Health Care

What The US Can Learn From The Cuban Health Care System

February 10, 2024 National Single Payer, Popular Resistance. Educate! Cuba, Economic Blockade, health, Health Care, US Sanctions

David Ramirez Alvarez is Second Secretary in the Cuban Embassy, representing Cuba’s cultural and political forces sectors. He will be presenting an historical and current analysis of the Cuban health care system, how it differs from our profit-driven system, how Cuba provides comprehensive primary and quaternary health services in the face of a decades’ long illegal and brutal U.S. blockade and still has better outcomes than ours. Ramirez Alvarez will also address how the training of health care providers and scientists in Cuba is intimately connected to the socialist culture derived from the Cuban Revolution. Is a socialist culture necessary to displace our capitalist health care system?

Casualties Of A Failed Health Care System

February 6, 2024 Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect. Educate! Capitalism, Failed State, Health Care, Hospitals, Massachusetts

A couple of weeks ago, a good friend found herself in the emergency room at one of our world-class hospitals, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. After emergency surgery, the medical team decided to admit her for at least another day to monitor her recovery. What she encountered next was something out of a makeshift battlefield hospital, as rendered by Hieronymus Bosch. There were no beds available in the patient rooms, so “admitted” patients were being stashed in beds laid end to end in the emergency area. A bit of delay getting a bed is not unusual. But in this case, there were seriously ill admitted patients in 73 beds crammed into the emergency area.

What Constitutes A Living Wage?

February 4, 2024 Elise Gould, Zane Mokhiber and Katherine deCourcey, Economic Policy Institute. Educate! Family budgets, Finance and the Economy, Health Care, Living Wage

More than 20 years ago, the Economic Policy Institute created the first version of the Family Budget Calculator (FBC). Since then, we have continuously made improvements to the methodology and updated it regularly with the latest data available. This interactive tool estimates the income needed for families of different sizes and compositions to afford basic necessities in different parts of the country. EPI’s family budget tool is frequently used to gauge the adequacy of labor earnings. It has been cited by living-wage advocates, private employers, academics, and policymakers who are looking for comprehensive measures of economic security.

The Silence Of The Damned

February 1, 2024 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. Educate! Crimes against humanity, Genocide, Health Care, Hospitals, Israel, Palestine, UNRWA

There is no effective health care system left in Gaza. Infants are dying. Children are having their limbs amputated without anesthesia. Thousands of cancer patients and those in need of dialysis lack treatment. The last cancer hospital in Gaza has ceased functioning. An estimated 50,000 pregnant women have no safe place to give birth. They undergo cesarean sections without anesthesia. Miscarriage rates are up 300 percent since the Israeli assault began. The wounded bleed to death. There is no sanitation or clean water. Hospitals have been bombed and shelled. Nasser Hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals in Gaza, is “near collapse.”

Massachusetts Wakes Up To A Hospital Nightmare

January 31, 2024 Maureen Tkacik, The American Prospect. Educate! Health Care, Hospitals, Liberal class, Massachusetts, Private Equity

The group of fresh medical school grads knew something wasn’t right with Steward Health Care when they showed up in Dorchester, Massachusetts to start their residencies in Carney Hospital’s inaugural family medicine residency class during the summer of 2014 and learned the president who had recruited them had already been fired. Soon afterward, a Steward administrator admitted the new family medicine clinic and the pediatric ward they had toured on their recruitment visit were never actually opening, and that the nearby hospital at which residents were supposed to learn how to deliver babies was being shuttered entirely.

New Round Of Universal Health Coverage Policies Lies Ahead

January 31, 2024 People's Health Movement, People's Dispatch. Create! Economic insecurity, Health Care, universal healthcare, WHO

During this week’s session of the Executive Board (EB) of the World Health Organization (WHO), Universal Health Coverage (UHC) has been one of the topics in the spotlight. The original purpose of introducing the concept was to increase access to healthcare and financial protection from health expenditure. However, as Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus presented a thematic report to EB members, it became evident — yet again — that UHC-based policies are failing in achieving these goals. Instead of continuing a consistent upward trend, access to care has stagnated since 2019. Financial protection, on the other hand, has worsened.

Hospital Workers Fired After Protesting Short Staffing Sue

January 20, 2024 Mark Kreidler, Scheer Post. Resist! Health Care, Hospitals, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Scott Byington got fired a few days before Christmas, but that’s not the half of it. Prior to being terminated over the phone, Byington, a registered nurse at St. Francis Medical Center just south of Los Angeles in Lynwood, had persevered through more than three years of wage freezes and drastic staff cuts imposed by his new employer. St. Francis has said Byington was among a group of workers who violated company policy when they hand-delivered a protest letter to the Ontario headquarters of the hospital’s owner, Prime Healthcare. In an interview with Capital & Main, Byington laughed while describing the number of ways in which the company’s claim can be disproved.

The Final Nail In Psychiatry’s Antidepressant Coffin

January 18, 2024 Bruce E. Levine, Counter Punch. Educate! Antidepressants, Big Pharma, Health Care, Medications, mental health, Psychiatry

Historically, there have always been some patients who report that any treatment for depression—including bloodletting—has worked for them, but science demands that for a treatment to be deemed truly effective, it must work better than a placebo or the passage of time without any treatment. This is especially important for antidepressant drugs—including Prozac, Zoloft, and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), as well as Effexor, Cymbalta, and other serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs)—because all of these drugs have uncontroversial troubling side effects.

