not just the uninsured. According to a recent interview with Dr.
Steffie Woolhandler, a Harvard associate medical professor
and one of the study’s authors, “Even the best policies in this
country have so many loopholes, it’s easy to build up thousands
of dollars in expenses.”

Even for those in the work force who have insurance,
retirement will offer new challenges for maintaining health
insurance coverage and for paying for health care. Acting
now to promote better health and to prevent disease will pay
dividends later in life.

What Is Creating the Health Care Crisis?

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the three
biggest expenses that we all incur due to America’s unhealthy
lifestyle are increased costs in hospital care, physician and
clinical services, and prescription drugs. It is important to
remember that these costs are not the cause of the health care
crisis in our country. They are merely a symptom of the problem;
a measure of how severe the problem has become.

Hospital Care

Hospital care accounts for the largest percent of health
care spending—about one-third of the national health care
costs. In recent years, these costs have increased dramatically.
“It’s not unusual for a hospital’s billed charges to increase 25 to
30 percent in one year,” says John Bauerlein, senior partner at
Milliman USA, a firm that tracks health care spending.
But even more important than the increase in price for
services provided is the fact that more people are having to
be hospitalized for being sick! According to a report from the
American Hospital Association, the most important source
of growth was volume—more people using more hospital
services. In fact, the total national spending on hospital care
rose a whopping $84 billion in just the four years between 1997
and 2001—more than half of that increase was simply from
more people being sick.13

Physician and Clinical Services

Next on the list of the biggest expenses is physician and
clinical services, which makes up about 22 percent of our total
health care costs.14 This includes all the times that we go to
see a doctor but we aren’t admitted to the hospital. Just like
with the increase in utilization of hospital care, the majority of
the increase in physician and clinical services is also due to an
increase in the demand for services. More people are sick.

Prescription Drugs

Another of the major contributors to rising health care
costs is the price of prescription medications and our enormous
appetites for these drugs. Americans comprise only five percent
of the entire world’s population, yet we consume one-half of all
the prescription drugs manufactured world-wide—more than
three billion prescriptions each year. Five out of six persons 65
and older are taking at least one medication, and almost half the
elderly take three or more, according to the US Department of
Health and Human Services’ annual check-up on Americans’
health. Drug expenditures have been the fastest growing
segment of health care spending in this country, rising by more
than 15 percent every year since 1998.14, 16

To put this in perspective, Pulitzer Prize winning journalists
Donald Bartlett and James Steele from the New York Times
write, “In 2002, New York-based Pfizer Inc., the world’s largest
drug company, reported return on sales of 28.4 percent. That
was two and a half times better than the 10.7 percent return
of General Electric Company, perennially ranked as America’s
best-managed business. It was nearly nine times better than
the 3.3 percent return of Wal-Mart Stores, the country’s largest
and best-run retailer. And it was nearly thirty-two times better
than the 0.9 percent of General Motors Corporation, America’s
largest car manufacturer.”15

The pharmaceutical industry has done a masterful job
at convincing people that drugs are intended to cure disease
and improve people’s lives. But if prescription drugs were the
answer to health, then we would have the healthiest nation in
the world. However, in spite of our immense drug consumption,
the general population is getting heavier, the rates of diabetes,
heart disease, and cancer are rising, and we have one of the
highest infant mortality rates in the civilized world.
This severe over-reliance on drugs is hastening the death
and disability of most of the public. People believe they are
“doing something” about their health issues by taking drugs
when the underlying challenges—what caused the disease in
the first place—are actually being ignored and therefore left
to fester. Simultaneously, of course, the revenues of the drug
industry continue to increase, meaning ever-fatter checks for all
who are directly and indirectly on their payroll and ever-more
money spent on marketing and lobbying efforts.

And those marketing and lobbying efforts are worth it.
The top selling drugs are consistently manufactured by the drug
companies who invest the most on marketing. Lobbying efforts
have been so effective that Congress now allows pharmaceutical
companies to charge Medicare whatever they want: Congress
willingly forfeited its right to negotiate drug prices for Medicare
recipients.

The pharmaceutical industry continues to do whatever it
can to protect its profits by prohibiting importation of drugs from
foreign countries, including Canada, claiming that importation
of drugs may be dangerous. When asked why Canada is able to
receive such favorable rates compared to America, they explain
that Canada has negotiated better rates and that it is America’s
duty to continue paying such exorbitant fees for supposedly
life-saving medications. After all, the pharmaceutical industry
argues, they would not be able to afford to continue research
and development efforts to search for the next miracle cure.

