Under President Obama's new health care law Medicaid will become a very different health coverage program than first envisioned.

Over 120 Aboriginal communities run their own health services - some have been doing so for 30 years. They struggle with difficult medical problems. They also try to deal with counselling stolen generations issues family relationships violence suicide prevention.

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.