The Blade (Toledo, Ohio)
Monday, April 17, 2000
CANDIDATE HIGHLIGHTS HEALTH AT OHIO STATE
By Fritz Wenzel, Blade Political Writer
COLUMBUS--A minor party candidate for president found a receptive audience here last night as he pitched his proposals to overhaul the American political system to take advantage of what he called "natural laws" to fix many of the nation's ills.
John Hagelin, a Harvard-educated quantum physicist..., charmed an audience of 300 people in a speech last night at the Fawcett Center on the campus of Ohio State University.
Mr. Hagelin will represent the Natural Law political party in the race for president on ballots in all 50 states, an accomplishment unmatched by the better-known Reform Party, founded in 1992 by billionaire Ross Perot.
Mr. Hagelin outlined to the sympathetic audience last night how he believes a focus on preventive care would make a dramatic improvement in the health of Americans and greatly would reduce the government's cost of paying for health care for the needy.
"Despite government studies that show much of the health costs could be reduced with preventive care, it has been virtually banned" by federal programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, he said.
"You can take every area of national concern and you can tell [government policies] are out of whack with natural law," he said. "By harnessing the natural laws of human health through prevention, we can overcome disease."
Prevention, he said, "transcends the human bickering over who will pay for whose disease," adding that Republicans and Democrats are too closely tied to the fight to find good solutions. He blamed Washington lobbyists for the failure to improve health care for many Americans, saying the "special interests continue to perpetuate health woes."
With that insight, the candidate insisted on campaign-finance reform, calling contributions from political-action committees "direct bribes to your congressman."
Mr. Hagelin said he will use his presidential campaign to push for changes, but he warned that "it is going to take a third party insurrection to transform the political process in Washington...."
"America's future is at stake," Mr. Hagelin said. "With the help of the 115 million eligible voters who did not vote in the last election, we can mount the most formidable challenge to the two-party system since Abraham Lincoln. We can break the two-party duopoly."
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