health care reform Archives - Astrology readings and writings by Lynn Hayes

My plan to revamp the US Healthcare system and add 14 years to your life!

This article was originally posted in 2008 and has been updated.

Under this week’s retrograde Mercury in Pisces, which has attached itself to travel companion Neptune over the next week, the William Barr Justice Department under President Trump has recommended repeal of the Affordable Care Act, generating a s*&#storm of panic and anxiety in the hearts of Americans.

The problem as I see it, though, is that the American healthcare system is completely broken. It doesn’t really matter how healthcare is paid for – the system is based on profit and corrupt at its core. It needs to be completely rebuilt. Pluto, the planet of destruction and regeneration, is in the US second house of money and finance. There has been a great deal of discussion among astrologers concerning how the US Pluto return over the next few years would affect the country, and perhaps this would be a good place to start. Healthcare spending in the US was $17.9B in 2017, or $10,739 per person. This is twice as much as the average of other comparable first world countries (only Switzerland comes close).

A recent Harvard study reports:

Maintaining five healthy habits — eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, keeping a healthy body weight, not drinking too much alcohol, and not smoking — during adulthood may add more than a decade to life expectancy, according to a new study led by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Researchers also found that American women and men who maintained the healthiest lifestyles were 82 percent less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and 65 percent less likely to die from cancer when compared with those with the least healthy lifestyles over the course of the roughly […]

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By Lynn Hayes|2019-05-11T07:32:26-04:00March 27th, 2019|Health & Healing, Politics|3 Comments

Landmark health care legislation passes

The US House of Representatives passed Obama’s health care bill last night, paving the way to the bill being signed into law.

Under the opposition of Saturn to Uranus which began in the fall of 2008 and will conclude this summer, it has been virtually impossible to obtain any kind of compromise between two opposing views. In the American political landscape this has occurred not only between liberals (Uranus) and conservatives (Saturn), but also between the left and right ends of each political party. The idea of compromise has become a badge of weakness rather than a time honored tool for moving through the gridlock of politics.

President Obama ran for office on a platform of bringing opposing views together so that change could occur, but the people that voted for him seem to forget that in order to achieve that kind of unification not everyone will get exactly what they want. Liberals have disowned him over the public option, which likely would have spelled the end of insurance companies as we know it. Conservatives have disowned him over the idea that the health reform plan will cost a lot of money to implement, forgetting that our current health care system will swallow us up in any case in the next decade.

The fact is, under Pluto in Capricorn there is no way to achieve financial stability without tightening our belts a bit and facing the hard realities of our situation.

Obama has some interesting planetary transits right now. Saturn has been transiting his progressed Sun which is completing a 30-year pass through Virgo and will soon (September) enter Libra, the sign of compromise and diplomacy. Perhaps his achievement of […]

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By Lynn Hayes|2010-03-22T06:08:56-04:00March 22nd, 2010|Health & Healing, Politics|1 Comment

We need real healthcare reform, not just more insurance

I’m going to classify this under both Saturn (making the hard choices) in Virgo (dealing with day to day life in a body such as health, diet and routines), as well as Pluto (transformation) in Capricorn (the way our governmental structures operate). The fact is, we need a complete overhaul with the way we look at health and healthcare, and not just the way we insure our health. Offering a public option for health insurance is not enough.

The fact is that the health care in the United States makes us sicker than people in other countries. Despite the recent slam of the British healthcare system by the conservative press, a 2006 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that more Americans suffer from chronic diseases than their counterparts in England. According to this study, Americans spend $5274 per year per person on health care as opposed to $2164 in the UK, yet there are twice as many Americans with diabetes as Brits, and Americans have a higher rate of heart attacks, strokes, lung disease and cancer.

Last year a book was released by journalist Shannon Brownlee called Overtreated–why too much medicine is making us sicker and poorer. Ms. Brownlee draws from the work of John Wennberg, who with his team from Dartmouth over the past forty years has proven that wealthier parts of the country spent more on health care, but were not any healthier. Wennberg’s colleague Elliot Fisher demonstrated in 2000 that people in areas that spent more on health care were dying at a higher rate. They were not getting more surgery; they were getting more tests, more pharmaceuticals and more unnecessary procedures. Fisher determined that the 2-6% increase in deaths was directly attributed to more […]

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By Lynn Hayes|2020-11-03T13:46:34-05:00August 19th, 2009|Health & Healing|Comments Off

Self-righteousness, ignorance and illusion in health care reform

Before a society can make intelligent choices about something that affects its citizenry, it must know the facts. In the United States the debate over health care reform is degenerating into violence and at least one congressman (Brad Miller of North Carolina) has received a death threat for his support of Obama’s health care plan. There has been a carefully orchestrated misinformation campaign that has spread rumors that, among other things, Americans would be forced to give up their private insurance and that seniors would be euthanized. Neither of these things are true.

Personally, I would rather see the government focus attention on ensuring that Americans can purchase their own health insurance no matter who they work for or what their pre-existing conditions are. I also saw first-hand how medical centers give expensive tests to people (me) who don’t need them just because insurance will cover them. (I went in to an emergency room needing pain medication and ended up with $8000 in Cat-scans and EKGs.) Clearly an overhaul is needed. But why not discuss the situation intelligently? Why must the debate become violent?

Thanks to Jill, I found this commentary by Paul Krugman. Krugman shares this interesting anecdote:

There was a telling incident at a town hall held by Representative Gene Green, D-Tex. An activist turned to his fellow attendees and asked if they “oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care.” Nearly all did. Then Representative Green asked how many of those present were on Medicare. Almost half raised their hands.

Obviously, Medicare IS government-run health care. Krugman makes the point this commentary (an excellent read!) that if the citizenry that are so violently opposed to Obama’s health care reform don’t know what they are opposed to, then they are actually opposed to something else.

The group that stands […]

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By Lynn Hayes|2022-10-15T13:32:02-04:00August 9th, 2009|Health & Healing, Planetary cycles, Politics|Comments Off