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Health Care

How Trump’S 21st Century Version Of Fiscal Forestry Will Harm VA Care

April 13, 2025 Suzanne Gordon, Substack. , , ,
In his brilliant book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James C. Scott, warned of projects “driven by utopian plans and authoritarian disregard for the values, desires, and objections of their subjects.” Although the Yale Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, who died last year, wrote Seeing Like a State in 1998, his message is more important than ever as Donald Trump and his allies try to destroy and privatize the VA healthcare system and other government services. Like the other authoritarian schemers that Scott analyzes, Trump, Elon Musk and their faithful servant, VA Secretary Doug Collins view the world through a narrow lens that ignores the “far more complex and unwieldly reality” in which human beings live their lives and, in the case of the VA, experience health and illness.

Creighton University Student Organization Helps Fight Medical Debt

April 12, 2025 Grace Updike, The Creightonian. , , ,
Throughout the 2024-2025 school year, Creighton’s Students for a National Health Program (SNaHP) chapter has worked to advocate and raise money for individuals struggling with medical debt. The organization recently reached their fundraising goal, raising over $10,000 for the non-profit Undue Medical Debt. SNaHP is a single-issue organization that advocates for single-payer universal healthcare through legislative advocacy and education. According to Allison Benjamin, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences and the outgoing president of Creighton’s SNaHP chapter, their mission is to achieve affordable, accessible and quality healthcare for all.

Another Inmate Death At Federally Operated Detention Center

April 11, 2025 Darren Thompson, Last Real Indians. , , ,
Red Lake Indian Reservation - A death at a federally regulated jail on the Red Lake Indian Reservation is one of several inmate deaths in recent years, and the family is speaking up. Robin Hanson, 52, a Red Lake Band of Chippewa citizen, died while in custody at the Red Lake Detention Center on April 2, said his wife Betty Hanson in an interview with LRI Media. The jail is on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota and is regulated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), unlike other detention facilities in the state. “What they did to him and how they treated him feels like, to me, third world war—where they don’t care about anyone,” said Betty Hanson.

Resistance Grows As Proposed Cuts Threaten Health Care For Millions

April 7, 2025 Eleanor J. Bader, Truthout. , , , ,
Kelly Smith, a 57-year-old New York City resident, is part of the Nonviolent Medicaid Army (NVMA), a growing national movement of poor people who are organizing to stop proposed cuts to Medicaid and promote health care as a human right. “The need for health care unites us all,” Smith told Truthout. “Right now, I’m terrified of losing Medicaid and being unable to get injections for pain control. They’re the only thing that makes it possible for me to be on my game.” Nonetheless, she says that her health is somewhat fragile. Not only is she a breast cancer survivor, but she also has severe scoliosis and takes medication for hypertension, high cholesterol and depression — all covered by Medicaid.

French Parliament Moves To Tackle Medical Deserts

April 6, 2025 Ana Vračar, People's Dispatch. , , , , ,
After years of political struggle, French parliamentarians made significant progress in tackling the country’s problem of medical deserts by backing a motion to regulate where physicians can establish their practices. Led by Socialist MP Guillaume Garot, the proposal received cross-party support – from right-wing Republicans to the left France Unbowed (La France Insoumise, LFI) – and was opposed only by part of the Macronist camp and the far-right National Rally. The motion proposes that regional health agencies be granted the authority to approve physicians – both general practitioners and specialists – wishing to set up practice in a given area.

Columbia University Medical Staff Protests Cuts In Health Care

April 2, 2025 Monica Moorehead, Workers World. , , ,
Members of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) in New York City held a solidarity gathering on March 27 to protest proposed cuts of grants to universities and colleges in the area of health care by the Trump administration. The main demands were: “Protect our patients! Protect our research! Protect our teaching! Protect our students!” The motivation for this protest reads in part: “Several CUIMC researchers will share their stories about their terminated grants, and we hope to build a community who want to raise our voices against the assaults on higher education and especially on health research from the federal government.”

Backlash To Transgender Health Care Isn’t New

April 1, 2025 Samantha Rosenthal, Scheer Post. , , ,
In the past century, there have been three waves of opposition to transgender health care. In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, they cracked down on transgender medical research and clinical practice in Europe. In 1979, a research report critical of transgender medicine led to the closure of the most well-respected clinics in the United States. And since 2021, when Arkansas became the first U.S. state among now at least 21 other states banning gender-affirming care for minors, we have been living in a third wave. In my work as a scholar of transgender history, I study the long history of gender-affirming care in the U.S., which has been practiced since at least the 1940s.

