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  • This Man Donated His Kidney — and Received a $13,064 Bill in Return

    Medical billing statement with stethoscope

    The email arrived in Elliot Malin’s inbox from his cousin’s mom.

    “Scott needs a kidney,” the subject line read.

    The message matter-of-factly described Scott’s situation: At 28 years old, Scott Kline was in end-stage renal failure. He wasn’t on dialysis yet. But he probably should have been.

    His mom was reaching out to as many people as she could, asking them to be screened as a potential donation match.

    “Thank you for considering it, but please don’t feel any pressure to do it,” she wrote. “Sorry I have to share this burden, but the best potential match is family.”

    Malin didn’t need to be pressured. For him, the decision was easy.

    “There was no other thought besides trying to help Scott,” Malin later said.

    He clicked on a link in the email to begin the screening process.

    If he turned out to be a match, Malin knew the surgery could put his health at risk. The recovery would be physically painful. What he didn’t anticipate was that it would put his finances in jeopardy. That just as he would have to trust the skilled hands of the surgeon to make sure the operation went well, he’d have to trust in the expertise of billing coders and financial coordinators to navigate the increasingly complex system that covers the costs of transplant surgeries.

    Living organ donors are never supposed to receive a bill for care related to a transplant surgery. The recipient’s insurance covers all of those costs. This rule is key to a system built on encouraging such a selfless act. And for most uninsured patients in end-stage kidney failure, Medicare would pick up the tab. But in Malin’s case, he would end up facing a $13,000 billing mistake and the threat of having his bill sent to collections.

    Donors like Malin play a critical role in the nation’s transplant system. According to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing, in the last three years more than 30% of kidney donations came from living donors. Neither UNOS nor other national advocacy organizations track how often billing problems like those encountered by Malin occur. But advocates say they do happen and can deter donors from coming forward.

    “Living donors should not be receiving any bills at all whatsoever regarding any part of the living donation process,” said Morgan Reid, director of transplant policy and strategy for the National Kidney Foundation.

    Malin and Kline describe themselves as cousins, but their blood relationship is distant. Their great-grandfathers were brothers, making them third cousins. Still, they’re the same age and grew up as friends, sometimes traveling and spending holidays together. Kline attended Malin’s wedding in 2019.

    Exactly what went wrong with Kline’s kidneys is a mystery. In the summer of 2020 he had just moved to Fort Worth, Texas, for work. He went in for routine blood work to monitor a medication he was taking. When the results came in, the doctor called to ask if he was on dialysis.

    “You’re in end-stage renal failure,” the doctor told him.

    “Oh, no I’m not,” Kline responded.

    The bloodwork wasn’t wrong. He had just 17% kidney function. Thus began his search for a new organ. Kline was told his wait for a kidney could be three to five years if a friend or family member didn’t step forward. In February 2021, Kline and his family began reaching out to everyone they knew. Volunteers signed up for medical screening, but insurance would only pay to test one at a time. Waiting for one potential donor to be ruled out before testing another drew out an already lengthy process.

    Four months after Malin signed up to be screened, he got final confirmation he was a match.

    By June, the two cousins were deep in the byzantine organ transplant bureaucracy: screeners, financial counselors, doctors, specialists, laboratories and, the most difficult, insurance companies.

    “The amount of hoops you have to jump through to do this is pretty extraordinary,” Malin said, describing rounds of medical tests, mountains of paperwork and preauthorizations for procedures. A multidisciplinary team of professionals assembled to assist the two patients through the process.

    “The hospital was amazing on trying to make everything as easy as possible,” he said of the team.

    Malin said they gave him one assurance: He wouldn’t have to contend with any bills or be responsible for a dime of the surgery’s estimated $160,000 cost. The team had received preauthorization from Kline’s insurance plan, which would pick up all of Malin’s medical costs.

    That assurance, however well-intentioned, fell flat.

    In July, Malin traveled from his home in Reno, Nevada, to Fort Worth, where the cousins underwent the transplant surgery at Baylor Scott & White All Saints Medical Center. The surgery was successful.

    Malin spent three days in the hospital recovering, Kline a day or two longer — a painful experience made bearable by their companionship.

    “We would do our little walks around the hospital floor,” Kline said. “We would be suffering together. It was really nice to have that. Usually you’re there alone, especially during COVID.”

    By early August, Malin was back in Reno to finish recuperating. The next week, he started law school. Life was getting back to normal.

    When the first bill arrived, it was more annoying than stressful. It totalled just $19.15 for blood work done before the surgery. The hospital said it would take care of it, Malin said. Then he got a notice that an old insurance plan he was no longer a member of had been billed $934 for lab work. Again, he notified the hospital.

    In late September, Malin got a bill for a stomach-dropping amount: $13,064. While he was startled by the cost, it didn’t worry him too much. He knew Kline’s insurance was responsible for paying it. He notified the hospital and forgot about it.

    A month later, a second notice arrived. Then, on Dec. 6, Malin received a document that scared him.

    “Final Notice! Your account is now considered delinquent,” the notice read. If he didn’t take action, the billing company warned, it would attempt “further collection activity.”

    The bill was from NorthStar Anesthesia, a firm that provides anesthesia services to hospitals across the country, including Baylor Scott & White All Saints.

    Now, Malin wasn’t only irritated that the bills just kept coming, he was worried about his credit.

    “I did call them and kind of chewed them out a little bit,” Malin said. “I walked through what this was for, that it was a kidney donation and I’m not the responsible party.”

    Malin complained on Twitter about the aggressive billing practice, eliciting an array of responses, from jokes about asking for his kidney back to outrage that he’d be in this position after such a gift.

    After he called the billing company and the hospital, there was nothing else he could do.

    “I’m just waiting to see if I go to collections or not,” Malin told ProPublica two weeks later.

    He did his best to leave Kline out of it entirely.

    “He’s had a lot on his plate,” Malin said of his cousin. “His recovery has been harder than mine. He’s the one accepting the organ, so he’ll be on immunosuppressants the rest of his life. Because of COVID, he’s largely stuck indoors. I don’t tell him a lot of it. I don’t want to stress him out.”

    Still, it troubled Kline that Malin was facing such problems.

    “At the end of the day, I want everything to go as smoothly as possible for Elliot,” Kline said. “He was doing me an unbelievable kindness. I owe my life to him.”

    Malin heard nothing until Jan. 19, one day after ProPublica reached out to NorthStar for comment.

    “The CFO of NorthStar just called me and told me she’s taken care of the bill,” Malin texted a reporter.

    The next day, the company emailed Malin, confirming he would not be responsible for the bill, that he was never sent to collections and that his credit wouldn’t be affected.

    “On behalf of NorthStar, I apologize for causing any confusion or concern for you regarding this matter and assure you that it has been resolved,” wrote Kate Stets, the company’s chief financial officer.

