Category: health care

  • As early as 1976, three years after Roe, Congress passed the Hyde Amendment prohibiting the use of federal funds like Medicaid for abortions, except to save “the life of the mother.” States have since enacted many other restrictive laws, such as mandating onerous insurance for clinics, requiring parental consent for an abortion, mandatory “counseling,” forced ultrasounds and waiting periods. Tax-exempt religious institutions like Catholic hospitals have prohibited their medical providers from performing abortions.

    Right-wing extremists and religious fundamentalists have waged a violent war against abortion providers and abortion seekers, including the bombing of clinics and the murder of doctors, clinic staff and patient escorts.

    The post How the ‘Janes’ created underground abortion access appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Large crowds of people took to the streets of cities and towns across the United States Friday evening to protest the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and to vow to fight for reproductive rights.

    In San Francisco, hundreds of youth-led protesters shouting slogans including “We won’t go back!” and “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries” rallied in Civic Center Plaza, while hundreds marched and staged a sit-in on Market Street.

    The post We WILL Fight Back’: Outrage, Resolve as Protests Erupt Against SCOTUS Abortion Ruling appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Medics for the People (Médecine Pour Le Peuple, MPLP) marked 50 years of providing health care to people in Belgium in 2021. The network of health houses currently employs more than 200 health workers in 11 health centers across Belgium, providing care to approximately 25,000 patients. This May, they launched a new mission statement in which they outlined their vision of how the healthcare system in Belgium can be changed in order to better serve the needs of the people. People’s Health Dispatch spoke to Janneke Ronse, President of MPLP, to learn more about the role the mission statement will play in the organization’s work and what effects it will have on the people who access healthcare services through MPLP’s health houses.

    The post Medics for the People has a radical plan to rebuild healthcare in Belgium and Europe appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Having tanked his party’s effort to expand Medicare and close the Medicaid coverage gap, Sen. Joe Manchin is now dangling his support for an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies as massive premium hikes loom for millions of people who buy insurance on the exchanges.

    Insider reported Wednesday that Manchin has “signaled he’s open to extending enhanced subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, a move that would help Democrats avert a huge political threat in the November midterms.”

    The American Rescue Plan — a Covid-19 relief package that President Joe Biden signed into law last year — included provisions that boosted ACA subsidies for low-income people and ended the income cap on subsidies. The changes were aimed at ensuring no one is forced to pay more than 8.5% of their total income to purchase health coverage in the ACA marketplace, which can be prohibitively expensive without federal subsidies.

    But the provisions are set to expire at the end of the year in the absence of congressional action, sticking the roughly 14 million people who buy insurance on the ACA exchanges with dramatically higher premiums. Notifications of premium increases would begin going out in October, just ahead of the crucial midterm elections.

    Even though eligibility for ACA subsidies — which progressives often characterize as gifts to the insurance industry — is already restricted on the basis of income, Manchin told Insider that he wants even more means testing, which he called “the main thing.”

    “We should be helping the people who really need it the most and are really having the hardest time,” said Manchin, who supported the ACA subsidy boost in the American Rescue Plan. “With healthcare, people need help. They really do.”

    That’s certainly true of people in his home state of West Virginia. After visiting a free medical clinic located just miles from Manchin’s riverfront home in Charleston, The Lever’s Andrew Perez reported earlier this week that one resident, Charles Combs, “has resorted to extracting his own teeth because dental care is too expensive.”

    Traditional Medicare currently doesn’t cover dental services. Late last year, Manchin blocked an effort — spearheaded by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — to expand the program to cover dental, vision, and hearing.

    “The Charleston clinic made clear just how badly people need such care — and not just seniors, and not just West Virginians. Combs, for instance, is still in his 50s, while the clinic saw patients of all ages driving hours from Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia,” Perez noted. “The [Remote Area Medical] clinic hinted at the kind of universal healthcare system America could have, if not for senators like Manchin and their healthcare industry donors.”

    “The organization doesn’t ask patients about what its team calls the ‘three I’s’: identification, income, or insurance,” Perez continued. “Patients are treated with kindness, compassion, and professionalism — and fairly quickly. All services are free.”

    In an interview with Punchbowl News this week, Manchin voiced concerns about the price tag of extending the ACA subsidies — scrutiny he has not applied to the trillions of dollars in Pentagon spending he’s voted for over the past decade.

    “The bottom line is there’s only so many dollars to go around,” Manchin said.

    According to a recent analysis by Families USA, the roughly 23,000 West Virginians who buy health insurance coverage on the ACA exchanges will see their annual premiums rise by an average of $1,536 — 63% — if Congress lets the subsidy provisions expire.

    “With little debate or media focus, Democrats are on the verge of dooming millions of Americans to huge new healthcare bills, which will in turn serve to ruin any hope Democrats have of winning the midterms,” journalist Jon Walker warned in The American Prospect earlier this year. “Beyond broadly hurting 14 million people, the end of these subsidies will create thousands of uniquely horrific stories of financial devastation.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The COVID-19 pandemic and the corresponding failure at every level of government to prevent its spread dealt a devastating blow to healthcare workers. Nurses, doctors, and other medical workers faced increasingly dangerous conditions, along with employers more concerned with increasing profits than saving the lives of their patients or employees. At St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, nurses fought back against their corporate employer by organizing a strike of over 700 workers that lasted for 10 months. Filmed by TRNN contributor Gino Canella, these interviews with St. Vincent nurses comprise an oral history of a ferocious labor battle that became the longest nurses’ strike in Massachusetts state history.

    The post An oral history of the 10-month St. Vincent Hospital strike appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • As reproductive rights groups brace for an anticipated US supreme court decision to overturn Roe v Wade and strike down federal abortion rights in America, workers at these groups are organizing to unionize ahead of the expected legal changes.

    About 400 workers at 28 clinics in five states in the midwest – Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota, announced in late May 2022 their intent to unionize with SEIU Healthcare Minnesota and Iowa. They have filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board after a majority of workers signed authorization cards and their request for voluntary recognition was turned down by management.

    The post Workers at US abortion rights groups seek unions to prepare for post-Roe care appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • In the early days of 2021, when it became clear no member of Congress would champion the cause of Medicare for All, a group of long-time health care activists, unionists, grassroots organizers, and progressives met to discuss the need for a national organization to unite activists across the country and rally the movement for national single payer health care free from corporate profits. The activists were frustrated. After all, the Democrats held power in the House, in the Senate, and in the Executive Branch, and yet, there was no enthusiasm for improved and expanded Medicare for All.

    The post 5 Reasons We Need A National Organization To Energize The Fight For Single Payer appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • We speak with Bishop William Barber and Reverend Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign, about plans for Saturday’s Moral March on Washington and to the Polls to demand the government address key issues facing poor and low-income communities. The march will bring together thousands of people from diverse backgrounds to speak out against the country’s rising poverty rates, voter suppression in low-income communities and more. “To have this level of poverty that’s untalked about too often … is actually morally indefensible, constitutionally inconsistent, politically insensitive and economically insane,” says Barber. Theoharis says the lack of universal healthcare in the U.S. is a major source of economic insecurity and has contributed to the COVID-19 death toll. She asks how a rich country “that spends more money on healthcare than any other nation with a comparable economy still has [these] kind of poor health outcomes.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

    As the United States experiences its worst inflation in decades with skyrocketing food, gas and energy prices, we end today’s show in Washington, D.C., where the Poor People’s Campaign has organized a massive Moral March on Washington Saturday. The demonstration is being led by low-income people and workers demanding access to stable housing, healthcare, living wages, gun control, and reproductive and voting rights.

    For more, we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by Bishop Dr. William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, president of Repairers of the Breach. We also hope to speak with Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign.

    Bishop Barber, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you can talk about what you’re doing in Washington? As inside the Capitol there is this epic historic hearing around the previous president’s attempted coup, the man who would not let go of power but was forced to in the end, I’m wondering if you could contrast what we’re seeing exposed there with what you’re doing this weekend.

    BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Well, thank you, Amy.

    We are not the insurrection. We are the resurrection, and a resurrection of thousands, of every race and creed and color and kind and geography, who are coming nonviolently to Washington, D.C., from all across this great land, to say that the 140 million poor and low-wealth people in this country, 43% of this nation, 52% of the children, 68% — 60% of Black people, 33% of — 30% of white people, 68% of Latinos, and so forth and so on, 87 million people who are uninsured or underinsured, 32 million people that get up every morning and work jobs that do not pay a living wage, less than $15 an hour — we won’t be silent or unseen anymore.

    The time has come for us to have a Third Reconstruction. We had one in the 1800s, one in the 1960s. We need one now, that’s about policy, reconstructing a moral framework, political framework in this country, because to have this level of poverty, that’s un-talked-about too often and unseen and unheard, is actually morally indefensible, constitutionally inconsistent, politically insensitive and economically insane. So people are coming. But poor people are coming to say not only do we need a moral reset — and low-wage workers are saying it — we represent 32% of the electorate now, poor people do, and 45% of the electorate in battleground states. And it’s time for that power to be organized, mobilized and felt in every election throughout this country.

    Now, when we look at what you see in these hearings, we have to ask the question, I think: Why were Trumpism or Trump and his team fighting to hold onto power? Why wouldn’t McConnell and them impeach him when they had a chance? I believe, Amy, and we believe, this isn’t just about personality, but policy. We’re witnessing a crisis of democracy, because some of the people who didn’t go along with Trump in this and didn’t go along with Eastman’s scheme still took the time to see if it was right, if there was a way they could do it. They still voted 99% of the time for Trump’s policies of extremism. And they still believe in a political policy coup d’état to suppress the vote, to rob the government of its resources by giving tax cuts to the wealthiest and to the greediest and the corporate interests, that disempowers the government from doing the things it needs to do for the least and the left-out and the workers and women. They are still the group that wants to take — to have a political coup d’état and take women’s rights to their own body. They’re still the group that wants to block living wages, block healthcare, block addressing climate change, block police violence. And all of these policies produce a policy murder. And we found out just this week that the denial of universal healthcare during COVID, for instance, has cost 330,000 lives. We found out, because of Trump and his allies’ policies in the beginning of COVID, poor people died at a rate of two to five times higher than anyone else in this country.

    So, we are the contrast. What you saw January 6th was the insurrection. What you see on Saturday is a resurrection. It’s a resurrection of people coming together, the Mass Poor People’s, Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March to the Polls. And we are calling on people to still join us at Third and Pennsylvania at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday morning.

    AMY GOODMAN: Liz Theoharis is also with us, the Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis, who is co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and president — also executive director of the Kairos Center at Union Theological Seminary.

    Liz, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you could talk about the significance of this march, and this coming at a time where a Yale study just came out saying that something like 338,000 people who died of COVID-19 during the pandemic in the United States — a third of the people — died unnecessarily, could have been saved if the U.S. had Medicare for All? Can you talk about how healthcare is a basic right, as one of the tenets of what people are calling for in Washington?

    REV. LIZ THEOHARIS: Well, thanks so much, Amy, and it is great to be back.

    And as Bishop Barber said, and as you just referenced, this study came out this week that says that, yeah, a third of the people who did not have healthcare would not have died from this pandemic. What we in the Poor People’s Campaign have been putting out, and we did a study with Jeffrey Sachs and with folks over at Columbia University that showed that between two and five times the number of poor people from poor communities died from the pandemic than richer communities and richer people. And again, this is because of these underlying issues of health inequality, of poverty, of low wages.

    And so, indeed, when we gather on Pennsylvania Avenue on Saturday and we hear the voices, the stories, but also the solutions coming out of poor and low-income people’s experience and lives, we will surely hear about the need for healthcare. As Bishop Barber has said, we need healthcare to be connected to people’s bodies, not to their jobs. And how is it, in this rich nation, that spends more money on healthcare than any other nation with a comparable economy, still has the kind of poor health outcomes, still has 87 million people who before the pandemic were uninsured or underinsured, and even some more who have — you know, tens of thousands who have lost their healthcare coverage in the worst public health crisis in generations?

    And again, this just does not have to be. It actually — you know, we could spend less on healthcare and lead healthier lives, and everyone could have universal coverage. We need to expand Medicaid, but we also need to implement a single-payer universal healthcare system. And again, this will lift society from the bottom.

    And so, this and then the cry and demand for living-wage jobs, for adequate housing, for immigration reform, for protecting this democracy, they’re all connected. And we see the interconnections, the intersections of the denial of healthcare, the destruction of our environment, the militarization of our communities, and the problems of poverty and low wages that are infecting almost half of the population, and, therefore, bringing this impoverished democracy to a real crisis.

    AMY GOODMAN: Liz Theoharis, you’ve also said that declaring war is a declaration of war on the poor. Explain.

    REV. LIZ THEOHARIS: So, you know, that actually comes from Dr. King and from many that have come before. But Dr. King, you know, when he comes out against the Vietnam War all those years ago, says that war, in all its form, is a war on the poor, and it’s cruel manipulation of the poor.

    And we’re seeing this today. I mean, we don’t have a draft in this country, but we have a poverty draft. And 22 veterans commit suicide every day in this country because of the moral costs of war. And if we look at our military budget, 53 cents of every discretionary dollar goes to the military. We can’t even spend 15 cents on healthcare and living-wage jobs and investments in our children and in anti-poverty programs combined. You know, this disproportionately impacts poor people. And that’s poor people in the United States, and that’s poor people across the world. As Dr. King said, you know, you have poor people come together from this rich nation to go and kill poor people across the world. And we’re seeing this, you know, across the world in this moment, as well.

    AMY GOODMAN: Bishop Barber, this is Pride Month, and there have been serious attacks or attempted attacks, from Coeur d’Alene to the Bay Area. You had Patriot Front in Coeur d’Alene, a small army stopped by police before they attacked a Pride march. Can you talk about the far right and the white supremacists using Christianity to justify what they’re doing?

    BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Well, I don’t call them “right.” I never use the term “far right” and “far left.” I think those terms are problematic. And one of the things the Poor People’s Campaign is saying is we need to have a moral conversation about right versus wrong, constitutional versus unconstitutional. And that’s part of our problem.

    The reality is that that’s heresy. Any time you use religion to justify violence against gay people, against women, against the poor, against any segment of a community, when you use it to suppress the vote, when you use religion to try to block living wages and healthcare, it is exactly wrong. One of the reasons it’s wrong from a moral and a religious standpoint is because those become the policies of death. You know, every piece of regressive policy costs lives. When you deny healthcare, it costs lives. When you attack LGBT communities, you cost lives. When you allow guns to flourish in the society, people to walk around with AK-47s, you cost lives. When you block living wages and people moving up out of poverty — we knew that, even before COVID hit, poor people were dying at a rate of 700 people a day, nearly 30 people an hour per day, 250,000 a year, from the effects of poverty. That is contrary to the biblical call to life. It is contrary to the call of the ancient prophets that says, “Woe unto those who legislate evil and rob the poor of their rights and make women and children their prey” — P-R-E-Y. It’s contrary to the call of Jesus, that we’re supposed to be about life and good news to the poor. And it’s contrary to the Declaration of Independence, that we are supposed to be about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and contrary to the Constitution promise to establish justice and equal protection under the law.

