WHAT'S WRONG WITH AMERICA'S HEALTHCARE SYSTEM

Indeed, as we enter the 21st century, the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S. is from reactions to FDA-approved drugs. On April 14, 1998, the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) published a shocking report, a painstaking analysis of 39 studies conducted over 30 years. The study showed that an average of 106,000 people die in hospitals each year - that's one every five minutes - from drugs approved by the FDA. The study does not include cases where drugs were misprescribed. When considering deaths from the same cause outside hospitals, i.e., at home, the number rises to around 140,000 a year, according to Centers for Disease Control statistics. These are not deaths from illegal street drugs; those cause only a small fraction of the deaths from FDA-approved drugs, which kill three times the number dying each year from automobile accidents.

And there's more. The fourth leading cause of hospital admissions in the U.S. is from reactions to prescription drugs. About 2.2 million Americans suffer such severe side effects from FDA-approved drugs that some are permanently disabled or require long hospital stays, reported USA Today on April 24, 1998. These side effects were estimated to have cost $78 billion in 1997.

When ABC News Director Peter Jennings announced the JAMA study, he presented a doctor whose wife had complained that her pain medication was not taking effect. "My words have come back to haunt me", he told Jennings. "`Take another pill', I told her. `It won't kill you"'. But it did; the next morning she didn't wake up. Only then did the doctor learn that the drug was capable of causing heart problems.

The cost of the American healthcare system has passed one trillion dollars per year - about 1/5 of the U.S. gross domestic product. We spend more per capita on health care than any country on earth. Despite that, some of our statistics are embarrassing: the infant mortality rate in the U.S. is higher than that in Cuba. The number of infants who died before their first birthday is 13.3 per 1000 births in New York City but 10.9 in Shanghai (Townsend Letter, May 1998).

A study issued in June, 2000, by the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) measured a new concept: healthy life expectancy. The WHO found Japan leading the world with the U.S. at #20, falling behind every country in Europe as well as Canada, Australia, and Israel. The WHO also ranked national health systems for overall quality. The WHO found that the U.S. system places a heavier financial burden on individuals than do other developed countries, and so rated the U.S. #37. France was ranked #l.

Perhaps its costliness results from the fact that the U.S. has one of the most bureaucratically controlled and over-regulated medical systems in the world. Manufacturers are not free to produce effective non-toxic products or to inform the public on what their products can do. Doctors are only free to prescribe for their patients what has been approved or accepted by Official Medicine.

Because of overuse of antibiotics, many strains of bacteria have developed resistance against any of them. When Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, lay dying from just such a bacteria, Official Medicine had nothing for him. In Texas in early 1998, eight people were suddenly dead from a new strain of Strep A, and doctors were helpless to save them. Old types of bacteria have mutated; new strains of the tuberculosis bacillus do not respond to existing antibiotics. Of those who go into hospitals, 14% come out with infections they did not have when they were admitted. Some don't come out - 21,000 die each year from such infections (USA Today, April 14, 1998). Do effective medicines for such situations exist which could never make it out of the closet in the current over-regulated environment?