    She said that after his call on Dec. 7, the bill had been rerouted to “the correct parties,” but that the company had failed to communicate that to him. The letter explained that NorthStar had received incorrect insurance information at the time of the surgery. (A spokesperson later said NorthStar received no insurance information at the time of the surgery.) In such cases, bills are automatically sent to the patient.

    The company has since adjusted its policy to prevent that from happening in future transplant cases, Stets wrote.

    “To be clear, it is not NorthStar’s policy to bill transplant donors for bills related to their donation surgeries,” Stets wrote. “We recognize the well-established public policy standard and practice that transplant donors should not be billed for such services — that we and the nation’s health care system have a responsibility to foster and encourage such acts of selflessness and generosity.”

    In a statement, a NorthStar spokesperson said no other organ donors owe “out of pocket payments.”

    “NorthStar did not hear from Baylor on this matter previously and was first notified of the billing error on December 7, 2021 after insurance information was not provided to NorthStar by the transplant center at the point of care,” a spokesperson said. “NorthStar resolved the error immediately and closed the account that same day, prior to any inquiry from ProPublica.”

    Both Malin and Kline commended the team at Baylor Scott & White All Saints that guided them through the process. The hospital, however, declined to grant an interview to ProPublica about what went wrong with the billing.

    A spokesperson provided a short statement: “We are pleased this has been resolved for our patient by NorthStar. Although billing can be complicated, these occurrences are rare. We have also been in touch with the patient and we don’t have anything further to report.”

    Financing such surgeries is so complex that transplant centers employ coordinators to help both patients with the process.

    “I tell donors, I can’t guarantee you won’t get a bill, but if you do, call me,” said Deidra Simano, president of the Transplant Financial Coordinators Association.

    In one case, after trying everything to get a provider to bill the proper insurance, Simano resorted to paying a patient’s $200 bill with the transplant center’s credit card.

    “That’s what we had to do to make it go away,” she said.

    Malin said he feels fortunate to be equipped to fight the billing issues. He worries about others with fewer means facing a similar situation, recognizing it could be a barrier to those selfless enough to donate an organ.

    “It sucks but I wouldn’t have changed any of it,” he said. “I like my cousin. I want him to be healthy.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Medicare for All Bill Introduced by Pramila Jayapal Gets Record 120 Cosponsors

    Rep. Pramila Jayapal speaks as members of Congress share their recollections on the first anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2022, in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C.

    A bill that would establish Medicare for All in the U.S. has reached 120 sponsors, Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) announced on Sunday.

    “We’ve officially got a record 120 co-sponsors on my Medicare for All Act!” said Jayapal, who introduced the legislation. “Thrilled to welcome Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Florida) to our fight to ensure health care as a human right!”

    Signing on to the bill as a cosponsor is one of Cherfilus-McCormick’s first acts since being sworn in as a member of Congress in mid-January. Last week, Representatives Donald Norcross (D-New Jersey) and Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) also became cosponsors of the bill; original cosponsors include progressive “squad” members like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota).

    The Medicare for All Act of 2021, or H.R. 1976, would establish a single-payer healthcare system in the U.S. Under the bill, health care claims would be paid by the government and all U.S. residents would be able to access health care without having to pay out of pocket for most services.

    Jayapal’s bill would establish a more generous plan than in countries like Canada, where the single-payer health care system doesn’t cover vital services like vision, dental or prescriptions. H.R. 1976 includes those benefits as well as long-term nursing and rehabilitative services.

    For years, Medicare for All has been a rallying cry for progressives across the country, popularized by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) during his 2016 presidential run. Some experts have pointed out that the original idea behind the Medicare program was for all residents to have access to health care, not just a few.

    “We mean a complete transformation of our health care system and we mean a system where there are no private insurance companies that provide these core benefits,” Jayapal said when she introduced the bill last March. “We mean universal care, everybody in, nobody out.”

    Though the bill is unlikely to pass Congress, the record number of cosponsors suggests that pushes for Medicare for All are gaining momentum as progressives in the House are growing in number.

    When Jayapal originally introduced the bill, it had only 112 cosponsors; when she introduced it in the last Congress, it only had 106 original cosponsors. In 2019, Sanders introduced a Medicare for All bill in the Senate with 14 cosponsors. He has not reintroduced the bill in this Congress.

    “In my view, the current debate over Medicare for All really has nothing to do with health care. It’s all about greed and profiteering. It is about whether we maintain a dysfunctional system which allows the top five health insurance companies to make over $20 billion in profits last year,” Sanders said in 2019. These profits have only multiplied since the start of the pandemic.

    Polling has found that a majority of Americans favor proposals for Medicare for All. But while the idea has gained some steam in Congress over the past years, it still faces fierce opposition from lobbyists and the lawmakers they solicit.

    Private health insurers are making record profits while insuring fewer people; reports have found that the U.S.’s health expenditures are the highest among member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), while the U.S.’s health care system ranks last on measures like access, efficiency, equity and health outcomes. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies are hugely reliant on profits generated by U.S. citizens, and a report last year found that prices for top prescription drugs are as much as 10 times higher in the U.S. than they are in other countries.

    Lobbyists, looking to maintain these profits, play a huge role in the legislative equation – according to Politico, the health care industry lobby has created an “army” to fight Medicare for All in Congress, developing cozy relationships with Democrats and Republicans alike. Last year, health insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists maxed out their donations to Democrats as they were crafting the Build Back Better Act, which included proposals that took aim at sky-high prescription drug prices.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Free abortion across borders

    This story originally appeared in Dissent on Oct. 13, 2021, and is shared with permission via the Progressive International’s Wire.

    Crystal, an abortion acompañante from Mexico, has a green bandana attached to her backpack that signals her involvement in the marea verde, the “green wave” of reproductive rights activism gaining momentum throughout Latin America. In her bag she carries pamphlets from the Tijuana Safe Abortion Network and Las Bloodys, the feminist collective she helped found. Designed to fold up into a neat rectangle that slips discreetly into a back pocket, the pamphlets provide details for how to self-administer an abortion safely, avoiding legal and medical risks.

    Crystal clarified that aborto libre didn’t just mean free of charge; it also means free as in liberated, free from stigma, free from medicalized control and legal restrictions, free for pregnant people to make the best decision for themselves.

    On Sept. 7, Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion, which until last month was illegal in the state of Baja California, where Crystal lives, and in much of the rest of the country. The recent ruling will eventually allow increased access to abortion care and free the women imprisoned under prior laws, often just for being suspected of intentionally terminating a pregnancy. But it will take some time for the ruling to take effect throughout Mexico’s 32 states, especially the 17 that have constitutional amendments that declare that life starts at conception. And though the ruling protects abortion-seekers from being prosecuted, it does not guarantee universal access. While the reproductive rights movement in Mexico has been waiting for this decision for a long time, “nothing much will change for us,” Crystal told me after the news broke. “Legalization has never been our end goal.”