We Deserve Medicare For All; What We Get Is Medicare For Wall Street

January 5, 2024 Les Leopold, Common Dreams. Strategize! Health Care, Medicare for all, Private Equity, Wall Street

The United States health care system—more costly than any on earth—will become ever more so as Wall Street increasingly extracts money from it. Private equity funds own approximately 9% of all private hospitals and 30% of all proprietary for-profit hospitals, including 34% that serve rural populations. They’ve also bought up nursing homes and doctors’ practices and are investing more year by year. The net impact? Medical costs to the government and to patients have gone up while patients have suffered more adverse medical results, according to two current studies. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) recently published a paper which found: Private equity acquisition was associated with increased hospital-acquired adverse events.

Health Workers Shut Down Headquarters Of A Gaza War Profiteer

January 1, 2024 Taj Ali, Portside. Resist! Health Care, Israel, Military Industrial Complex, NHS, Palestine, United Kingdom (UK)

Last week, hundreds of UK health workers shut down the central London headquarters of US tech giant and spy firm Palantir to disrupt its business. Their mass picket aims to blockade entry to and exit from the building in protest against National Health Service (NHS) England awarding a £330 million contract to Palantir, a company that professes to be keeping the Israeli government “armed and ahead” in its ongoing bombardment of Gaza, including Israel’s systematic targeting of health care facilities, health workers, and patients. Palantir specializes in artificial intelligence–powered military and surveillance technology and data analytics, working with the CIA and the UK Ministry of Defence.

‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 81: Gaza’s Health System Being ‘Decimated’

December 26, 2023 Mustafa Abu Sneineh, Mondoweiss. Educate! Gaza, Genocide, Hamas, Health Care, Israel, Palestine, Wars and Militarism, WHO

In his first public message since October 7, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar said that the Izz al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades are waging a fierce and unprecedented battle against Israeli occupation forces in the Gaza Strip in a letter published by Al-Jazeera Arabic on their website. Sinwar’s letter was addressed to members of the Hamas political bureau amid talks of Egyptian-Qatari mediation efforts to reach a ceasefire and a hostage exchange deal with Israel. Later on Monday, however, Al-Jazeera removed the letter from its website. Sinwar said that resistance fighters inflicted significant losses on Israeli forces, targeting no less than 5,000 soldiers, killing a third of them.

Animal Pharma Industry Resists Curbing Overuse Of Antibiotics

December 23, 2023 Michaela Herrmann and Clare Carlile, DeSmog. Educate! Animals, antibiotics, Food and Agriculture, Health Care

Two years after landmark European Union legislation designed to curb the overuse of antibiotics on farms came into force, new analysis from DeSmog reveals eight key narratives the veterinary medicine and farming lobbies deploy to defend the billion-dollar market for the drugs. Aiming to combat the emergence of deadly treatment-resistant bacteria in humans, known in medical jargon as “antimicrobial resistance,” or AMR, the new rules are the world’s most rigorous legislation governing farm antibiotics. The regulations banned the “routine” use of antibiotics on farms for whole herds of healthy animals, including outlawing the practice of using antibiotics to compensate for illnesses caused by poor animal welfare and hygiene.

‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 74: Hamas Tells Israel It ‘Arrived Too Late’

December 19, 2023 Mustafa Abu Sneineh, Mondoweiss. Educate! Gaza, Genocide, Hamas, Health Care, Health Professionals, Israel, United Nations, War crimes

The atrocities Israel committed in the Gaza Strip may need a UN special tribunal, said Martin Griffiths, the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs. Griffiths told The Financial Times in an interview that he has dealt with conflicts and natural disasters in Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, and Sudan, and yet the situation in Gaza, where 136 UN workers have been killed in Israeli bombardment, is by far the worst. “None of the normal, sound foundations you see across the world for humanitarian operations in places like Syria and Afghanistan exist for us in Gaza.

Despite Biden’s Claims, Gaza Health Ministry Death Toll Is Accurate

December 19, 2023 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. Resistance Report Gaza, Genocide, Health Care, Israel, Palestine, War crimes, Wars and Militarism

The death toll of Israel’s war on Gaza reported by the Palestinian health ministry is accurate, according to two peer-reviewed studies by scientific experts published in top medical journal The Lancet. As of December 18, Israel had killed 19,453 Palestinians in Gaza, the ministry reported. Two-thirds of the deaths were children (7,729) and women (5,153). United Nations bodies, human rights organizations, and major media outlets have often used these statistics, because they have a history of being accurate. “International organizations including the United Nations usually rely on these same figures as they are seen as the best available”, the Washington Post acknowledged.

They Clean After Holiday Shoppers But They Don’t Get To Celebrate

December 11, 2023 Sarah Lazare, In These Times. Organize! Christmas, Class Struggle, Health Care, Worker Rights and Jobs

For Elbida Gomez, the winter holiday season is not marked by cheer or family time, but by an exponential increase in her workload — cleaning bathrooms and store offices, taking out the trash, mopping entrances and wiping up food from the floor of the employee cafeteria. The 43-year-old mother of two says she is one of just two people whose primary job is to clean the Woodbury, Minn., location of Cabela’s, a big box store chain that sells hunting, fishing and camping goods. Foot traffic increases as patrons do their holiday shopping. Parents line up with their children to take a photograph with Santa Claus. The floor gets covered in chocolate, candy wrappers and footprints.

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