Our Healthcare is Failing

According to Dr. Floyd Bloom, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the U.S. healthcare system is “in imminent danger of collapse,” despite the fact that we spend more on medicine than any other country. He says the system is failing both patients and doctors, and our medical weakness could suddenly become serious during a chemical or biological attack. “The threat of war and the imposition of mass casualties from any new acts of terrorism could prove calamitous for the U.S. medical community’s ability to care for the ill,” Bloom says. An interesting note: This story comes from the BBC and was not reported in the U.S. media.

He says, “The costs of medications are exceeding the ability of employers to pay for them, patients are dissatisfied with their care, physicians are demoralized about the practice of medicine because of the high rates of malpractice insurance, and the numbers of nurses we can recruit to the profession is diminishing. The system is not working and we need to find ways to repair it.”

He deplores the difference in healthcare between the rich and the poor and says, “Socio-economic status has important proclivities for a host of illnesses in our country?including arthritis or asthma or other kinds of pulmonary illnesses.” In other words, the poor get sicker?and in different ways?than the rich.

Music doesn’t take the place of medicine, but it does have healing properties.

NOTE: This news story, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.