Preventive Health Care and Herbal Medicine—Working draft of legislation

By Harold H. Bloomfield, MD

I invite you to comment on the following working draft of a bill promoting preventive health care and herbal medicine, which can lower our health care costs by 50%, and ensure a more healthy and productive population. The savings from this bill alone could fund essential reforms in education and still have money left to support several other programs and tax cuts.

Preventive Health care and Natural Medicine

Expand health professional and medical education requirements in California
Require medical colleges to offer 3 unit, full year courses in
• Diet and Nutrition
• Herbal medicines
• Stress reduction techniques, including the Transcendental Meditation technique
• Alternative and Integrative medical approaches

Enrich basic and community education
Require schools to offer preventive health classes for students
Require community colleges and school districts to offer the same for adults

Expand Medi-Cal to cover preventive programs (including but not limited to stress management, nutrition, exercise, smoking cessation, health education classes and herbal medicine) if they are shown to be efficacious and cost-effective."

Note the following definitions:

• "Efficacious programs" are defined as "programs for which research published in peer-reviewed academic journals has demonstrated efficacy for the particular risk factor involved"; for high blood pressure, for example, research must show that the program reduces blood pressure.
• "Cost-effective programs" are defined as "programs with one or more studies published in peer-reviewed academic journals showing lower health care utilization and/or reduced health care costs."

Your endorsement will not be construed to be a political endorsement of me, my party or any party. In fact, I ask all the candidates from all parties to support this bill and adopt it as their own.

This is an example of what my party—the Natural Law Party—calls conflict-free politics. We believe that elections should bring together the best minds and best ideas of our society to create the most comprehensive, forward-looking policies.

This process is illustrative of the historical role that third parties have played in the U.S. Significant advances including the abolition of slavery, a woman's right to vote, and essential child labor laws, all came about from strong third party voices supporting issues that were not being properly addressed by the two major parties of the day.

I invite you to read the Natural Law Party's comprehensive platform of proven solutions at www.natural-law.org, or by calling the national headquarters at 800-332-0000.