(NaturalNews) It would cost between $1.5 trillion and $1.7 trillion over the next 10 years to provide health insurance to everyone in the United States, according to an estimate by the consulting and policy analysis company the Lewin Group.

This is significantly greater than the $1.2 trillion that the group estimates it would take to pay for President Obama’s proposed health care plan, which would not cover all currently uninsured U.S. residents.

Obama recently set aside $634 billion in the 2009 budget as a “down payment” on reforming the health insurance system.

“It’s impossible to put a price tag on the plan before even the basics have been finalized,” White House spokesperson Reid Cherlin said. “Here’s what we do know: The reserve fund in the president’s budget is fully paid for and provides a substantial down payment on the cost of the reforming our health care system.”

Len Nichols of the New America Foundation estimated the cost of health insurance reform to be between $1.25 and $1.5 trillion over the next decade but said that Obama is being “strategic” by not committing to a firm estimate.

“Until that gets revealed by the Congress, it would be highly premature for the president to assert that sort of number,” he said.

Because the health care reform is meant to be permanent, however, the plan could commit the United States to paying $150 billion per year into the indefinite future. The only way to reduce this cost would be to find a way to reduce the country’s current expenditure on health care, an estimated $2.4 trillion per year.

“We shouldn’t just be throwing more money on top of the present system, because the present system is so wasteful,” said Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire.

More than a third of all money spent on health care in the United States goes to pay for unnecessary tests or other medical procedures, many experts estimate.

Sources for this story include: apnews.myway.com.

(NaturalNews) Phthalates used in food packaging could be linked to childhood obesity, according to two recent studies conducted by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine that included research conducted on more than 900 children in East Harlem and surrounding communities. The studies have added to a growing body of evidence that link phthalates to health problems.

One of the studies, according to the Mount Sinai researchers, focused on 400 girls in the East Harlem community. The results showed that the heaviest girls had the highest levels of phthalates metabolites in their urine.

Another significant research project called Growing Up Healthy in East Harlem examined the diet and other factors for 520 East Harlem children aged 6-8 with the results indicating that the level of phthalates in the children tested was higher than the national average.

About 40 percent of children in East Harlem are considered to be overweight or obese. “When we say children, I’m talking about kindergarten children, we are talking about little kids,” said Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, a professor of pediatrics at Mount Sinai, one of the lead researchers on one of the East Harlem studies. “This is a problem that begins early in life.”

Health concerns over phthalates have been debated for more than 10 years, as shown by a New York Times article from 1999 that describes opposing views on their use and mentions an FDA investigation into the matter. At that time, a major concern was the use of chemicals in children’s toys.

Previous reports linking phthalates to health disruptions have shown that they are connected to abdominal obesity, insulin resistance, poor semen quality in men, and changes in reproductive organs in infant boys.

Phthalates can be found in personal care products like cosmetics, shampoos, soaps, lotions, paint and pesticides. They are also used to make plastics more pliable. Phthalates are absorbed into the body and are a type of endocrine disruptor – a category of chemical that affects glands and hormones that regulate various bodily functions.

The FDA continues conducting ongoing investigations into potential risks, but notes that while there have been studies on laboratory animals demonstrating carcinogenic effects of certain chemicals, “there are no studies in humans that are adequate to serve as the basis for regulatory decision-making.”

Other packaging chemicals that have recently caused consumer concern include Biosphenol A (BPA) and perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs). PFCs, which are found in grease-resistant packaging such as that used in microwaveable popcorn bags and pizza boxes, have been linked to infertility in women.

Sources:

http://www.nutraingredients.com/Publications/Food-Beverage-Nutrition/FoodProductionDaily.com/Packaging/Studies-link-packaging-chemical-to-childhood-obesity/

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/child-obesity-is-linked-to-chemicals-in-plastics/?hp

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/28/health/a-debate-over-safety-of-softeners-for-plastic.html?sec=health&spon=&pagewanted=1

About the author
Louis Lazaris is a website developer, programmer and owner of Natural-Life.ca, a resource that offers free business listings for Canadian naturopathic doctors, organic food stores, organic farms, and organic and vegetarian restaurants.
Louis also maintains a web design blog where he regularly posts web design articles and web design tutorials.

(NaturalNews) Today an FDA advisory panel approved the prescribing of powerful mind-altering chemicals for children. Seroquel, Zyprexa and Goedon have now been approved by the advisory panel to be prescribed to children as young as 10 years old to treat a fictitious disease invented by psychiatrists and given the name “bipolar disorder.” (There is no such thing as a bipolar disorder disease. It is merely a name assigned to children demonstrating the predictable side effects of correctable dietary imbalances.)

