Advances in science and medical research and public health policies have meant that life expectancy for Australians is one of the highest in the world.

Here in Silicon Valley I have taken part in hundreds of conversations trying to convince people to dive in and become entrepreneurs. All too often innovators with good safe jobs are unwilling to put their family's access to health care at risk by walking away from company-backed medical insurance.

I basically believe the medical insurance industry should be nonprofit not profit-making. There is no way a health reform plan will work when it is implemented by an industry that seeks to return money to shareholders instead of using that money to provide health care.

Medical professionals not insurance company bureaucrats should be making health care decisions.

But if you're asking my opinion I would argue that a social justice approach should be central to medicine and utilized to be central to public health. This could be very simple: the well should take care of the sick.

Whenever I write about mental health and integrative therapies I am accused of being prejudiced against pharmaceuticals. So let me be clear - integrative medicine is the judicious application of both conventional and evidence-based natural therapies.

Citizens must pressure the American Hospital Association the American Public Health Association the Centers for Disease Control and other relevant governmental agencies to make greening our hospitals and medical centers a top priority so that they themselves don't create even more illness.

I am not against all forms of high-tech medicine. Drugs and surgeries have a secure place in the treatment of serious health conditions. But modern American medicine treats almost every health condition as if it were an emergency.

I'm by no means condemning prescription medicine for mental health. I've seen it save a lot of people's lives.

America has the best doctors the best nurses the best hospitals the best medical technology the best medical breakthrough medicines in the world. There is absolutely no reason we should not have in this country the best health care in the world.

I believe the most important aspect of Medicare is not the structure of the program but the guarantee to all Americans that they will have high quality health care as they get older.

I think first and foremost everybody should understand that Canadians are strongly committed to the system of universal health insurance to the principle that your ability to pay does not determine your access to critical medical service.

One thing governors feel Democrats and Republicans alike is that we have a health care system that if you're on Medicaid you have unlimited access to health care at unlimited levels at no cost. No wonder it's running away.

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.

Lost wealth may be replaced by industry lost knowledge by study lost health by temperance or medicine but lost time is gone forever.

Medicine sometimes snatches away health sometimes gives it.

Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organized to serve human health but only itself as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.