Amidst all of the media clatter about mandatory universal health insurance, one point of view has been conspicuously absent.

That is the opinion held by a lot of well-informed people who reject most of Western pharmaceutically-based medicine.

These people have maintained their own health naturally for many decades, and don't believe that the pharmaceutical approach is a healthy one. Indeed, studies have found that properly-used pharmaceutical medicines, unnecessary surgeries, and other medical procedures cause more than 700,000 deaths every year, in the United States alone. And that's not even counting all of the "cancer deaths" that were really caused by chemotherapy and radiation, the "AIDS deaths" that were really caused by the extremely toxic AIDS drugs, and many more similar situations.

Instead, these highly-informed people believe in self-care, through dietary and lifestyle choices, nutritional supplements, detoxification and other therapeutic prodedures, and natural medicines used as needed. Natural medicines – mostly herbal-based but some based upon natural, not synthetic, chemicals – have very few of the toxic side effects of conventional synthetic, chemical-based pharmaceuticals, and many are supported by thousands of years of experience and observation that certain plant extracts can ameliorate disease.

Some people in the U.S. make use of Traditional Chinese Medicine, a proven healing system that uses natural substances, which is far older than Western medicine. Or the similar Ayurvedic medicine, developed over eons in India. Or homeopathy, naturopathy, or other (often overlapping) schools of medicine.

The mandatory health insurance promoted by Hillary Clinton and other drug-industry funded politicians would not cover herbal, Chinese, Ayurvedic, or other schools of medicine that treat the body gently, understand the mind-body connection to disease and health, and stimulate the body's innate healing capabilities. It would only cover Big Pharma's patented, petrochemical-based, seek-and-destroy, military-style toxic medicine, whose destructive side effects beget new profit opportunities as they sell you more drugs and procedures, even liver transplants to treat the often-horrific drug side effects. Such mandatory health insurance forces people to buy something they neither want nor believe in.

To be fair, even people who reject the synthetic chemical potions of Big Pharma recognize that conventional medicine is not all bad. It is very good at emergency treatment, for example. But some people have done the math and know that emergency treatment is not very expensive. If one has a heart attack or a car accident, it is unlikely to break the bank to get emergency treatment.

Many people have calculated that they have the resources to pay for such emergency treatment if needed, have perhaps even made choices to live their lives carefully to prevent accidents, to stay fit and eat a healthy diet to deter heart attacks, to eat organic food to lessen the chance of cancer, and have thus made a simple financial decision that the high monthly payments of health insurance end up costing them much more than they might have to pay from their own resources for an emergency that might never happen. Hence, standard health insurance is, for them, a very bad investment that would be a continual drain on their finances, which would mean they would have less money left to pay for the herbal medicines and organic diets that they prefer, items mandatory health insurance does not cover.

It is things like cancer chemotherapy, coronary bypasses, and the like that are super-expensive, and these are procedures that these educated consumers reject, preferring inexpensive nutritional, alternative, and lifestyle therapies, and that simple idea that pharmaceutical corporations dread – prevention.

Yes, natural medicines might not work, we might still die; but the same is true of the pharmaceutical/surgical approaches. Every human being has the right to make those decisions for him- or herself. We don't need Big Brother -- or Big Sister in the case of Senator Clinton -- making them for us.

Some people who get cancer might simply choose to die with grace and dignity, without a lot of chemicals pumped into them. They suspect that chemotherapy is probably only going to make them die faster, and cause side effects that will make their lives miserable, and maybe they would rather give their remaining assets to their heirs instead of to the medical industry. That is their right.

Moreover, some people are rich, and can afford to pay even for harmful overpriced pharmaceutical treatment, from their own resources, without any problem at all. Why should Bill Gates and the Rockefellers have to pay for health insurance (aside from the fact that they are heavily invested in the drug industry and hence stand to profit from mandatory health insurance far more than they would lose by having to purchase it for themselves)? Why does our "democratic" government insist on forcing people to buy something they plainly do not need?