In light of this disturbing decision, it is instructive to remember the history of pharmaceutical medicine and children. One hundred and ten years ago, Bayer marketed heroin to children as a non-addictive alternative to morphine. Did I say “non-addictive?” Yes, it’s right from the company’s own marketing materials. It just goes to show you that drug companies have been lying to the public (and poisoning the children) for well over one hundred years.

Much like the FDA’s present-day endorsement of antipsychotic drugs for children, the American Medical Association endorsed Bayer Heroin for kids, touting its ability to ease coughs. Heroin definitely eases coughs. And so does smoking meth! In offering this endorsement, the AMA apparently borrowed some of the FDA’s screwy logic, which claims “The benefits outweigh the risks.”

This means, of course, that the benefits to the drug companies outweigh the risks to the children!

During all this, of course, the AMA utterly failed to inform parents that heroin was a highly addictive narcotic drug. So parents were dosing their babies with heroin — all with the full approval of the American Medical Association!

Today, the FDA spearheads the promotion of drugs to children, doing its best to promote toxic synthetic chemicals that artificially alter brain chemistry while outlawing any mention of natural remedies that work much better (like omega-3 oils, which are natural brain chemistry stabilizers). The FDA also utterly fails to ban toxic chemical food ingredients known to destroy healthy brain chemistry (like MSG and artificial food coloring).

Thus, in one hundred and ten years, western medicine has learned nothing! It still poisons the children with the full approval of “health authorities” all while enriching the powerful drug companies.

Big Pharma’s ties to Nazi Germany
In remembering the endorsement by the AMA of heroin treatments for children, it’s helpful to consider a bit more of the history of Big Pharma:

The name Heroin comes from the German word heroisch, which means “heroic.” Take enough heroin, and you might feel heroic, too. (At least until the high is gone.)

Bayer, of course, is a German pharmaceutical company with all sorts of interesting ties to Nazi Germany and the medical experiments conducted on Jewish prisoners during World War II. In 1956, for example, Fritz ter Meer became the chairman of Bayer. What’s so interesting about that? This was after he served seven years in prison for carrying out experiments on Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz.

One minute you’re committing crimes against humanity, and the next minute you’re the Chairman of Bayer. Amazing, isn’t it? (Amazing how deep the criminal backgrounds go for these Big Pharma people, it seems…)

More recently, Bayer has been found contaminating the U.S. rice crop with genetically engineered rice seeds. Read more details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer#Nazi_chairman_and_aspirin_discoverer

There’s a lot more you probably didn’t know about the true history of Big Pharma’s dangerous experiments on humans. Read up on the history of human medical experimentation in the United States here: http://www.naturalnews.com/019189.html

and here:

http://www.naturalnews.com/019187.html

Pushing narcotics for children – the Big Pharma way!
Bayer eventually pulled its heroin from the market in 1910, by the way. In 1914, the U.S. Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which allowed heroin to continue to be prescribed as a medicine. In wasn’t until 1924 that the U.S. Congress banned heroin sales outright. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin

Interestingly, 85 years later, narcotics are routinely prescribed to U.S. schoolchildren as “ADHD medications” (they are actually amphetamine drugs). And now, with the help of the FDA, drugs like Seroquel and Zyprexa can be legally prescribed to children by doctors.

And yet even that is just a hodge-podge of FDA theater, because in reality, doctors have been illegally prescribing these drugs to children for well over a decade, and not one doctor has ever been arrested or fined for engaging in this “off-label prescribing” of dangerous, mind-altering chemicals. In fact, the FDA’s decision today isn’t really about medical science at all: It’s about sweeping under the rug the routine crimes of America’s psychiatrists who have been poisoning children’s minds with dangerous drugs for years on end.

And rather than enforcing existing medical laws that forbid off-label prescribing of drugs, the FDA apparently finds it more convenient to simply legalize the criminal behavior of psychiatrists via a politically-motivated vote.

A hundred and ten years from now, this decision will be viewed with the same disbelief that we now evoke when looking back at the AMA’s endorsement of heroin cough syrup for children. Future citizens of our world will look back and ask themselves, “Were these people on drugs?”

And the answer, of course, is yes, the decision makers are all on drugs. They’re taking drugs, pushing drugs and profiting from drugs. And now they’re going after the children with those same drugs because there’s more profit to be found by expanding the age range of victims who can be targeted for financial exploitation by the pharmaceutical industry. Children are simply the next target on the corporate profits priority list.

