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Health Care

Rally To Save Labor And Delivery Department At St. Francis Hospital

December 23, 2022 Ryan Hamann, Fight Back News. , , , ,
Milwaukee, Wisconsin - More than 60 workers and union members from Ascension St. Francis Hospital (SFH), together with community supporters, gathered outside Milwaukee’s city hall on the evening of December 20. The event was called for by the Wisconsin Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals (WFNHP) Local 5000, the union which represents nurses and technical and service employees at the hospital. The purpose for the rally was to raise awareness around the services being cut at the hospital, specifically management’s decision to close down the labor and delivery department. This closure isn’t only significant because of the jobs being lost, but because it is the only unit of its kind on Milwaukee’s South Side, home to many working Chicano/Mexicano families.

Alta Bates Nurses Revolt

December 22, 2022 Sarah Hughes, Labor Notes. , , , ,
Nurses at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center are set to vote on a tentative contract agreement on December 21, ahead of their Christmas Eve strike date. The problem? The negotiating committee of elected nurses is unanimous in its rejection of what Summit management says is its “last, best, and final” offer. Vocal member leaders at the Oakland-area complex allege that California Nurses Association (CNA) staff are ignoring the objections of the negotiating team and pushing a bad agreement on the members. Notably, while many nurses have been making gains at the bargaining table, the Alta Bates tentative agreement includes concessions, including the loss of the defined-benefit pension plan for new hires, who would be moved to a “cash balance design.”

Disabled Minnesotans Are Facing A Home Care Crisis

December 21, 2022 Isabela Escalona, The Real News Network. , , , ,
Minnesota - Gail Larson lives in Bloomington, Minnesota, with her fiancé, whom she has been partners with for 20 years. For years, they did not marry due to a federal law that prohibits most married people from working as Medicaid-funded personal care assistants (PCAs) for their spouses.* Her fiancé, Ronald, is a veteran who suffered a traumatic brain injury and has other physical and mental health needs. She describes how caring for a family member is unique because family members never truly clock out, no matter how many hours the state approves them for. “As a PCA, if the client is the person that you live with, it’s all day, no matter how many hours we are given.” The blurred line between spouse and PCA means she works many hours that she is not compensated for, Larson says.

Teaching Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago In Prison

December 19, 2022 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , ,
Two nights a week for the last four months, I plowed my way through the three volumes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago with 17 students in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University in the New Jersey prison system. No one in my class endures the extremities imposed on the millions who worked as slave labor, and often died, in the Soviet gulag, or work camps, set up after the Russian revolution. The last remnants of the hundreds of camps were disbanded in 1987 by Mikhail Gorbachev, himself the grandson of gulag prisoners. Nor do they experience the treatment of those held in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and our secret black sites who undergo mock trials and executions, torture, extreme sensory deprivation and abuse that comes disturbingly close to replicating the hell of the gulag.

Brazil: Pharma Companies Attempt To Overturn Supreme Court’s Historic Decision On Patents

December 19, 2022 Felipe Carvalho Borges Da Fonseca, People's Dispatch. , , ,
The barriers that certain intellectual property rules can generate – preventing the fair distribution of vaccines and medicines – are a recurring theme in debates on global health. Traumatic experiences such as the HIV/AIDS treatment access crisis in the 90s, the global rationing of hepatitis C treatment in 2014, and the unfair distribution of COVID-19 vaccines are concrete examples of the right to health being systematically violated when monopolies over medical technologies are established and exercised arbitrarily. It is urgent to recognize, expose and confront the abuses that are committed in the patent system that result in death and suffering for millions of people. In Brazil, we are currently experiencing a situation of triple abuse, which threatens the populations’ access to dozens of essential medicines.

Labor Leaders Provide Cover For Privatization Of Medicare

December 15, 2022 Ed Grystar, Counter Punch. , , ,
Such a statement from the AFL-CIO would suggest that labor is determined to protect Medicare and even support improving and expanding it to all Americans. Additionally, President Biden and Democrats regularly criticize Republican threats to reauthorize and voucherize Medicare. Meanwhile, what’s left out of both the Democrat talking points and the AFL-CIO’s 2022 national resolution on healthcare is any acknowledgment that the real threat to Medicare and healthcare today is the decades-long tax-subsidized privatization supported by both major parties. With major support from organized labor, including AFL-CIO President George Meany at the signing, Medicare was signed into law in 1965. Before Medicare, only 60% of those over 65 had insurance since it was unavailable or unaffordable via private insurance (seniors were charged 3x the rate of younger people).

As Long As We Are Here, We Will Keep Fighting

December 12, 2022 Viva Salud, People's Dispatch. , , ,
On June 30, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, son of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was elected in the presidential election in the Philippines. His coming to power raised concerns about the status of human rights in the country, especially when it comes to red-tagging and other forms of repression of human rights activists. Viva Salud, a Belgian organization working to protect and promote the right to health, met with Tinay Palabay, secretary-general of Karapatan, an alliance that conducts research and advocacy of human rights, to discuss what the new government will bring to health activists. I fear that Marcos will reinforce President Duterte’s culture of impunity. For instance, the new president has promised Duterte protection from international legal proceedings. This means that he cannot be sued for the human rights violations he committed during his time in office. Perpetrators among the state actors are emboldened to continue violating human rights because they’re not held accountable for previous violations.