    We are a movement of life, though. What we are saying is — and on Saturday, we are having Black people, white people, Brown people, Asian people, Native people, gay people, straight people, Republicans, Democrats, veterans, nonveterans. These are the voices you will hear, poor and impacted people, on the stage. It’s not a march and a rally and an assembly, really, for [inaudible] —

    AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

    BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: — for people to come and talk for people. People will talk for themselves. We are the resurrection and not the insurrection.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you both so much for being with us, Bishop Dr. William Barber and Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign, holding the Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington on Saturday.

    Oh, and, Liz, I also want to congratulate your sister Jeanne Theoharis. The film The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, based on Jeanne’s best-selling book by the same title, just premiered last night at the Tribeca Film Festival, directed by our former Democracy Now! producer Yoruba Richen, as well as Johanna Hamilton. It is fantastic, not to be missed by anyone. It was at the Tribeca Film Festival.

    And that does it for our show. Democracy Now! is produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Camille Baker, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud, Mary Conlon.

    On Monday, a Juneteenth special — don’t miss it — on Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. Stay safe.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A universal health care system could have saved more than 338,000 lives in the United States by preventing roughly one in three deaths resulting from the COVID-19 infections through March 2022, according to a new study. A single-payer health care system would also have saved the nation an estimated $105.6 billion in health care costs associated with COVID treatments and hospitalizations, leading the study’s authors to conclude that universal health care, often called “Medicare for All,” is both a moral and financial imperative for policymakers.

    Published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, the study and a companion analysis are a stunning indictment of what their authors describe as a “fragmented and inefficient” health care system that leaves millions of people uninsured and underinsured every year. Americans spend more money on health care than people living in any other nation, but the U.S. has sustained 16 percent of COVID’s global “mortality burden” while only representing 4 percent of the world’s population.

    James Kahn, a professor of health policy at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co-author of the study, said the modeling and analysis present a precise estimate of the massive human and financial costs “imposed on the U.S. population by the lack of universal insurance” during the pandemic. Even in non-pandemic years, a single-payer health system would save tens of thousands of people from preventable death annually.

    “Placing the profits of private insurers over the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans is obscene,” Kahn said in a statement this week.

    By comparing the risk of death from COVID and other conditions for the insured and uninsured populations, the researchers concluded that Medicare for All could have saved 131,438 people from dying of COVID over the course of 2020 alone, when the virus swept across the country and overwhelmed local hospitals and public health systems.

    Before COVID, about 28 million people in the U.S. did not have health insurance, and another 9 million lost insurance coverage after losing their jobs during the pandemic. Millions more are underinsured and face high out-of-pocket costs for prescriptions and medical care. A recent investigation by media outlets found that 100 million people in the U.S. — about 41 percent of adults — are in debt due to unpaid medical bills.

    People who are uninsured are more likely to develop preventable conditions such as type 2 diabetes because they typically do not have a primary doctor who can catch potential health problems early on. Such comorbidities can complicate a COVID infection and increase the risk of death, as does any delay in seeking medical care.

    Uninsured (and underinsured) people are more likely to wait longer to seek treatment or attempt to avoid racking up medical bills altogether, and during a viral pandemic, that means they are also more likely to become seriously ill and transmit COVID-19 to others, according to the study. Lower-income and frontline workers may also show up to work sick if they worry about losing income or their employer’s health coverage, one reason why advocates say the government must guarantee paid sick leave for all workers along with health care.

    Opponents of Medicare for All argue a single-payer system would be expensive, but once again researchers have concluded that privatized insurance and health care services are less efficient and require far more spending. After factoring in the cost of insuring everyone in the U.S., the study concludes that universal health care would produce a net savings of $438 billion in a typical, non-pandemic year. In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, $459 billion in costs would have been saved along with so many lives.

    In a comment published at Health Justice Monitor, Kahn said the study’s modeling determined that the current health care system wasted half a trillion dollars in 2020 thanks to “ongoing inefficiency.”

    “Health care access leads to earlier diagnosis, with better treatment and reduced transmission, as well as stronger prevention such as higher vaccination rates,” Kahn wrote. “Promises of special insurance coverage for COVID fall short when individuals don’t know about it, and when implementation is seriously flawed. Fewer cases also mean lower hospital burdens that may compromise quality of care.”

    Medicare for All would also reduce administrative costs by eliminating the maze of bureaucracy created by private insurance companies, which also deflect health care spending toward advertising and legal expenses. As the primary and universal provider of health coverage, the government would also have great negotiating power over the price of pharmaceuticals, medical equipment and related fees, which would promote market efficiency and bring costs down across the board.

    Ann Keller, an associate professor of health policy and management at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that disturbing levels of preventable death during the pandemic may actually underestimate the costs of the current system’s failures. While the study looks at preventable comorbidities and other risks, it does not consider lower rates of chronic illness associated with single-payer systems in other countries.

    “Having consistent access to care can prevent chronic disease from occurring and can ensure that patients who develop chronic disease have it better managed,” said Keller, who was not involved in the research, in an interview with Scientific American. “I would think that, if one took that into account, the estimates of avoided deaths would be greater than the numbers reported here.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Elizabeth Woodruff drained her retirement account and took on three jobs after she and her husband were sued for nearly $10,000 by the New York hospital where his infected leg was amputated.

    Ariane Buck, a young father in Arizona who sells health insurance, couldn’t make an appointment with his doctor for a dangerous intestinal infection because the office said he had outstanding bills.

    Allyson Ward and her husband loaded up credit cards, borrowed from relatives, and delayed repaying student loans after the premature birth of their twins left them with $80,000 in debt. Ward, a nurse practitioner, took on extra nursing shifts, working days and nights.

    “I wanted to be a mom,” she said. “But we had to have the money.”

    The three are among more than 100 million people in America ― including 41% of adults ― beset by a health care system that is systematically pushing patients into debt on a mass scale, an investigation by KHN and NPR shows.

    The investigation reveals a problem that, despite new attention from the White House and Congress, is far more pervasive than previously reported. That is because much of the debt that patients accrue is hidden as credit card balances, loans from family, or payment plans to hospitals and other medical providers.

    To calculate the true extent and burden of this debt, the KHN-NPR investigation draws on a nationwide poll conducted by KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) for this project. The poll was designed to capture not just bills patients couldn’t afford, but other borrowing used to pay for health care as well. New analyses of credit bureau, hospital billing, and credit card data by the Urban Institute and other research partners also inform the project. And KHN and NPR reporters conducted hundreds of interviews with patients, physicians, health industry leaders, consumer advocates, and researchers.

    The picture is bleak.

    In the past five years, more than half of U.S. adults report they’ve gone into debt because of medical or dental bills, the KFF poll found.

    A quarter of adults with health care debt owe more than $5,000. And about 1 in 5 with any amount of debt said they don’t expect to ever pay it off.

    “Debt is no longer just a bug in our system. It is one of the main products,” said Dr. Rishi Manchanda, who has worked with low-income patients in California for more than a decade and served on the board of the nonprofit RIP Medical Debt. “We have a health care system almost perfectly designed to create debt.”

    The burden is forcing families to cut spending on food and other essentials. Millions are being driven from their homes or into bankruptcy, the poll found.

    KFF Health Care Debt Survey of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,674 with current or past debt from medical or dental bills, conducted Feb. 25 through March 20. The margin of sampling error for the overall sample is 3 percentage points.
    KFF Health Care Debt Survey of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,674 with current or past debt from medical or dental bills, conducted Feb. 25 through March 20. The margin of sampling error for the overall sample is 3 percentage points.

    Medical debt is piling additional hardships on people with cancer and other chronic illnesses. Debt levels in U.S. counties with the highest rates of disease can be three or four times what they are in the healthiest counties, according to an Urban Institute analysis.

    The debt is also deepening racial disparities.

    And it is preventing Americans from saving for retirement, investing in their children’s educations, or laying the traditional building blocks for a secure future, such as borrowing for college or buying a home. Debt from health care is nearly twice as common for adults under 30 as for those 65 and older, the KFF poll found.

    Perhaps most perversely, medical debt is blocking patients from care.

    About 1 in 7 people with debt said they’ve been denied access to a hospital, doctor, or other provider because of unpaid bills, according to the poll. An even greater share ― about two-thirds ― have put off care they or a family member need because of cost.

    “It’s barbaric,” said Dr. Miriam Atkins, a Georgia oncologist who, like many physicians, said she’s had patients give up treatment for fear of debt.

    Patient debt is piling up despite the landmark 2010 Affordable Care Act.

    The law expanded insurance coverage to tens of millions of Americans. Yet it also ushered in years of robust profits for the medical industry, which has steadily raised prices over the past decade.

    Hospitals recorded their most profitable year on record in 2019, notching an aggregate profit margin of 7.6%, according to the federal Medicare Payment Advisory Committee. Many hospitals thrived even through the pandemic.

    But for many Americans, the law failed to live up to its promise of more affordable care. Instead, they’ve faced thousands of dollars in bills as health insurers shifted costs onto patients through higher deductibles.

    Now, a highly lucrative industry is capitalizing on patients’ inability to pay. Hospitals and other medical providers are pushing millions into credit cards and other loans. These stick patients with high interest rates while generating profits for the lenders that top 29%, according to research firm IBISWorld.

    Patient debt is also sustaining a shadowy collections business fed by hospitals ― including public university systems and nonprofits granted tax breaks to serve their communities ― that sell debt in private deals to collections companies that, in turn, pursue patients.

    “People are getting harassed at all hours of the day. Many come to us with no idea where the debt came from,” said Eric Zell, a supervising attorney at the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland. “It seems to be an epidemic.”

    In Debt to Hospitals, Credit Cards, and Relatives

    America’s debt crisis is driven by a simple reality: Half of U.S. adults don’t have the cash to cover an unexpected $500 health care bill, according to the KFF poll.

    As a result, many simply don’t pay. The flood of unpaid bills has made medical debt the most common form of debt on consumer credit records.

    As of last year, 58% of debts recorded in collections were for a medical bill, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That’s nearly four times as many debts attributable to telecom bills, the next most common form of debt on credit records.

    But the medical debt on credit reports represents only a fraction of the money that Americans owe for health care, the KHN-NPR investigation shows.

    • About 50 million adults ― roughly 1 in 5 ― are paying off bills for their own care or a family member’s through an installment plan with a hospital or other provider, the KFF poll found. Such debt arrangements don’t appear on credit reports unless a patient stops paying.
    • One in 10 owe money to a friend or family member who covered their medical or dental bills, another form of borrowing not customarily measured.
    • Still more debt ends up on credit cards, as patients charge their bills and run up balances, piling high interest rates on top of what they owe for care. About 1 in 6 adults are paying off a medical or dental bill they put on a card.

    How much medical debt Americans have in total is hard to know because so much isn’t recorded. But an earlier KFF analysis of federal data estimated that collective medical debt totaled at least $195 billion in 2019, larger than the economy of Greece.

    Tabulations of the August 2021 Urban Institute credit bureau data.
    Tabulations of the August 2021 Urban Institute credit bureau data.

    The credit card balances, which also aren’t recorded as medical debt, can be substantial, according to an analysis of credit card records by the JPMorgan Chase Institute. The financial research group found that the typical cardholder’s monthly balance jumped 34% after a major medical expense.

    Monthly balances then declined as people paid down their bills. But for a year, they remained about 10% above where they had been before the medical expense. Balances for a comparable group of cardholders without a major medical expense stayed relatively flat.

    It’s unclear how much of the higher balances ended up as debt, as the institute’s data doesn’t distinguish between cardholders who pay off their balance every month from those who don’t. But about half of cardholders nationwide carry a balance on their cards, which usually adds interest and fees.

    Tabulations of the August 2021 Urban Institute credit bureau data.
    Tabulations of the August 2021 Urban Institute credit bureau data.

    Debts Large and Small

    For many Americans, debt from medical or dental care may be relatively low. About a third owe less than $1,000, the KFF poll found.

    Even small debts can take a toll.

    Edy Adams, a 31-year-old medical student in Texas, was pursued by debt collectors for years for a medical exam she received after she was sexually assaulted.

    Adams had recently graduated from college and was living in Chicago.

    Police never found the perpetrator. But two years after the attack, Adams started getting calls from collectors saying she owed $130.68.

    Illinois law prohibits billing victims for such tests. But no matter how many times Adams explained the error, the calls kept coming, each forcing her, she said, to relive the worst day of her life.

    Sometimes when the collectors called, Adams would break down in tears on the phone. “I was frantic,” she recalled. “I was being haunted by this zombie bill. I couldn’t make it stop.”

    Health care debt can also be catastrophic.

    Sherrie Foy, 63, and her husband, Michael, saw their carefully planned retirement upended when Foy’s colon had to be removed.

    After Michael retired from Consolidated Edison in New York, the couple moved to rural southwestern Virginia. Sherrie had the space to care for rescued horses.

    The couple had diligently saved. And they had retiree health insurance through Con Edison. But Sherrie’s surgery led to numerous complications, months in the hospital, and medical bills that passed the $1 million cap on the couple’s health plan.

    When Foy couldn’t pay more than $775,000 she owed the University of Virginia Health System, the medical center sued, a once common practice that the university said it has reined in. The couple declared bankruptcy.

    The Foys cashed in a life insurance policy to pay a bankruptcy lawyer and liquidated savings accounts the couple had set up for their grandchildren.

    “They took everything we had,” Foy said. “Now we have nothing.”

    About 1 in 8 medically indebted Americans owe $10,000 or more, according to the KFF poll.

    Although most expect to repay their debt, 23% said it will take at least three years; 18% said they don’t expect to ever pay it off.

    Medical Debt’s Wide Reach

    Debt has long lurked in the shadows of American health care.

    In the 19th century, male patients at New York’s Bellevue Hospital had to ferry passengers on the East River and new mothers had to scrub floors to pay their debts, according to a history of American hospitals by Charles Rosenberg.

    The arrangements were mostly informal, however. More often, physicians simply wrote off bills patients couldn’t afford, historian Jonathan Engel said. “There was no notion of being in medical arrears.”

    Today, debt from medical and dental bills touches nearly every corner of American society, burdening even those with insurance coverage through work or government programs such as Medicare.

    KFF Health Care Debt Survey of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,674 with current or past debt from medical or dental bills, conducted Feb. 25 through March 20. The margin of sampling error for the overall sample is 3 percentage points.
    KFF Health Care Debt Survey of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,674 with current or past debt from medical or dental bills, conducted Feb. 25 through March 20. The margin of sampling error for the overall sample is 3 percentage points.

    Nearly half of Americans in households making more than $90,000 a year have incurred health care debt in the past five years, the KFF poll found.

    Women are more likely than men to be in debt. And parents more commonly have health care debt than people without children.

    But the crisis has landed hardest on the poorest and uninsured.

    Debt is most widespread in the South, an analysis of credit records by the Urban Institute shows. Insurance protections there are weaker, many of the states haven’t expanded Medicaid, and chronic illness is more widespread.