    “Our work won’t stop until abortion is free,” she continued. “Queremos el aborto libre.” Crystal clarified that aborto libre didn’t just mean free of charge; it also means free as in liberated, free from stigma, free from medicalized control and legal restrictions, free for pregnant people to make the best decision for themselves. In the years leading up to the September decision, collectives of acompañantes like Las Bloodys, Las Confidentas, and Las Libres provided emotional, logistical, and even medical support to people seeking abortions. This informal network is redefining the struggle for reproductive justice.

    The acompañantes movement in Mexico can teach US activists about grassroots mobilizing where restricted access is the norm.

    While abortion was being decriminalized in Mexico, advocates north of the border were dealing with devastating setbacks: Texas’s Senate Bill 8, which severely restricts abortion access in the state, and the Supreme Court’s announcement that it would hear arguments on Mississippi’s ban on abortion after fifteen weeks of pregnancy—a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade. In this difficult moment, the acompañantes movement in Mexico can teach US activists about grassroots mobilizing where restricted access is the norm. Their flexible and holistic model of abortion care anticipates the limits of state health services and the formal medical establishment. Now is the time to revive cross-border solidarity networks and deepen a transnational reproductive justice movement that centers bodily autonomy and diverse, dignified options for pregnant people.

    Snacks and Slippers for All

    Before the September ruling, acompañantes often worked at the margins of the law to bridge the gaps in Mexico’s uneven landscape of reproductive rights. With support from Mexico’s feminist and reproductive rights organizations, they connected people to formal medical and legal resources and funded travel to Mexico City and the other few places where abortion was legal. While acompañantes helped bring people to clinics, they found that many preferred instead to self-administer abortions using misoprostol, or “miso,” an ulcer drug and effective abortifacient that is available over the counter in Mexico. While data is hard to come by, an estimated 30% of abortions in Mexico are induced using miso. One of the many roles of the acompañante, then, is to help minimize the risks involved in self-managed abortions.

    An in-clinic surgical procedure costs around $200 USD; anesthesia costs extra. For an additional $100, you can get snacks, slippers, and a private room to recuperate in. For someone earning Mexico’s minimum wage of $7 a day, these are unaffordable luxuries.

    Many collectives encourage people to get ultrasounds at clinics and send the results to allied medical professionals to confirm the success of a self-administered abortion. Most collectives also recommend taking miso orally instead of vaginally, to reduce the possibility of an unsympathetic medical provider finding residual evidence. Without physical proof or a confession, people can claim that a planned abortion was a spontaneously occurring miscarriage.

    While the recent Supreme Court ruling reduces the legal risks that acompañantes and abortion-seekers face, it doesn’t mean an end to the work of grassroots feminist collectives. Even if there were a legal guarantee of free abortion care, “we still see an important role for acompañantes,” Natalia, a member of Las Confidentas, said. “Our ultimate goal is destigmatization and the abolition of obstetric violence. Even when this is achieved, people will likely still want people to accompany them, to make sure they’re receiving the kind of emotional support that even the fanciest clinics may not be able to provide.”

    Some of the “fancy” clinics—the private practices in Mexico City that offer legal abortions until the twelfth week of pregnancy—have tiered packages of care. An in-clinic surgical procedure costs around $200 USD; anesthesia costs extra. For an additional $100, you can get snacks, slippers, and a private room to recuperate in. For someone earning Mexico’s minimum wage of $7 a day, these are unaffordable luxuries. “We’re working to bring about a world where everyone can have snacks and slippers with their abortion,” Marina, another member of Las Confidentas, remarked.

    Acompañantes often host people at their homes to provide a safe place for self-administering abortion pills. “For zero pesos you can come to my house, and I’ll make sure you’re comfortable, that you have snacks, a hot water bottle, and Netflix,” Marina laughed. Then she grew more serious: “It’s ridiculous. How is it that only the rich have access to this kind of support?”

    Beyond Roe

    Before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, the US abortion landscape looked more like Mexico’s before Sept. 7: while there was no guaranteed access, a robust activist network helped to provide abortion care. Several acompañantes mentioned taking inspiration from underground movements and feminist networks in the United States. Marina referred to the Jane Collective, a group of activists in Chicago with an anonymous hotline that connected pregnant people to abortion services and trained non-medical professionals to perform them. Silvia, an acompañante from Mexicali, recalled receiving training in the 1970s through a binational solidarity network that taught activists from both sides of the border to perform surgical abortions, a method that’s become less common with the advent and availability of abortion medications.

    Especially for women of color and people in low-income and conservative areas, legalization never meant the end of grassroots organizing and mobilizing efforts, largely because Roe never delivered the universal aborto libre that people sometimes think it did.

    While many of these underground transnational solidarity groups disappeared after Roe, there are still networks of activists supporting abortion access in the United States by connecting people to resources and diverse types of care. Especially for women of color and people in low-income and conservative areas, legalization never meant the end of grassroots organizing and mobilizing efforts, largely because Roe never delivered the universal aborto libre that people sometimes think it did.

    Organizations headed by Black and brown activists, like the Georgia-based SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, have worked to broaden how US reproductive rights advocates conceive of the struggle for bodily autonomy and the right to choose. In Reproductive Justice: An Introduction, scholar-activists Rickie Solinger and Loretta Ross explain “reproductive justice” as the recognition of the “human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” Mexican abortion activists and prominent reproductive rights organizations also embrace the language of reproductive justice. Nonprofits like GIRE draw connections to the struggles of domestic workers and frame reproductive justice as a call for more robust social and economic rights, including increased access to parental leave and other forms of support for people who choose to be parents.

    Through trainings and advocacy, SisterSong and other activist organizations foster informal networks of volunteers to support pregnant people economically, logistically, and emotionally. Growing numbers of radical and full-spectrum doula collectives of non-medically trained care workers are finding ways to assist people through all potential stages of a pregnancy—pre-conception, birth, abortion, post-partum, and beyond. In California, New York, Kentucky, Texas, and other states, these groups are bringing attention to the racial and economic disparities in reproductive care.

    Accompanied Self-Managed Abortions

    Misoprostol has been used as an abortifacient since the 1980s. The most common medical abortion regimen today is a combination of misoprostol with mifepristone, or “mife,” as the acompañantes refer to it. Mife/miso is 98% effective before 60 days of gestation, while miso alone in the first gestational phase is less effective, with a 75 to 85% chance of terminating a pregnancy. Acompañantes prefer to use the combination, but mife is not available over the counter, so most acompañantes provide abortion-seekers with only miso.

    In 2015, a woman in Indiana was charged with fetal homicide for taking abortion-inducing drugs; 28 states have fetal homicide laws like Indiana’s.

