COMMENT
In May, 2005, it was yet again reported in the mass media that 24,000 Canadians were dying yearly from the misdiagnosis and misprescribing errors of conventional doctors. With Canada having 1/10th or less of the population that their southern neighbor, the USA, has, this is comparable to 240,000 Americans dying each year if the statistics matched there.

If the Americans would launch a war against Afghanistan, and then Iraq, on the basis of a terrorist attack which killed 3500 persons on their soil, what might they do to avenge the killing of 240,000 persons, year after year, within their nation? Some would call this act, within ANY nation, one of treason, murder, or terrorism. Similar statistics have been reported for a decade with nothing demonstrating any political or medical institutional will to make changes.

Behavior would seem to indicate that most Canadians, and perhaps Americans being not far behind, are too lazy, numbed out, or brainwashed by the medical establishment to care about their families and loved ones or whether they themselves will die suddenly. Few other nations have citizens who express themselves with such subservience while the nation has the financial and research resources capable of fixing such a basic problem of service.

The failure of private self-funded health care was that quality service could be supported and paid for only by the wealthiest 15% of the public. With few limits on practicality and professionalism and great expectations on authority by position and a reverence for technology, many high cost, and often limiting or short-term medical repair procedures were accepted and promoted as panaceas. Time often proved that simpler, lower cost, non-technology solutions were curative, not just short-term patches or needless surgeries.

The failure of social government-funded health care has been that what is available to 100%, at a cost affordable by most, tends to become a disease extension service. Persons with acute illness are quickly treated, or die. Increasingly they form the minority of the service. Persons with chronic illnesses provide a high growth service sector which eludes effective treatment by authoritarian single-discipline approaches and the demands of government rationalizations of minimal patient contact during the critical diagnostic stage. One either dies from delay, denial, misdiagnosis, ignorance, confusion, or justified paranoia. It is just a matter of time and how much money the system is willing to spend.

Self-directed health care can be preventive, cooperative, self-responsible, and highly corrective, IF, the consumer is acknowledged as a co-worker by their physician and provided with the FACTS and OPTIONS by the educational and healthcare industries. Self-directed health care COULD be very economical and effective IF the public did not have to work against the authoritarian blindness, power, and pride of their physicians and their government ... all subsidized by the pharmaceutical industry. Most citizens will NOT take the Risk of taking responsibility for their health until those with the Power to help them ... their government representatives and their physicians, work WITH them and VALUE them.

IF the USA falls, like all of the empires which have preceded it, it will NOT be because of armed invasion or imported terrorism. It is already bleeding to death from the abuses dealt against its own citizens from within, sanctioned by the governments involved. Canada is simply a quieter microcosm of the decaying nation in which the people increasingly are falling into depression and despair through the poverty and helplessness which chronic illnesses bring to many. Empires do not always die with a bang. Most just wither away! It is called a failure to remain relevant and face reality. SURVIVAL is called Providing a Service and Earning Respect to and from Others, not Demanding Payment and Worship of Self.