    Tabulations of the August 2021 Urban Institute credit bureau data.
    Tabulations of the August 2021 Urban Institute credit bureau data.

    Nationwide, according to the poll, Black adults are 50% more likely and Hispanic adults 35% more likely than whites to owe money for care. (Hispanics can be of any race or combination of races.)

    In some places, such as the nation’s capital, disparities are even larger, Urban Institute data shows: Medical debt in Washington, D.C.’s predominantly minority neighborhoods is nearly four times as common as in white neighborhoods.

    In minority communities already struggling with fewer educational and economic opportunities, the debt can be crippling, said Joseph Leitmann-Santa Cruz, chief executive of Capital Area Asset Builders, a nonprofit that provides financial counseling to low-income Washington residents. “It’s like having another arm tied behind their backs,” he said.

    Medical debt can also keep young people from building savings, finishing their education, or getting a job. One analysis of credit data found that debt from health care peaks for typical Americans in their late 20s and early 30s, then declines as they get older.

    Cheyenne Dantona’s medical debt derailed her career before it began.

    Dantona, 31, was diagnosed with blood cancer while in college. The cancer went into remission, but when Dantona changed health plans, she was hit with thousands of dollars of medical bills because one of her primary providers was out of network.

    She enrolled in a medical credit card, only to get stuck paying even more in interest. Other bills went to collections, dragging down her credit score. Dantona still dreams of working with injured and orphaned wild animals, but she’s been forced to move back in with her mother outside Minneapolis.

    “She’s been trapped,” said Dantona’s sister, Desiree. “Her life is on pause.”

    KFF Health Care Debt Survey of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,674 with current or past debt from medical or dental bills, conducted Feb. 25 through March 20. The margin of sampling error for the overall sample is 3 percentage points.
    KFF Health Care Debt Survey of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,674 with current or past debt from medical or dental bills, conducted Feb. 25 through March 20. The margin of sampling error for the overall sample is 3 percentage points.

    Barriers to Care

    Desiree Dantona said the debt has also made her sister hesitant to seek care to ensure her cancer remains in remission.

    Medical providers say this is one of the most pernicious effects of America’s debt crisis, keeping the sick away from care and piling toxic stress on patients when they are most vulnerable.

    The financial strain can slow patients’ recovery and even increase their chances of death, cancer researchers have found.

    Yet the link between sickness and debt is a defining feature of American health care, according to the Urban Institute, which analyzed credit records and other demographic data on poverty, race, and health status.

    U.S. counties with the highest share of residents with multiple chronic conditions, such as diabetes and heart disease, also tend to have the most medical debt. That makes illness a stronger predictor of medical debt than either poverty or insurance.

    In the 100 U.S. counties with the highest levels of chronic disease, nearly a quarter of adults have medical debt on their credit records, compared with fewer than 1 in 10 in the healthiest counties.

    Tabulations of the August 2021 Urban Institute credit bureau data and the 2018 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data.
    Tabulations of the August 2021 Urban Institute credit bureau data and the 2018 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data.

    The problem is so pervasive that even many physicians and business leaders concede debt has become a black mark on American health care.

    “There is no reason in this country that people should have medical debt that destroys them,” said George Halvorson, former chief executive of Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest integrated medical system and health plan. KP has a relatively generous financial assistance policy but does sometimes sue patients. (The health system is not affiliated with KHN.)

    Halvorson cited the growth of high-deductible health insurance as a key driver of the debt crisis. “People are getting bankrupted when they get care,” he said, “even if they have insurance.”

    Washington’s Role

    The Affordable Care Act bolstered financial protections for millions of Americans, not only increasing health coverage but also setting insurance standards that were supposed to limit how much patients must pay out of their own pockets.

    By some measures, the law worked, research shows. In California, there was an 11% decline in the monthly use of payday loans after the state expanded coverage through the law.

    But the law’s caps on out-of-pocket costs have proven too high for most Americans. Federal regulations allow out-of-pocket maximums on individual plans up to $8,700.

    KFF Health Care Debt Survey of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,674 with current or past debt from medical or dental bills, conducted Feb. 25 through March 20. The margin of sampling error for the overall sample is 3 percentage points.
    KFF Health Care Debt Survey of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,674 with current or past debt from medical or dental bills, conducted Feb. 25 through March 20. The margin of sampling error for the overall sample is 3 percentage points.

    Additionally, the law did not stop the growth of high-deductible plans, which have become standard over the past decade. That has forced many Americans to pay thousands of dollars out of their own pockets before their coverage kicks in.

    Last year the average annual deductible for a single worker with job-based coverage topped $1,400, almost four times what it was in 2006, according to an annual employer survey by KFF. Family deductibles can top $10,000.

    While health plans are requiring patients to pay more, hospitals, drugmakers, and other medical providers are raising prices.

    From 2012 to 2016, prices for medical care surged 16%, almost four times the rate of overall inflation, a report by the nonprofit Health Care Cost Institute found.

    For many Americans, the combination of high prices and high out-of-pocket costs almost inevitably means debt. The KFF poll found that 6 in 10 working-age adults with coverage have gone into debt getting care in the past five years, a rate only slightly lower than the uninsured.

    Even Medicare coverage can leave patients on the hook for thousands of dollars in charges for drugs and treatment, studies show.

    About a third of seniors have owed money for care, the poll found. And 37% of these said they or someone in their household have been forced to cut spending on food, clothing, or other essentials because of what they owe; 12% said they’ve taken on extra work.

    The widespread burden of medical debt has sparked new interest from elected officials, regulators, and industry leaders.

    In March, following warnings from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the major credit reporting companies said they would remove medical debts under $500 and those that had been repaid from consumer credit reports.

    In April, the Biden administration announced a new CFPB crackdown on debt collectors and an initiative by the Department of Health and Human Services to gather more information on how hospitals provide financial aid.

    The actions were applauded by patient advocates. However, the changes likely won’t address the root causes of this national crisis.

    “The No. 1 reason, and the No. 2, 3, and 4 reasons, that people go into medical debt is they don’t have the money,” said Alan Cohen, a co-founder of insurer Centivo who has worked in health benefits for more than 30 years. “It’s not complicated.”

    Buck, the father in Arizona who was denied care, has seen this firsthand while selling Medicare plans to seniors. “I’ve had old people crying on the phone with me,” he said. “It’s horrifying.”

    Now 30, Buck faces his own struggles. He recovered from the intestinal infection, but after being forced to go to a hospital emergency room, he was hit with thousands of dollars in medical bills.

    More piled on when Buck’s wife landed in an emergency room for ovarian cysts.

    Today the Bucks, who have three children, estimate they owe more than $50,000, including medical bills they put on credit cards that they can’t pay off.

    “We’ve all had to cut back on everything,” Buck said. The kids wear hand-me-downs. They scrimp on school supplies and rely on family for Christmas gifts. A dinner out for chili is an extravagance.

    “It pains me when my kids ask to go somewhere, and I can’t,” Buck said. “I feel as if I’ve failed as a parent.”

    The couple is preparing to file for bankruptcy.

    About This Project

    “Diagnosis: Debt” is a reporting partnership between KHN and NPR exploring the scale, impact, and causes of medical debt in America.

    The series draws on the “KFF Health Care Debt Survey,” a poll designed and analyzed by public opinion researchers at KFF in collaboration with KHN journalists and editors. The survey was conducted Feb. 25 through March 20, 2022, online and via telephone, in English and Spanish, among a nationally representative sample of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,292 adults with current health care debt and 382 adults who had health care debt in the past five years. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points for the full sample and 3 percentage points for those with current debt. For results based on subgroups, the margin of sampling error may be higher.

    Additional research was conducted by the Urban Institute, which analyzed credit bureau and other demographic data on poverty, race, and health status to explore where medical debt is concentrated in the U.S. and what factors are associated with high debt levels.

    The JPMorgan Chase Institute analyzed records from a sampling of Chase credit card holders to look at how customers’ balances may be affected by major medical expenses.

    Reporters from KHN and NPR also conducted hundreds of interviews with patients across the country; spoke with physicians, health industry leaders, consumer advocates, debt lawyers, and researchers; and reviewed scores of studies and surveys about medical debt.

    KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • An investigation by KHN and NPR shows more than 100 million people in America, including 41% of adults, are beset by a health care system that is systematically pushing patients into debt on a mass scale. The investigation reveals a problem that, despite new attention from the White House and Congress, is far more pervasive than previously reported. That is because much of the debt that patients accrue is hidden as credit card balances, loans from family, or payment plans to hospitals and other medical providers.

    To calculate the true extent and burden of this debt, the KHN-NPR investigation draws on a nationwide poll conducted by KFF for this project. The poll was designed to capture not just bills patients couldn’t afford, but other borrowing used to pay for health care as well. New analyses of credit bureau, hospital billing, and credit card data by the Urban Institute and other research partners also inform the project. And KHN and NPR reporters conducted hundreds of interviews with patients, physicians, health industry leaders, consumer advocates, and researchers.

    The post 100 Million People in America Are Saddled With Health Care Debt appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Registered nurses picketed outside 11 Twin Cities hospitals Wednesday, calling on health care executives to put patients over profits in contract negotiations with their union, the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA).

    Talks covering 15,000 nurses in the metro and Duluth began in March. Twin Cities nurses, who work at Allina Health, Children’s Hospital, M Health Fairview and North Memorial hospitals, saw their contracts expire Tuesday.

    On a combined picket line outside United and Children’s hospitals in St. Paul, nurses said the crisis facing their profession demands urgency and bold action to keep nurses from leaving the bedside.

    The post Twin Cities Nurses Picket, Demand Hospitals put Patients over Profits appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • As governments worldwide prepare to meet at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva for its first ministerial summit since the start of the pandemic, more than 750 students across the U.S. are calling on President Joe Biden to support a comprehensive waiver of WTO rules standing in the way of COVID vaccine, test and treatment access.

    “While COVID vaccines are readily available throughout the United States, that’s still not the case for billions of people worldwide,” said Noël Hutton, student outreach coordinator for the Trade Justice Education Fund. “The U.S. has a major role to play in removing barriers to vaccine and treatment access. Each day that passes without President Biden’s leadership, there are more avoidable deaths and greater chances of a new COVID variant developing that disrupts everyone’s lives all over again.”

    The post Ahead of WTO Summit, 750 Students Nationwide Urge President Biden to Support Global COVID Vaccine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Two thousand northern California Kaiser Permanente mental health practitioners, members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) have voted to strike the giant California health maintenance organization (HMO). The result of the late May balloting was 91% in favor of walking out – the date yet to be determined.

    The vote follows a three-day strike in Hawaii. In May, Hawaiian psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses and chemical dependency counselors walked picket lines on Oahu, Maui, and the Big Island to protest Kaiser’s severe understaffing at clinics and medical facilities. Staffing, patient loads, working conditions, these issues are the same right throughout the Kaiser’s vast system. The wealthy and powerful corporation that self-advertises as non-profit and patient centered cynically refuses to meet minimal staffing requirements (mandated by state regulations and the law) while enforcing working conditions that demoralize clinicians and place mental health patients in danger (often severe, even fatal)– all in the name of the bottom line.

    The post Kaiser Clinicians Prepare To Strike. Trench Warfare in California Hospitals appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Updated: Mahmood AbdulJabbar Nooh was a 17-year-old minor when Bahraini authorities arrested him on 13 November 2019, after chasing him in the streets of AlKarranah Town without presenting any arrest warrant. During his detention, he was subjected to torture, electric shocks, and burning. He was interrogated without the presence of his lawyer and faced an unfair trial based on confessions extracted under torture. Additionally, he suffered from medical neglect. He is currently serving his sentence of 10 years in prison on politically motivated charges. He was transferred from the new Dry Dock Prison, designed for inmates under the age of 21, to Jau Prison after turning 21 years old.  

     

    On 13 November 2019, Mahmood was arrested by plainclothes officers who pursued him in civilian vehicles. They approached him in the street without presenting an arrest warrant or notifying him of the reason for his arrest. Although he was allowed to contact his family the same night of his arrest, any sort of contact was cut off from 8:30 P.M. onward. Throughout this period, his family continued to search for him in various centers and hospitals, only discovering later that he was being held at the Criminal Investigation Directorate (CID) building.

     

    At the CID, Mahmood was interrogated for around seven to nine days without the presence of a lawyer. Throughout the interrogation period, CID officers subjected Mahmood to torture in the form of electric shocks and burning, aiming to extract a confession from him. Despite having sustained injuries during the interrogation, Mahmood was denied treatment. The examining doctor asserted that the burn, located in a private area, was not a result of torture but rather occurred at the “crime scene” during Mahmood’s arrest. This explanation seems unrealistic, considering the absence of marks on any other part of his body. Mahmood’s coerced confession was subsequently used against him in court.

     

    Following his interrogation, Mahmood was brought before the Public Prosecution Office (PPO), which subsequently ordered his detention for two months. He was then transferred to the Dry Dock Detention Center. It wasn’t until a week after he arrived at the detention center that he was finally permitted to meet his family for the first time since his arrest. Throughout the initial months of Mahmood’s detention, his parents were kept uninformed of the charges of which he was accused.

     

    On 30 November 2020, the First High Criminal Court sentenced Mahmood to 10 years in prison, charging him with joining a terrorist cell. Despite the presentation of evidence in Mahmood’s defense, the court did not consider it.  Following unsuccessful appeals, both the Court of Appeal and the Court of Cassation upheld the judgment. Mahmood was then transferred to the New Dry Dock Prison to serve his sentence. Upon reaching the age of 21, he was later transferred to Jau Prison. 

     

    Mahmood suffers from sickle cell anemia and G6PD deficiency, and experiences pain in his feet and bones. The intensity of the pain increases in cold and wet climates. On 15 May 2022, he initiated a hunger strike in protest against the medical negligence practiced by the prison administration. He has consistently been denied treatment and is only taken to the clinic to take painkillers to stop the strong pain without being offered further treatment. Although the prison authorities have scheduled appointments for Mahmood at Salmaniya Hospital to receive proper medical attention, he was not taken to these appointments. On 18 May 2022, the public prosecutor met with Mahmood and promised to respect his right to treatment and transfer him to the hospital. Based on those promises, he decided to end his hunger strike. On 9 June 2022, the Ministry of Health website revealed Mahmood’s infection with COVID-19 while incarcerated in Dry Dock Prison among other prisoners.

     

    Mahmood is still suffering from severe pain and serious health complications since his arrest in 2019, as a result of the severe torture and brutal beatings he endured during ten days of interrogation. He was subjected to kicking, punching, and electric shocks all over his body, particularly in sensitive areas. These actions caused him intense pain, leaving him unable to urinate normally and experiencing blood in his stool. After enduring prolonged suffering and making repeated demands during his time in the Dry Dock Prison, Mahmood was taken to the prison clinic on several occasions. At one point, he was transferred to the AlQalaa clinic, where a forensic pathologist examined him. Despite informing the doctor of his suffering, Mahmood did not receive proper treatment or any medication. Mahmood’s suffering persists even after his transfer to Jau Prison, where he continues to experience medical neglect and a lack of proper diagnosis for his health condition.