    While self-induced abortions have become safer in the decades since abortifacients first came on the market, the legal risks have remained in place. In both Mexico and the United States, people have been prosecuted for performing at-home abortions without prescriptions. In 2015, a woman in Indiana was charged with fetal homicide for taking abortion-inducing drugs; 28 states have fetal homicide laws like Indiana’s. In Mexico, people even suspected of seeking abortions could get up to six years of jail time. According to figures from GIRE, there have been around 500 abortion criminal investigations per year since 2015. Ninety-eight of these cases resulted in convictions. With Mexico’s Supreme Court ruling in September, being suspected of having an abortion will no longer be criminalized in this way.

    Advocates for self-managed care on both sides of the border want legislation that allows people to choose the abortion procedure that best suits them. In the meantime, global nonprofits such as Women Help Women provide resources with detailed instructions for how to safely self-administer an abortion anywhere in the world.

    Illegal Doesn’t Have to Mean Unsafe

    Reproductive rights activists often emphasize the lengths that people will go to when they’ve decided to terminate a pregnancy, and the deaths caused when services aren’t legal. The Roe ruling in 1973 was followed by a rapid drop in maternal deaths, showing how important legalization is to increasing access to safe care. But these narratives can also reinforce a stigma against self-managed care and minimize the financial, emotional, and other forms of support a pregnant person might need. Advocates for radical abortion care make the case that not all illegal self-managed abortions are inherently unsafe—and that they can expand access dramatically. The importance of centering care on the pregnant person’s needs and preferences over the authority of a doctor or the government is one of the many important lessons that can be learned from the work of Mexican activists.

    The importance of centering care on the pregnant person’s needs and preferences over the authority of a doctor or the government is one of the many important lessons that can be learned from the work of Mexican activists.

    Crystal is emboldened by Mexico’s Supreme Court decision but also wants the global reproductive justice movement to think beyond legal barriers and battles. “The legal struggle is an important one, but it’s not the only pathway to attaining el aborto libre,” she said. The news from Texas confirmed Crystal’s belief that more radical visions of reproductive justice are needed. “I’m working toward a world where we all possess the herbal and medical knowledge to handle a pregnancy how we want to and access the resources that we alone know we need,” she said.

    My message to reproductive activists in the United States is not to let legal battles get in the way of imagining alternative ways of caring for each other and ourselves. Women have always found a way and we will continue to. Decriminalized, legalized, it doesn’t matter. We’re here for you, we’ll send you pills in the mail, we’ll walk you through our tactics. Whatever you need.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Warren Calls on Biden to End Trump-Era Plan Aimed at Privatizing Medicare

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren talks with reporters as she makes her way to the Senate floor for a vote in Washington, D.C., on June 22, 2021.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday joined physicians and dozens of her House Democratic colleagues in urging the Biden administration to immediately halt Medicare Direct Contracting, a Trump-era pilot that could result in complete privatization of the cherished public healthcare program by decade’s end.

    “It is completely baffling to me that the Biden administration wants to give the same bad actors in Medicare Advantage free rein in traditional Medicare,” Warren (D-Mass.) said during a hearing held by the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth.

    “My view is that President Biden should not permit Medicare to be handed over to corporate profiteers,” Warren added. “Doing so is going to increase costs and put more strain on the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund. The Biden administration should shut down the Direct Contracting model.”

    The Direct Contracting (DC) pilot was first publicly announced by the Trump administration in 2019 and launched with little notice in the final months of the former president’s tenure. The program is administered through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Innovation Center, an agency that the Affordable Care Act empowered to experiment with alternatives to traditional Medicare’s payment model, which directly reimburses healthcare providers.

    The DC pilot, by contrast, inserts private middlemen called Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs) between patients and providers, allowing insurance giants and Wall Street-backed startups to keep as profit the public funding that they don’t spend on care.

    A majority of the 53 current DCEs — which are paid monthly by the federal government to cover a specified portion of a patient’s medical care — are investor-owned. Unlike Medicare Advantage, which Medicare patients choose voluntarily, the DC pilot automatically assigns seniors to DCEs, often without their knowledge or consent.

    “Wall Street is not racing to buy up clinics because they want to expand coordinated care models and limit profits,” Warren argued Wednesday. “Private equity and insurance companies want the eye-popping profits that are possible when the federal government lets them pocket whatever it is they can avoid spending on seniors and people with disabilities who need healthcare.”

    “The number of corporate vultures hoping to feed on Medicare continues to grow,” said Warren, the first Democratic senator to publicly criticize the Biden administration for letting the DC pilot proceed. “This invites fiscal disaster, and I hope this administration will reverse this decision.”

    Among the witnesses who testified at Wednesday’s hearing was Dr. Susan Rogers, president of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), an advocacy group that has been leading the opposition to the DC pilot and urging the Biden administration to stop the experiment in its tracks.

    During her testimony, Rogers noted that “DCEs may spend as little as 60% of their Medicare payments on patient care, keeping the other 40% as profit and overhead.”

    “Medicare was designed as a lifeline for America’s seniors and those with disabilities, not a playground for Wall Street investors,” Rogers said. “If middlemen in healthcare actually saved money and improved outcomes, the U.S. wouldn’t have the most expensive and ineffective healthcare system in the world. We don’t need to put seniors through another failed experiment to prove this.”

    Despite mounting pressure from advocacy groups and members of Congress — including more than 50 House Democrats led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) — the Biden administration has not yet provided any signal that it intends to stop the DC pilot.

    As Buzzfeed reported last week, the administration’s “current plan is to run the program through the end of Biden’s term, potentially allowing a future president to expand its scope and further erode Medicare, the pillar of public healthcare in America.”

    While the Biden administration paused the most extreme form of Direct Contracting — known as the Geographic (GEO) Model — last March, it has let the rest of the pilot program move forward as planned despite internal questions over its legality.

    One unnamed Senate Democratic aide told Buzzfeed that “because companies had already spent a substantial amount of money preparing for the program, his administration would have faced fierce industry backlash if they shut it down.”

    In her opening statement at Wednesday’s hearing, Warren argued that the federal government needs “to make changes to Medicare.”

    “But not the cuts and privatization that my Republican colleagues have sought in past efforts to so-called ‘reform’ Medicare. No,” Warren continued. “Instead of undermining the system and the benefits that we deliver, we need to crack down on greedy drug manufacturers, on private insurers, and on private equity firms.”

    “The Medicare system is hemorrhaging money on scams and frauds,” said the Massachusetts Democrat. “It is critical that we stop the flow, and, if we do, the system will have more than enough money to operate at its current level and increase coverage.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Cash Assistance Boosted Infants’ Brain Development, Study Shows

    When mothers with low incomes received just over $300 in monthly cash assistance during the first year of their children’s lives, their infants’ brains displayed more high-frequency brain waves when they reached 12 months old, a major new study by a team of investigators from six U.S. universities and released this week by the National Academy of Sciences shows. These types of brain waves are associated with higher language and cognitive scores and better social and emotional skills in children as they grow older.