Let’s be honest here: These are crimes against our children. And those FDA advisory panel members who voted to whitewash these crimes are, themselves, guilty of crimes against humanity (and should be arrested and tried accordingly).

The Nazis gassed Jewish children with Zyklon B. America now openly drugs its own children with Zyprexa.

Both chemicals, not coincidentally, were invented and manufactured by the same industry: The pharmaceutical industry.

(NaturalNews) A U.S. psychiatrist has been arrested in the Philippines and charged with defrauding a sick man out of $70,000 by promising him a liver transplant that never materialized, leading to his death.

In 2001, Florida psychiatrist Jerome Howard Feldman was indicted on charges related to stolen property, money laundering, state and federal fraud, and racketeering. Feldman evaded arrest and remained a fugitive until his Feb. 2 arrest in Manila. He has since then been indicted on further charges of federal wire fraud for the liver transplant case. Also pending against him are federal healthcare fraud charges, filed in 1999.

According to prosecutors, Feldman used the alias “Dr. Mitch Michaelson” to communicated by e-mail with A New York couple who contacted him through the Web site www.liver4you.org. He convinced the couple to wire $70,000 to a bank account in the name “Alberto Gomez,” actually another of his aliases. He promised them that if they flew to the Philippines and went to a certain hospital, Dr. Michaelson would carry out a liver transplant for the man in the couple, all expenses paid.

When the couple arrived at the hospital, however, staff there had never heard of Michael Michaelson. To make matters worse, their transplant doctor was unable to perform the procedure that the man needed.

The man died in the hospital in July 2008, still awaiting a transplant, and “Michaelson” stopped responding to his widow’s e-mails. The hospital has since billed the widow $20,000 for medical fees incurred during her husband’s stay.

Prosecutors report that Feldman had bilked at least six other victims in a similar fashion, netting a total of $400,000.

Feldman was initially arrested on immigration charges for living illegally in the Philippines. If convicted of the wire fraud charges alone, he faces up to 20 years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines.

Sources for this story include: www.google.com.

(NaturalNews) For years, I’ve tried to find a truly natural shampoo that I could feel good about using and recommending to family, friends and NaturalNews readers. It’s been a virtually impossible task: Many of the so-called “natural” shampoo products sold today are loaded with fragrance, Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS) or questionable preservative chemicals. This is true even with many “organic” brands (some of which aren’t really organic, of course).

Those aren’t the kind of things I want to be putting on my hair (and scalp), and I’m willing to venture you feel the same way about it. Why is it so difficult to find a good quality, truly natural, fragrance-free shampoo sold at a reasonable price?

I decided to work on this problem myself. With the help of a couple of remarkable product formulators in the natural products industry (who are long-time followers of superfoods and living foods themselves), we’ve been able to come up with an a really solid shampoo formula using absolutely nothing artificial:

• No parabens
• No SLS (sodium lauryl sulfate) or other “hidden” forms of SLS
• No fragrance chemicals
• No chemical preservatives
• No sudsing chemicals
• No harsh chemicals that destroy hair fibers
• No petroleum byproducts
• No testing on animals (of course!)

We went all out on this formula, working on it with our formulators for months, sourcing everything organic that we could find. The result? Our shampoo is 98% organic and 100% natural. (It’s not yet certified organic, nor USDA Organic. We’ve just begun that process and hope to receive those certifications in the future…)

What’s in the 2% that’s non-organic? Both guar gum and Kosher vegetable glycerin are not available in organic forms (because these aren’t ingredients commonly made with pesticides anyway). Everything else is 100% organic.

Check out these remarkable ingredients yourself:

Our natural shampoo ingredients:
Purified Water, Saponified organic oils of Cocos Nucifera (Coconut Oil), Organic Helianthus Annuus (Sunflower), and Organic Castor Seed, Kosher Vegetable Glycerin, Guar Gum, Panthenol (Vitamin B5), Organic Equisetum Arvense (Horsetail/Silica), Organic Urtica Dioica (Nettle), Organic Astragalus Membranacus (Astragalus), Organic Coriandrum Sativum (Cilantro), Triticum Vulgare (Wheat Germ Oil), Pelargonium Gravolens (Geranium Essential Oil), Organic Rosmarinus Officinalis (Rosemary), Organic Matricaria Recutita (Chamomile), Organic Aloe Barbadensis Leaf (Aloe), Citric Acid, Rosemary Seed Extract.

As you can readily tell yourself, this formula is absolutely loaded with herbs and nutrients that support and nourish healthy hair: Horsetail, Nettle, Geranium oil, Aloe, Coconut Oil and much more. And our only “preservative” is rosemary seed extract – a natural inhibitor of bacterial growth, made by Mother Nature!

