Health Care

Hey, Bernie, Make It A Real Single Payer Bill…No Profits

April 26, 2022 Kay Tillow, Counter Punch. Educate! Bernie Sanders, Health Care, Medicare for all

Senator Bernie Sanders has announced that he is going to introduce his Medicare for All bill in the Senate—and hold a hearing. This is most welcome news. As Bernie campaigned for the presidency, he elevated national single payer health care, an improved Medicare for All, into the public spotlight and onto the nation’s agenda. His advocacy for Medicare for All informed millions and lifted spirits building hope that a universal single payer plan is possible in the US. He has not done that well at writing legislation. His most recent bill, the Medicare for All Act of 2019 (S. 1129), falls short of essential single payer principles and lets stand billions in profits that will undermine care and steal public funds.

US Spent 7.5 Times More On Nuclear Weapons Than Vaccine Donations

April 23, 2022 Sarah Lazare, In These Times. Educate! Health Care, Nuclear Weapons, Vaccines, Wars and Militarism

Since the pandemic began, the United States has spent 7.5 times more money on nuclear weapons than on global vaccine donations. Stated another way, the money put towards global vaccine donations has amounted to just 13% of the money put toward nuclear weapons. The comparison shows that, even during a shared international crisis, in which an outbreak anywhere threatens people everywhere, the U.S. political apparatus is far more willing to fund instruments of death than vaccines that protect life. Zain Rizvi, research director for the corporate watchdog organization Public Citizen, helped In These Times calculate the total number of dollars that went toward the purchase of global vaccine donations: roughly $7 billion. This number can be found by adding up contracts from the Department of Defense

Health Concerns Are At The Heart Of New Amazon And Starbucks Unions

April 20, 2022 Alexa Spencer, The Observer. Organize! Amazon, Health Care, Starbucks, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

When news broke on Friday, April 1, 2022 that Amazon workers in Staten Island, N.Y. had managed to organize the first union in the notoriously anti-union company’s 27-year history, a common refrain across social media went something like this: This is not an April Fool’s Day joke. The news was so noteworthy that the name of Christian Smalls, a 33-year-old Black former Amazon employee and the interim president of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) who led the walk-out, even trended on Twitter. Did Smalls and the other employees want better pay and benefits? Absolutely. But what many people may not realize is that the drive to unionize at Amazon and elsewhere is being driven by employee concerns about health and safety at work.

Gross Negligence In For-Profit Prison Health Care

April 17, 2022 Marie Kelly, Workers World. Educate! Corporatism, Health Care, Prisoner rights, Prisons

By law, people in prison have a right to get the health care they need. In the late 1970s, the U.S. Supreme Court decision Estelle v Gamble set the standard for medical rights of prisoners. But prison authorities are being criminally negligent in not providing adequate health care to incarcerated people. As the jailed population ages, 40% have chronic health conditions. The cost of providing health care has skyrocketed and local, state and federal governments have contracted with for-profit prison health care companies as a way of tightening their budgets. Private companies give a per diem rate for basic and specialty care – which would be lower if services were publicly provided. The negotiated per diem rate creates a huge profit incentive.

Child Care And Elder Care Investments Are A Tool For Reducing Inflation

April 11, 2022 Josh Bivens, Economic Policy Institute. Create! Finance and the Economy, Health Care, Inflation

Policymakers should look for any tool that can help restrain inflationary pressures without causing significant collateral damage. One such tool could be investments in child care and elder care. By subsidizing families’ use of child care and elder care and providing direct investments to providers, such investments could boost future labor supply by allowing working-age parents and children who want to look for paid employment to do so while remaining confident their family members are receiving care. Further, these investments can help dampen inflationary pressures—that rising wages could in theory contribute to—even well before they fully take effect.

Decolonizing The Healthcare System

April 4, 2022 Rae Rose, Last Real Indians. Create! Decolonization, Health Care, Indigenous culture

Mainstream healthcare is historically a twisted, uneven, financially debilitating, and constrictive path forcing incomplete ideals that do not always consider the person as a whole or the health of that individual in their totality. Specialties compartmentalize the body, concentrating on stabilizing a part without the care to follow through to care for the complete person’s needs. To often forgotten, emotional, and spiritual healing is often completely disregarded and not seen as necessary for a truly holistic recovery. The fact is today’s westernized approach of and on “holistic” healthcare is the colonizing of and plundering from many different cultures, fragmented, incomplete. Anything beyond the organ, bone, or system outside of the “specialty” team’s expertise is often given a referral or disregarded completely.

The CDC Is Beholden To Corporations And Lost Our Trust

April 4, 2022 The People's CDC, The Guardian. Create! Capitalism, CDC, COVID-19, Health Care

A new omicron variant, referred to as BA 2, is taking hold in the US. Anthony Fauci and others have said they don’t expect a new surge in the US, but BA.2 is causing devastating surges elsewhere, and the policies and behaviors we might use to prevent a surge in the US have been widely abandoned, in part thanks to the CDC’s new system for measuring and conveying Covid risk. In late February, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) unveiled a new Covid-19 monitoring system based on what they call “Community Levels.” By downplaying the importance of Sars-CoV-2 transmission, the new system instantly turned what was a pandemic map still red from Omicron transmission to green – creating the false impression that the pandemic is over.

