I work in health care. I’ve been a massage therapist for over 20 years. These are my ideas for quality health care in this country.

Health care has been run in this country as a business to make money as its first priority. This is wrong and needs to be changed. Health care in my view is a right, and government has a moral responsibility to provide affordable health care to all its citizens. Without access to health care, the people’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as guaranteed under the Constitution is in peril.

Health care needs to be in the hands of the government whose main responsibility is the welfare of all its citizens and not profits to shareholders.

Shift the focus away from crisis intervention to prevention and wellness. In the long run and for younger generations, this will reduce costs. It’s much more expensive to treat chronic or life-threatening illness, than to prevent it in the first place. Major illnesses like heart disease and diabetes, to name just two, can be prevented through proper diet and nutrition. Western M.D.s have come to acknowledge this.

Make a healthy diet and nutrition a top priority in schools and institutions which serve and work with our young. Childhood obesity in recent years has skyrocketed. We need to reverse this trend by reducing exposure to junk foods as much as possible and serving healthier meals to our children.

Change the way food is grown in this country to restore nutritional content and reduce as much as possible exposure to dangerous chemicals and pesticides.

Health care must be made affordable and accessible to all Americans. Not exotic high tech health care, just basic, competent health care. People will seek medical care when needed and sooner, thus reducing costs. Extras or non-essential procedures like cosmetic surgery could be covered by supplemental insurance.

Identify the treatments and/or therapies which work best for which health conditions and make them standard practices. I’ve seen numerous clients over the years who prior to receiving massage therapy were dissatisfied with the treatments they had received which were unsuccessful.

Incorporate low tech, simple but effective tools for maintaining wellness and early detection of illness instead of high tech and expensive ones. For example, Iridology which has been used as a diagnostic tool in Germany and Australia is an inexpensive method for detecting unhealthy conditions which can lead to disease. Oriental medicine and practitioners of acupuncture uses "pulse diagnosis" which is a tool that requires no equipment other than the hands for detecting subtle unhealthy conditions in the body that go undetected in Western medicine and that can lead to illness.

Broaden or extend types of treatments covered to include alternative modalities having proven and successful track records, such as acupuncture, osteopathy, massage therapy, naturopathic and homeopathic medicine, and herbology. These types of treatments if covered will widen significantly their utilization by the American public which will reap many benefits. This will improve the health of Americans who rank pretty low among nations at the present time, will save health care costs, will reduce absenteeism and lost wages and productivity, and will make the goal of disease prevention and wellness easier to actualize.