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Health Care

The Rural South Lost 13 Hospitals In 2020

For the Southwest Georgia Regional Medical Center, the last straw was the COVID-19 pandemic, which strained the critical access hospital's already-precarious finances past the breaking point. In Florida, two hospitals closed inpatient non-emergency services after being bought out by the HCA hospital chain. In Tennessee and West Virginia, financial problems combined with the strain of the pandemic led two more rural hospitals to shut their doors. Of the 20 rural hospitals that closed in 2020, 13 were in the South, according to data from the Sheps Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which defines a closed hospital as one that no longer offers inpatient services.

Biden’s Neoliberal Rescue Of For-Profit Health System Proves We Need Medicare For All

President Biden, the Democratic Party and America's neoliberal vision of world order is rooted in an economic philosophy of privatization and financialization. To assure privatization goals of the 1% oligarchs, distinguished economist Michael Hudson writes that this is achieved by "conquering the brains of a country by shaping how people think. If you can twist their view into unreality economics, to make them think you are there to help them and not to take money out of them, then you've got them hooked." To maintain corporate control of U.S. health care insurance, our system is privatized and unregulated. Private, big insurance companies are in the business of making money, not providing health care, and when they undertake the latter, it is likely not to be in the best interests of patients or to be efficient.

Abortion Ban Repealed In New Mexico After Years Of Struggle

Radical and progressive activists recently led the way to an important victory for working-class women in New Mexico. For the past three years, several organizations in New Mexico, including the Party for Socialism and Liberation, have struggled to force the repeal of a 1969 New Mexico law which made it illegal for women to make their own decisions about their bodies. Finally reacting to significant protests, on Feb. 26, the governor signed a bill which repealed the law that made abortion illegal. This ban was, of course, unenforceable under the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. However, with the new conservative-dominated Supreme Court, the real fear that this latent law could come into effect spurred action.  PSL members joined other organizations in a series of protests during the 2018 legislative session, including a rally which disrupted proceedings.

The Major Struggle For The Rights Of Transgender People Is In The States

While the Equality Act that passed recently in the House is getting attention, the critical struggle for the rights of transgender people is taking place in state legislatures. This year, 26 states have legislation that would criminalize the provision of gender-affirming care to youth, ban transgender students from participating in athletics and more. This is an increase from 20 states last year. These bills are being pushed through by conservative Christian groups. Clearing the FOG speaks with Chase Strangio, a lawyer with the ACLU LGBT project, who is tracking the bills and working to stop them. We discuss what these anti-transgender rights bills would do, where they are imminent and what people can do to stop them.

Health Care For Trans Youth Is Under Attack In The UK

Fourteen years ago, Susan Evans left her job as a psychiatric nurse at the UK’s Tavistock GIDS clinic (the Gender Identity Development Service for child and adolescent patients) where she’d been working between 2004 and 2007. Her reason for leaving, she said, was her discomfort with the clinic providing hormone replacement care to older trans teens. She thought the clinic should be providing psychotherapy rather than “affirming” trans youth. Following the British government proposing reforms for the Gender Recognition Act in 2015, a wide range of new anti-trans organizations were formed targeting different areas of trans rights, health care, sex education and inclusion policies in schools. Within this growing interest in organizing against trans rights and health care, twelve years after she left the Tavistock clinic, Susan Evans connected with a parent (named in the case as Mrs. A) who claimed she was concerned that her child might one day be referred to the Tavistock for treatment.

Medicare-For-All Is Good For Our Towns

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, 30 million people in the U.S. had no health insurance, and about 50 million were underinsured. The pandemic has caused millions more to lose coverage because of losing their jobs. Indeed the pandemic has given us perspective on an array of injustices in our health care delivery system — including the lack of an adequate public health infrastructure, the racial disparities in access to care, the rationing of care based on ability to pay, and hospitals’ concentration on lucrative cardiac and orthopedic services rather than mental health and primary care. The U.S. spends twice as much per capita on health care as other high-income countries that provide universal coverage, and yet our health outcomes are worse.

Biden’s Health Plan Shifts Even More Public Dollars Into Private Hands

As the American Rescue Plan (ARP) winds its way through Congress, some progressives are hailing its health provisions as the greatest expansion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 10 years, while conservatives are claiming that it is a slippery slope to a national Medicare for All system. Democrats have decided to forego seeking Republican support for President Biden’s $1.9 trillion promise of relief to those suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic and recession by using the budget reconciliation process. This has Republicans worried the legislation will be used to advance the progressive agenda to expand government health care programs. However, at the end of the day, while the bill may be used to strengthen some provisions in the ACA, it will not move the United States’s health care system any closer to the popular national improved Medicare for All system that we need.