There has been much noise from the medical research industry in recent years trying to convince people that vitamins and nutritional supplements are dangerous. Most of the scientists conducting these studies are funded either by Big Pharma itself, or by corrupt government institutions like the National Institutes of Health that have an incestuous relationship with Pharma. The way medical research operates these days, scientists who do not come to the conclusions that the government and Pharma desire are at great risk of never getting a research grant (or promotion) again. Scientists have even been fired and denied tenure because their research findings did not dovetail with the goals of industry. Medical science has become a dictatorship that punishes dissent from profitable paradigms and rewards those who "get with the program." Because of this reality, scientists have devised a plethora of ways to design their studies so that they will arrive at pre-ordained conclusions. Hence, studies warning against vitamins and other natural substances can hardly be said to be objective, nor can they negate all of the earlier research – from a less-corrupt scientific era – that showed how beneficial nutritional supplements can be.

Flying in the face of all the organized scaremongering about natural remedies is also the simple fact that very few people have ever died from taking vitamins and nutritional supplements; by contrast, modern medicine keeps cemetery owners around the World deliriously rich and happy (perhaps Pharma executives might like to invest some of their gains in this lucrative, related field?)

"Coincidentally," all of this new anti-vitamin research comes at a time when Big Pharma and its government flunkies are spearheading efforts, through the Food and Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization's joint Codex subsidiary, to severely lower the dosages of nutritional supplements that can be sold to the public, and to outright ban many of them (this has been nicely hushed up by the media so most people don't know about it). It's hard to avoid concluding that the current science-media-government campaign to convince people that nutritional supplements are dangerous is designed to "soften the public up" so that they will accept the dictatorial new Codex rules with little resistance when they are instituted in a few years.

Codex's planned standards and mandatory health insurance are just naked ploys to snuff out Big Pharma's competition, being dressed up as "protecting the public." Pharma lusts after a mandatory health insurance "on their terms" that will boost their already-obscene profits and force people to abandon Natural Medicine and proven home remedies. Pharma craves a monopoly on health care, with no alternatives available. And since Pharma funds everybody from politicians, doctors, scientific researchers, government regulators, to the WHO, the media, the universities, even the "charities" that, not surprisingly, promote their drugs, it is damned difficult for the other side to get their voices heard.

Seen in this light, the recent Massachusetts legislation that forces every resident to buy health insurance or pay a stiff penalty (hailed as a model for other States to follow by the media), is an outrageous intrusion into people's freedom of choice. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has adopted this position, and plans to make health insurance "available to all" by garnishing workers' salaries to force them to buy it.

Whose country is this anyway? How did we get to the point that the government is planning to tell us what we have to buy? A case can be made for mandatory car liability insurance, as a person needs to have the funds to compensate someone he might injure with his car, but now the government is going to tell us that we have to pay for medical drugs and services for our own bodies, even if we don't want them. Bodies that are ours, not the government's.

It is easy to predict what the next step in their program will be: Soon, they will start telling us that we have to swallow medicine even if we don't want to. They will send their goons to our homes to force it down our throats. The seeds for this have already been planted, with the drug-industry funded World Health Organization's "Directly Observed Therapy" program (DOT). With DOT, a medical professional is assigned to watch you take your pills, confirm that you have swallowed them, and "document" that you have ingested the pills. Originally applied to TB patients only, DOT is now being expanded to AIDS patients. Since DOT results in more drugs being sold, and whatever is good for drug-industry profits historically becomes "confirmed" by "scientific research," it seems likely that they will try to further expand DOT in any direction they can – maybe to people who "test positive" on a future mandatory "H5N1" test, even if they're perfectly healthy with no signs of flu.

This kind of thing is already happening to our children even without DOT. Parents are told that they have to get their kids vaccinated, and their kids can be taken from them by "Child Protective Services" if parents make an educated decision not to give their kids destructive chemotherapy, preferring alternative treatments that exist, and that have been proven to defeat cancer, but which are suppressed and criminalized in the U.S. because they are a threat to the medical industry's monopoly. Children are having surgical tubes implanted into their stomachs by medical research "charities," against the kids' and parents' wishes, so that doctors can pump them full of toxic AIDS chemotherapy drugs that the kids, who know that the drugs make them feel awful, refuse to swallow, or vomit up when forced to swallow them.

