Making Vitamins Too Costly for Your Health

By Alan Caruba

At age 72 I have been taking a full range of vitamin and mineral supplements for years. Even I find it amusing to open more than a dozen bottles every morning to extract vitamins A, B, C, D and E, along with zinc, potassium, selenium, and fish oil. On the advice of my physician long ago, I also take a low dose aspirin every day. I also take some herbal supplements.

In early January I fell and broke my collar bone. A month later it was completely healed. I don’t get the common cold, although I do experience seasonal allergies that are controlled with anti-histamine. In sum, I am as healthy as a person of my age can hope to be.

So why have Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) joined to introduce an amendment to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that would deny freedom of easy access to these vitamins and minerals that are now commonly available in supermarkets, pharmacies and other outlets at affordable prices?

Why would they conspire to make dietary supplements such as purified fish oil seven times more expensive than it is today?

It is irrational, not to say obscene, at a time when a debate is raging over the costs of Medicare and the various illnesses that afflict Americans to introduce a law that would raise the cost of vitamins, minerals and herbal supplements that are among the best forms of preventative medicine available to the general public.

Who, ultimately, will benefit from such a law? The answer is the pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Steven Joyal, M.D., vice president of science and medical affairs of the Life Extension Foundation, says “This bill aims to further pharmaceutical profits by creating wide-ranging, unprecedented FDA power to reclassify natural nutritional products as drugs.”

I am a free market capitalist, but I also know that many companies engage in “rent seeking”, a term to describe how they use the ability of Congress to pass laws and regulations that improperly and unfairly increase their profits.

The bill, titled that “Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010” is a classic example of how an ever-expanding federal government continues to get between Americans and the freedoms they have come to take for granted. High on the list is the freedom to maintain one’s health; in this case with affordable and easily accessible vitamins and minerals.

The “Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010” has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with increasing the profits of pharmaceutical companies. It does not enhance safety because vitamins and mineral supplements are already manufactured under some of the most stringent restrictions placed on any products sold anywhere in the world.

My friend, Frank Murray, is the author of nearly 50 books on health and nutrition. He is the former editor of Better Nutrition, GreatLife, and Let’s Live magazines. His books have documented how various vitamins and minerals, as well as herbal supplements have preventative and curative affects on a wide range of ailments and afflictions.

His latest book, “Sunshine and Vitamin D” describes the research concerning this vitamin’s ability to reduce or ameliorate cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cystic fibrosis, and a host of other ailments. And that is just one common vitamin!

It is astonishing how vitamins, minerals, and herbal supplements can aid the body to resist the many pathogens in our environment, to digest the food we eat, and to enhance many of our mental and physical abilities.

This latest bill in Congress should be defeated. Its two sponsors should be held up to scrutiny to determine how great a role the donations of pharmaceutical companies to their election campaigns played in the drafting and introduction of this bill.

There is not enough scorn that can be heaped upon the bill’s sponsors and any member of Congress that votes for it.

I don’t want and I don’t need a doctor’s prescription to purchase the vitamins and minerals I take daily. Neither do you!

(c)Alan Caruba, 2010

Healthcare is Your Business, Not the Government's

By Alan Caruba

I know spring has arrived because my seasonal allergy has returned. When it goes from winter to spring and sometimes fall to winter, I suffer all the usual symptoms. It happened last night, but I got up and took a Claritin pill and was able to survive the first attack. I renewed my supply today, giving thanks for Schering-Plough, the pharmaceutical company that spent millions to invent this drug.

No one ever talks about the millions pharmaceutical companies spend on “research and development”, nor the fact that for every new drug they discover there are any number that simply do not make it to the medical community or the shelves of your local pharmacy.

Yes, these companies do reap profits, but they need them in order to continue looking for the next new drug. They need those millions to get through the onerous and costly Food and Drug Agency’s approval process.

The Heartland Institute has published “More Choices, Better Health” a booklet ($2.95) by Bartley J. Madden, an independent researcher, about the FDA monopoly on which drugs make it to the marketplace and which do not.

Madden points out that we have grown accustomed to the monopoly, “but prior to 1962, new drugs had to pass only safety trials to be legally marketed.” It was left to physicians and consumers to determine how effective they were.

Today, it is a three-step process that takes an average of 8.5 years! If you want to know why drugs cost so much more, try calculating the millions involved in the R&D phase that is then followed by the millions that the approval phase costs.

In addition to an insane budget that Barack Obama wants the Congress to approve—one that will drive the nation’s spending through the ceiling and imposes huge deficits for years to come—the other item on his wish list is healthcare coverage for those people who are not insured.

This does not mean they will not be cared for if they are ill. The law requires that hospitals tend to the ill even if they arrive penniless and quite a few do. As often as not, they are illegal aliens.

The figure we keep hearing is that “46 million” Americans are uninsured. In a recent American Spectator article, Philip Klein dissected “The Myth of the 46 Million.” The figure comes from the Census Bureau in 2007.

As Klein points out, statistics can lie and liars can use statistics. For example, the same data shows “that 9.7 million of the uninsured are not citizens of the United States.”

