Looking for Green in Health Care Reform

With Health Care Reform being all the rage in the news these days, I thought that I’d take a moment to make a connection: Health Care is directly related to “Living Green.”

The connection is pretty easy to make.  “Why do people get sick? Breathing dirty air, drinking poisoned water, using toxic chemicals in the in homes and at work, eating pesticide residue on their food, taking fistfuls of designer pharmaceuticals, etc., etc.”

Unfortunately, the “fix” to this problem is not in Health Care Reform – as a matter of fact, nobody in the debate even seems the slightest bit interested in talking about reforming our health at all. 

Truth is, real Health Care Reform can only come from you - when you choose to live a healthier life where you are connected to your food and to the products that you use in your home and at your work. You need to be connected to your body, too, and be able to quiet down your racing mind long enough to listen to what it tells you.

When you practice this (and it takes a lot of practice), you will start to understand the connections that government and business don’t want you to make because health care is one of the biggest industries on the planet, and if people aren’t getting sick, then a whole lot of people are out of work.

That’s an over-simplification, of course, but it’s true in many ways. You can demonize government for their inefficiency or demonize big businesses for their greed.  Either criticism is true, and the arguments are easy to make and to illustrate, so pick one that fits your political ideology, if you must.

The real villain is the complexity of it all. Does our health need to be so complicated?

I would say the answer to that is “No”, but unless we tear down the whole system and build it from the ground up, it will probably be a long time before most people stop listening to their favorite doctor, pharmacist, yogi, nutritionist, or whatever, and start listening to their own bodies.

When you learn to listen, you will know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is insane to treat our growing foods with pesticides and somehow expect that they will be safe to eat. It is crazy to treat our water with poisons and expect that it will be safe to drink. It is lunacy to clean our homes and offices with an ever-increasingly complex combination of manufactured chemicals and expect they will be safe to live in.

So, let the Health Care Reform debate rage on in whatever direction it may go; hopefully, we’ll make some progress in a positive direction. But as far as I can see, the end result will have nothing to do with our health care (or Living Green) at all.