Senator Clinton, do you think the American people want a president who will dictate to us and micromanage our lives for us? Your proposals to force us to buy health insurance and garnish our salaries if we refuse are not just outrageous, they are un-American in the most fundamental sense. Being ultra-wealthy and connected to exclusive elitist organizations that strive to control and manipulate the masses, you have zero understanding of how precious working people's modest salaries are to them, nor of how the common people cherish their right to remain unmolested by their governments and to make their own decisions.

So, Big Sister, make this product available to all if you wish, but don't force us to buy it. Force is the way of tyranny, not the action of a country that exalts the free market and individual liberty. Pharma-based health care is just another product, brilliantly marketed as a vital public service, due to the immense wealth and power of the industry. Next, will you force us to buy a mandatory TV set? How about mandatory life insurance? Why not outlaw organic food and make it mandatory that we eat pesticide-contaminated food to benefit the chemical industry? I'll bet you would find scientists who would back the proposal with erudite scholarly papers full of big words. Surely a case can be made to mandate that we drink a minimum of two bottles per day of Coca Cola, too?

Honorable scientists and senators, we are skeptical of your good intentions. We know that many "medical triumphs" are just mythmaking. We know that polio was never eliminated by the polio vaccine, it was just redefined as other diseases by public-health authorities to create the impression that the vaccine was effective. (In fact, the vaccine caused polio cases to explode in number, but they were quickly "re-classified" as meningitis, Guillian-Barré syndrome, and other diseases by our protectors in the Public Health racket). We know that there are thousands of medical professionals and scientists, including a Nobel Laureate and at least two members of the National Academy of Sciences, who reject the never-proven theory that a virus is the cause of AIDS and who think it more likely that such factors as the poisonous HIV medicines, the psychological and social devastation caused by the "HIV+" diagnosis, and malnutrition, not the virus, are what kill people who test positive.

We are aware that there are many fully qualified scientists who dispute the cholesterol-heart disease theory, the saturated fat dogma, and many other "facts" that just by coincidence are highly beneficial to industry profits.

We know that sexual transmission of the human papilloma virus has never been proven to cause cervical cancer (although anti-sex religious zealots and newspaper headline writers – and of course vaccine manufacturers – want fervently to believe that it does). We suspect that Bird Flu is a WHO-invented "global crisis" designed to justify giving billions of dollars of taxpayers' money to WHO's sweetheart funders in Big Pharma for "stockpiles" of useless drugs, to spur the legislating of mandatory treatments and forced vaccinations that benefit Pharma, and to advance the interests of Big Agribusiness which wants to outlaw the backyard chicken farming that families do everywhere in the Third World to maintain their economic independence from corporations. We are well-informed, thinking people who make up our own minds and seek out information that the less-intellectually curious never get to see, and are aware that we are living in a very corrupt world where our leaders do not have our interests at heart, despite their smarmy protestations to the contrary.

So, compromised politicians, medical/pharmaceutical-cartel lobbyists, drug industry-funded NGOs, take your mandatory health insurance and add coverage for natural therapies, include an opt-out clause for people who don't want it regardless, or kindly file it where the Sun doesn't shine (the same Sun that, as some of us are aware, can fight cancer and other diseases and strengthen bones without drugs ... far from being the deadly light that the medical establishment urges everyone to avoid. But, of course, they cannot patent the Sun and charge us to use it. It, too, is competition for them, so their position against it is quite understandable).

Marcel Girodian is a writer who specializes in alternative health issues. He has written much about the many absurdities of "AIDS science", and invites people to learn more about the subject at these pages:
http://www.rethinkingaids.com/quotes/rethinkers.htm and
http://www.rethinkingaids.com/quotes/aidsquotes.htm.

His previous essay for the NHF, Politically Motivated Disease Causation, can be read at www.thenhf.com/articles_117.htm.

Marcel always welcomes comments on his work; you can contact him at marcel7@gmail.com