     

    On 19 January 2024, Mahmood experienced a health setback due to the policy of medical neglect. Consequently, he was transferred to the Jau Prison clinic. Facing challenges with the responsiveness of the clinic’s physician, Mahmood was urgently transferred to Salmaniya Medical Complex due to his deteriorating condition. X-ray images revealed that he had testicular torsion, requiring immediate surgery. The doctor asked him to inform his father due to his young age as he was only 21 years old, given the impact of this process on his life. Mahmood requested the police officers accompanying him to make a phone call to his father to obtain his opinion, because he was unaware of the seriousness of the surgery and its consequences and whether it would be beneficial for him or not. Also, he had no experience with surgeries and the healthcare system. However, Mahmood’s request was forcefully rejected by the police, compelling him to make the decision alone despite his young age and the impact of this surgery on his future life. Mahmood informed the doctor of his consent to undergo the surgery. Initially, the doctor hesitated to perform it because Mahmood was alone and needed his family’s presence during this period. However, due to the seriousness of his condition and the inability to delay the procedure, the surgery proceeded. As a result, Mahmood experienced psychological pressure during the surgery and his time at Salmaniya Medical Complex, as his family was unaware of his condition and the authorities refused to allow them to be informed about his deteriorating health.

     

    Despite the necessity for accurate follow-up regarding his health condition, Mahmood continues to suffer from medical neglect. He remains unaware of any updates regarding his health status post-surgery and has not been provided with the necessary medications. Instead of providing a wheelchair to assist him in walking, considering his inability to move long distances, he was sometimes forced to move through either a food distribution cart or on a makeshift bed for sleeping.

     

    Mahmood’s warrantless arrest on politically motivated charges, torture, and unfair trial constitute clear violations of the Convention against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), to which Bahrain is a party. Furthermore, the violations he endured as a minor contravene the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), to which Bahrain is also a party. 

     

    As such, Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) calls on the Bahraini authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Mahmood. ADHRB also urges the Bahraini government to investigate the allegations of arbitrary arrest, torture, denial of access to legal counsel during the interrogation phase when he was a minor and medical neglect. ADHRB further advocates for the Bahraini government to provide compensation for the injuries he suffered due to torture and hold the perpetrators accountable. At the very least, ADHRB advocates for a fair retrial for him under the Restorative Justice Law for Children, leading to his release. Additionally, ADHRB urges the Jau Prison administration to immediately provide Mahmood with the necessary health care to address the injuries resulting from torture, holding it responsible for any additional deterioration in his health condition.

    The post Profile in Persecution: Mahmood AbdulJabbar Nooh appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

    This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

  • This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with THE CITY. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

    Sara Taylor felt the knot in her stomach pull tighter even before she answered the phone. The call was from the hospital taking care of her 11-year-old, Amari. And she knew what they were going to say: Amari was being discharged. Come pick her up right away.

    Taylor was sure that Amari — that’s her middle name — wasn’t ready to come home. Less than two weeks earlier, in March 2020, she threatened to stab her babysitter with a knife and then she ran into the street. Panicked, the babysitter called 911. Police arrived, restraining Amari and packing her into an ambulance, which rushed her to the mental health emergency room at Strong Memorial Hospital, not far from her home in Rochester, New York.

    This had all become a sickeningly familiar routine. Amari had struggled since she was little, racked by a terrible fear that Taylor — who is her great-aunt and has raised her for most of her life — would leave her and not come back. She often woke up screaming from nightmares about someone hurting her family. During the day, she had ferocious tantrums, breaking things, attacking Taylor and threatening to hurt herself.

    Taylor searched desperately for help, signing Amari up for therapy and putting her on waitlists for intensive, in-home mental health services that are supposed to be available to New York kids with serious psychiatric conditions. But the programs were full, and it took months to get in.

    During Amari’s worst episodes, Taylor had little choice but to call 911 — which Taylor, who is Black, said made her nauseous with fear. She and Amari live just a few miles from the block where Daniel Prude, a Black man with a history of paranoia and erratic behavior, was hooded and pinned to the ground by police until he stopped breathing, in a 2020 incident that began after his brother called 911 for help. Prude died days later at the hospital. In 2021, a video went viral that showed Rochester police officers handcuffing a 9-year-old Black girl and pepper-spraying her in the face while she sat, sobbing, in the back of a squad car. Every time police entered her home, Taylor was terrified that Amari would end up hurt or dead.

    “We know that Black children with mental illness are criminalized,” Taylor said. “When you have men with guns coming into your house to handle your sick child, that’s frightening.”

    Several months earlier, in 2019, Taylor had filled out paperwork to apply for a place where she thought Amari would be safe: a residential treatment facility for kids with very serious mental health conditions. But the application was still pending in March 2020, and Taylor had no idea how long it might be before Amari got a spot.

    Since the early 1980s, New York’s residential treatment facilities have served as an option of last resort for very sick children and adolescents, after outpatient and community-based services have failed. Like psychiatric hospitals, they provide round-the-clock medical and mental health care, but they are designed for much longer stays. Kids typically end up in them after cycling through emergency rooms and hospital beds without getting better. Often, they’ve had multiple encounters with police and their families see residential treatment as a last-ditch chance to get help before they end up in a juvenile lockup — or worse.

    In the past 10 years, however, more than half of New York’s residential treatment facility beds for kids have shut down, with the total bed count plummeting from 554 in 2012 to just 274 this year. Sick kids often wait months to get into the remaining beds, despite a 2005 federal court settlement in which the state agreed to cut waitlists and make admissions faster.

    State officials, who license and regulate residential treatment facilities, have done little to fix the problems, an investigation by ProPublica and THE CITY found. Instead, the officials made bed shortages worse, greenlighting facility closures even as the number of kids in psychiatric crisis soared. In recent years, the state also made the admissions system even more complex, keeping sick kids in limbo while they wait for care.

    “Years ago, when you needed to move a kid up” to a residential treatment facility, “it just got done,” said James Rapczyk, who directed mental health programs for kids on Long Island for more than a decade. In the last several years, “the system just froze up.”

    The residential treatment facility closures are part of a larger trend. New York has repeatedly promised to fix a mental health care system that officials have acknowledged to be broken, but in fact the state has made it even harder for the sickest kids to find treatment. As we reported in March, New York has shut down nearly a third of its state-run psychiatric hospital beds for children and adolescents since 2014, under a “Transformation Plan” rolled out by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. At the same time, the state promised to massively expand home-based mental health services designed to prevent kids from getting so sick that they needed a hospital or residential program at all. In reality, those services reach a tiny fraction of the kids who are legally entitled to them.

    That’s why, when the hospital called to say that Amari was ready for discharge, Taylor made one of the most difficult decisions of her life: She refused to pick Amari up. Taylor knew that she would be reported to child protective services and investigated for abandoning Amari — and that there was a chance she could lose custody of her altogether. But she was banking on the hope that, if Amari had nowhere else to go, state officials would fast-track her into residential care.

    “The last thing I wanted to do was send my little girl away from home,” Taylor said. “But I couldn’t keep her safe.”

    Up through the 1930s, children who were violent or psychotic — or even suicidal — were likely to either spend their lives in state-run asylums or be labeled as delinquents and sent to reform schools on the theory that they could be punished into good behavior.

    Residential treatment programs appeared in the 1940s, founded on the premise that kids with mental health and behavioral problems were sick, rather than criminal, and needed specialized treatment. Over the next several decades, the model evolved to include a sprawling assortment of group homes, boot camps and therapeutic boarding schools — some with horrific histories of abusing and neglecting children. As of 2020, just under 19,000 kids were living in close to 600 residential treatment centers in the United States, according to federal data.

    A few of those programs are run directly by states, but the vast majority are operated by independent providers that survive on a mix of public funds, private insurance reimbursements and patients with deep pockets. Often, insurance covers a stay of a month or two, and then families may be on the hook for anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000 for a year of treatment.

    New York created its residential treatment facility program in the early 1980s as an option for young people who tend to get kicked out of other settings. In a typical year, more than 80% of kids in the facilities are physically aggressive; about 60% have histories of running away. When young people are admitted, the state nearly always enrolls them in Medicaid, the public insurance program, which reimburses providers $500 to $725 for each day of stay. Kids live in dorms, attend full-day schools and do art and recreational therapy, in addition to traditional counseling.

    After a surge in the use of residential treatment in the 1980s and 1990s, however, advocates and the federal government have pushed to reduce the number of kids in institutions. This is partly because of new research: Studies show that young people who receive intensive mental health services at home have better outcomes — at far lower costs — than those who are removed from their families and communities. It’s also because kids in institutions are especially vulnerable to abuse. New York’s residential treatment facility providers have been sued at least five times in the past 10 years by kids who say they were sexually or physically abused by staff or other patients. (Four of the cases are still open; one was closed with no finding on the facts.)

    A decade ago, the Cuomo administration announced a plan to cut psychiatric hospital beds. Residential treatment facilities warned state officials that they might have to close beds down, too. Reimbursement rates hadn’t gone up in years, and providers couldn’t pay enough to attract employees, according to a 2013 report commissioned by a coalition of mental health care agencies.

    Rich Azzopardi, a spokesperson for Cuomo, told THE CITY and ProPublica that facility closures were part of “a national movement away from one-size-fits-all institutionalization and redirecting resources toward out-patient treatment.”

    This year, thanks to a budget surplus and an infusion of federal money, the state legislature approved increases to funding for residential treatment facilities — up to about $25 million, in addition to nearly $9 million for COVID-19 relief and employee recruitment. The state also earmarked funds to open 76 new beds where kids can stay short-term during emergencies, according to the Office of Mental Health. But much of that new money has yet to reach providers, some of whom have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on the programs in recent years.

    Keeping staff in place is a persistent challenge. Residential treatment facilities rely on workers who earn as little as $15 per hour — not enough to convince most people to work with kids who are confrontational and sometimes violent, said Cindy Lee, the CEO of OLV Human Services, which runs a residential treatment facility in Lackawanna, New York. “Our wages are not competitive with Walmart, Tim Hortons, Burger King. You can go work an eight-hour shift at Target for more money, no mandated overtime and not be challenged by children with trauma.”

    The 2013 report’s alarm bell went unheeded. By 2020, three facilities had shut down, while others cut back on beds. Then, in 2021, the system went into freefall when The Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services — one of the state’s largest providers of mental health care for kids, and one of just a few agencies to run residential programs in or near New York City — got out of the residential treatment facility business altogether, closing three sites in the Bronx and Westchester County.

    In addition to budget deficits, the facilities had faced several “programmatic concerns,” including excessive use of restraints, kids going AWOL and allegations of serious abuse, according to The Jewish Board’s closure application. But the model had also become obsolete, Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, the agency’s CEO, told ProPublica and THE CITY. The Jewish Board is expanding other programs that keep kids close to their families and get them home faster, Brenner said.

    By law, proposed residential treatment facility closures must be reviewed by a state oversight board called the Behavioral Health Services Advisory Council, which hears petitions and makes recommendations to New York’s mental health commissioner. In September 2021, when The Jewish Board presented the council with its closure plan, however, all of the residents had already been discharged. At the Bronx site, staff had vacated the premises and the parking lot was stacked with moving boxes.

    During the council meeting, members discussed their concerns about the disappearance of residential treatment facility beds. Michael Orth, the commissioner of the Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health, said that referrals had increased in the region, and that facility closures left “significant gaps” in care.

    In the end, however, the council unanimously voted yes on The Jewish Board’s closure proposal. “Telling folks to stay open when it’s fiscally unfeasible makes no sense,” another council member said.

    In response to questions about the timing of the closure application, a Jewish Board spokesperson wrote that the agency had worked with the Office of Mental Health, “diligently obtaining the required approvals at every stage of the process of closing down our three RTF programs.”

    The Office of Mental Health did not address the timing of the closure application submission, but said that all of the children from the Jewish Board facilities were appropriately discharged.

    Amari was 11 months old when she came to live with Taylor. Her biological mother — Taylor’s niece — was 18 and “so smart and capable,” Taylor said, but she was also alone and struggling with a depression that seemed to suffocate her after Amari was born. She had dropped out of high school and was bouncing from house to house when her sisters — Amari’s aunts — asked Taylor to take the baby in.

    Taylor’s own son was grown. The idea of raising another child seemed unimaginable, but she didn’t want to see Amari end up in foster care. On Memorial Day weekend in 2009, she met her nieces, with Amari, in Erie, New York. “They gave me a $100 bill, a child carrier and a gym bag and said, ‘Here she is.’ I cried like a baby,” Taylor said.

    At first, Amari saw her mom by video every night, but the calls faded away. She started calling Taylor “mommy.”

    From the beginning, she had a terrible fear of separation. She sobbed inconsolably when Taylor left her at day care in the mornings, and she threw toys and hit other kids. As she got older, she seemed to have trouble focusing and following simple instructions. Her pediatrician prescribed her medication for ADHD when she was 4.

    Later, social workers would make lists of Amari’s strengths. She loves her family and has a great sense of humor. Even at her most recalcitrant, she likes showing off her gymnastics moves. And she has very big ambitions: When she grows up, she plans to be a rapper, a nurse and an actor, she said in one clinical interview. But she was also lonely. At school, she sat by herself most of the time. At home, her tantrums spun wildly out of control. She’d exhaust herself, sobbing, “I want my mom. Why doesn’t she want me?”

    Taylor, left, has raised Amari for most of the girl’s life. Since she was little, Amari has struggled with a fear that Taylor would leave her and not come back. (Sarah Blesener for ProPublica)

    When Amari was 9, Taylor took her to a therapist, who helped to get her approved for in-home mental health services, including a crisis-response team that would come during emergencies and a specialist who would work with her on coping and social skills. But the waitlist was more than six months long, and by the time Amari finally got into the program, everything had fallen apart.

    It was the spring of 2019, and Amari was 10 years old. Her mother came for a visit, but when she left, she didn’t answer or return Amari’s phone calls. The family’s pastor, whom Amari had known since she was a baby, died suddenly. And then Taylor went on a business trip, leaving Amari with a cousin. When Taylor came back, Amari told her that the cousin’s boyfriend had molested her.

    Over the next 11 months, “our lives were chaos,” Taylor said. Amari had always been a bad sleeper; now she refused to get up in the mornings. When Taylor dragged her out of bed, she’d throw things, punch the walls, grab onto Taylor’s neck and refuse to let go. Sometimes, she told clinicians later, a “bad emoji” would tell her to do things like run out of the house, into the street. More than once, she jumped out of Taylor’s car and into traffic.

    After Daniel Prude’s death, the City of Rochester — along with many other jurisdictions, including New York City — promised to transform how emergency services responded to people experiencing mental health crises. Carlet Cleare, a spokesperson for the City of Rochester, told THE CITY and ProPublica that police officers participate in numerous mental health courses and training activities, and that all uses of force are reviewed by supervisors. In the coming year, the city will add staff to its crisis intervention programs, Cleare wrote in a statement.

