All people have the right to adequate health care: both preventive care and medical treatment. Unfortunately, this goal is becoming ever more distant. Growing numbers of Americans have no health insurance while soaring medical costs have become the number one cause of bankruptcy. Fundamental change is needed in health care delivery.
The Maryland Green Party calls for:
A single payer health system funded by public revenues and available to all that would include preventive medicine as well as holistic and alternative health care.
Expanded funding of medicines, research and treatment programs for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) AIDS related complex (ARC) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Education and prevention programs for youth are vital for AIDS and other sexually transmitted disease education and prevention, and should include condom availability in schools.
Increased support for substance abuse/addiction programs. Access to these programs should be universal and immediate. Drug addiction should be considered a disease rather than a crime and treated as such.
Women's full rights to reproductive freedom must be maintained and protected, including the right to determine the degree of technological intervention, including abortion, they deem necessary for their own care and protection regardless of age or ability to pay.
No government interference with private individual and family decisions concerning the beginning or end of life. These important and sensitive decisions must be left to the family, advised by their doctors.
We support increased efforts to prevent unwanted births, including public education, family planning counseling, government subsidies for birth control methods, including male contraceptives and “day after” pills, and for people seeking more permanent methods such as vasectomies.
Making all public buildings and workplaces smoke free.
Strengthening family medical leave requiring employers to provide medical leave to both men and women for the care of newborn or adopted children, ailing family members, or to seek attention for a serious health condition.
3 comments:
Re: Public funding for "alternative and holistic health care":
Especially in the current economic climate, the efficacy and relative cost effectiveness of health maintenance, diagnostic, and intervention modalities must be clearly demonstrable to deserve public funding. While anecdotal evidence may point to benefits from a subset of "alternative" health care approaches, many methodologies employed by its practitioners fail to demonstrate substantial benefit when subjected to unbiased scientific scrutiny. (Clearly, many of the more "mainstream" medical approaches also deserve quite a bit more scrutiny than they have received, as well.)
To me, inclusion of the words "alternative", and, to a degree, "holistic" in the platform statement are somewhat troubling. If an approach is truly effective, then it clearly fits under the rubric "healthcare" and needs no further distinction. At best, then, the descriptors "alternative" and "holistic" are superfluous. At worst, these terms legitimize practices which are ineffective or even detrimental to the well-being of the patient. These, the public should not support.
The platform should not include any support to non-scientific practices. Not in Health, not in Education, not in environmental management. Public support to serious scientific research can give us a better place to live and generate many high level work positions. We have many great universities, please, do not include support to "alternative anything" not recognized by science.
PAID Maternity Leave... should be on this list.
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