Everyone, these days, has an opinion about health-care reform. Yet the current political tug-of-war and its outcome, while critically important, is only a chapter in a much larger story. Underneath the arguments about universal insurance coverage and who's-going-to-pay-for-what are serious questions about the quality of the health care in this country -- and that, say many experts, is our biggest crisis.

For decades, integrative physicians -- those who combine conventional Western methods with holistic approaches-have been sounding the alarm that something is wrong with medicine in America: namely, that its methods and underlying philosophy, though brilliantly effective in certain situations, don't do enough to prevent chronic illness or promote health.

In every crisis lies opportunity, goes the cliche, and one upside of our present impasse may be the national conversation that has begun about health care and, more broadly, about the stewardship of our health. 

As integrative-medicine pioneer Andrew Weil, M.D., told the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions a year ago, "the time has come for a new paradigm of preventive medicine and a society-wide effort to educate our citizens about health and self-care." At this pivotal point, say Weil and many others, we need to think and dream big, and keep talking -- not just about insurance, but about our whole medical system, and what it means to be healthy.

At press time, the U.S. House of Representatives had passed a landmark reform bill, and the Senate was wrestling with its own version. Whatever final plan we end up with will be an improvement, yet according to many health experts, it won't go far enough. 

Here, several leading voices in the integrative-medicine field share their visions of what true health-care reform might look like, and what we can all do to make it a reality.

A Focus on Health, Not Disease
Everyone agrees that Western medicine is great in an emergency -- for heart attacks and strokes, traumatic injuries, and serious infections, the technology and pharmacology in our hospitals repair bodies and save lives every day. "But what [the medical world] decided to do was use that model for everything," says cardiologist Mimi Guarneri, M.D., medical director of the Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine in La Jolla, California. "In medical school, I learned to diagnose disease and prescribe a pill or surgery." This approach clearly isn't making us healthier; despite spending billions a year on drugs and medical procedures, our rates of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer are among the highest in the world, and 34 percent of American adults are obese. "The real way we'll save money," says Guarneri, who sees an average of 15 cardiac patients a day, "is to keep people healthy."

The most universal -- and certainly the most damning -- criticism of our modern medical system is that it does little to promote human health. In his Senate testimony, Weil went so far as to declare that "we do not have a 'health-care' system at all" but rather a "deeply dysfunctional" disease-management system. Guarneri echoes this sentiment, saying that in the United States, "we don't have health care; we have disease care."