Health Care

US Labor Fights Back Against Amazon’s Expansion Into Healthcare

July 28, 2022 People's Dispatch. Resist! Amazon, Health Care, Labor Unions, Privatization

On July 21, Amazon announced that the corporation would buy One Medical, a national chain of healthcare clinics and services based in San Francisco, for $3.9 million. In response, unions and labor organizations marched in San Francisco’s Financial District against the deal on July 26. The march was attended by the newly-formed Amazon Labor Union (ALU), with ALU president Chris Smalls leading chants at the helm of the protest, as well as the California Labor Federation, San Francisco Labor Council, ALU, California Nurses Association, Teamsters Local 665, and Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW). “We think health care is high on the list of experiences that need reinvention,” said Neil Lindsay, SVP of Amazon Health Services, in a July 21 statement.

A Measure To Crack Down On Predatory Medical Debt Collection

July 28, 2022 Aída Chavez, More Perfect Union. Resist! Arizona, Debt, Health Care, Medical Debt

Liz Gorski was a 15-year-old in Prescott, Arizona, when she was in a car accident that changed her life, and trapped her in a cycle of medical debt. After being in a coma for five days, Gorski woke up in the hospital to a new reality. She needed surgeries, physical therapy, and extensive medical care, a bill that ended up being over a million dollars, Gorski recalled. Insurance covered some of these initial expenses, and a lawsuit several years later covered more of the bill. But she still had medical debt sent to collections. Gorski’s health problems have required lifelong treatment, as she continues to deal with the aftermath of the crash, and the medical bills keep piling up. “Every single time I go, I have a copay and then I have some part of the bill billed to me, and every month I’m paying on all of these bills just to make sure that they don’t go to collections, but sometimes they do because it’s just too many at one time,” she told More Perfect Union.Liz Gorski was a 15-year-old in Prescott, Arizona, when she was in a car accident that changed her life, and trapped her in a cycle of medical debt. After being in a coma for five days, Gorski woke up in the hospital to a new reality. She needed surgeries, physical therapy, and extensive medical care, a bill that ended up being over a million dollars, Gorski recalled. Insurance covered some of these initial expenses, and a lawsuit several years later covered more of the bill. But she still had medical debt sent to collections. Gorski’s health problems have required lifelong treatment, as she continues to deal with the aftermath of the crash, and the medical bills keep piling up. “Every single time I go, I have a copay and then I have some part of the bill billed to me, and every month I’m paying on all of these bills just to make sure that they don’t go to collections, but sometimes they do because it’s just too many at one time,” she told More Perfect Union.

Planned Parenthood Workers In Five States Unionize

July 25, 2022 Fight Back News. Organize! Abortion, Health Care, Planned Parenthood, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Minneapolis, Minnesota - On July 21, 435 Planned Parenthood workers from Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska joined the Service Employees International Union, Healthcare Minnesota and Iowa (SEIU HCMN&IA) in a resounding 90.1% yes vote. 238 workers voted to join the union, and only 26 voted not to. The Planned Parenthood workers began working with organizers at SEIU HCMN&IA in early summer of 2021. Over the next year they built an organizing committee among their coworkers with workers from all five states represented on the committee and wide representation from the 28 locations involved. In May of 2022 they felt they finally had a strong enough organizing committee to move forward and began talking to coworkers and having them sign union cards committing to join the union.

Medical Students Walk Out On Antiabortion Speaker

July 25, 2022 Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed. Resist! Abortion, Education, Health Care, Medical Students, Walkout

University of Michigan medical students walked out on a speech Sunday by an antiabortion speaker during their “white coat day” to mark the start of medical school. In the weeks before the speech, students petitioned to have the speaker changed. The speaker was Kristin Collier, an assistant professor at the medical school. She has spoken out many times against abortion. “While we support the rights of freedom of speech and religion, an anti-choice speaker as a representative of the University of Michigan undermines the University’s position on abortion and supports the non-universal, theology-rooted platform to restrict abortion access, an essential part of medical care,” said the petition. “This is not simply a disagreement on personal opinion; through our demand we are standing up in solidarity against groups who are trying to take away human rights and restrict medical care.”