The First Overdose Prevention Centers In US History Vote To Unionize

December 8, 2022 Left Voice. , , , ,
New York City, New York - Workers at OnPoint NYC officially submitted their demand for voluntary union recognition on Thursday, December 8. The workers, who are demanding union recognition with the New England Joint Board of UNITE HERE, are calling their union OnPoint United. They are fighting for a wall-to-wall union, greater job security for employees, better healthcare, and a democratization of the workplace. The unionizing workers recognize every worker’s right to a union. In their union recognition letter, they write: OnPoint NYC rightfully prides itself in having a workforce which is comprised of a wide range of individuals, many of whom have diverse life experience, some of whom are previously incarcerated, and many of whom come from varied levels of educational background or training. We recognize that regardless of the workforce background, level of training, or educational status, all workers have a right to a union.

Media’s Crime Hype And Scapegoating Led To Crackdown On Unhoused People

December 8, 2022 Julie Hollar, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. , , , , , , , ,
New York City, New York - For some time now, news media have been conflating crime, homelessness and mental illness, demonizing and dehumanizing people without homes while ignoring the structural causes leading people to sleep on subways and in other public spaces. With New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ latest announcement that he would hospitalize, against their will, unhoused people with mental health conditions—even those deemed to pose no risk to others—in the name of “public safety,” the local papers once again revealed a propensity to highlight official narratives and try to erase their own role in conjuring the crime hysteria that drives such ineffective and pernicious policies. Adams, who made fighting crime the centerpiece of his 2021 campaign, announced his latest plan on November 29, his latest in a series of pushes to clear unsheltered people from the streets and subways of New York City.

Black Market In Broad Daylight

December 7, 2022 Lauren Smith, Covert Action Magazine. , , , ,
Operating in the shadows is easy in the United States secondary food market, as few question what happens to food that exceeds its expiration date in leading supermarket chains across the nation. Well, truth be told, expired food gets reprocessed, repackaged, relabeled, and resold to institutions, discount retailers and restaurants. With scant regulations in place for repurposed food, and institutional purchasing specifications silent, food liquidators underbid their competitors and win contracts nearly every time. In the secondary food market, you get what you pay for, and never has the saying “garbage in, garbage out” been more appropriate. No matter how much hot sauce or gravy is added as camouflage, spoiled food products are unfit for human consumption and cause foodborne illness. Here, what you don’t know can kill you.

Health Workers And People Unite In The Struggle For Primary Care

November 20, 2022 Ana Vračar, People's Dispatch. , , , ,
Madrid, Spain - Family physicians and primary level pediatricians in the region of Madrid are preparing to go on strike on Monday, November 21. The health workers are fighting against problems that have burdened primary care services for a long time, including overload of work. “All the time we are being told that primary care is the base of the health system. But the base is falling down, and no one seems to care”, says Elena Polentinos Castro, primary health care physician and member of the Society for Family and Community Medicine (semFYC). The industrial action will take place only a week after hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Madrid demanding a better health system. Earlier, in October, more than 50,000 did the same.

UK’s NHS Workers Gear Up For Massive Action Demanding Fair Wages

November 16, 2022 People's Dispatch. , , ,
Health workers’ unions in the UK are gearing up for massive protests, including strike action, to assert the demand for decent wages and more recruitment and resources for the National Health Service (NHS). The UNISON union is currently balloting its members in England, Wales and Northern Island to determine if industrial action should be taken. Meanwhile, on November 9, the nurses’ union of Royal College of Nursing (RCN) announced plans to initiate strike action before Christmas at many big hospitals and several other NHS care facilities. The RCN union decided to go on strike after the Tory government refused to meet their demand for a pay rise between 4.5% to 5% to meet the soaring inflation, which currently stands at 10.1%. Junior doctors affiliated to the British Medical Association (BMA) are also gearing up for a strike ballot in January to protest overwork and underpayment.

Bronx Physician Residents Announce Supermajority Of Votes To Unionize

November 13, 2022 Left Voice. , , ,
The Bronx, New York - Montefiore medical residents in the Bronx announced that they reached 70 percent of votes among the 1,200 residents and fellows to unionize with the Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR). Montefiore is one of the largest employers in the Bronx and among the 50-largest employers in New York State. Montefiore residents have been organizing a union for the past year, announcing it publicly on November 1. There has been an increase in unionization among thousands of residents, who work as many as 80 hours weekly. Dr. Noa Nessim, a third-year Family Medicine resident and union organizer, denounced healthcare worker shortages in the Bronx and in the nation more broadly.

How The World Bank Weakens Health Systems

November 2, 2022 People's Dispatch. , , ,
Natalie Rhodes, PhD candidate at University of Leeds, and People’s Health Movement, along with Remco van de Pas, researcher at the Centre for Planetary Health Policy, and People’s Health Movement discuss in detail about the implications of the newly established World Bank fund for Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response and the Bank’s other policies pertaining to public health.

Florida Is Poised To Ban Gender-Affirming Care For Minors

November 2, 2022 Ezra Brain, Left Voice. , , ,
On Saturday October 29, the Florida Board of Medicine voted to begin drafting rules that will ban all gender affirming care for anyone under 18. They did this based on a “medical report” written by a dentist, after refusing to let activists and experts opposed to the ban speak at the hearing while trans youth led a die-in outside. This is the latest advance of the far-right’s deadly and radical anti-trans agenda. The Florida Board of Medicine sets and regulates medical practices and medical professionals in the state of Florida. This rule would essentially ban medical professionals from providing gender affirming care unless they want to risk losing their licenses. This vote follows the DeSantis administration issuing a non-binding order to the Florida Department of Health to stop not just medical transition but also social transition for trans children.
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