    Those efforts, however, remain small and limited. The reality for most families is that, if they can’t physically contain a child who is threatening to hurt themselves or someone else, there is no option except to call 911 and wait for police.

    What happens next depends on who shows up at the door, Taylor said. Once, she and Amari got lucky. An officer who happened to have an autistic child saw Amari rushing at Taylor. Instead of putting his hands on her, he got between the two of them and talked Amari down.

    Other police officers got physical far too fast, Taylor said. “They would handcuff her, manhandle her. I would be crying.”

    By 2020, Taylor had left her job in order to take care of Amari. She started organizing support groups and advocating for families of color with kids in the mental health system, who are often reluctant to seek help because they are afraid that they’ll be reported to child protective services or that their kids will be treated like criminals, she said.

    After Prude’s death, “Black and brown parents were terrified,” Taylor said. “Nobody with a Black child with a mental health condition was calling the police.”

    Taylor, too, decided that no matter what happened with Amari, she would handle it on her own. But then, just two months after the video of Prude came out, Amari called 911 herself, intending to report Taylor for refusing to let her out of the house. When police arrived, Taylor could feel her heart pounding, she said. She tried to force the image of Prude, face down on the sidewalk and suffocating, out of her mind.

    “I went to the door as articulate as I can be, because I can’t have them coming in my house harming my child,” Taylor said. “I said, ‘My child is highly dysregulated. This is not a criminal justice issue; this is mental health. I need you to take it easy when you come in my house.’”

    At first, the officers tried to talk to Amari, but when she ran toward Taylor, they grabbed her and forced her into handcuffs, Taylor said. “I’m frantic, begging them to take it easy, telling her to calm down, saying, ‘Don’t touch her like that.’ They take her outside — rough, like a criminal. I’m crying, ‘Stop, stop!’”

    Amari struggled, refusing to get in the police car, Taylor said. “I’m watching them physically wrestle each other. It was like flashbacks. What’s going to happen when they get her in the car?”

    Eventually, an ambulance arrived, and Amari climbed into it, unhurt. But Taylor thinks a lot about what it must have been like for Amari — how much it must have scared her, and what it taught her about herself — to be physically overpowered, again and again, by adults with guns, nearly all of them men, most of them white.

    It’s damage that can’t be undone, Taylor said. “If I’m traumatized as a parent when they handcuff her and take her out like a criminal, can you imagine how she feels? This child who from the age of 10 has had multiple restraints and arrests? I can’t even imagine what that’s like for her.”

    New York’s application system for residential treatment facilities has been a subject of contention for a long time. In 1999, the Legal Aid Society filed a lawsuit against New York state’s Department of Health and its Office of Mental Health on behalf of kids who were sitting on waitlists for residential care. Many kids waited more than five months for a bed, the lawsuit alleged; some waited over a year. During that time, they were either locked in restrictive hospital units or left unsafe at home. Some ended up in juvenile or adult jails.

    The state settled with plaintiffs in 2005, with a requirement that the state must place kids in residential treatment facilities within 90 days of certifying them as eligible. A judge encouraged officials to solve the problem by opening more beds. Instead, providers and advocates say, the state created a complex, multilayered application system that slows down applications and keeps kids off the waitlist.

    “If you deem a kid eligible, you have some responsibility for providing services,” said Jim McGuirk, who recently stepped down as the executive director of Astor Services, which operates a residential treatment facility in Rhinebeck, New York. The state evades that responsibility by doing “whatever you can to reduce the waiting list by not approving people. By making it harder,” he said.

    Two years ago on Long Island — in the far corner of New York state from Rochester — a 16-year-old named M (his first initial) spent more than a year in the limbo of the application process. As a little boy, M had watched his dad abuse his mom for years, according to treatment records. After his parents split up, M got violent with his mom, hitting her and threatening to kill her when she didn’t give him what he wanted. It got so bad that his mom would lock herself in the bathroom to hide.

    When M was 12, the Office of Mental Health placed him in a community residence — a group home that’s less restrictive and has fewer services than a residential treatment facility. As M got older, however, his behaviors only got worse. He attacked workers and bullied kids who were smaller than him. M “will conduct himself in a charming manner to get what he wants,” according to notes from mental health professionals who treated him, but he “displays no remorse” and “has no empathy.”

    In June 2020, M’s treatment team submitted an application for a residential treatment facility. He urgently needed intensive treatment — in a more controlled environment — before he became an adult, his providers said. The first step was to bring his case to a regional outpost of the Office of Mental Health, where a local committee would decide whether to forward it to a second committee, which can authorize kids to be placed in residential treatment facilities.

    The rationale for the multiple layers of screening is that these facilities are such restrictive environments that, under federal law, it’s the state’s responsibility to try everything else first. In practice, providers say, the result is constant deferral and delay. If a committee doesn’t make it through all of its pending applications, “Well, wait until next month,” said Christina Gullo, the president of Villa of Hope, a nonprofit mental health care agency in Rochester that closed its residential treatment facility this year because it was running at an annual deficit of over $500,000.

    Rather than referring M’s application to the authorization committee, the local committee said that he should try to find a spot at a residential school, paid for by the state Education Department. The schools, however, rejected M because he was too aggressive and his mental health needs were too great. M’s team came back to the Office of Mental Health in October 2020. This time, the local committee declined to advance the application because it had questions about M’s physical health: Was it possible that his neurological issues or sleep apnea caused the behavior problems? Had the family tried getting services through the Office for People With Developmental Disabilities? (The answer was yes — it had turned M down too.)

    “My jaw just dropped at that one,” said a family advocate who worked with M’s mom through the process. “It’s a sin that they’re not helping this boy. He’s just falling through the cracks, and he has been for years.”

    Finally, on the third submission, the local committee agreed to pass M’s application to the authorization committee, which approved M for placement and sent his information to individual providers. By that time, however, three residential treatment facilities in the region — run by The Jewish Board — were getting ready to close. The shutdowns hadn’t yet been made public, but the facilities were discharging the kids they had, not taking new ones. One by one, the facilities turned M down.

    State data shows that delays and denials are common. While the number of applications for spots in residential treatment facilities has gone up since 2018, the share of applications that the committees approved has dropped, from close to 70% in 2018 to just over 50% in the first half of 2021. The percentage that were denied nearly doubled, from 16% to 29%. Close to 20% of committee reviews resulted in a deferral.

    And even when kids are authorized for admission, many don’t end up entering residential treatment facilities. In 2020, for example, 444 young people were approved by the authorization committees, but only 364 were actually admitted.

    Some of those kids may have gotten the treatment they needed in the community, according to James Plastiras, a spokesperson for the Office of Mental Health. In that case, “the family may decline to proceed with an RTF admission, or the child may no longer meet RTF eligibility criteria,” Plastiras wrote in a statement.

    No one would disagree that it’s best for kids to live at home whenever possible, said Rapczyk, who directed the Long Island community residence where M lived. But it doesn’t make sense to close beds when young people still can’t find outpatient care, Rapczyk said. “It was so crazy to me that they were closing all of these places without any contingency plan, in a pandemic, without any hospital beds available and kids’ mental health skyrocketing,” he said. “It was just crazy to me that this was going on.”

    For M, time ran out. He aged out of the group home and moved into an adult housing program, which — unlike in the kids’ system — can kick him out if his behavior is too disruptive.

    The next stop would be a homeless shelter or jail, M’s mom said. “He never got the help he needed, so what do you expect? The system says, ‘Oh, we’re here to help you,’ but it’s such bullshit. They just give you the runaround.

    “My fear is that it’s gonna be a complete train wreck and my son will have a truly horrible life,” she continued. “I think his evils will take him over.”

    What Taylor did in the spring of 2020 — refusing to pick Amari up from the hospital — is not so unusual, said Dr. Michael Scharf, chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center, which encompasses Strong Memorial Hospital.

    Amari first went to Strong Memorial in April 2019. She’d woken up in the middle of the night, shaking uncontrollably. Taylor took her to the emergency room, where a security guard scanned her with a wand for potential weapons and escorted her to the hospital’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program. A heavy steel door locked shut behind them. Staff sat behind thick glass.

    Once kids are inside, they wait — sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. The setup delivers the message that kids with mental health problems are bad rather than sick, Taylor said. “Children with medical conditions — they treat them completely different than children with psychiatric disorders. Our families are blamed; our children are blamed.”

    Scharf agrees that the emergency room is not a good place for kids in crisis. But like the rest of New York, Rochester faces a crisis-level shortage of outpatient mental health care. The hospital’s outpatient clinic — the largest in the region — gets calls from about 100 families a week looking for services, and it typically has at least 125 kids on a waiting list, according to a hospital spokesperson.

    Without access to outpatient care, the sickest kids often cycle in and out of hospital beds, where providers focus on treating their most acute symptoms, not on addressing long-term behavioral problems.

    The cycle is exhausting and scary for kids and their families, Scharf said. Often, hospital staff get involved in the search for residential treatment, but there are never enough beds available. “It’s almost silly to be in some of these meetings” with the Office of Mental Health, Scharf said. “They will say, ‘This child is on our highest-needs, crisis list.’ The parent thinks, ‘OK, that means something is going to happen.’ But there’s 70 people on that list. That list doesn’t necessarily mean a bed is coming.”

    A stack of Taylor’s files concerning Amari (Sarah Blesener for ProPublica)

    In a way, Amari was fortunate. In April 2020, less than a month after Taylor refused to pick her up from the hospital, the Office of Mental Health worked with a social service agency called Hillside Family of Agencies to get her into a residential treatment facility in Rochester.

    For Taylor, it was an excruciating victory. She believed that if the mental health system had done its job, Amari would never have had to leave home. But she also blamed herself. Amari’s worst fear was being abandoned, and now Taylor was dropping her off and driving away.

    She remembers sobbing all the way home. At one point, she pulled the car over to throw up. “The guilt and shame runs so deep,” she said. “I was sick in bed for two days.”

    At the facility, Amari cried for Taylor and begged to go home. Many of her behaviors got worse. Counselors wrote that she frequently tried to run away, was aggressive with her peers and made homicidal threats. She would yell and swear, pounding on the walls and flipping tables. She told an evaluator that she often wanted to hurt herself. After a few weeks, she was placed on a “prevent from leave” status, meaning that staff should physically restrain her if she tried to leave a building without permission. Even so, there was a night when she ran out of the facility and was left outside, unsupervised, with a 17-year-old boy, until morning.

    To Taylor, it seemed like she was constantly getting calls from staff saying that Amari had been restrained. She thought about bringing Amari home, but then what? Ending up in a juvenile justice facility would surely have been worse, she thought.

    Maria Cristalli, Hillside’s CEO, told THE CITY and ProPublica that staff rely on nonphysical interventions whenever possible, using restraints only as a last resort. “Hillside is committed to maintaining therapeutic environments that are free of violence and coercion,” Cristalli wrote. “We do not tolerate unnecessary, inappropriate, or excessive physical intervention.”

    In November 2020, Amari was in such constant crisis that the residential treatment facility staff applied to get her into a state-run psychiatric hospital for acute care. The hospital was full, so Amari waited more than a month to get in. When she came back to Hillside, the facility told Taylor that Amari needed an even higher level of supervision. They wanted to transfer her to their Intensive Treatment Unit — a residential treatment facility that was more restrictive, with a lower staff-to-resident ratio.

    At first Taylor said no. She spent weeks trying to secure in-home mental health services, but no one could promise her anything other than what Amari had been getting before. Eventually, she gave up and agreed to the higher-level facility. Beds were full there, too. It took six months before a spot opened up for Amari.

    Last month marked two years since Amari left home. Taylor hopes she’ll come back in the fall, in time to start a new school year. She’s given up the idea that Amari will get the services she needs at home — or that anyone, really, will be there to help her.

    “At this point, I’m just trying to keep her alive,” Taylor said, her voice breaking. “I have a very sick child. She wants to come home. How do I keep her alive?”

    Taylor is hopeful that Amari will be able to return home for school in the fall. (Sarah Blesener for ProPublica)

    Mollie Simon contributed research.

    This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

  • Last week, the Biden administration quietly reaffirmed its decision to enact the highest Medicare premium hikes in history right before this year’s midterm elections. At the same time, President Joe Biden is endorsing a plan to funnel significantly more Medicare money to insurance companies and further privatize the government insurance program for older Americans and those with disabilities.

    In effect, the higher premium increases will subsidize the larger payments to — and profits for — private insurance corporations. This comes after Biden raked in roughly $47 million from health care industry executives during his 2020 campaign.

    The Biden administration announced on May 27 that due to “legal and operational hurdles,” Medicare recipients won’t see their premiums lowered this year, even though that rate was originally hiked last November in large part due to the projected costs of paying for a controversial Alzheimer’s drug that Medicare now says it generally will not cover.

    The Biden administration announced on May 27 that due to “legal and operational hurdles,” Medicare recipients won’t see their premiums lowered this year, even though that rate was originally hiked last November in large part due to the projected costs of paying for a controversial Alzheimer’s drug that Medicare now says it generally will not cover.

    The post Biden Hikes Medicare Prices, Funnels Profits To Insurers appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • In the early weeks of the pandemic, Dr. Lorenzo González, then a second-year resident of family medicine at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, ran on fumes, working as many as 80 hours a week in the ICU. He was constantly petrified that he would catch the covid-19 virus and guilt-ridden for not having enough time to help his ailing father.

    In April 2020, his father, a retired landscaper, died of heart and lung failure. González mourned alone. His job as a doctor-in-training put him at high risk of catching the virus, and he didn’t want to inadvertently spread it to his family. Financial stress also set in as he confronted steep burial costs.

    Now, González is calling for better pay and benefits for residents who work grueling schedules at Los Angeles County’s public hospitals for what he said amounts to less than $18 an hour — while caring for the county’s most vulnerable patients.

    “They’re preying on our altruism,” González said of the hospitals. He is now chief resident of family medicine at Harbor-UCLA and president of the Committee of Interns and Residents, a national union that represents physician trainees and that is part of the Service Employees International Union.

    “We need acknowledgment of the sacrifices we’ve made,” he said.

    Residents are newly minted physicians who have finished medical school and must spend three to seven years training at established teaching hospitals before they can practice independently. Under the supervision of a teaching physician, residents examine, diagnose, and treat patients. Some seek additional training in medical specialties as “fellows.”

    These trainees are banding together in California and other states to demand higher wages and better benefits and working conditions amid intensifying burnout during the pandemic. They join nurses, nursing assistants, and other health care workers who are unionizing and threatening to strike as staffing shortages, the rising cost of living, and inconsistent supplies of personal protective equipment and covid vaccines have pushed them to the brink.

    More than 1,300 unionized residents and other trainees at three L.A. County public hospitals, including Harbor-UCLA, will vote May 30 on whether to strike for a bump in their salaries and housing stipends, after a monthslong negotiation deadlock with the county. Since March, residents at Stanford Health Care, Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, and the University of Vermont Medical Center have unionized.

