health

Whistleblower Demands Governor Fix ‘Completely Unregulated’ Fracking Wastewater Network

December 23, 2024 Justin Nobel, DeSmog. Resist! Energy, Fossil Fuels, Fracking, health, Pennsylvania, Water Pollution, Whistleblowers

A whistleblowing Pennsylvania oil and gas worker, together with the state’s former lead environmental regulator, are ringing the alarm bell on an unregulated and shadowy network of pipelines at least hundreds, and perhaps even thousands of miles long. The pipeline system was constructed over the past decade by oil and gas operators in Pennsylvania to transport toxic and radioactive fracking wastewater. “There is no oversight,” says Robert Green, who works in southwestern Pennsylvania as a hydrostatic tester, a niche job in the industry that involves assuring pipelines can appropriately handle the complex and often hazardous fuels and waste streams they contain.

DOE Study Finds LNG Exports Don’t Just Hurt The Climate

December 22, 2024 Sharon Kelly, DeSmog. Educate! Department of Energy, Fossil Fuels, Gas Exports, health

If you don’t live anywhere near an export terminal for liquified natural gas (LNG), you could still feel big impacts from the industry’s planned construction boom in the U.S. – and not just because the fossil fuel is rapidly worsening the climate crisis. That’s according to a new study on LNG export authorizations by the Department of Energy (DOE), which finds that the average U.S. household will pay an additional $122.54 a year in utility bills if LNG export expansions go forward unchecked. Some households could see rates go up by over $360 a year.

A History Of Success Drives The Ongoing Struggle To Clean Up Cancer Alley

December 17, 2024 Sue Inches, Waging Nonviolence. Organize! Cancer Alley, Environment, Fossil Fuels, health, Louisiana

Two days after the election, I left on a research trip to Mississippi and Louisiana. I joined four others from my church in Yarmouth, Maine. Our purpose was to witness and learn about the struggle for civil and environmental rights in a region known as “Cancer Alley.” This 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi — between Baton Rouge and New Orleans — is home to 150 petrochemical plants, all along the river. It is also home to many working-class people, a majority of them Black. The first thing you notice are the huge refineries. Tall smokestacks spew toxic chemicals and methane flares light up the sky. The scale of industrialization is hard to imagine — there are miles and miles of factories and chemical plants.

Behind UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Is A Larger System Of Corporate Rule

December 13, 2024 Derek Seidman, Truthout. Educate!, Strategize! Corporatism, health, Health Insurance, Profiteers, United Healthcare

The killing of UnitedHealthcare’s Brian Thompson — a brazen assassination of a wealthy CEO in the streets of midtown Manhattan — shocked the United States. But the tsunami of mass anger unleashed against a hated for-profit health care system has so far defined the story in the news. The killing sparked a deluge of personal testimonies of horrifying experiences with health insurance corporations. Dark humor around the shooting continues to flood social media. Millions of people in the U.S. viscerally hate health insurance corporations, and see these companies and their CEOs as symbols of the worst kind of corporate greed.

US Healthcare Corporations Reap Profit From Human Misery

December 12, 2024 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. Educate! Assassination, Brian Thompson, Class Struggle, Corporate America, Corporate greed, health, Health Care, Health Insurance, Luigi Mangione, Medicare for all, United States

The assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4 has sparked a reaction that few may have suspected. The perpetrator has received an outpouring of popular support, and a profound debate on the brutality of the US for-profit healthcare system has been sparked, with many accusing healthcare corporations of reaping their profits directly from human misery. Thompson was shot and killed while heading to an investors meeting in Midtown Manhattan on December 4. Police have arrested 26-year-old Luigi Mangione in connection with the crime, who quickly has become a working class hero in the eyes of many in the US public, especially after his alleged manifesto revealed that he was motivated by outrage towards healthcare corporations.

Supreme Court Case On Trans Health Shows How Gender Essentialism Harms Us All

December 8, 2024 Lewis Raven Wallace, Truthout. Resist! Gender equality, health, Human Rights, Transgender Rights, US Supreme Court

When I had my first gender-affirming medical intervention, I was 21 years old. The year was 2005, and at that time, the idea of a trans surgery being covered by health insurers was outlandish. So, I saved up money starting at age 18, and visited psychologists at the free gender clinic in the San Francisco Bay Area where I lived. I told them I had been “living as a man full time” and pretended to fit the clinical definition of gender dysphoria in order to get a letter allowing the surgeon to work on me. (I was genderqueer and nonbinary, had a high voice and feminine features and had virtually never “passed” as a man.)

We Need A Care System That Treats Patients With Dignity

November 27, 2024 Connie Choi, Inequality.org. Educate! health, Health Care, Hospitals, Profiteers

Earlier this year, I lost my dad to complications from diabetes. He was first admitted to the hospital two days before Thanksgiving of last year. Over the course of the next nine months, he suffered through 15 surgeries and 14 hospital stays. In between those stays, he was shuffled between skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities, and board and care homes. While watching my dad’s decline in health, I learned the differences of what those terms meant in real-time as my family and I tried to navigate a complicated, and oftentimes unforgiving, health care system. All in all, he went to four separate hospitals and six outpatient facilities to receive his so-called “care.”

