Want to know the best new health idea lately? Making healthcare available to everyone.

Oh, wait! That is not a new idea. In fact, it is 100 years old. President Teddy Roosevelt, leader of the Rough Riders, outdoorsman, adventurer, Republican, was the first U.S. President to advocate healthcare for all.

While Canada and most countries of Europe have achieved that goal. the U.S. has been repeatedly prevented from protecting all its citizens from dying for lack of medical care. Nowadays 18,000 people a year die because they cannot afford health care. Some of them have jobs.

In other countries, like Canada and England, everyone gets free healthcare. A young American man I worked with had a sudden heart attack in his 30s while visiting his cousins in Canada. He said his care doctors and hospital care were top notch, and they cost him nothing.

As one British doctor told an American patient, “Call us selfish, but we don’t want you getting us sick.”

Yet Canadian and British doctors are well paid, have nice houses and cars and are happy with the system. When interviewed last year, one young doctor near London mentioned his $million dollar home and could not understand why anyone would think that English doctors are not well paid.

So here is a video of President Obama on Labor Day, explaining once again why we must have healthcare reform, and we cannot afford to wait while insurance costs, which have risen three times as fast as wages, continue to soar.

Notice as he says that while Americans are dying for lack of healthcare and being denied coverage or losing their insurance just when they need it most, some profitable insurance companies are being subsidized by the U.S. government.

Subsidizing the insurance companies? That alone is enough to make me sick. It has got to stop.

So you are not so thrilled with your belly fat as of late and you now want to do something about it. Great idea considering belly fat not only looks bad but is also extremely bad for your health. Losing the belly fat will takes some work but with enough desire and determination, it can be done. Here are a few tips to help you along the way.

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It has been known for some time that those diagnosed with depression have a higher heart disease risk or cardiac event— the medical term for a heart attack, stroke or other sudden problem involving your heart.

There’s also lots of evidence that depression is more common in heart patients and seems to up the risk of a second cardiovascular event.

No one has yet been able to pin down the reason for the association, but a new study published in the November 26th issue of  The Journal of the American Medical Association sought to do just that.

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Interesting recent medical research offers surprising news on several fronts:

* British researchers have found that ibuprofen is fastest at reducing fever.

* U.S. medical research shows that taking fish oil capsules with Omega 3 fatty acid is more effective for treating heart disease than the widely prescribed statin drugs.

* California researchers have found that having soft drink machines in elementary schools greatly increases the incidence of childhood obesity, because even a small increase in caloric intake results in weight gain for children. They don’t call soft drinks “liquid candy” for nothing!

12-inch car subwoofer (sub bass) speaker. Image via Wikipedia

Noise really does harm your health. New medical research shows what we all know intuitively.

Many cities have banned the so-called “boombox cars” with huge speakers that dominate the whole neighborhood with sound. That is, the laws say the sound of your stereo should not be heard more than 50 feet from your car. Some cities have also banned the use of subwoofers, the subsonic speakers that make your windows vibrate and can cause structural damage to buildings.

The laws are a good idea, but it is hard to get them enforced. Apparently most police officers either disagree with the laws or consider them too trivial to bother with.

Earlier studies had shown that the human brain can cope with only three noise sources, and only for a short time. Concentration is impaired, and eventually the brain just shuts down, and we can no longer think. It’s not just being “overly sensitive,” though some are more affected by sound than others. It is a physical process that we need to be aware of.

Researchers have now found that continous or repeated noise over 50 decibels can damage your heart.