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.

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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By Riley West

The first time I had a panic attack I was getting on an airplane! That was my worst flight ever and my life was not the same for several years. I got a handle on it, though, and it went away. Yes, it can go away.

For me the panic attacks lasted several years, about 5 or 6. I fought them every way I could think of including alcohol, running, meditating, and various other things.

When I think back it looks like panic attacks couldn’t possibly have entered my life. I was a risk taker. Read the rest of this entry »