    The post Cash Assistance Boosted Infants’ Brain Development, Study Shows appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Striking Massachusetts Nurses Outwait Corporate Giant Tenet

    Last year’s longest-running strike came to an end in early January when nurses at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, overwhelmingly voted to ratify their new contract and return to work. Seven hundred nurses had walked out over dangerous staffing conditions last March—ten months ago. (See previous Labor Notes coverage from last April and August.) In a year of health care workers organizing amid Covid surges and staffing shortages, St. Vincent nurses stood out for their willingness to strike indefinitely and for the discipline the strikers showed.

    The post Striking Massachusetts Nurses Outwait Corporate Giant Tenet appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Where Is The 100,000-Strong Public Health Corps Biden Promised Us?

    A year after Joe Biden’s inauguration, things seem bleak. Despite the existence of life-saving vaccines, tests and masks, on January 21, more than 3,000 people were reported to have died of Covid-19, and the last time daily deaths were below 1,000 was in August. There is a better way, and it was proposed by then-candidate Joe Biden in 2020. As part of the Biden-Harris plan to tackle Covid-19, the campaign proposed the creation of a 100,000-strong U.S. Public Health Jobs Corps. In the words of the campaign, such a force would ensure “contact tracing reaches every single community in America” and that corps members “should come from the communities they serve.” Such a force was never created and, in the meantime, public health departments have struggled to deal with the increasing workload, with staff quickly burning out.

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    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • How Can We Solve Inequality?

    Oxfam’s latest report on global inequality has highlighted some alarming statistics on how wealth distribution has worsened during the pandemic. While the wealth of the world’s 10 richest men doubled since the pandemic began, the incomes of 99% of humanity became worse off because of COVID-19. What are the solutions to this crisis?

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  • What Student Activists Walking Out Over Covid Safety Can Learn From Student Movements Around The World

    There is a long international history of student strikes. The recent student movements in Chile, Brazil, and elsewhere can offer ideas and inspiration to the thousands of K-12 students organizing school walkouts to demand remote learning and other safety protocols during the current Covid wave.

    The post What Student Activists Walking Out Over Covid Safety Can Learn From Student Movements Around The World appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Corporate Takeover Of Multilateralism Deals More Blows To Right To Health

    It is no news that transnational corporations have effectively infiltrated institutions such as the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Still, according to a new report published by the People’s Working Group on Multistakeholderism (PWGM), their influence has now edged towards a breaking point. The Transnational Institute (TNI), the People’s Health Movement (PHM), Public Services International (PSI), and other organizations members of the working group have warned that surpassing this point will make it even more difficult to reclaim power from corporations, and that will have an effect on all aspects of people’s lives.

    The post Corporate Takeover Of Multilateralism Deals More Blows To Right To Health appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Bereft Of Paid Sick Leave, Millions Of Ill Americans Are Forced To Work With Covid-19 – Report

    In the last 10 days, 7.6 million new COVID-19 cases have been detected in the United States. Before mid-December, that’s the time period for which the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would have required Americans to quarantine once they test positive for COVID-19 – a practice intended to limit the spread of the highly contagious virus.

    However, a sudden policy change on December 27 halved that time, with Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of Biden’s coronavirus response team, telling CNN that “We want to get people back to their jobs, particularly those with essential jobs, to keep our society running smoothly.”

    The post Bereft Of Paid Sick Leave, Millions Of Ill Americans Are Forced To Work With Covid-19 – Report appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • If Dems Don’t Deliver on Health Care, They May Suffer in Midterms, Jayapal Warns

    Demonstrators rally in front of PhRMA's Washington office to protest high prescription drug prices on September 21, 2021.

    Rep. Pramila Jayapal warned Monday that the upcoming midterm elections could be painful for Democrats if they fail to substantively deliver on their healthcare-related campaign promises, which ranged from tackling sky-high drug prices to lowering the Medicare eligibility age.

    “It has been a concern for us,” Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and lead sponsor of the Medicare for All Act of 2021, told the Washington Post. “You can see it with the number of Democrats in vulnerable districts across the country who want to be able to go back and tell people that we’ve lowered their costs for child care, for pre-K, for elder care, for drug pricing, for healthcare.”

    The stagnation of Democrats’ $1.75 trillion Build Back Better package — thanks in large part to opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and other right-wing lawmakers — has increased the likelihood that the party will enter campaign season having accomplished little on healthcare, which voters consistently view as a top priority.

    Republicans, which have obstructed their Democratic counterparts at every turn, are already favored to retake the House in the midterms, riding a wave of voter suppression and aggressive map-rigging.

    The current, dramatically scaled-back version of the Build Back Better Act includes a new hearing benefit for Medicare, provisions to reduce sky-high prescription drug costs, and policy changes aimed at addressing the Medicaid coverage gap.

    More sweeping proposals to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60 and add dental and vision coverage to the program were removed at the behest of corporate-backed right-wing Democrats, including Manchin.

    The Medicare for All Act — which has the support of a majority of the House Democratic caucus and the public, but not President Joe Biden — hasn’t even been put on the table for discussion. The Democratic Party’s 2020 platform, unveiled in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, mentions Medicare for All just once but does not endorse it.

    With Congress and the Biden administration failing to act, pharmaceutical companies are raising prices for prescription drugs at will and Medicare beneficiaries are facing a massive premium hike — neither of which bode well for the party in full control of the federal government.

    The healthcare provisions that have survived Build Back Better talks thus far are likely to crumble if Democrats aren’t able to salvage the bill, which has been put on hold as the party focuses on voting rights legislation that also faces long odds in the Senate.

    “We’ve campaigned for a long time on taking it to the drug companies and passing the bulk negotiation of prices. It’s something that voters understand,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told the Post. “I think it’s problematic if we can’t get that done.”

    With the full Build Back Better Act stuck in the Senate, some vulnerable frontline Democrats are calling on the party’s leadership to break the bill into pieces and hold votes on popular individual elements, including prescription drug price reforms.

    “People want to know that the people they elect can get things done that are going to make a difference in the lives of ordinary citizens,” said Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.), who narrowly won reelection in 2020.

    But some outside progressives argue such an approach would be a mistake and would not increase the likelihood of passage given that individual bills, unlike the full reconciliation package, would be subject to the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster.

    “Breaking up BBB at this point when Democrats have foolishly given away all their leverage (by releasing [the bipartisan infrastructure bill]) will only reward and embolden obstruction — while further diluting an already milquetoast bill,” tweeted progressive media strategist Murshed Zaheed.

    Ellen Sciales, a spokesperson for the youth-led Sunrise Movement, echoed that criticism in a statement to the Post.

    “The idea of breaking up BBB into smaller bills is a false choice for Democrats,” she said. “Everything in the Build Back Better Act is urgently needed.”