Their emotional appeal to the public has worked and so have
their vast lobbying efforts. But if you know better, you can help
stop the insanity, help save money, and help save lives.
It is certainly fair to say that there are times when traditional
medicine can do amazing things, especially in treating trauma
and infectious disease.

America has the world’s foremost experts at high-tech
interventions and there are many well intentioned,
honest medical professionals. But for promoting
health, traditional medicine is ineffective and extraordinarily
expensive. As wellness expert Dr. Joe Mercola states, “It is
indisputable that our current system has enormous benefit and
value in the treatment of acute medical emergencies that require
the use of trauma centers, skilled surgeons, and intensive care
units to help repair us when we are injured. When this system is
applied to chronic degenerative health conditions that comprise
more than 95 percent of the health problems, it becomes a
miserable failure.”

Soon, this brewing health care crisis will be worsened by
a flood of retiring Baby Boomers whose medical expenses,
if current trends continue, will be large enough to bankrupt
the country. The conventional medical paradigm has been a
destructive influence in our culture, promoting disease by pinning
all focus on treatments to combat the symptoms of existing
illness while virtually ignoring prevention and wellness.

Current Health Care Solutions Won’t Work

There is no longer any disagreement among policy makers,
government officials, corporate executives, and business owners
that the cost of health care must be brought under control. But
there is much disagreement on how to best address the problem.
Price controls, strict budgets, and free market competition have
been proposed as solutions. But these “solutions” only focus on
rationing the availability of health care to the average person
and have no effect on improving the health of the population
as a whole.

Most public officials agree that the current employerbased
health insurance system has major problems, and that
something must be done to help the forty-five million uninsured
Americans. What to do about the problem is another matter
entirely. President George W. Bush has urged the use of health
care savings accounts, and is considering whether to force
insurance companies to compete for consumers’ business by
allowing people to buy insurance across state lines.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich proposed a plan for a nationwide
“re-insurance pool” to evenly distribute health care costs.
Another popular suggestion is for the federal government to
provide health care coverage for all citizens.
Much debate has centered on this problem with no simple
solution in sight. It is obvious to everyone that our current
system doesn’t work.

We Need More People Less Sick

While all of the numbers are big and impressive, it’s
important to remember that health care costs are not the cause
of the health care crisis. They are merely a measure of how
severe the health care crisis really is. The reason why the health
care crisis exists is simple: there are too many sick people.

As simple a statement as that is, it communicates a real
truth about the source of the problem. Any proposed solution
to the health care crisis that does not specifically lead to more
people being less sick is doomed to failure. Just like changing
seats on the Titanic, it can only, at best, delay the inevitable.
There is an old saying that nothing good in life comes free.

This is true when it comes to your body as well. Living a
wellness lifestyle requires you to be a proactive agent for your
body. You need to treat it well and not wait until you hurt before
you decide to take care of it. Health is not merely the absence of
disease any more than wealth is an absence of poverty. Health
is not simply “feeling fine,” for we know that problems may
progress for years without causing any symptoms whatsoever.
For example, heart disease often progresses unnoticed for many
years before it rears its ugly head. In fact, the first symptom that
many people experience with heart disease is a heart attack or
death.

I work hard to get people to understand that it is much
better to prevent disease from happening in the first place than
try to treat it once it occurs. By creating a state of optimal health
within your body, you will feel better, have more energy, and
increase your quality of life. You will also reduce your risk of
the expense and pain associated with getting hooked into the
downward spiral of disease and dependence on more and more
prescription medications.

The main ideas that I really want to drive home in this
program are:
1) illness causes bankruptcy in every way, 2) most
of our health care dollars are spent on expensive treatments
for lifestyle-related chronic conditions, 3) each of us has the
opportunity to enrich our lives by adopting a wellness lifestyle,
and 4) each of us has the responsibility to ourselves and to our
country to do our part in solving America’s health care crisis by
promoting our own well-being.

Each of the program’s sixteen chapters covers important
topics that are relevant to your health. You will learn how the
major diseases—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity—
are largely the consequence of poor lifestyle choices, and you
will learn the components of health that will lead to a lifetime
of wellness: alignment, nutrition, exercise, healthy thinking
and healthy lifestyle habits. Finally, you will learn about the
importance of having your own hand-picked wellness team to
help you build up a rich reserve of health to carry into your
future.

In this program, I want to share with you the best and latest
information on wellness so that you can look and feel your very
best. It has been my experience that people who are free from
chronic pain, who are active, and who feel their best are the
people who are also the happiest with themselves, nicest to
others, and best able to contribute to their employers, families,
and communities. They have the most rewarding relationships
and spend the least on medical expenses. It is this combination
of factors that makes people RICH.