Atlantis Educational Initiatives: A Health Plan For America: An "ATLANTIS INITIATIVE"

A Health Plan For America: An "ATLANTIS INITIATIVE"

A HEALTH PLAN FOR AMERICA:
AN ATLANTIS INITIATIVE.
SUMMARY OF PROPOSALS:
No citizen left without medical help. How?

Everyone who wishes gets Canadian style One Click Medical Card, (electronically furnished with all holder's medical info).

The OCMC provides free treatment for all conditions deemed of public concern, including:
  • Current hospital emergency services
  • Multiphasic checkups and medical advice
  • Preventative vaccines
  • Infectious diseases, including STDs
  • Addictions: alcohol, drugs, obesity (first year)
  • Injuries whether physical or mental, arising out of accidents,
  • Patients suffering from industrial pollution (costs provided by special pollution taxes on polluting industries.)
  • Patients who have accepted a rigorous health regime, in respect of diet, exercise, check ups, etc and taken normal safety precautions as using seat belts, motorcycle helmets, etc as appropriate.
  • The OCMC may charge patients accordingly for medical care who have neglected such precautions.
  • Illegal immigrants without work permits get special treatment in border clinics that discharge patients only on the Mexican side of the border.
Individual insurance for other conditions would be available as:
  • Cooperative health plans, eg Samaritan Ministries (tax relief available)
  • Current private insurance plans, supervised by special courts, for alternative, special high cost or immediate treatments (as UK's BUPA.)
Health Care and Poverty:
we would adopt the Mexican OPPORTUNITIES program, for cooperating communities, featuring welfare payments to mothers who keep their children in school, and bring their families to health checkups and education classes.

Health Care and Business
Payments from businesses to workers phased out and replaced by OCMC and cooperative or private insurance, reducing business administration costs and ensuring an even playing field between businesses, home and abroad.

Health Education
Doctors would give out pamphlets generally descriptive of the patient's problems and treatment, including recommendations about any diet or lifestyle modifications as well as reference to validated alternative treatments.

All medications would be delivered to the patient with the kind of informative packaging of eg. Wyeth Pharmaceuticals Protonix, with easily understood illustrated descriptions of the causes, symptoms, and workings of the condition, and the way the drug acts to deal with the problem, with reference to possible side effects, along with dietary and other recommendations. It would also include an 800 number and website address for further information.

Websites, such as WebMD and TV channels, such as Discovery's Health Channel, should be incorporated into a generally available network of health information.

Public Health
Once governments have accepted responsibility for general health, both ethics and economics require a greatly stepped up effort to reduce industrial pollution, ecological deterioration and similar hazards. Sales taxes should be adjusted flexibly to cover the damage the manufacture of any given product inflicts on public health and welfare.

Research should step up investigation of less conventional, alternative, healing systems, such asayurvedic medicine, acupuncture, and other oriental methods.

For instance, NPR and PBS should be encouraged to open up separate channels to provide continuous beautiful and soothing classical music, perhaps drawing on such resources as Montreal's La Plus Belle Musique du Monde. This would provide an immediate antidote for stress, one of our greatest threats to health..

Atlantis Philosophy in Education, as applied to Health Care
The Atlantis Educational Initiatives started as an attempt to raise educational standards and lower costs by treating students with enhanced respect, but concomitantly with greatly increased responsibility for their learning. The intensive tutorial methods on which Atlantis is based date back to 15th century Oxford, and have been developed in pilot projects at UC Berkeley and McGill Universities since the 1960s.

The same philosophy applied to health care would offer the patient a much higher level and greater availability of treatment, in return for an increased patient responsibility for his or her own health.

Moreover, should the Atlantis Educational Initiative be widely adopted, the potential savings in education would take pressure off healthcare budgets.

On another level, the Atlantis Outreach Tutorials would be very easily adopted to provide additional support to such various areas as patient care and actual medical research, including personalized alternative methods, such as EFT and Healing Touch.