    “Democrats have a trifecta right now, and instead of pitting programs and communities against each other, the White House and Senate leaders should figure out a way to bring the last two senators on board,” Sciales added, referring to Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). “It’s clear the tactic of negotiating in private is failing, and we’re quickly losing our window of opportunity to act.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Urged to Fire Covid Response Chief Over ‘Damning’ Failures

    President Joe Biden is coming under growing pressure to fire White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients—a former private equity executive with no public health background—as the administration continues to face criticism over its slow-moving and inadequate efforts to combat Covid-19.

    Watchdog groups have long warned that Zients is not qualified to take on the massive task of leading the federal government’s pandemic response given both his lack of scientific and medical experience as well as his record in the private sector, where his firm invested in a company accused of exploitative surprise billing.

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    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Public Health Professionals Must Demand An End To The Use Of Weaponized Drones

    The public health community has an obligation to condemn the use of weaponized drones and demand an end to these targeted killings. If the goal of the public health sector — which includes health care practitioners, researchers, academics and policy makers — is, as the American Public Health Association’s (APHA) website states, “to prevent people from getting sick or injured,” then surely lending an authoritative voice in opposition to weaponized drones is more than appropriate.

    The post Public Health Professionals Must Demand An End To The Use Of Weaponized Drones appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Biden’s Failure To Provide At-Home Covid Tests Looks Extra Ridiculous

    After two years without being able to travel home from London, England to Los Angeles, Cali. to see my family, I finally arrived in a chaotic U.S. in time for the holidays amid the Omicron wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although I’d been preparing for a difficult return thanks to the new variant, I had been eager to see my family now that I’m finally vaccinated against Covid-19 and that my partner, who holds a British passport, was able to visit alongside me after more than a year of travel restrictions barring Europeans. What I hadn’t been expecting, however, was to find family and friends desperately trying to procure rapid antigen tests as many of them developed Covid symptoms and wanted to protect their loved ones and community over the holidays.

    The post Biden’s Failure To Provide At-Home Covid Tests Looks Extra Ridiculous appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Australian Trade Unions Demand Free COVID Testing For All

    In a scathing condemnation of the Scott Morrison government, Australian trade unions criticized its inability to make testing for COVID-19 freely available for all. The country’s largest apex trade union body, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), released a statement on Thursday, January 13, criticizing the failure to make Rapid Antigen Tests (RATs) free and accessible for all.

    “The ACTU condemns in the strongest possible terms the Prime Minister’s failure at National Cabinet to ensure Rapid Antigen Tests be made free and accessible for all to protect worker and community safety and get the economy moving again,” reads the ACTU statement.

    The statement also criticized the announcement made on Thursday to relax quarantine rules for close contact workers in transport, education and emergency services.

    The post Australian Trade Unions Demand Free COVID Testing For All appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • We Know The Silver Bullet To Ending Poverty And Destitution But Choose Not To Use It

    Here’s how the world should operate in simple terms: A certain country or region or city or township or Hobbit hole tries something in order to help their society or group or hovel — if it works, other places then do it. If it doesn’t work, other places don’t do it. It’s like when you were a kid and you saw your brother slide down the banister and rack himself on the newel post — You then thought, “Maybe that activity is not for me.” But if he didn’t nail himself in the jewels, you probably thought, “I think I’ll try that.”

    That’s how the United States government should work, but it doesn’t.

    The post We Know The Silver Bullet To Ending Poverty And Destitution But Choose Not To Use It appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Strikes And Student Walkouts Spread Across US As Omicron Surges And Schools Re-Open

    Across the US, Omicron infections continue to explode, as “more children are being admitted to hospitals than ever before,” according to *CNN.* Vaccination rates among children remain low and community spread, accelerated by the holiday season and the return to in-person instruction, is rippling across the social terrain; hitting teachers, parents, and family members. In just the Los Angeles school district, “Approximately 65,000 students and staff members have tested positive for COVID-19, according to mandatory testing conducted by the district during the winter break.” The drastic spike in COVID cases has also been coupled with increasing shortages of medical staff, which has hindered the ability of many people to get tested and receive medical attention.

    The post Strikes And Student Walkouts Spread Across US As Omicron Surges And Schools Re-Open appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Nurses In US Protest COVID-19 Working Conditions

    Hospitals in the US, the worst-hit country in the world, have been struggling to cope up with the new tide of COVID-19 cases in recent weeks, as well as worker shortages and burnout. Nurses are furious over sheer callousness and indifference shown by the government as well as their employers, blaming them for caring about their businesses, not the public health. The protests took place across 11 US states  and Washington, D.C. “to demand the hospital industry invest in safe staffing, and to demand that President Biden follow through on his campaign promise to protect nurses and prioritize public health,” according to the union.

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  • Comparing The COVID-19 Responses In Cuba And The United States

    With fundamental differences in health systems structure and organization, as well as in political philosophy and culture, it is not surprising that there are major differences in outcomes. The more coordinated, comprehensive response to COVID-19 in Cuba has resulted in significantly better outcomes compared with the United States. Through July 15, 2021, the US cumulative case rate is more than 4 times higher than Cuba’s, while the death rate and excess death rate are both approximately 12 times higher in the United States. In addition to the large differences in cumulative case and death rates between United States and Cuba, the COVID-19 pandemic has unmasked serious underlying health inequities in the United States.

    The post Comparing The COVID-19 Responses In Cuba And The United States appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • China Tests 12.5 Million In Zhengzhou For Covid In Six Hours

    On Friday, Chinese health authorities began testing every single resident of Zhengzhou, the capital of China’s central Henan Province, after a handful of COVID-19 cases were detected in the massive city of 12.5 million. Just six hours later, they were finished, achieving a rate of 2.1 million people tested per hour, or 583 residents per second, according to the Global Times. For comparison, that is equal to New York City and Chicago combined. On Sunday, health officials set about trying to do it again with the even larger city of Tianjin, home to 14 million people.

    The post China Tests 12.5 Million In Zhengzhou For Covid In Six Hours appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Sudan’s Doctors March To Protest Violence Against Hospitals

    Hundreds of Sudanese doctors and medics marched in Khartoum and other parts of Sudan on Sunday to protest against violence by security forces against the medical staff, healthcare facilities, and patients. Slogans against the military and its October coup were raised and a petition was handed to the United Nations representative in Sudan, calling on the international community to document the violations against the Sudanese people. The doctors’ march comes as neighborhood-based resistance committees, political parties, and other pro-democracy groups carry out an ongoing campaign of protests under a “no negotiation” slogan.

    The post Sudan’s Doctors March To Protest Violence Against Hospitals appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Yes, There Really Were Only Two COVID Deaths In Mainland China In 2021.