    “Residents were always working crazy hours, then the stress of the pandemic hit them really hard,” said John August, a director at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

    The Association of American Medical Colleges, a group that represents teaching hospitals and medical schools, did not address the unionization trend among residents directly, but the organization’s chief health care officer, Dr. Janis Orlowski, said through a spokesperson that a residency is a working apprenticeship and that a resident’s primary role is to be trained.

    Residents are paid as trainees while they are studying, training, and working, Orlowski said, and the association works to ensure that they receive effective training and support.

    David Simon, a spokesperson for the California Hospital Association, declined to comment. But he forwarded a study published in JAMA Network Open in September showing that surgery residents in unionized programs did not report lower rates of burnout than those in nonunionized programs.

    So far, none of the new chapters have negotiated their first contracts, the national union said. But some of the longer-standing ones have won improvements in pay, benefits, and working conditions. Last year, a resident union at the University of California-Davis secured housing subsidies and paid parental leave through its first contract.

    With more than 20,000 members, CIR represents about 1 in 7 physician trainees in the U.S. Executive Director Susan Naranjo said that before the pandemic one new chapter organized each year and that eight have joined in the past year and a half.

    Residents’ working conditions had come under scrutiny long before the pandemic.

    The average resident salary in the U.S. in 2021 was $64,000, according to Medscape, a physician news site, and residents can work up to 24 hours in a shift but no more than 80 hours per week. Although one survey whose results were released last year found that 43% of residents felt they were adequately compensated, those who are unionizing say wages are too low, especially given residents’ workload, their student loan debt, and the rising cost of living.

    The pay rate disproportionately affects residents from low-income communities and communities of color, González said, because they have less financial assistance from family to subsidize their medical education and to pay for other costs.

    But with little control over where they train — medical school graduates are matched to their residency by an algorithm — individual residents have limited negotiating power with hospitals.

    For unionizing residents seeking a seat at the table, wage increases and benefits like housing stipends are often at the top of their lists, Naranjo said.

    Patients deserve doctors who aren’t exhausted and preoccupied by financial stress, said Dr. Shreya Amin, an endocrinology fellow at the University of Vermont Medical Center. She was surprised when the institution declined to recognize the residents’ union, she said, considering the personal sacrifices they had made to provide care during the pandemic.

    If a hospital does not voluntarily recognize a union, CIR can request that the National Labor Relations Board administer an election. The national union did so in April, and with a certified majority vote, the Vermont chapter can now begin collective bargaining, Naranjo said.

    Annie Mackin, a spokesperson for the medical center, said in an email that it is proud of its residents for delivering exceptional care throughout the pandemic and respects their decision to join a union. Mackin declined to address residents’ workplace concerns.

    Dr. Candice Chen, an associate professor of health policy at George Washington University, believes that the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services also bears some responsibility for residents’ working conditions. Because the agency pays teaching hospitals to train residents, it should hold the facilities accountable for how they treat them, she said. And the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which sets work and educational standards for residency programs, is moving in the right direction with new requirements like paid family leave, she added, but needs to do more.

    How far these unions will go to achieve their goals is an open question.

    Strikes are rare among doctors. The last CIR strike was in 1975, by residents at 11 hospitals in New York.

    Naranjo said a strike would be the last resort for its L.A. County members but blamed the county for continuously delaying and canceling bargaining sessions. Among its demands, the union is calling for the county to match the wage increase granted to members of SEIU 721, a union that represents other county employees, and for a $10,000 housing allowance.

    The union’s member surveys have found that most L.A. County residents report working 80 hours a week, Naranjo said.

    A spokesperson for L.A. County’s Department of Health Services, Coral Itzcalli, thanked its “heroic” front-line workforce for providing “best-in-class care” and acknowledged the significant toll that the pandemic has taken on their personal and professional lives. She said limits on hours are set by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and that most trainees report working “significantly less” than 80 hours a week.

    Jesus Ruiz, a spokesperson for the L.A. County Chief Executive Office, which manages labor negotiations for the county, said via email that the county hopes to reach a “fair and fiscally responsible contract” with the union.

    Results of the strike vote are expected to be announced May 31, the union said.

    This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

    KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • On Tuesday May 24, over 500 mental health workers will walk off the jobs at three hospitals in the Minneapolis metro area. The striking groups include mental health coordinators and psych techs, along with other job classes that perform mental health work. All three of the groups have organized and joined SEIU Healthcare Minnesota and Iowa (SEIU HCMNIA) in the last eight months and are fighting for their first contract. They work at Allina Health’s Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, Allina Health’s Unity Hospital in the Twin Cities suburb of Fridley, and MHealth Fairview Riverside Hospital in Minneapolis. While they work for three different hospitals, each with their own separate contract negotiations, the mental health workers are coordinating across the three locations and two health systems as they see the fight for a first contract with real improvements to working conditions and for safety in their jobs as a shared fight throughout the hospital industry.

    The post Newly-organized mental health workers at 3 Minneapolis hospitals set to strike Tuesday appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • A private equity–owned emergency room staffing firm cofounded by a wealthy Republican congressman has been openly hailing a coming “oversupply” of doctors, promising prospective investors that a surplus of emergency physicians — soon projected to reach nearly ten thousand — will drive doctors’ wages low enough to offset the haircut that health care reforms have imposed upon its profit margins.

    The physician glut was highlighted in a recent pitch deck prepared by the cash-strapped Nashville ER staffing firm American Physician Partners (APP). The company, which operates ERs in 155 hospitals, has been trying — and failing — for months to raise $580 million to pay off creditors, including Representative Mark Green (R-TN), who holds somewhere between $5 million and $25 million of the company’s debt.

    The post Vulture Capitalists Want to Flood the Health Care System With Cheap Medical Labor appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • I got my second COVID booster shot this morning, so if I do catch this damned thing, it won’t be for lack of ducking. The CVS worker who dosed me seemed an affable sort and the coffee had just kicked in, so I decided to have a bit of sport at the expense of the medical industry. When he brought the tray with the syringe over, I asked if it was the one with the Bill Gates microchip or the one that glows to let Satan know where I am. He stared at me a long moment, looked left and right, then leaned close and said, “5G, man. 5G.”

    It’s laughing or screaming at this point, when the mention of one conspiracy theory is parried with yet another (in this case, the outrageous idea that 5G cellphone towers are to blame for COVID-19), and that is the ignoble truth.

    With solemn tone and a truly daunting dot-matrix map of the lost, The New York Times put forth the question that nobody seems prepared to deal with at this juncture: How did this country suffer one million COVID deaths, easily the most of any country in the world, in less than three years?

    The answers are spread across a broad palette of shame and disgrace that, brushstroke by disgraceful brushstroke, combined to paint a mural of a nation in pinwheeling decline. COVID did not do this to us. Like water, it made for the lowest places and flooded the gaps until the walls crumbled, the floors cracked, and the “exceptional” country was forced to confront just how drab and subpar it really is… which may serve to explain the silence enveloping this grim and monstrous milestone.

    This is how it happens,” writes Indrajit Samarajiva, who watched as his home country of Sri Lanka collapsed after years of civil war. “Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner. If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.”

    It was capitalism, of course, that made sure this thing would rule the day. The idea of obeying science to the point that multi-billion dollar corporations might lose custom and market share for a time was more than intolerable; it was heresy spoken against the faith of the free-marketeers and their trickle-down pabulum. Minimum-wage workers behind plexiglass at the Piggly Wiggly were hailed as heroes in the media, but they weren’t heroes… or at least they didn’t want to be. They needed the money and the insurance (if any was actually available), and so they worked. Thousands were infected, and hundreds died.

    The gruesome details of COVID and the meat-packing industry are a perfect metaphor for the collision between greed and disease. According to a report by ProPublica, a cohort of meat-packing concerns combined their efforts and lobbied the Trump administration for exemptions that would allow their plants to remain open while shielding them from legal liability. Soon enough, Trump complied.

    “The effect that the meatpacking plant outbreaks had on the early spread of COVID-19 is staggering,” reads the report. “ProPublica and other news outlets tracked cases and deaths involving meatpacking workers. But academic researchers have found that by July 2020, about 6 percent to 8 percent of all coronavirus cases in the U.S. were tied to packing plant outbreaks, and that by October 2020, community spread from the plants had generated 334,000 illnesses and 18,000 COVID-19-related deaths.”

    Notwithstanding the towering courage and perseverance of the doctors and nurses who fought COVID on the front lines — wearing garbage bags and masks hosed down with Lysol in the early days because of supply snafus — the bleak truth of this country’s garbled medical industry has been exposed. This reaches beyond the overworked hospitals all the way down to the manner in which we as a nation care for our elders. COVID is exceptionally dangerous for older people, to be sure, but hundreds of thousands of elders died warehoused in “homes” staffed by brutally undertrained workers.

    This, again, was capitalism at work, the “for-profit” medical industry championed by capitalists as the best in the world. The dead know better.

    Speaking of sham capitalism, no critique of the last three years would be complete without a long look at Donald Trump himself, whose performance as president during the crisis will go down in history as one of the more spectacular failures since Icarus told his dad, “Just a little higher.”

    Everything you need to know about Trump’s long bungle of COVID can be found in the first public statement he made on the pandemic, on the last day of February 2020:

    At this moment, we have 22 patients in the United States currently that have coronavirus. Unfortunately, one person passed away overnight. She was a wonderful woman, a medically high-risk patient in her late 50s. Four others are very ill. Thankfully, 15 are either recovered fully or they’re well on their way to recovery, and in all cases they’ve been let go, and they’re home.

    Additional cases in the United States are likely, but healthy individuals should be able to fully recover, and I think that will be a statement that we can make with great surety now that we’ve gotten familiar with this problem. They should be able to recover should they contract the virus. So healthy people, if you’re healthy, you will probably go through a process and you’ll be fine.

    First of all, the deceased person he referred to was a man, not a woman, setting the tone for the fact-free avalanche of calamity his administration became in the ensuing months. The happy talk, though, is the tell: he made this statement weeks after telling journalist Bob Woodward, “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. This is deadly stuff.”

    Hundreds of thousands of deaths, along with millions of infections, lay at Trump’s spray-tanned feet, but the dying has continued through the entirety of the Biden administration. In this, we have the perfect storm: A president weighed down by the failures of his predecessor and beset by a Republican opposition that has been more than happy to use a lethal pandemic for political purposes. It also has not helped that Biden and his fellow Democrats have raised snatching defeat from the jaws of victory into a form of performance art.

    In the face of all this, frustrated silence reigns. There’s no mystery to it; a great many myths about greatness have been shredded and burned in the passage of COVID, and here we are once again confronted with a new wave of infections. New cases are exploding across the country, especially in areas where the GOP convinced people that vaccinations and masks are some sort of liberal Trojan Horse. There were more than 90,000 new infections yesterday alone, a two-week increase of 60 percent.

    Biden ordered flags to be flown at half-mast to honor the million we have lost. It is as bland a recognition as any other we have seen. The longer we refuse to face what this really is — a pandemic that has attacked us at our weakest places that were supposed to be our strongest places — the longer this will continue. It is a reckoning that must be both national and personal, or there will be no recovery at all.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • When it comes to reproductive care, Mississippi has a dual distinction. The state spawned the law that likely will lead to the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade. It is also unique among Deep South states for doing the least to provide health care coverage to low-income people who have given birth.

    Mississippians on Medicaid, the government health insurance program for the poor, lose coverage a mere 60 days after childbirth. That’s often well before the onset of postpartum depression or life-threatening, birth-related infections: A 2020 study found that people racked up 81% of their postpartum expenses between 60 days and a year after delivery. And Mississippi’s own Maternal Mortality Review Committee found that 37% of pregnancy-related deaths between 2013 and 2016 occurred more than six weeks postpartum.

    Every other state in the Deep South has extended or is in the process of extending Medicaid coverage to 12 months postpartum. Wyoming and South Dakota are the only other states where trigger laws will outlaw nearly all abortions if Roe falls and where lawmakers haven’t expanded Medicaid or extended postpartum coverage.

    “It’s hypocrisy to say that we are pro-life on one end, that we want to protect the baby, but yet you don’t want to pass this kind of legislation that will protect that mom who has to bear the responsibility of that child,” said Cassandra Welchlin, executive director of the MS Black Women’s Roundtable, a nonprofit that works at the intersection of race, gender and economic justice.

    Efforts to extend coverage past 60 days have repeatedly failed in Mississippi — where 60% of births are covered by Medicaid — despite support from major medical associations and legislators on both sides of the aisle.

    Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn, a Republican, said shortly after he killed the most recent bill that would’ve extended postpartum coverage that he’s against expanding any form of Medicaid. “We need to look for ways to keep people off, not put them on,” he told The Associated Press in March. When asked about the issue during a May 8 interview on CNN, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said, “When you talk about these young ladies, the best thing we can do for them is to provide and improve educational opportunities for them.” (Neither Gunn nor Reeves responded to requests for comment.)

    During the pandemic, a change in federal rules prevented states from cutting off Medicaid recipients, which has allowed people in Mississippi and elsewhere to retain postpartum coverage beyond 60 days. But at the end of the federal public health emergency declaration — which is set to expire in July 2022 — states will revert to their prior policies. “What we are afraid of is that when that does end, it will go back to what we knew was pre-pandemic health care,” Welchlin said.

    We discussed the implications of Mississippi’s post-Roe reality with Welchlin and two other experts in the field: Alina Salganicoff, the Kaiser Family Foundation’s director for women’s health policy, and Andrea Miller, president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health. Their answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

    What services does Medicaid provide postpartum?

    Alina Salganicoff: Typically, everything from assistance if the person is having problems breastfeeding to screening for depression services.

    Cassandra Welchlin: We know the struggles of so many who have had life threatening illnesses such as heart conditions and hypertension. We know of course that Medicaid helps in that.

    What have you seen in terms of postpartum needs in Mississippi?

    Welchlin: One of the stories that really touched me over the course of this pandemic was that of a mom who already had a child, and she needed access to child care so she could get back and forth to the doctor. During this particular pregnancy she had a severe heart disorder where she couldn’t breathe, and she had to get rushed to the hospital. Because she was so connected to doulas and a supportive care organization like us, she was able to get admitted and sure enough that’s when they diagnosed her with that heart condition. And she was a mom on Medicaid.

    What happens when mothers lose Medicaid coverage postpartum?

    Andrea Miller: Only giving someone two months postpartum doesn’t allow for the kind of continuation of care that you need. If there are indications of problems in the postpartum period, they don’t all necessarily show up within the first two months. And we certainly know that the ability to have a healthy infant and keep an infant healthy is also related to whether you have coverage. The extension to 12 months really allows for that kind of continuum of care.

    Welchlin: We know in the state of Mississippi, women die at higher rates, and of course it’s higher for Black women. And so, when women don’t have that coverage, what happens is they die.

    What does it mean to not extend postpartum Medicaid coverage if Roe falls?