Beware of false “organic” shampoo products
In my five years as the editor of NaturalNews, I’ve tried hundreds of different hair care and body care products. There are some real gems in the industry, such as Karen Adler’s Toothsoap company (www.Toothsoap.com), which also offers a “Hair Soap” shampoo that’s truly natural. But overall, I’ve been totally let down by the so-called “natural” products industry when it comes to shampoo.

In fact, NaturalNews worked directly with the Organic Consumers Association (www.OrganicConsumers.org) to help break the story about the toxic chemical 1,4 dioxane being found in baby shampoo products (http://www.naturalnews.com/022846.html). In that breaking news story, we informed NaturalNews readers of the dangers of cancer-causing chemicals in so-called “natural” shampoo products, urging them to look for and avoid all the following potentially toxic ingredients:

• Myreth
• Oleth
• Laureth
• Cateareth (or other “eth” chemicals)
• PEG
• Polyethylene
• Polethylene Glycol
• Polyoxyethylene
• Oxynol

You’ll notice that our Valley of Longevity Natural Shampoo contains none of these ingredients. I wouldn’t dare use a product made with potentially toxic chemicals that could harm human health.

If you haven’t already, read up about the dangers of SLS (sodium lauryl sulfate) here: http://www.naturalnews.com/003210.html

(You’ll instantly realize why we don’t use SLS in our shampoo…)

Our list of ingredients is, I’m sure you’ll agree, the most honest, natural and truly healthful list of ingredients you’ll find in any shampoo product, anywhere. Compare our Valley of Longevity Natural Shampoo side-by-side with ANY other shampoo on the market, and you’ll be amazed at how much better the quality of ingredients is in our product.

You can pick some up for yourself at BetterLifeGoods.com, where we offer free shipping in the continental U.S. for any shampoo order over $75 (that’s a lot of natural shampoo).

See the 8 oz. bottle here:
http://www.betterlifegoods.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=BLG-CAT21551

… and our 36 oz. bottle here:
http://www.betterlifegoods.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=BLG-CAT21552

But what about the cost?
The “dirty little secret” of the shampoo products industry is that most shampoo products are made with very low-quality ingredients that cost virtually nothing. Filling a plastic bottle with synthetic chemicals and artificial fragrance is, of course, dirt cheap. But it’s also not honest, in my opinion, especially when so many of those products use misleading words like “natural” or “organic” or “herbal” on their labels.

The ingredients that have gone into our Valley of Longevity Natural Shampoo are expensive! We had to contract to make this formulation in very large quantities just to keep the price of the ingredients within reason. Remarkably, we’ve been able to price this product very competitively, thanks in part to the fact that we aren’t selling this through Whole Foods or other retailers. As a result, we don’t have to build in a huge markup to cover the costs of retailing.

What’s a better bottle: Plastic or glass?
A glass bottle would be the ideal container for any personal care product. We considered that very carefully, but in the end, it turns out that a recyclable plastic bottle is actually better for the environment and for consumers.

Why? Because glass is heavy, meaning more fossil fuels are consumed during transportation, causing greater CO2 emissions into the environment. Glass also breaks easily in the shower, creating a safety hazard for bare feet. Plastic is easier to grip, easier to squeeze, and it bounces off the shower floor! So using recyclable plastic makes more sense for lots of reasons, especially for a shampoo product.

Does it dry out my hair?
I’ve tried a lot of “natural” shampoo products, and most are disappointingly drying to hair follicles. Amazingly, our Valley of Longevity Natural Shampoo formulation avoids this through the careful use of moisture-enhancing herbs (like horsetail and aloe). This is the only “natural” shampoo formulation I’ve ever tried that left my hair feeling healthy and nourished, not dried out and brittle.

100% without fragrance
Here’s another really cool part about our shampoo: It completely avoids the use of any fragrance whatsoever! No fragrance chemicals, no essential oils… nothing! That makes it ideal for chemically-sensitive individuals, pets and anyone who wants to wash their hair without having their senses assaulted in the process.

Add your own fragrance, if you want, in the form of tea tree oil and mint essences. But we ship this shampoo 100% natural and 100% without any fragrance whatsoever.

Check it out here (8 oz.):
http://www.betterlifegoods.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=BLG-CAT21551

… or here (36 oz.):
http://www.betterlifegoods.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=BLG-CAT21552

Remember, we offer free shipping on all orders over $75 within the continental United States. (Plus, we unconditionally guarantee your satisfaction with this shampoo, so there’s no risk in trying it.)

Happy showering!