    In the United States, which has seen more deaths from the disease than any other country on Earth, there were 476,863 new deaths in 2021, up from 370,777 in 2020. However, it is in fact widely accepted that only two people died of the disease in China in 2021 on the mainland, plus 64 deaths in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and 843 in Taiwan, where the central government of China does not exercise control – according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering COVID-19 Data Repository. This brings China up to a total of 4,636 deaths in the mainland and 5,699 deaths overall since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of which occurred in the first few months of 2020.

    The post Yes, There Really Were Only Two COVID Deaths In Mainland China In 2021. appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Omicron Spike Is Straining Hospitals as Health Care Workers Leave the Profession

    The Omicron variant’s transmission rate is exponentially higher than Delta, leaving healthcare workers across the U.S. in dire straits. Waves of doctors, nurses and other health professionals are unionizing, and some have quit the profession over exploitative conditions. The staffing shortage has added on to the strains of increasing hospitalizations due to COVID-19, limited availability of necessary equipment and lack of federal support for preventative measures such as paid medical leave. “This is the cost of two years spent pushing prematurely for a return to normal,” says Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and science writer at The Atlantic. Yong also discusses the debate over keeping schools open during the COVID-19 surge, and challenges to President Biden’s vaccine mandates affecting nearly 100 million workers.

    TRANSCRIPT

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

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

    Here in the United States, nearly a quarter of hospitals are reporting critical staffing shortages as Omicron drives an unprecedented surge in infections. This comes as public schools in Chicago are closed for a fourth day as talks between the teachers’ union and Mayor Lori Lightfoot over in-person teaching remain at an impasse.

    For more, we’re joined by Ed Yong, science writer at The Atlantic. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his coverage of the pandemic. His most recent pieces, “Hospitals Are in Serious Trouble” and “Omicron Is Our Past Pandemic Mistakes on Fast-Forward: We’ve been making the same errors for nearly two years now.”

    Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, Ed. Let’s start with the hospitals. Explain the serious trouble our hospitals are in.

    ED YONG: Yeah, they are at breaking point. It’s really hard to overstate how badly hospitals are faring right now. Even before the Omicron wave, they were already in trouble, because so many healthcare workers had left because of the collective traumas of the last two years of the pandemic. And now we have, firstly, a Delta wave and now Omicron on top of that. Huge volumes of patients are flooding hospitals. And while Omicron is less severe than previous variants, it’s so contagious that the sheer number of those patients is so high that there are still a lot of very sick people, and there are a lot people, full stop. So they are inundating hospitals at a time when there are fewer healthcare workers than ever before. Those healthcare workers are demoralized. They’re exhausted. And a lot of them are out sick because they have breakthrough infections from Omicron.

    And all of this means that hospitals are — like, I really struggle to use the words like “crumbling,” because I don’t want to, like, exaggerate the risk, but that is what I’m hearing from people all around the country. People are waiting for six to 12 hours to get seen for any kind of emergency procedure. People in the ER are on ventilators waiting to get into ICUs, which are full. The entire system is clogged up. And it’s not just about COVID anymore. This now means that medical care for basically anything is worse than it was two years ago, because the system is just so completely flooded and unable to cope with the volume of patients right now.

    AMY GOODMAN: The National Nurses United said, “Going to work should not mean putting your life and the lives of your loved ones in danger.” A group of nurses’ unions and the AFL–CIO have demanded the federal government enact permanent rules to ensure workplace safety, saying all frontline health workers should be guaranteed “personal protective equipment, exposure notification, ventilation systems, and other lifesaving measures.” Can you talk about this kind of organizing that’s going on?

    ED YONG: Yeah. I think a lot of healthcare workers are fed up. Like, there’s sort of a culture, a social contract in medicine, that you sacrifice yourself for the sake of your patients. And while that contract means that the rest of us get decent medical care when we expect it, it also creates the conditions where healthcare workers are very easily exploited by society at large, as we’re seeing now, and by their own particular institutions.

    So it’s no surprise, after two years of this, after feeling betrayed by the public, by a lot of places they work for, that a lot of them are starting to organize, and there’s more movement towards unions. There’s more of a sense of, like, “We just cannot take this anymore.” And I commend that. I do think, like, that’s necessary for creating a more stable medical system.

    What I worry is that there are a lot of people who, rather than deciding to fight for this, have just decided, very reasonably, to stop, to leave their jobs or the profession. I’ve heard from so many healthcare workers who have already made that choice. And their decisions thin the ranks of those who are left behind to take care of the rest of us and whose jobs are now that much harder.

    But, honestly, if so much of society has pretended that the pandemic is over, and has longed to get back to normal, can you really blame healthcare workers for wanting to do the same? This is the cost of two years spent prematurely pushing towards a return to normal, except, for the healthcare system, for our ability to get medical care, there might not be a normal to return to.

    AMY GOODMAN: Last week, President Biden reiterated his support for keeping schools open during the COVID surge. This is what he said.

    PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: We know that our kids can be safe when in school, by the way. That’s why I believe schools should remain open.

    AMY GOODMAN: I want to get your response to this, Ed. We see the Chicago schools are closed because the Chicago Teachers Union says they’re not going to expose their teachers in this way. Other schools that are remaining open around the country, like in New York, are just vectors for infection.

    ED YONG: So, I sympathize with everyone on this side of the debate, right? Like, on the one hand, you have parents who are really scared about putting their children in these conditions where this extremely transmissible virus is just going everywhere. I sympathize for parents who can’t handle remote schooling or just don’t have the option to do that. I sympathize with teachers who don’t feel that they can put themselves at risk anymore. I think, though, that we’re sort of — we’ve been put in a position where we’re having to choose, we’re having to, like, take sides between people who are all in the right. Like, this shouldn’t be a debate in the way it’s framed.

    The jobs of the federal government should have been to control transmission of this virus and to control the pandemic to an extent where this shouldn’t even have been an issue. And so many of the measures that were necessary — you know, the rollout of rapid tests, mask mandates — all of these things have been, if anything, got pulled back at both the federal and the state level. There’s not been enough done to control the pandemic for two years now. And last year really wasn’t that much different. Like, because our policymakers have made bad decisions, it puts individual schools, teachers, parents in an impossible position and sets them against each other, when, in fact, I think the main problem is that the policies that should have protected all of us have not been put in place.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about what those policies should be. I mean, you’ve pointed out in your writing, for example, that when — obviously, for politicians, they want to put this behind them, so then talking about unmasking — the fact that there aren’t tests available now, though President Biden said he’s going to get half a billion out to the country, and the fact that Abbott, which makes Binax, one of the tests, destroyed millions of those tests.

    ED YONG: Right, because we keep on treating this like a short-term problem. We keep on assuming that we’re going to get back to normal at some point in the near future without actually doing the work to get to that point. Rapid tests are a clear example of this. Like, why do we not have them deployed on a mass scale? Biden talks about deploying that number of tests out to people. It’s roughly like one-and-a-half tests per person.