The reality is that the Census Bureau made a guess about the number of people without health insurance and the figure they cited “more closely approximates the number of people who are uninsured at a specific point during the year” such as those between jobs that provide such insurance and “the number of people uninsured for the entire year.”

That brings the number closer to between 31 and 21 million people. At least 18.3 million of the uninsured were under 34, an age group that might conclude they are healthy enough to do without the cost of coverage.

A BlueCross BlueShield study determined that 8.2 million Americans are without coverage for the long haul because they are too poor to purchase health care insurance, but earn too much to qualify for government assistance. Remember, though, they too will receive health care when they show up at the emergency room.

The law requires that no one in need is ever turned away unless, of course, they showed up at the hospital for which Michelle Obama was formerly an executive. She devised a plan to send the poor to other hospitals in Chicago.

We have now come a long, long way from the “46 million” that Barack Obama and news media keep repeating.

What they don’t tell you, however, is just how astonishingly bad universal healthcare as practiced in England and Canada can be. In a recent article in Health Care News, a monthly Heartland Institute publication, Devon Herrick , a senior fellow and health care economist with the National Center for Policy Analysis, noted that in Canada, “at any given time, nearly 750,000 Canadians are waiting for a medical procedure. According to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, 42% of Canadians with chronic illnesses said they had to wait more than two months to see a specialist.”

The one thing that will ensure health care providers will provide the best care at the lowest price is the competition based on price and quality that is the hallmark of a free market economy.

It’s socialists like Obama who keep insisting that the government has to determine who gets health care, what kind of health care they receive, and how much hospitals and physicians can charge for it.

As Herrick says, “Instead of wasting time on a system that limits our choices, creates long waiting times, and can jeopardize our health, the United States should opt for a system of innovation and choice.”

Instead, Obama wants the government to creep ever more into every aspect of your life, every choice you make about anything essential to your well being, and to begin pre-school programs to indoctrinate your toddlers while requiring older ones enroll in “volunteer” programs that are anything but voluntary.

In October 2010, U.S. voters will have an opportunity to take control of Congress away from the Democrats and make Obama wait two years while he is rendered unable to do any more harm.

To enjoy the cartoon better, click on it to enlarge the image

The Christmas Kill-Joys

By Alan Caruba

I would like to reserve a special place in Hell for those people who, every year, issue warnings about “toxic toys” and thus add to every parent’s concerns additional worries about anything and everything they purchase for their children.

I was reminded of this when my local daily devoted a full page, plus scary cartoon illustrations, to the claims of a group in Michigan, the Ecology Center, citing an alleged threat from plastic toys that include the use of phthalates and other “chemicals” that will surely kill every child who receives one.

Here’s what the American Chemistry Council says about phthalates: “Most phthalates are used to make vinyl soft and flexible. From their use in medical devices to toys to cars to homes, flexible vinyl products help make our lives better and safer. And in hospitals and emergency rooms, they help save lives.” Such products are “high-performing and cost effective; their performance is difficult or impossible to match with competitive substitutes.”

The Council further notes that “Safety reviews by European and American scientific panels have specifically cleared phthalates for use in toys and in nail polish,” adding that “No governmental review has found any phthalate unsafe as used in products for the general public.”

The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act will, as of next year, ban phthalates. Never mind the findings of scientific panels. Never mind the oldest principle of toxicology that it is the “dose”, the amount of any chemical or substance that determines whether it is unsafe, whether it is a poison or not. If you consumed too much salt, sugar or water, it would kill you.

There is, to my knowledge, no evidence whatever that phthalates have caused injury or death to anyone.

Do you know what actually kills children? From one to four years of age, the leading cause is “accidents”, followed by “developmental and genetic conditions that were present at birth", then cancer, also largely genetic-related. From age 15 through 24, the leading causes are “accidents” followed by homicide and suicide!

Consumers are being victimized by their own lack of knowledge about the use of chemicals while, at the same time, benefiting in countless ways from them. Pharmaceuticals, too, are “chemicals” that bring relief and recovery from all manner of illness and injury.

Plastic, a derivative of oil, has so enhanced our lives one could write a multi-volume history of how its use has been a benefit.

The problem is that the enviro-crazies don’t care about improving our lives. They are determined to deny humanity the benefits of modern life, returning us all to earlier times when epidemics swept over whole populations and destroyed them.

We are, as the expression goes, being nibbled to death by little duckies. A ban on DDT, a ban on phthalates, a ban on harvesting timber, a ban on irrigation to save some minor specie of fish, a ban on extracting oil from a tiny part of a vast wildlife reserve or of the thousands of miles of our continental shelf, attacks on “dirty” coal or “dangerous” nuclear power for our electricity needs, a proposed “emissions” tax on ranchers for every single cow, pig, sheep, and other livestock and poultry, and the list just keeps growing and growing.

Environmentalism has everything to do with its own perverted religion of protest and nothing to do with reality. Meanwhile, we find ourselves the victims of politicians who no longer care, nor bother to understand—if they ever could—the science of the issues. These are the same people who have destroyed the U.S. housing market and set in motion another Recession.

Much of the fear that Americans and others around the world endure is fed by the worldwide environmental movement with its locus in the United Nations. Its sole commodity is the generation of irrational fears.