McKinney talks about health care and the non-caring media

Cynthia McKinney, Green Party Candidate for President, in Minneapolis

All the major U.S. media organizations have summarized the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates’ views on health care. You can find such summaries on the web sites of the New York Times, the Association of Health Care Journalists, and countless other places.

Are you curious what Cynthia McKinney, one of six Green Party candidates for president, says about health care? If you followed only major media you would not know that the Green Party has presidential candidates. Well, now you know.

McKinney, the former U.S. House member from Georgia, spoke at a press conference in Minneapolis in December and I asked her what type of health care system she would envision for the nation.

“We can look at systems around the world and adapt them to our own particular circumstances,” McKinney said. “We spend the most of any country on health care but our statistics inform us that we are not the most healthy people on the planet, and therefore we need to change the system that we have. I’ve been a consistent supporter of universal access and coverage and a single-payer system that could be modeled after what we have in existence with Medicare. That would be the ideal.”

When asked if there is any role for complementary and alternative forms of health care within Western medicine she responded that the healthcare industry has effectively locked out any alternative and less invasive therapies – whether or not they have been used for thousands of years -- to protect profit margins.

The health care industry is all about competing “for a piece of the health care dollar,” said McKinney, adding that some companies are “sort of invasive in their efforts to try and patent the flora in Asia and in Africa because they are trying to basically steal the medicinal characteristics of that particular flower or plant and prevent Africans and Asians from having access to their own resources.”  Drawing a comparison to commodities like diamonds and oil, McKinney said industry looks at medicinal plants as “a resource for monetary gain.”