Never mind that many of the uninsured are unable to appreciate their need for insurance until they turn up in a hospital emergency room. On the Republican side, there's a lot of loose talk about tax credits and tax deductions making health insurance more affordable. The Republicans, whose hearts probably are with individual responsibility and competition in free insurance markets, resolutely avoid talking about inexpensive, high-deductible insurance or medical savings accounts, or anything that Democrats could paint as mean-spirited dismissal of the needy in the middle class. The more practical aspects of the leading Democrats' plans involve higher income taxes, but not enough higher to meet their goals. Never mind that the same candidates also raise their eyes in horror at the deficits incurred for the war, which may end some day - unlike our desire for health care. There's a lot of loose talk on the Democratic side about reallocating the money now spent on the war in Iraq. The rich will pay, of course and, if not, then businesses will pay. Instead, they waffle and argue with each other about whom they will make pay for those who are not now insured. The Democrats, whose hearts probably are with the single-payer systems of Canada and Europe, resolutely avoid anything that the Republicans could denounce as socialized medicine. The leading candidates say their goal is more-or-less universal health insurance, building on the present system of private policies for employed people and government health coverage for the elderly, disabled and the very poor. Their plans may do no more harm than the current system, with all its leechery, blood-letting and paperwork, but they will fail to do much to improve American health care.įortunately for the candidates, the Food and Drug Administration is no more effective at regulating their nostrums than it is at regulating those of the homeopathic set. They hope to achieve large effects with infinitesimal doses of medicine. Quackery is the nicest adjective we can muster. We recalled the story of homeopathy as we considered the health-care proposals of the major presidential candidates of both parties. They can do no harm, except the unattributable harm of distracting patients from other treatments that might be effective. The main reason this scandal persists is that homeopathic drugs are fundamentally doses of water. Today, they are marketed in health-food stores, in pharmacies, in practitioner offices and by multilevel distributors operating through the mail and on the Internet. Second, the Food and Drug Administration hasn't held homeopathic products to the same standards of safety and efficacy as other pharmaceuticals. It recognizes as drugs all substances included in the Homeopathic Pharmacopeia of the United States. First, the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act was shepherded through Congress by a homeopathic physician who was a senator. This situation is a result of two circumstances. Homeopathic "remedies" enjoy a unique status in the American health marketplace: They are the only category of quack products legally marketable as drugs. Later, he theorized that the smaller the dose, the more powerful the effect - a notion referred to as the "law of infinitesimals." Privileged Status Hahnemann declared that diseases represent a disturbance in the body's ability to heal itself and that only a small stimulus is needed to begin the healing process. Taught that these treatments were intended to balance the body's "humors" by "opposite effects," Hahnemann developed an equally unscientific "law of similars" - a notion that symptoms of disease can be cured by extremely small amounts of substances that produce similar symptoms in healthy people when administered in large amounts.
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