Healthcare Research

Dear Ideas group:

Two trillion six hundred billion dollars is presently spent yearly in the United States for Health care. That amounts to about $8700 for every man woman or child. For a family of four it costs $32,800. That is more money than tens of millions of families earn in a year, especially after taxes.

The cost will go up to 25% of the Gross Domestic Product by 2025, which is only 14 years from now. This will bring the cost of medical care to over $50,000 for a family of four. That's crazy but unfortunately true.

The remedy many give is to ration care. Our solution should be to find cures for the illnesses so that we don't need so much medical care. That can only be done with increased medical research. Our scientists and engineers are exceptional. If we fund them appropriately they will find cures and preventions. It will help us and be our gift to the world.

Military research spends fifty billion dollars yearly more for research than the government spends for medical research. Shame on them. We should demand that government expenditures for medical research at least equal military research and hopefully exceed it. Over a ten year period the government spent hundreds of billions of dollars more for military research then they spent for medical research.

The cost of health care is making us uncompetitive in the international trade market and usurping our wealth in the United States. But most important we will have a healthier nation and have a healthier world.

The high cost of health care will also make inequality of health care as poorer people won't be able to afford top medical care. Only medical research can help solve this problem. Politicians and the press talk about health care but not medical research. We should encourage this to stop by informing the public with public relations and demonstrations. The demonstrations should be aimed both at politicians and the press.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the following were the major killers of Americans yearly.

Heart Diseases: 616,067 Cancer: 562,875 Stroke: 135, 875 Chronic lower respiratory disease: 127,924 Diabetes: 71,632 Influenza and Pneumonia: 52,717 Nephritis, Nephritic syndrome and nephrosis: 46, 448 Septicemia: 34,828

Every two days 9,203 people die of major illnesses. (we are not counting the "minor" illnesses.) In one year 1,679,632 die of the above diseases. In five years 8,398,160 people are scheduled to die. In twenty years about 33,398,160 Americans are scheduled to die of the above diseases.

American deaths from some recent wars are as follows. World War One - 116,708. World War Two - 407,316, Korean War - 58,169, Iraq War - 4,477 and the Afghanistan War - 1,803. The soldiers that died and serve are patriots and should receive the highest honors.

Every two days thousands more Americans die of the above illnesses than died in the combined death toll of Iraq and Afghanistan. Every six months more Americans die of what Doctors cannot cure in our country than died in all the wars of the twentieth century. Why doesn't any organization speak out about this?

I hope that the Occupy movement will be the voice for medical research. Surveys have shown that the majority of Americans believe that we should spend more for medical research.

Thank you,

Sincerely submitted,

Alvin Steinberg