Making America Healthy Again: Don't Wait, Get Started!

Make Your Family Healthy, Make Yourself Healthy

Making Americans Healthy Again is a great slogan. It represents a worthy mission. It should represent a priority national commitment to changing our current healthcare system. We don’t really have a national healthcare system at all. The closest thing we have to a system are very large dominant, monopolistic healthcare systems that operate as independent silos. They are not patient centered. They are focused on their own interests and those of their clinicians that generate lots of revenue. In cardiovascular disease, these hospital systems rely on an outdated care model that is over 50 years old. They have proven they will not Make America Healthy Again. Our current system is a sick care system that rescues patients late in the chronic disease process. It is not about keeping people healthy.

New science means that we can identify Americans who will need rescuing from heart artery disease, heart attack, and stroke decades before those catastrophes occur. Patients with poor diet, inactivity, abdominal fat, obesity, insulin resistance, high blood pressure, prediabetes, diabetes, high cholesterol or smoking tobacco have begun the journey. Addressing those problems when first identified using best practices or OMT keeps us as healthy as possible for as long as possible. It delays catastrophes like heart attack and stroke and prolongs healthier life for eight years.

Making America Healthy Again should be the highest priority health program for our federal government. I have been working on the systems to accomplish that goal for thirty years. I will be writing about the practical steps to make the slogan a reality. There will be lots of local variations, but the core steps to achieve success are clear cut. Here is some really good news. The federal government may or may not do what is needed to achieve success, but we don’t have to wait for them. We can make our cities healthy again. We can make our towns healthy again. We can make our employees healthy again. We can make our families healthy again. We can make ourselves healthy again. Fortunately, there is no law against what needs to be done. As you read what comes next, you will understand exactly how you can make progress yourself or with those you are responsible for or care about.