The reform bill of 2010 will kill Medicare. It increases bleeding from a vein opened by the 1997 giveaway to the insurance industry called Medicare Advantage. “Reform” has been the last drop for our doctors at the Vashon Health Center, who now must turn away seniors for whom Medicare is the primary insurer.

In 2011 seniors will be cared for by Medicare Advantage, which is stolen money. There has been no public cry of foul. There continues a valiant effort by the group Single-Payer Vashon to urge Olympia to substitute single payer health care for what amounts to insured health repair. This is futile. Vashon needs to rethink health care, and for everybody, not just seniors.

The role of health care should have changed lately because today we are being poisoned — poisoned by chemical additives to food, type seven plastic packaging, poisonous household products and, now, by genetically modified food crops. Health care has to move into the supermarket. This does not require insurance.

Health care in the Congressional mind has come to emphasize high-tech diagnosis, invasive surgery, drugs and organ transplants. There’s more money in repair. Invert that mindset and put prevention first. The key is to resolve the paradox of conventional medicine and Eastern medicine. This is the paradox of molecular biology and holistic mind-body healing, of medical hubris and reverence for life. This does not require insurance.

A prevention-based health care clinic for Vashon requires dual transition funding in dollars and a local, absolute value, currency. Exceptional care, dialysis, transplants — this is another matter.

The Island is ours, people. Let’s not wait for “reform” to yank the health care rug out from under us.

— Tom Herring

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