How Medicaid Cuts Could Devastate Tribal Health Systems

March 29, 2025 Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez, In These Times. , , ,
As Congress mulls potentially massive cuts to federal Medicaid funding, health centers that serve Native American communities, such as the Oneida Community Health Center near Green Bay, Wisconsin, are bracing for catastrophe. That’s because more than 40% of the about 15,000 patients the center serves are enrolled in Medicaid. Cuts to the program would be detrimental to those patients and the facility, said Debra Danforth, the director of the Oneida Comprehensive Health Division and a citizen of the Oneida Nation. “It would be a tremendous hit,” she said.

Fighting The Trans Care Scare

March 23, 2025 Eva Moschitto, The Indypendent. , , ,
Less than 48 hours after NYU ­Langone canceled gender-affirming care appointments for two trans children, over one thousand protesters, including doctors, parents, students and teachers, showed up at the Upper East Side hospital for an action organized by the Democratic Socialists of America. Five days later, several thousand people gathered in Union Square for a “Rise Up for Trans Youth” rally organized by Transformative Schools, Act Up NY and the Gender Liberation Movement.  Attorney General Letitia James sent a letter reminding health care providers of their obligation to comply with state anti-discrimination laws, “regardless of the availability of federal funding.” 

Critics Of Veterans Administration Cuts Say, ‘This Is Life And Death Stuff’

March 21, 2025 Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early, Washington Monthly. , , , ,
Earlier this month, Vietnam War veteran Paul Cox went to a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical center in St. Louis to visit a sick friend. When he left the hospital, he encountered a woman handing out flyers in its parking lot. “VA workers are being fired,” her leaflet said. “This can hurt your care. This is an assault on the VA. Call or email your Senators and Representatives as soon as you can.” Cox, a leading Veterans for Peace (VFP) member and supporter of its Save Our VA (SOVA) committee, has distributed similar appeals on many occasions, often to support VA caregivers.

Nicaragua Ranks Highest In Gender Equity In The Americas

March 20, 2025 Jameela Alexander, Kenneth Yale, Deanna Risser, and Geraldine Cawthorne, Popular Resistance. , , , ,
If you asked 100 people in the U.S. or the U.K. to name the country leading gender equity in the Americas, it’s unlikely anyone would correctly answer Nicaragua. This lack of awareness reflects the success of a decades-long imperialist campaign to discredit and undermine Nicaragua’s remarkable achievements since the 1979 revolution. The U.S has continuously attempted to destroy the Sandinista revolution, from the contra wars, through active support for the 16 years of neo-liberal government, to the 2018 attempted coup, and the current punitive economic sanctions.

Ms. Farmer’s Law Protects Trans Women

March 19, 2025 Lolo Serrano, Workers World. , , , , ,
On his first day in office, President Trump 2.0 signed Executive Order 14168: “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” EO 14168 sets in motion an attack on trans people throughout the country — then, using trans people as a springboard, an attack on incarcerated people as a whole. Within weeks of Inauguration Day, Trump’s Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP) announced plans for implementing EO 14168. FBOP officials told the less-than-two-dozen trans women housed in women’s facilities that they would be summarily transferred to men’s prisons.

Call To Action May 31, 2025: Demand Health Not Profit!

March 17, 2025 National Single Payer. , , , ,
Following the shooting in December of United Health Care CEO, Brian Thompson, the response from Americans was not your typical “sending thoughts and prayers.” The rage, frustration, and disgust directed at the “victim” surprised many. Quickly enough, it became clear why people were responding with anger and not condolences. Many recognized that the victims included people who have been wronged by a cruel, expensive, failed broken health care system. Brian Thompson symbolized an ugly, rapacious industry. It was hard to mourn its death.

Unionizing United Healthcare

March 17, 2025 Benjamin Y. Fong, Portside. , , , ,
There were 122 National Labor Relations Board representation elections run in February 2025, and ten involved units of 250 or more eligible voters. Those ten elections, however, involved 74 percent of all eligible voters that month. The highest-profile election was the loss at the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Garner, North Carolina, which my colleague Jonathan Rosenblum covers well here. Jonathan and I offer some more in-depth thoughts on what recent news in the world of Amazon organizing means in a recent article in these pages, but in brief: it’s going to be very difficult to make much headway with this company with traditional site-by-site organizing methods.

Caribbean Leaders Oppose US Policy Targeting Cuban Medical Missions

March 13, 2025 Bert Wilkinson, Resumen English. , , , ,
Caribbean leaders are pushing back against a new U.S. policy that aims to crack down on Cuban medical missions, saying that the work of hundreds of Cuban medical staff across the region is essential. Hugh Todd, Guyana’s foreign minister, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that foreign ministers from a 15-member Caribbean trade bloc known as Caricom recently met with U.S. Special Envoy for Latin America Mauricio Claver-Carone in Washington, D.C. after the U.S. threatened to restrict the visas of those involved with Cuban missions, which U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called “forced labor.”
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