Amazon Joins The Medicare Privatization Spree

July 24, 2022 Matthew Cunningham-Cook, The Lever. Educate! Amazon, Health Care, Jeff Bezos, Medicare, Privatization

Amazon, the $1.25 trillion company founded and led by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, has announced that it is acquiring One Medical, a private equity-backed primary care provider that generates over half of its revenue from Medicare. While Amazon’s profits from its core consumer retail business are dwindling, in part because of heightened competition from brick-and-mortar retailers that were shut down at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the corporation’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, continues to enjoy robust profits thanks in part to generous government contracts. Now Amazon could be attempting to build on that federal largesse by seeking to milk revenue from Medicare, the national health insurance program for seniors and people with disabilities.

‘Mothers Of Gynecology’ Monument Exposes Horrors Of Slavery

July 23, 2022 Monica Moorehead, Workers World. Educate! Black America, Health Care, History, Slavery, Torture

A righteous tidal wave of anger followed people seeing the nine-minutes-plus videotaped police lynching of George Floyd in Minneapolis late May 2020. Racist monuments glorifying the slave-owning Confederacy came tumbling down, especially in the Deep South. These acts to take down the statues were part of historic mass protests that swept the country during the summer of 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two years earlier the monument paying homage to J. Marion Sims, once praised as the “father of modern gynecology,” was removed from Central Park in New York City, following many years of protest. What led to the removal was a growing understanding and anger that Sims, a 19th century gynecologist in Montgomery, Alabama, used enslaved Black women as guinea pigs, experimenting on them with new medical techniques without using anesthesia or obtaining their consent.

‘Value-Based Care’ Is A Pretext For Privatization

July 21, 2022 Kay Tillow, Counter Punch. Educate! Corporatism, Health Care, Medicare, Privatization

Later this month, right before Medicare’s 57th birthday on July 30, corporate health care and the government players who facilitate their lucrative businesses, will gather for a summit on value-based care. They will speak of driving health equity, of reaching underserved communities, of coordination of care, and accountable care. They will insist that physicians share in risk just like insurance companies. They will advocate the transformation of health care to value-based care, supposedly founded on payment for quality rather than quantity, value instead of volume, and outcomes not fee-for-service. They will assert that this transformation brings equity, improves care, and saves money. They have no evidence to back up their assertions.

Nurses In The US Are Suffering ‘Moral Injury’

July 19, 2022 Kari Lydersen, In These Times. Educate! COVID-19, Health Care, Moral injury, Nurses, Worker Rights and Jobs

Minnesota emergency room nurse Cliff Willmeng remembers, during the early days of the pandemic, treating a patient at United Hospital who asked how the nurses were doing. The man was a Vietnam veteran, and Willmeng recalls that he said, “This is your war.” “I kind of laughed, like what do you mean by that?” said Willmeng, who recalled he didn’t grasp at the time how horrible the pandemic would become. “He said, ‘We dealt with this in Vietnam. You don’t know it yet but none of you are ever going to be the same again.’” More than two years later, Willmeng, like countless other nurses and frontline workers nationwide, knows all too well how true those words turned out to be. “The combination of the lethality of the virus and the seemingly total abandonment of collaboration from the management I was under produced anxiety and fear in me I had never felt, never,” said Willmeng.

Privatizing Medicare

July 18, 2022 Muffy Sunde, LA Progressive. Organize! Health Care, Joe Biden, Medicare, Privatization

Capping five decades of battle by the labor movement for federal healthcare for elders, Medicare was signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson. Funded by payroll taxes under Social Security, the new program provided comprehensive, low-cost care for retirees and the disabled. Medicare was part of the largest government domestic expansion since the depression-era New Deal. Shaken by civil rights protests, labor strikes and student anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, politicians responded with some valuable reforms. Medicare joined the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, federal aid for education and housing, Head Start programs and food stamp allotments as victories of the Civil Rights era. Medicare proved wildly popular. Most of organized labor and virtually all organizations of seniors supported it. Adults no longer faced bankruptcy paying for medical care.