Deterioration Of Rights Sparks Month-Long Actions Among Health Workers

April 3, 2022 People's Dispatch. Resist! Haiti, Health Care, Human Rights, Violence, Worker Rights and Jobs

Health workers in major public hospitals in Haiti have reasserted their intention to continue striking on 28 March, citing lack of action by the Ministry of Health (MoH) on their earlier demands. Nurses, physicians, lab workers and other health professionals at the Haitian State University Hospital and Justinien Hospital among other places, began to strike near the end of February. They intend to continue the action until demands are met. The workers are asking for salary adjustments, improvements to working conditions, and payment of arrears in the form of debit cards, but remain dissatisfied by the approach taken by the Ministry since they first stopped working. While emergency care services have remained operational throughout the duration of the strike, delivery of other forms of care has significantly slowed down, increasing pressure on the MoH.

Medicare For All Is Not Enough

April 3, 2022 David U. Himmelstein, Stephanie Woolhandler, Adam Gaffney, Don McCanne and John Geyman, The Nation. Create! Health Care, Medicare for all, National Health Service, Privatization

We have long advocated for single-payer national health insurance. By eliminating private insurers and simplifying how providers are paid, single-payer would free up hundreds of billions of dollars now squandered annually on insurance-related bureaucracy. The savings would make it feasible to cover the uninsured and to eliminate the cost barriers that keep even insured patients from getting the care they need. And it would free patients and doctors from the narrow provider networks and other bureaucratic constraints imposed by insurance middlemen. We still urgently need this reform. However, the accelerating corporate transformation of US health care delivery complicates this vision. In the past, most doctors were self-employed, free-standing hospitals were the norm, and for-profit ownership of facilities was the exception.

25,000 Finnish Health Workers Set To Begin Strike On April 1

March 31, 2022 People's Dispatch. Resist! Finland, Health Care, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Finland - 25,000 health care workers from six hospital districts represented by the Finnish Union of Practical Nurses (SuPer) and the Union of Health and Social Care Professionals (TEHY) are all set to go on strike starting on April 1. Unions are demanding immediate staff recruitments to solve an acute staff shortage in the social and healthcare services (Sote) sector, and a 3.6% increase on top of the annual pay raise over the next five years. On March 30, A national mediator presented a proposed settlement but it was rejected by unions who declared that the settlement did not address workers’ primary concern of staffing shortages. If the union’s demands are not met after two weeks of striking, 15,000 more health workers from other seven hospital districts also will join the strike.

Doctors Who Care For Trans Kids Are Being Targeted, Protested, Harassed

March 29, 2022 Carter Sherman, Vice. Educate! Doctors, Health Care, State legislature, Transgender Rights

Protests are pretty common at the Little Rock, Arkansas, clinic where Dr. Janet Cathey works. After all, she works for Planned Parenthood. Controversy is practically part of the job description. But at one recent protest, Cathey noticed an unusual sign. It was homemade, and it wasn’t condemning abortion. Instead, its message was: “Boys are born boys, girls are born girls.” “Oh, so they’re picking on us for the transgender care, too,” Cathey, director of gender education for Planned Parenthood of Great Plains, recalled thinking. Arkansas is the only state whose governor has signed into law a bill to restrict healthcare for trans kids, and although that law has been halted by a court challenge, it hasn’t dissuaded a flurry of other states from trying to enact similar laws this year.

The Ongoing Covid Disaster

March 28, 2022 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. Educate! COVID-19, Health Care, Joe Biden, Omicron

Nothing shows the abject failure of the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris administration like the continuing toll of covid-19 deaths in this country. A pledge to end the covid pandemic was a centerpiece of their 2020 campaign. They promised to improve upon Donald Trump’s disastrous handling of the crisis which resulted in the deaths of 385,000 people in 2020. Biden and Harris had 446,000 covid deaths as of their first anniversary in office. The total covid death toll is expected to reach 1 million by the end of March 2022. Now an Omicron subvariant, known as B.A.2, is becoming the dominant variant. The U.S. usually follows Europe in its covid rates, and on that basis scientists are predicting a new wave in the next two to three weeks.

A Radical Approach To Psychedelics And Mental Health

March 25, 2022 Mike Pappas And Dimitri Mugianis, Left Voice. Educate! Capitalism, Health Care, mental health, Psychedelic Drugs

It seems that every day there is a new article or study showing how psychedelics can be beneficial in treating the effects of psychological suffering. Now, state and local governments have passed laws decriminalizing or regulating the use of psychedelics. The battle to make these substances available to the public has been one hundreds of physicians and activists have had put forward, fighting the conservatism and insatiable thirst for profit of the healthcare system. Although the acceptance of psychedelics is a step forward, unfortunately the tendency is for these new treatments to be assimilated by the current health system that considers mental illness an individual issue and that considers health care in general as just another avenue to maximize profit.

The Coming Medicaid Purge

March 23, 2022 LibWatson, The Lever. Educate! CARES Act, Health Care, Medicaid, Pandemic

Since the start of the pandemic, Medicaid, the federal and state program to provide health insurance to low income Americans, has been far more generous than in the past. Enrollment is higher than ever, at 77.8 million. This isn’t because of some nationwide change of heart in state governments; it’s because states were paid to stop cutting people from their Medicaid rolls. Under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, the first coronavirus relief bill passed in March 2020, states received a 6.2 percent boost in federal Medicaid funding in exchange for halting disenrollments. The usual process of conducting “redeterminations,” in which states redetermine whether a beneficiary’s income levels or other factors still qualify them for Medicaid, has been paused for almost two years.

«1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 »

assetto corsa mods

Daily movement news and resources