    Miller: These bans on abortion are going to be layered on top of an already-unconscionable maternal and infant health crisis that most particularly impacts those who are struggling to make ends meet. It particularly impacts Black women and other communities of color…. A state like Mississippi that is so clearly wanting to ban abortions — the fact that they refuse to extend basic health care benefits that will help during pregnancy and postpartum just clearly indicates that they are not interested in the health and well-being of women and families and children, that they are purely on an ideological crusade.

    Anything else that you wanted to add?

    Salganicoff: We’re very focused on that first year of life. But if you’re speaking about a woman who is not going to be able to get an abortion that she seeks and ends up carrying the pregnancy, the supports that she’s going to need and her child is going to need go far beyond the first year of life.

    Miller: You can’t have a conversation about legality or soon-to-be illegality of abortion in these states and not have a conversation simultaneously about the existing crisis around maternal and infant health. These things are all interconnected, and that’s why it is so deeply disturbing that the states trying to ban abortion are the same states that are refusing to expand Medicaid under the ACA, that are failing to take advantage of the ability to extend postpartum [coverage] by 12 months, that don’t invest in child care, that don’t invest in education — these are all part of the same conversation.

    Welchlin: Audre Lorde said, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” So, abortion access, reproductive justice, voting rights, racial justice, gender equity — these are not separate issues, they are intersecting issues that collectively determine the quality of our lives.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

    When it comes to reproductive care, Mississippi has a dual distinction. The state spawned the law that likely will lead to the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade. It is also unique among Deep South states for doing the least to provide health care coverage to low-income people who have given birth.

    Mississippians on Medicaid, the government health insurance program for the poor, lose coverage a mere 60 days after childbirth. That’s often well before the onset of postpartum depression or life-threatening, birth-related infections: A 2020 study found that people racked up 81% of their postpartum expenses between 60 days and a year after delivery. And Mississippi’s own Maternal Mortality Review Committee found that 37% of pregnancy-related deaths between 2013 and 2016 occurred more than six weeks postpartum.

    Every other state in the Deep South has extended or is in the process of extending Medicaid coverage to 12 months postpartum. Wyoming and South Dakota are the only other states where trigger laws will outlaw nearly all abortions if Roe falls and where lawmakers haven’t expanded Medicaid or extended postpartum coverage.

    “It’s hypocrisy to say that we are pro-life on one end, that we want to protect the baby, but yet you don’t want to pass this kind of legislation that will protect that mom who has to bear the responsibility of that child,” said Cassandra Welchlin, executive director of the MS Black Women’s Roundtable, a nonprofit that works at the intersection of race, gender and economic justice.

    Efforts to extend coverage past 60 days have repeatedly failed in Mississippi — where 60% of births are covered by Medicaid — despite support from major medical associations and legislators on both sides of the aisle.

    Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn, a Republican, said shortly after he killed the most recent bill that would’ve extended postpartum coverage that he’s against expanding any form of Medicaid. “We need to look for ways to keep people off, not put them on,” he told The Associated Press in March. When asked about the issue during a May 8 interview on CNN, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said, “When you talk about these young ladies, the best thing we can do for them is to provide and improve educational opportunities for them.” (Neither Gunn nor Reeves responded to requests for comment.)

    During the pandemic, a change in federal rules prevented states from cutting off Medicaid recipients, which has allowed people in Mississippi and elsewhere to retain postpartum coverage beyond 60 days. But at the end of the federal public health emergency declaration — which is set to expire in July 2022 — states will revert to their prior policies. “What we are afraid of is that when that does end, it will go back to what we knew was pre-pandemic health care,” Welchlin said.

    We discussed the implications of Mississippi’s post-Roe reality with Welchlin and two other experts in the field: Alina Salganicoff, the Kaiser Family Foundation’s director for women’s health policy, and Andrea Miller, president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health. Their answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

    What services does Medicaid provide postpartum?

    Salganicoff: Typically, everything from assistance if the person is having problems breastfeeding to screening for depression services.

    Welchlin: We know the struggles of so many who have had life threatening illnesses such as heart conditions and hypertension. We know of course that Medicaid helps in that.

    What have you seen in terms of postpartum needs in Mississippi?

    Welchlin: One of the stories that really touched me over the course of this pandemic was that of a mom who already had a child, and she needed access to child care so she could get back and forth to the doctor. During this particular pregnancy she had a severe heart disorder where she couldn’t breathe, and she had to get rushed to the hospital. Because she was so connected to doulas and a supportive care organization like us, she was able to get admitted and sure enough that’s when they diagnosed her with that heart condition. And she was a mom on Medicaid.

    What happens when mothers lose Medicaid coverage postpartum?

    Miller: Only giving someone two months postpartum doesn’t allow for the kind of continuation of care that you need. If there are indications of problems in the postpartum period, they don’t all necessarily show up within the first two months. And we certainly know that the ability to have a healthy infant and keep an infant healthy is also related to whether you have coverage. The extension to 12 months really allows for that kind of continuum of care.

    Welchlin: We know in the state of Mississippi, women die at higher rates, and of course it’s higher for Black women. And so, when women don’t have that coverage, what happens is they die.

    What does it mean to not extend postpartum Medicaid coverage if Roe falls?

    Miller: These bans on abortion are going to be layered on top of an already-unconscionable maternal and infant health crisis that most particularly impacts those who are struggling to make ends meet. It particularly impacts Black women and other communities of color. … A state like Mississippi that is so clearly wanting to ban abortions — the fact that they refuse to extend basic health care benefits that will help during pregnancy and postpartum just clearly indicates that they are not interested in the health and well-being of women and families and children, that they are purely on an ideological crusade.

    Anything else that you wanted to add?

    Salganicoff: We’re very focused on that first year of life. But if you’re speaking about a woman who is not going to be able to get an abortion that she seeks and ends up carrying the pregnancy, the supports that she’s going to need and her child is going to need go far beyond the first year of life.

    Miller: You can’t have a conversation about legality or soon-to-be illegality of abortion in these states and not have a conversation simultaneously about the existing crisis around maternal and infant health. These things are all interconnected, and that’s why it is so deeply disturbing that the states trying to ban abortion are the same states that are refusing to expand Medicaid under the ACA, that are failing to take advantage of the ability to extend postpartum [coverage] by 12 months, that don’t invest in child care, that don’t invest in education — these are all part of the same conversation.

    Welchlin: Audre Lorde said, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” So, abortion access, reproductive justice, voting rights, racial justice, gender equity — these are not separate issues, they are intersecting issues that collectively determine the quality of our lives.

    This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

  • Resident physicians are unionizing around the country. Most recently, residents at University of Vermont Medical Center (UVM), Stanford Medical Center, and Keck School of Medicine of USC all voted to join the Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR), which is part of the larger Service Employees International Union (SEIU). These wins come despite ongoing pushback from the hospital bosses. This resistance is coming because hospitals know unionized resident physicians will be harder to exploit. More residents should fight to unionize to protect themselves and the care of patients, and in the process of winning unions, they should extend their fight and demands to challenge the dynamics of the healthcare system itself.

    The growth in resident physician unions is occurring in the context of a growing pro-union sentiment around the country. Approval for unions in the United States is at its highest point in over 60 years, according to a recent Gallup poll. As part of this pattern of growing support, workers in Amazon recently voted to establish the company’s first union in Staten Island, and Starbucks Workers around the country continue to win union votes, even with ongoing pushback and union-busting tactics from the company. As interim ALU President Chris Smalls has noted, workers are unionizing as a way to fight back against their poor working conditions instead of quitting their jobs. Workers are seeing unions as ways to fight back collectively against the boss and more resident physicians are seeing joining a union as a way to do the same thing.

    Still, though, only about one seventh of the over 145,000 resident physicians in the United States today are unionized. But 100 percent of residents should have a union. As we have written about previously, residents are cheap labor in an exploitative, for-profit healthcare system. In many ways, residency training itself serves to condition physicians to act as tools for a capitalist healthcare system constantly looking to cut staff and cut costs to increase profits. Much of the fight for resident unions goes against this dynamic. Residents at hospitals fight through their unions for more demands such as raises, housing stipends, and a better parental leave policy, etc.

    And resident organizing for and through unions only increased during the height of the Black Lives Matter Movement and then again throughout varying waves of the pandemic as resident physicians were at the frontlines caring for patients and witnessing the outcomes of intersections of race and class under capitalism have on people’s bodies. These experiences highlighted very clearly how institutions that claim to care about health and well being ultimately put their bottom line above the well being of patients and frontline healthcare workers.

    We undoubtedly need more resident unions, and as the number of resident unions grows, the most combative sectors of resident physicians need to explore how to push further beyond demands of workplace improvements and towards questioning the exploitative dynamic of residency itself and more largely the dynamics of the for profit healthcare system. For example, as we have written about in the past, residents often work 80-100 hours per week during their training. They serve as cheap labor for hospital systems and that labor helps uphold the factory-like dynamic of many of these healthcare settings. Resident programs claim to care about addressing these long hours, but argue their hands are tied. One potential avenue of resistance is for resident unions to begin to challenge the 80 hour workweek by forcing their hospitals or clinics to unilaterally cut work hours in contracts (for reference, our CIR union local did exactly this when I was a resident in NYC, winning the first reduced hour contract in CIR history).

    Struggles should not stop around hours, however. Residents should also begin to think about challenging their own union leadership. As noted above, most residents unionize under the Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR). The union often attempts to “play nice” or be cordial with hospital leaderships, even signing “no-strike” clauses with the hospitals or clinics at which they are based. But hospital executives are enemies of healthcare workers and patients, and there should be nothing cordial about relationships with them. The strike is one of the most powerful tools any worker has, and the potential for its use should never be signed away in a contract.

    Resident mobilizations should go beyond the limits of medical residency. Resident physicians should fight together in their workplaces to challenge the exploitative healthcare system as a whole and push their unions to actually be fighting organs to fight for a better healthcare system. We see some glimmers of this in some of the current resident unionizing efforts where workers want to push for broader improvements at the workplace. At UVM, for example, they “want to tackle broader working conditions at the hospital, including an ongoing staffing shortage and a lack of adequate work spaces.”

    In general, physicians today, whether still in residency training or outside residency training, must begin to see themselves as part of the working class, fighting with other workers for better conditions and against conditions that threaten the well being of the general public. For example, resident physicians could also mobilize their unions and fight with other unions to push back against recent threats to the right to abortion in the United States. Rank and file committees could be made to mobilize healthcare workers against the ongoing war in Ukraine. Unionized healthcare workers should be mobilized to confront these fights in their workplaces and in the streets.

    As the pandemic showed us, the maintenance of individual and community health extends beyond the walls of any hospital or clinic. When the right to abortion is threatened, this threatens health and well being. When an Amazon worker is exploited by Jeff Bezos and forced to work in unsafe conditions, it does the same. As residents continue to unionize, their fight needs to become more dynamic and combative and spread across sectors to other healthcare workers and other workers more generally.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • At 43 and 45 years old, husband and wife farmers Angie and Wenceslaus Provost, Jr., hope they live to see age 70.

    They don’t fear terminal illness or a farm accident that could consign them to an early grave.

    Instead, they fear stress could do them in. Years of trying to protect family land from encroaching banks and government agencies have worn on them, despite their love of farming.

    After years of mounting debt with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and a bank, the New Iberia, La. sugar cane farmers filed a September 2018 lawsuit against a USDA-approved lender. The suit alleges that Wenceslaus, known as “June,” was all but run out of the profession in 2015 after the bank reduced his crop loans over successive years, effectively underfunding his farm operation.

    The post The Health Crisis Afflicting Black Farmers appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • These are deeply upsetting times. The COVID-19 global pandemic had the potential to bring people together, to strengthen global institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO), and to galvanize new faith in public action. Our vast social wealth could have been pledged to improve public health systems, including both the surveillance of outbreaks of illness and the development of medical systems to treat people during these outbreaks. Not so.

    Studies by the WHO have shown us that health care spending by governments in poorer nations has been relatively flat during the pandemic, while out-of-pocket private expenditure on health care continues to rise. Since the pandemic was declared in March 2020, many governments have responded with exceptional budget allocations; however, across the board from richer to the poorer nations, the health sector received only ‘a fairly small portion’ while the bulk of the spending was used to bail out multinational corporations and banks and provide social relief for the population.

    The post In a World of Great Disorder and Extravagant Lies, We Look for Compassion appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • For the first time since 2019, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) reintroduced his proposal to establish Medicare for All in the U.S., the only wealthy country in the world without universal health care.

    Sanders introduced the legislation with 14 cosponsors on Thursday “to guarantee health care in the United States as a fundamental human right to all,” according to his press release. The Medicare for All Act of 2022 would establish a universal health care system over the next four years, gradually broadening the existing Medicare system until all medical benefit areas and all members of the public are covered.

    Under the proposal, any member of the public can access whichever health care provider or health facility they want, without worrying about whether or not their care is covered. It would also allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices to lower costs for the government and individuals.

    The bill’s introduction came as the Senate Budget Committee, of which Sanders is the chair, held a hearing on the subject on Thursday. The aim of the hearing, entitled “Medicare for All: Protecting Health, Saving Lives, Saving Money,” is to examine the benefits of Medicare for All both for public health and for the economy – and the benefits, Sanders says, would be vast.

    Medicare for All has been kicked around as a concept in the U.S. since as early as the 1960s, when Medicare was originally established. Though lawmakers and activists have advocated for it for decades, Sanders brought the concept into the mainstream during his 2016 presidential run. In the years since, it has become a rallying cry for progressive activists and lawmakers.

    In his opening statement on Thursday, Sanders emphasized that he believes the debate over Medicare for All isn’t really about the merits or demerits of the system, but rather a struggle between the wants and needs of the American people versus the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

    “Let’s be clear about something – and this is maybe the most important point that I want to make – the current debate that we’re having on health care and Medicare for all really has nothing to do with health care. Because, in my view, this dysfunctional health care system cannot be rationally defended,” he said.

    “What this debate has everything to do with is the unquestionable greed of the health care industry and their desire to maintain a system which fails the average American but which makes the industry huge profits year after year after year,” he continued.

    Ultimately, since the health care industry operates as a for-profit enterprise, it will always put profits before the health of its customers, Sanders emphasized. He pointed out that, while millions of Americans lost health insurance or struggled to pay for needed medications or visits during the pandemic, insurers raked in hundreds of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, compensation for executives at insurance companies shot up 31 percent between 2019 and 2020.

    “The debate we’re having is whether we have a health care system which provides quality care to all in a cost effective way, or whether we have a system which makes the drug companies and insurance companies and their executives very, very wealthy,” he said.

    Sanders pointed out that corporations’ lobbying campaign against Medicare for All echoes the original lobbying campaign against Medicare, one of the most popular federal programs in the U.S. Health care lobbyists have spent billions of dollars over the past decades on ads and campaign contributions, in part to fight Medicare for All. Similarly to attacks on Medicare before it was established, Medicare for All has also been attacked by fear mongering right-wingers as “socialist.”

    Americans spend trillions of dollars per year on health care, yet experience worse health outcomes than people in countries with universal health care, while insurers and lobbyists take that money and spend it on lobbying to keep the system the way it is, the lawmaker said.