    And I also want to talk about the social measures that should have been put in place right from the start. Like, we know that a pandemic is a social problem. It’s not just a biomedical one. Yes, vaccines and therapeutics and diagnostic tests are great, but we need things that actually allow people to protect their livelihoods and their lives at the same time. And paid sick leave is a great example of this. It seems like a really weird measure to be talking about in the context of a pandemic, but if you can’t actually take the time off to isolate or to take care of yourself if you’re exposed, if your workplace conditions don’t allow you to do that, then how are you going to stop yourself from spreading this disease?

    Like, we know that these things actually matter and can have an immediate impact, but they don’t seem to be part of the package of measures that we’ve been talking about. People sort of gravitate between just going on completely as normal or going to a strict lockdown. There are so many things in the middle. Like, we’ve talked about masking, we’ve talked about rapid tests, we’ve talked about paid sick leave. Ventilation is important. Having places where people can isolate is important. These kind of measures are going on in parts of the country but not everywhere, and there doesn’t seem to be any sort of federal push to really make them everywhere or to pressure states into actually putting them into place. And that is part of the problem. That is why we’re in the state where we’re having these horrendous discussions about schools and where we’re looking at a healthcare system that is collapsing under the sheer weight of infections.

    AMY GOODMAN: Do you think this could lead to Medicare for All? I mean, it has exposed the fracture of the entire system, a system that was broken already in terms of who gets healthcare and who doesn’t in this country. Now it’s who dies and who doesn’t.

    ED YONG: Yeah. You know, people who are unvaccinated are actually, like, the uninsured, make a disproportionate — I’m saying this terribly. A lot of people who are unvaccinated are also uninsured, right? And that says something about the medical system in this country. Like, there’s this sort of tendency to paint unvaccinated people as all like antagonistic anti-vaxxers. And I think access is still actually a large problem that isn’t really grappled with.

    I would hope that the lessons from these two years are that inequities harm us. You cannot fight a vaccine — you cannot fight a pandemic properly in a grossly unequal society such as what we currently live in. But that doesn’t seem to be the lesson that is being learned. Like, we’ve had lip service paid to the need to focus on inequities, but even from, like, leading public health voices, it seems to be a thing that is readily forgotten. And that is — you know, that is part of why we are where we are now. Unless we actually make efforts to protect the most vulnerable, to help people on low incomes, people from marginalized groups, disabled communities — unless we stop treating them like disposable commodities, we’re going to end up back in this situation that we currently find ourselves in.

    AMY GOODMAN: The Supreme Court hearing oral arguments around Biden’s vaccine mandates, your thoughts?

    ED YONG: I worry that we are — instead of learning the lessons that you’ve just talked about, that would make us better prepared for the next one, that we are setting legal precedent in place that would actually make us more vulnerable next time ’round. And, you know, there are many different examples of this. State legislatures around the country have put in orders that make it more difficult for people to put in, say, mask mandates or quarantine orders. That contributes to how hard it is to fight something like Omicron. It is going to make it more difficult to deal the next variants. It’s going to make it more difficult to deal with the next pandemics, which I guarantee you we will face.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well —

    ED YONG: I worry —

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, Ed, we’re going to have to go, but I wanted to wish you a happy 40th birthday. I know it was very difficult. You wrote a piece talking about canceling your 40th birthday because of Omicron.

    ED YONG: Thank you.

    AMY GOODMAN: Thank you so much for being with us. Ed Yong, science writer at The Atlantic, won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the pandemic. We’ll link to his pieces.

    That does it for our show. Remember, wearing a mask is an act of love. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Capitalist Death-Drive. Afghan Sanctions, Attack On Medicare.

    Lee Camp looks at how the capitalist system sits at the heart of the worst problems facing society. In this history lesson, Camp takes you back to the feudal system, to the creation of corporations and currency, to the modern system that’s destroying the lives of the poor today. The ruling class don’t even try to hide the inhumanity that keeps the system running anymore, now that it has become almost impossible to ignore. This leaves it up to popular movements to end the capitalist system and create something new. Then, Camp reports on the police brutality victims who don’t gain as much attention as those murdered by cops, and Marilyn Manson’s #MeToo allegations.

    The post The Capitalist Death-Drive. Afghan Sanctions, Attack On Medicare. appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Highest Attainable Standard of Health Is a Fundamental Right of Every Human Being

    It is not as if Joe Biden, who succeeded Trump, has been monumentally better at managing the pandemic. When the US Food and Drug Administration paused the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in April 2021, it fed into growing anti-vaccine sentiment in the country; confusion between Biden’s White House and the Centre for Disease Control over the use of masks furthered the chaos in the country. The deep political animosity between Trump supporters and liberals and the general lack of concern for hand-to-mouth earners with no social safety net accelerated the cultural divides in the United States.

    The post The Highest Attainable Standard of Health Is a Fundamental Right of Every Human Being appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Veterans’ Health Care For Mental And Environmental Illnesses Under Attack

    In recent years, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have backed privatization of services provided by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA).  As part of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the VHA serves about nine million patients and operates the largest public healthcare  system in the country. Since 2015, billions of dollars have been diverted from VHA care to private doctors and for-profit hospitals who treat veterans in costlier and less effective fashion.  This cannibalization of the VHA budget began under President Obama, escalated during the Trump era, and continues under Joe Biden.

    The post Veterans’ Health Care For Mental And Environmental Illnesses Under Attack appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Covid Fueled by Neoliberal Austerity

    The reliance on a vaccine only strategy has led to this situation. When it became clear that “breakthrough” infections could occur after vaccination, the CDC announced that it would limit tracking of breakthroughs to those cases which required hospitalization. The decision was an admission that a course correction was needed. Instead the Biden team doubled down on failure and began forcing federal agencies and contractors, which means most private companies, to vaccinate employees whether they wanted it or not.

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  • A Roundtable Discussion With NYC Nurses And Teachers

    The United States has averaged a thousand people a day dying from COVID since August and the total number of lives lost is approaching a million. The number of children hospitalized with COVID has hit an all-time high nationally. During all of that, the rich have only gotten richer. On the same day we set a new national record for COVID cases, Wall Street hit a record high. Labor journalist and NewsGuild organizer Chris Brooks sat down with a group of New York City nurses and teachers to talk about how the institutions they work for are collapsing and what labor activists can do about it.

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  • The Cruel Failure Of Welfare Reform In The Southwest

    ProPublica has taken this moment to examine the present state of cash assistance in the U.S., focusing on the Southwest, where massive population growth and a surging cost of living for low-income parents have collided with the region’s libertarian attitude toward government help for the poor.

    What ProPublica discovered is an abundance of overlooked stories of bizarre — and mean-spirited — practices on the part of state governments, which were handed near-complete responsibility for welfare under the 1996 law.

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