Green Party Platform:
Health Care
All people have the right to adequate and affordable health care--both preventive care and appropriate medical treatment--when they are ill.
The American health care system is in deep crisis. Millions of Americans have no health insurance and millions more have inadequate insurance and, therefore, go without basic health services. More natural, highly successful treatments that the drug industry can not profit from have been suppressed. As a result, millions have suffered and died needlessly from cancer, heart disease and other illnesses.
We need an equal access health care system with an emphasis on prevention. With such a system, health care could be provided without co-payments or deductibles for less than we now pay for our present inadequate system.
The Green Party calls for:
- Publicly funding a universal health care system equally accessible to all.
- Broadening acceptance by the health care industry, including the AMA, FDA and HMOs, of holistic and preventive health care systems, rather than reliance on drugs and mere repression of symptoms.
- Giving patients complete freedom of choice as to their form of treatment or to refuse treatment.
- Correcting economic discrimination present in health care that often excludes poor patients from medically indicated but expensive treatments.
- Supporting natural birthing.
- Shifting funds for research on breast and prostate cancer-related treatment away from chemotherapy, radiation and surgery.
- Adequate funding for HIV, ARC and AIDS education, research and treatment programs with an emphasis on alternative approaches.
- Encouraging and educating people on healthy life-styles, and more awareness of our natural ability for self-healing.
- Supporting the implementation of Prop 215 (medical use of marijuana).