    Though Medicare for All would be expensive to implement, the conservative Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has found that it would save Americans billions of dollars each year, making it less expensive than the current system – with the added benefit that Americans would no longer have to deal with piles of bills and the tedious bureaucracy of private insurers.

    “This is an issue not just of health care. This is an issue about what kind of nation we are,” Sanders said. “It’s an issue of whether we’re going to turn our backs on 60,000 people a year who die because they cannot get the health care that they need, turn our backs on the fact that we live shorter than some people in other countries, turn our backs [on the fact] that we are spending twice as much per capita as the people in other nations.”

    “This is an issue that has to be dealt with. Medicare for All will become the law of the land – if not now, then in the future,” Sanders concluded. “Because this is what the American people want.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Updated: Mr. Hasan Mushaima is a prominent Bahraini opposition figure and political prisoner who has been serving his life sentence in Jau Prison since 2011 after being charged with attempting to overthrow the government in light of his role in the pro-democracy demonstrations. During his imprisonment, authorities have been subjecting the 76-year-old to maltreatment and medical negligence. He has been held in prolonged solitary confinement at the Kanoo Medical Center for the past 1,165 days, since July 2021, as a retaliatory measure. On 16 November 2023, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) adopted an opinion concerning four elderly Bahraini opposition leaders, including Mr. Hasan Mushaima, concluding their detention as arbitrary and calling for their immediate and unconditional release, as well as a thorough and independent investigation into the violations of their rights. 

     

    In recent months, prison authorities have tightened restrictions on Mr. Mushaima’s access to simple food items like dates, biscuits, and milk, leaving him in a precarious nutritional state. He is also barred from accessing the center’s canteen, relying solely on what his family can provide for food and health products. In July 2024, the Kanoo Medical Center administration removed the BBC Arabic channel from the list of channels available to Mr. Mushaima, further isolating him from the outside world. Mr. Mushaima’s isolation at Kanoo Medical Center remains ongoing, now lasting for 1,165 days. Despite this prolonged confinement and his deteriorating health, the authorities continue to subject him to medical neglect. Recently, in July 2024, Mr. Mushaima developed a nerve issue in his right hand, resulting in loss of movement and severe pain. In addition, his right knee pain has intensified, making daily activities like getting out of bed or performing prayers increasingly difficult. Yet, permission to see a specialist for this issue is also delayed pending the MOI’s approval, prolonging his suffering.

    Since his imprisonment, Mr. Mushaima has faced various restrictions and has been denied his basic rights, including adequate health treatment. Mr. Mushaima, who is in cancer remission, suffers from many chronic diseases including hypertension and diabetes, and has been denied medication and regular checkups for prolonged periods, despite several specialist evaluations indicating that he requires regular treatment and follow-up. His diabetes and blood pressure medicines are also not provided consistently. Painkillers and medicinal drugs were also not adjusted to his needs.

     

    Furthermore, the prison administration constantly cancels his medical appointments without informing him. For instance, authorities have prevented him from undergoing regular Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans which he requires every six months since he is in remission. Even when the scans are done, results are delayed for a long time although they require only one day to be released. Officers have also used the degrading practice of shackling prisoners while taking them to medical clinics. Many prisoners, including Mr. Mushaima, refused these practices and thus were denied the required medical treatment. Due to his severe health problems, his situation has been critical and the lack of treatment is causing him “a slow death”.

     

    Between 2011 and 2019, five different UN special procedure communications demanded that the Bahraini government provide the opposition leader with the necessary medical care, to no avail.

     

    On 19 October 2020, Mr. Mushaima was rushed to the hospital due to shortness of breath. Doctors requested that he be seen by a specialist. However, authorities neglected this request and no appointment was made. As a result, Mr. Mushaima’s health deteriorated further in November 2020, and he was transferred from Jau Prison to the Bahrain Defense Force Hospital, where he was put on an emergency respirator for the second time since October 2020. He was returned to prison after about 6 hours. Again, doctors requested that he see a specialist. Five days later, authorities finally arranged the requested appointment. It was revealed that the cause of his high blood pressure and shortness of breath was a weak heart. The doctor prescribed him medication and requested another consultation after he finished his month-long course of medication.

     

    In May 2021, after being quarantined for 2 months on the pretext of receiving care, Mr. Mushaima developed new symptoms including abnormal swelling of feet with black spots, large swelling in his leg, severe knee pain, limping, and difficulty moving. As a result, he was taken by ambulance to the BDF hospital and returned to the quarantine block at 2:00 A.M. Doctors suspected inflammation and prescribed medications, stating that his condition requires regular follow-ups. After his health deteriorated, neither he nor his family was allowed to see his medical records. Moreover, the Ministry of Health in Bahrain posted a false statement in which it said that Mr. Mushaima’s situation is stable and being monitored.

     

    Two months later, in July 2021, due to his medical situation, Mr. Mushaima was moved to the Kanoo Medical Center, where he remains. His tests showed extremely high blood sugar and blood pressure levels. He also suffers from undetermined damage to his kidneys and stomach, a cyst on his eye, and a heart muscle issue. However, he has not been receiving the needed treatment and is still suffering from many medical complications. The lack of movement and unsuitable food which was devoid of vegetables and lacked nutritional value appropriate to his condition aggravated his condition. Moreover, he has been subjected to punitive measures and stifling psychological pressure.

     

    In mid-September 2021, Mr. Mushaima was offered an alternative sentence by a delegation from the Ministry of Interior. This deal proposed his release on the same day, but it came with numerous conditions and restrictions, primarily requiring him to remain silent about the Bahraini government after his release. Mr. Mushaima refused the offer, emphasizing his right to unconditional freedom. His treatment worsened immediately after his refusal, and authorities denied him the right to make phone and video calls and gradually stopped his medical follow-ups. He was finally allowed to make phone calls after a year of deprivation.

     

    Furthermore, Mr. Mushaima has complained of provocation in the center, with an argument breaking out between him and the police in March 2022. Mr. Mushaima has remained at the center in order to monitor his medical status. However, his extended stay there has been used as an excuse to isolate him after he refused alternative sentencing rather than to provide him with the medical care he needs, as he has been denied his right to call his family. Mr. Mushaima has been demanding to return to Jau Prison, describing his stay at the medical center as ‘solitary confinement”.

     

    Between October and November 2022, his family held daily sit-ins in front of the Kanoo Medical Center, requesting Mr. Mushaima’s transfer to a dentist after 10 months of suffering from broken teeth. On 22 November 2022, the Bahraini police arrested some of Mr. Mushaima’s family members during their sit-in. He was only taken to a dentist in December 2022.

     

    Mr. Mushaima is also denied treatment for knee pain and access to specialists for his different chronic diseases. Members from the Ministry of Interior periodically visit him and promise him that things will improve. Additionally, on 28 November 2022, Mr. Mushaima was visited by a committee from the NIHR at Kanoo Medical Center. The NIHR later tweeted that they listened to his health status request as well as his rights as an inmate. However, his situation has not improved, and no specialist has visited him.

     

    Since his transfer to the Kanoo Medical Center in 2021, Mr. Mushaima has been deprived of leaving his room, despite repeated requests to allow him to exercise. From September 2023, he has been allowed to leave his room twice a week to exercise and access the sunlight, however, for a very short duration (30 minutes each day), which is insufficient. Also, Mr. Mushaima is currently prevented from seeing and talking to the prominent detained human rights defender Dr. AbdulJalil AlSingace, who is also detained in the same section in the Kanoo Medical Center, with both of them currently being isolated and prohibited from meeting other inmates. Moreover, during his isolation at the Kanoo Medical Center, Mr. Mushaima has been barred from participating in key religious events, including the recent Ashura rituals in July 2024. He is also prohibited from communicating with other prisoners during these occasions, further deepening his psychological and emotional isolation and infringing on his right to practice his religious beliefs freely. 

     

    On 15 November 2023, Mr. Mushaima’s diabetes medications were changed due to the adverse effects on his kidneys, and his new medications are causing him to have unstable blood sugar levels, according to his doctor. Despite his unstable blood sugar levels, he has not been provided with an insulin pump or another medical device to regulate his insulin levels.

     

    On 16 November 2023, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) adopted an opinion on four elderly Bahraini opposition leaders, including Mr. Hasan Mushaima, determining their detention to be arbitrary. The WGAD urged Bahrain to immediately and unconditionally release all four opposition figures, conduct a comprehensive and independent investigation into the violations of their rights, and hold the perpetrators accountable.

     

    On 30 November 2023, Mr. Mushaima’s doctor at the Kanoo Medical Center indicated that his kidneys are significantly damaged and that he might soon need dialysis. When the detained opposition figure insisted on knowing the details of the damage, the doctor told him that they could not disclose this information without permission from the Ministry of Interior. His family is highly concerned about his declining health and the lack of information he has been provided about his diagnosis and health crisis.

     

    In 2023, Mr. Mushaima was forced to wait for months to be seen by a nephrologist and was denied treatment for hearing loss in his right ear. He has also not been referred to a neurologist to check tremors in his hands.

    On 25 and 28 March 2024, Mr. Mushaima was transferred to the emergency room due to severe knee pain that made him unable to move or sleep. He was given pain-relieving injections after an X-ray examination. The center administration refused to inform him of the X-ray results and then returned him to isolation in the Kanoo Medical Center.

     

    On 2 April 2024, after two weeks of suffering from severe knee pain without receiving the necessary treatment, which was only partially alleviated by painkillers with limited effectiveness, the general physician at the center confirmed to Mr. Mushaima that his referral to a specialist physician for the required treatment depends on an order from the Ministry of Interior. Mr. Mushaima’s family made numerous calls to the Jau Prison administration demanding treatment but to no avail. They also visited the specialist doctor who had treated him more than a year ago and found that he was available; however, he could not provide the treatment without a request and permission from the Ministry of Interior (MOI).

     

    On 26 April 2024, Mr. Mushaima developed new symptoms, including sudden significant swelling in his legs and feet, along with persistent severe pain. Consequently, he was transferred to a non-specialist physician, who told him to reduce his water intake and elevate his foot as much as possible until a nephrologist could diagnose him. Despite this health setback, he hasn’t been seen by a specialist or given any medications other than painkillers. 

    In recent months, prison authorities have tightened restrictions on Mr. Mushaima’s access to simple food items like dates, biscuits, and milk. While these were previously permitted, they now require prior approval through submitted requests and administrative orders, which are often delayed or denied, leaving him in a precarious nutritional state. He is also barred from accessing the center’s canteen, relying solely on what his family can provide for food and health products. In July 2024, the Kanoo Medical Center administration removed the BBC Arabic channel from the list of channels available to Mr. Mushaima, further isolating him from the outside world. This channel, along with others, is typically accessible to prisoners in Jau Prison, highlighting the increasing restrictions imposed specifically on Mr. Mushaima.

    Mr. Mushaima’s isolation at Kanoo Medical Center remains ongoing, now lasting for 1,165 days. Despite this prolonged confinement and his deteriorating health, the authorities continue to subject him to medical neglect. Recently, in July 2024, Mr. Mushaima developed a nerve issue in his right hand, resulting in loss of movement and severe pain. Unable to control the hand, he now uses his left hand to adjust his thumb. Alarmingly, the condition has begun affecting his left hand as well. Despite a doctor’s recommendation at Kanoo Medical Center for him to consult a specialist, Mr. Mushaima is denied this care because it requires approval from the Ministry of Interior—a process that typically takes an excessive amount of time. He is still waiting for this approval, further worsening his condition. This delay has occurred repeatedly in the past, consistently leaving Mr. Mushaima without the proper medical attention he needs. In addition, his right knee pain has intensified, making daily activities like getting out of bed or performing prayers increasingly difficult. Yet, permission to see a specialist for this issue is also delayed pending the MOI’s approval, prolonging his suffering.

     

    Mr. Mushaima still suffers from medical neglect for his hand nerves, knees, teeth, and kidney issues, in addition to ongoing neglect for his chronic diseases, including diabetes, hypertension, and heart muscle problems. Moreover, he is still prevented from undergoing regular Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans, which he requires every six months since he is in cancer remission. Furthermore, he is still denied access to the results of the medical tests and images he has undergone.

     

    Opposition leader Mr. Hasan Mushaima’s warrantless arrest, torture, enforced disappearances, solitary confinements, deprivation of contact with his family, religious-based insults, unfair trial, reprisal, isolation, and medical negligence all constitute clear violations of the Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), to which Bahrain is a party. Moreover, the violations he faced during his imprisonment, particularly medical negligence, constitute a breach of the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, known as the Nelson Mandela Rules.

     

    Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) calls on the Bahraini authorities to comply with the opinion of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention opinion by immediately and unconditionally releasing Mr. Mushaima, who was arbitrarily detained due to his peaceful activism, along with all other political prisoners. This call is especially pertinent in light of the recent royal pardons and alternative sanctions that have resulted in the release of several prisoners, including political detainees. However, these releases did not include elderly imprisoned opposition leaders, such as Mr. Mushaima, who are facing serious health complications due to medical neglect. Given their age and health issues, it is imperative that these releases also include them. ADHRB also urges the Bahraini government to investigate allegations of arbitrary arrest, torture, enforced disappearances, solitary confinements, deprivation of contact with his family, religious-based insults, reprisal, isolation, and medical negligence and hold perpetrators accountable. ADHRB further calls on the Bahraini government to compensate Mushaima for the violations he suffered, including serious medical negligence. ADHRB warns of Mr. Mushaima’s seriously deteriorating health condition resulting from years of medical neglect and urges the Kanoo Medical Center administration to end his isolation and urgently provide him with appropriate and necessary medical care, holding it responsible for any further deterioration in his health. Finally, ADHRB calls on the international community to further advocate for Mr. Mushaima’s immediate and unconditional release and to call for his urgent provision of appropriate and necessary medical care.

    The post Profile in Persecution: Hasan Mushaima appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

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  • More than a dozen activists staged a “die-in” outside the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) headquarters in Arlington, Va., Monday, demanding the agency allow patients with life-threatening conditions to legally access psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” to treat psychiatric disorders.

    Federal police arrested 17 protesters who were lying down in front of the building’s entrance and refused to leave until a representative from the agency met with them to discuss their demands. The DEA refused to send anyone out to speak with demonstrators, which included terminally ill cancer patients.

    The post Activists Demanding Psilocybin For Terminally Ill Patients Arrested Outside DEA Headquarters appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • The Democratic Party – which had 50 years to write Roe v Wade into law with Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama in full control of the White House and Congress at the inception of their presidencies – is banking its electoral strategy around the expected Supreme Court decision to lift the judicial prohibition on the ability of states to enact laws restricting or banning abortions.

    I doubt it will work.

    The Democratic Party’s hypocrisy and duplicity is the fertilizer for Christian fascism. Its exclusive focus on the culture wars and identity politics at the expense of economic, political, and social justice fueled a right-wing backlash and stoked the bigotry, racism, and sexism it sought to curtail.

    The post Jesus, Endless War, And The Rise Of American Fascism appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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