Inspector General Report On Red Hill Fuel Spill Confirms Resident Concerns

November 21, 2024 Hawai'i Sierra Club, Popular Resistance. Resist! AZccountability, Fossil Fuels, Hawaiʻi, health, pollution, Red Hill, US military

The Navy’s and Department of Defense’s initial responses to the IG’s recommendations provide little assurance of meaningful accountability and protections moving forward. Most “resolved” recommendations remain to be implemented over months or years, while numerous other recommendations remain “unresolved.” Particularly troubling is the response to the primary IG recommendations that oversight of fuels facilities operations and maintenance and drinking water compliance be assigned to specific accountable individuals. The Department of Defense’s vague responses—assigning these roles to the Pearl Harbor Commanding Officer—would merely continue the practice of entrusting the operation of extremely complex systems to a revolving door of short-term Navy leaders, for whom environmental and human health and safety have never been a demonstrated priority.

UnitedHealth’s Playbook For Limiting Coverage Puts Countless People At Risk

November 20, 2024 Annie Waldman, ProPublica. Educate! Denials, health, Health Insurance, Insurance, mental health, UnitedHealthcare

For years, it was a mystery: Seemingly out of the blue, therapists would feel like they’d tripped some invisible wire and become a target of UnitedHealth Group. A company representative with the Orwellian title “care advocate” would call and grill them about why they’d seen a patient twice a week or weekly for six months. In case after case, United would refuse to cover care, leaving patients to pay out-of-pocket or go without it. The severity of their issues seemed not to matter. Around 2016, government officials began to pry open United’s black box.

Three Years After The Fuel Spill, Community Members Continue To Demand Accountability

November 20, 2024 Marti Townsend, Popular Resistance. Resist! Accountability, Hawaii, health, pollution, Red Hill, US military, Water Defenders

Today, November 20, 2024, marks the third anniversary of the catastrophic 2021 Red Hill fuel spill, which contaminated the drinking water for thousands of our families and exposed deep flaws in the Navy’s management of its fuel storage facilities. On this solemn occasion, the Community Representation Initiative (CRI) reflects on the ongoing harm caused by the spill and calls for decisive action in light of recent Department of Defense Inspector General (DoD IG) and Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that confirm widespread mismanagement by the Navy and Department of Defense.

Inside New Jersey’s Fight Against Anti-Abortion Centers

October 31, 2024 Kimberly Izar, Next City. Resist! Abortion, Anti-abortion Centers, health, New Jersey (NJ), Religion, Reproductive Rights

Pilgrim Medical Center is a small, privately-owned abortion clinic in downtown Montclair, New Jersey, offering abortions conducted by licensed and board-certified medical professionals. Just three blocks down the street stands First Choice Women’s Resource Center. Its website promises “compassionate care” with cost-free services, and answers questions about abortions: How late can the abortion pill be taken? How much does an abortion cost? When is the latest I can get an abortion? “If you think you could be pregnant, please come in for a pregnancy test and to receive information about your options,” the website encourages. But First Choice does not actually provide abortion services or referrals to abortion providers.

Escalating Climate Impacts Threaten Health Worldwide

October 31, 2024 Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, EcoWatch. Educate! Carbon emissions, climate crisis, Extreme weather, Food Insecurity, health

Human-driven climate change is causing temperatures to rise to dangerous new heights, while worsening drought and impeding food security, according to the ninth Lancet Countdown report. The report by health experts and doctors warned that people all over the world are facing unparalleled health threats because of the climate crisis. “This year’s stocktake of the imminent health threats of climate inaction reveals the most concerning findings yet,” said Dr. Marina Romanello, executive director of the University College London-led Lancet Countdown, as The Guardian reported.

Inside The Company Helping America’s Biggest Health Insurers Deny Coverage

October 24, 2024 T. Christian Miller, Patrick Rucker and David Armstrong, ProPublica. Educate! health, Health Care, Health Insurance, Profiteers

Every day, patients across America crack open envelopes with bad news. Yet another health insurer has decided not to pay for a treatment that their doctor has recommended. Sometimes it’s a no for an MRI for a high school wrestler with a strained back. Sometimes for a cancer procedure that will help a grandmother with a throat tumor. Sometimes for a heart scan for a truck driver feeling short of breath. But the insurance companies don’t always make these decisions. Instead, they often outsource medical reviews to a largely hidden industry that makes money by turning down doctors’ requests for payments, known as prior authorizations. Call it the denials for dollars business.

EPA Found No Threat Of Air Pollution During An Oil Spill In Louisiana

September 28, 2024 Julie Dermansky and Sharon Kelly, DeSmog. Educate! Activism, Air Pollution, Environment, EPA, Fossil Fuels, health, Louisiana, Oil Spill

The pungent smell of oil woke Gerald and Janet Crappel on the morning of Saturday, July 27. Stepping outside their home on the banks of Bayou Lafourche in Raceland, Louisiana, they spotted the fumes’ source: crude oil from Crescent Midstream’s Raceland pump station was gushing into the picturesque waterway, sparsely lined with homes and fishing boats, via a stormwater canal directly across from their home. The oil’s fumes were thick that morning. “It choked you,” Gerald told DeSmog correspondent Julie Dermansky, who documented the incident as it unfolded. Before cleanup crews contained the spill, reportedly 34,000 gallons of crude oil, a slick stretched for eight miles, just past the area’s drinking water system.

US Health System Ranks Last Compared With Peer Nations

September 20, 2024 Jessica Glenza, The Guardian. Educate! health, Health Care, Report, United States

The United States health system ranked dead last in an international comparison of 10 peer nations, according to a new report by the Commonwealth Fund. In spite of Americans paying nearly double that of other countries, the system performed poorly on health equity, access to care and outcomes. “I see the human toll of these shortcomings on a daily basis,” said Dr Joseph Betancourt, the president of the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation with a focus on healthcare research and policy. “I see patients who cannot afford their medications … I see older patients arrive sicker than they should because they spent the majority of their lives uninsured,” said Betancourt. “It’s time we finally build a health system that delivers quality affordable healthcare for all Americans.”

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