How Cuba Is Eradicating Child Mortality And Banishing Diseases

July 16, 2022 Vijay Prashad and Manolo de los Santos, Black Agenda Report. Create! Child Welfare, Cuba, Health Care, Poverty

Palpite, Cuba, is just a few miles away from Playa Girón, along the Bay of Pigs, where the United States attempted to overthrow the Cuban Revolution in 1961. Down a modest street in a small building with a Cuban flag and a large picture of Fidel Castro near the front door, Dr. Dayamis Gómez La Rosa sees patients from 8 AM to 5 PM. In fact, that is an inaccurate sentence. Dr. Dayamis, like most primary care doctors in Cuba, lives above the clinic that she runs. “I became a doctor,” she told us as we sat in the clinic’s waiting room, “because I wanted to make the world a better place.” Her father was a bartender, and her mother was a housecleaner, but “thanks to the Revolution,” she says, she is a primary care doctor, and her brother is a dentist. Patients come when they need care, even in the middle of the night.

Houston’s Fight To Decriminalize Mental Illness And Homelessness

July 16, 2022 Atirikta Kumar, The Real News Network. Create! Health Care, Homelessness, Housing, Houston, mental health, Texas

While Harris County is spending millions of dollars on mental health services and service-providing agencies to reduce the number of mentally ill people entering its county jails, activists on the ground are tackling the problem from another angle—by providing direct support to the county’s homeless population. “We don’t have the best safety nets in Texas, and from the mental health standpoint, there really aren’t the mental health services available that people need,” Catherine Villarreal, director of communications at the Coalition for the Homeless, told TRNN. But Villarreal also stressed that, for people experiencing homelessness and/or mental health crises, the lack of healthcare resources and social support is a crisis unto itself: “when someone ends up homeless, often that didn’t happen overnight.”

A Veterans Health Commission Dies An Early Death

July 9, 2022 Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early, Washington Monthly. Educate! Health Care, Joe Biden, Privatization, Veterans

When Joe Biden ran for president in 2020, he marketed himself as a pragmatist, eager to collaborate with Republicans and capable of bridging divides because of his long experience in the Senate and as vice president. Despite this résumé, in late June Biden was rebuked by Senate colleagues on both sides of the aisle. They came together, unexpectedly, to block his nominations to a presidential commission that no one at the White House or the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) thought would be that controversial.

National Strike In Ecuador Was Also A Strike For People’s Health

July 6, 2022 People's Dispatch. Resist! Ecuador, Health Care, National Strike, Neoliberalism

After more than two weeks of mobilization, people’s movements in Ecuador reached an agreement with the government, bringing the national strike to halt. On Thursday, June 30, representatives of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), the Council of Indigenous Evangelical Peoples and Organizations of Ecuador (FEINE) and the National Confederation of Peasant, Indigenous and Afro-descendant Organizations (FENOCIN) formally recognized a list of measures announced by the government, including a 15-cent reduction of the price of diesel fuel per gallon and a continuation of the discussion on the inclusion of Indigenous communities in debates that impact their livelihoods, like exploitation of land and water sources.

Labor Condemns Supreme Court Decision Overturning Roe v. Wade

July 1, 2022 Portside. Resist! Abortion, Health Care, Labor Movement, Supreme Court

On June 27, The Supreme Court, by a 6-3 Majority took the extreme step of denying an existing constitutional right by overturning Roe V. Wade. This decision to deny women the right to an abortion is an attack on all women, is an attack on all working people The statements below by numerous labor organizations all make that point and all point to the necessity to resist and to organize. The Coalition of Labor Union Women was founded in 1974, the year after Roe v Wade confirmed a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. The CLUW founding mothers believed in a woman’s right to a safe termination of her pregnancy and we still believe every woman has that right.

Machinists’ Retirees 751 Resolve To End ACO REACH

July 1, 2022 Kay Tillow, Popular Resistance. Resist! Health Care, Labor Union, Medicare, Privatization

On June 13th the International Association of Machinists IAM 751 Retirement Club voted overwhelmingly to end the privatization of Medicare and to send their resolution to their congressional delegation, to President Biden, and to Secretary Xavier Becerra at Health and Human Services. Machinists’ District 751 represents 27,000 members who work at Boeing and some smaller shops across the state of Washington. It is one of the largest organizations within the IAM. The privatization scheme the 751 Retirement Club opposes is ACO REACH, formerly called direct contracting entities (DCE). It is a pilot program in which seniors who chose traditional Medicare are placed, without their consent, into plans that are run by insurance companies, private equity, and venture capitalists who can take as high as 40% in overhead and profit from the Medicare program.

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