You Don't Have to be Sick Let's Get Fiscal About the Cost of Health Care By: Burt Goldberg

Every time I think about the $1 trillion annual price tag for health care in the U.S. I feel outraged. Americans are not that healthy for all the money spent on their health every year. According to the World Health Organization, in the 1930s the U.S. was ranked as the third healthiest population; but by the 1990s, we've dropped down way below that. Cancer is now affecting nearly 1 out of every 2 Americans. As cases of congestive heart failure have doubled in the last decade and now cost $40 billion a year, heart failure has become the number one drain on Medicare.

As a lifelong businessman, when I think about that $1 trillion, I have to ask: "are we getting our money's worth? Does all this make fiscal sense?"

The sad fact is that it doesn't make sense at all. This isn't health care-it's sickness care. Conventional medicine keeps coming up with new drugs and high tech procedures, yet none of this heals or cures disease. At best, it deals with symptoms, and, too often, it either suppresses symptoms or makes a person unwell from the "side-effects."

Take cancer research. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) spends about $2 billion of American taxpayer's money every year to look for "cures," as long as they don't come from alternative medicine, even though all the breakthrough discoveries in healing chronic diseases are coming from this source. Think about it: The NCI has a $2 billion a year expense account; but, after 40 years, mainstream cancer researchers are no closer to a cancer cure than NASA is to colonizing the Moon.