The Never Ending COVID Crisis

It was in early 2020 that the word COVID-19 entered the lexicon. In the past year more than 440,000 people in the United States have died from this disease. The impact of shutdowns meant to end the spread of disease have cost millions of people their jobs, and businesses large and small no longer exist at all. COVID-19 has proven that the political system is devoted to the interests of the billionaire class and is therefore incapable of acting in the interests of the people. The vaccines which hold some promise are distributed by the same for-profit entities that run what passes for a health care system in this country. They are distributed by criteria that each state has developed, resulting in a patchwork of 50 different rules.

Medicare For All Reaches The Crossroads

In 2021 the U.S. healthcare crisis has, again, reached a boiling point. It was already simmering in 2019 when the number of uninsured grew to 33 million. Covid then triggered a job crisis that added anywhere from 15 to 27 million to the ranks of the uninsured. The still-growing job crisis has pushed the number of uninsured near or beyond the 49 million uninsured that existed prior to Obamacare, whose goal was “universal healthcare.” It’s no surprise then that Medicare For All emerged, pre-Covid, as the most popular policy during the Presidential Democratic primaries. But after the Democratic Party organized, once again, to crush Bernie Sanders’ campaign, Biden tried to push discourse away from Medicare For All with plans to “improve Obamacare” a goal as ambitious as “patching up the Hindenburg.”

We Should All Be Outraged

Someday the world will be free of the coronavirus. Then, we will glance backward at these years of misery inflicted by virions with spike proteins that have struck down millions of people and held social life in its grip. Much will be debated about the origins of the virus and the rapidity of its spread around the world, a transmission that shows how closely interconnected we have become due to modern transportation technology. There is no going backward from the processes that will continue to shrink the globe, bringing us closer and closer together, bringing other viruses and diseases greater and greater host populations.

What Biden Can Do Without Congress

What if it could get done now? What if all (or many) of the largest problems within the United States could be solved now? What if the most exploited, the most troubled, the most chopped-up-masticated-and-drooled-out-by-the-American-machine populations could be helped right now? No Congress. No 10 years of “building up power” just to achieve a post-abuse pat on the head. None of that. Just fixing the problems now. Right now. Well, it actually is possible.  I think we can all agree that Congress is basically a pit filled with hungry crocodiles in the later stages of lead poisoning, each with a different degree of dementia. (And I know that’s being generous in terms of their mental acuity.).

Hospital Closes Without Warning Because It’s Behind On Rent

Houston, TX - Doctors and patients at the Heights Hospital were left stuck in the parking lot after being told they were not allowed in the building Monday afternoon. A note posted on the door said that the locks for the spaces rented by 1917 Ashland Ventures LLC, the owners on record of the hospital, have been changed and they will only be given keys when $461,302.24 in rent and fees are paid. Staff members said they were given no warning or opportunity to alert their patients or collect their personal items from inside. "I tried to contact the owners," said Dr. Felicity Mack, who is listed as a physician at the hospital. "They aren't responding. The title company is not responding.

Single Payer: Which Way Forward?

To say that there’s a political disconnect in the fight for a national single payer health care delivery system is to state the obvious. The struggle for M4ALL has grown due to decades of grassroots organizing alongside the gradual worsening of Americans’ health insurance coverage, with support now reaching 70% in the general public as reported by FOX News after the November elections. Yet now in the middle of a pandemic, where the USA accounts for a quarter of the world’s infections, and a third of the deaths, the USA’s for-profit healthcare system has no national plan or coordinated response. Instead, since so few Americans are going to the doctor this year, there is resounding joy in the industry as profits mount simultaneously with the despair of millions.

Eldercide In The United States

Contrary to what many believe, the tens of thousands of deaths of those living in long-term care (LTC) were no inevitable biological catastrophe. Their grieving, angry family members know better: they know the conditions that prematurely deprived their loved ones of the remainder of their lives. By December, just as vaccine distribution started, nearly 110,000 residents and staffers had died. The extra deaths among our elders constitute an appalling percentage of the 1.4 million Americans who were living in nursing homes before the pandemic. These older adults were of all races, genders, ethnicities, religions, and political persuasions.

Equity Is More Than Words

On behalf of Physician Women SOAR, an antiracist physician group, we wish to respond to the Indiana University Health (IU Health) statement regarding the medical treatment provided to the late Dr. Susan Moore, a Black physician who was admitted to IU Health in early December for COVID-19. Twelve hours after she was discharged from IU Health, Dr. Moore was readmitted to another hospital in respiratory failure, where she was quickly transferred to the ICU. Dr. Moore remained in critical condition for over two more weeks and died on December 20th. While admitted to IU Health, Dr. Moore was treated so poorly that she turned to social media to both document her experience and to seek help from her fellow physician network.
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