Start reform by reorganizing FDA

There is a lot more to health care than simply treating disease after the fact with pharmaceuticals. A lot more. And a lot more could be done. It is said, by many, that we have the world’s best health-care system. The World Health Organization doesn’t think so, ranking the U.S. 37th among the world’s health-care systems, alongside Cuba, Slovenia and Costa Rica.

But, we are No. 1 as to being the most expensive. One of the biggest impediments to bringing down health-care costs is the federal government itself, the same outfit that now wants to ram into law an expensive system that a majority of ordinary folks don’t want.

We currently have, and have had for decades, an incestuous relationship between the FDA and the pharmaceutical cartel, resulting in a pseudo-monopolistic stranglehold on health care. The results are outrageously high costs, the suppression, censorship and criminalizing of scientific information and otherwise cost effective protocols. Millions have thus suffered and died prematurely. The FDA’s own mission statement is, thus, absolutely meaningless.

If this relationship is not dismantled with a completely reorganized FDA emerging with strict oversight and to be funded by the government, rather than big pharma, health-care costs cannot be fully contained.

Ideally, a new system of integrative, free-market, cost-effective health care with an emphasis on wellness rather than sickness would really be a change I could believe in. One can only hope.

Richard Cromoga

Arlington