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Category: health care

  • Why Did the DoD Abandon a Report Tracking 139 Military Mental Health Programs?

    Soldier in military fatigues touches head as mental health professional reaches out

    Air Force Capt. Ben Landry struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts and checked himself into Cedar Springs Hospital in Colorado in 2020. He was lucky. “I got support from my unit,” he said.

    Not everyone at the hospital did. Officers, Captain Landry heard, punished troops for seeking mental health services, issuing letters of reprimand or Article 15 disciplinary procedures, which can reduce pay and rank.

    For years, Captain Landry had endured Air Force Suicide Prevention Program mandatory lectures on how to identify symptoms of distress that had, unintentionally, ostracized him as “a danger to society,” he said.

    His wife, Aleha, and their four children, have also struggled while continuing to advocate for military spouses and their families to be included in military psychological health programming. “It’s been hard on all of us,” Aleha told Truthout. In an op-ed, she called the Air Force’s Suicide Prevention Program a “Band-Aid program” that sent Captain Landry “further underground and only coached him on what not to say.”

    Now, President Joe Biden is announcing a new military veteran and suicide prevention strategy in an attempt to address a larger problem of how the U.S. military treats service members’ mental health conditions, including the “adoption of rigorous program evaluation” for suicide prevention programs.

    But, since at least 2012, the military knew it had an accountability problem for programs on suicide, substance abuse, PTSD and sexual assault, according to unreleased Department of Defense (DoD) records provided to Truthout. While the military grappled with the psychological consequences of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the DoD was spending about $1 billion annually on mental health programs of questionable effectiveness with scant accountability, the unreleased DoD records, which include individual program evaluations, show.

    In 2019, the DoD produced a final report out of a $53 million project that evaluated 139 military psychological health programs worldwide across the armed forces. It states that many programs, like Air Force Suicide Prevention, did not clearly track costs. Other programs had insufficient staffing and resources, and most lacked sufficient data to determine if a program improved a person’s mental health, according to the report.

    While the Air Force program prevented suicides, according to a separate 2010 study, it had not established adequate monitoring to “secure long-term effectiveness.” The more recent internal DoD evaluation scored the program in the bottom third of the military’s 139 programs. No one knew, for example, if the lectures Landry attended increased help-seeking behavior and reduced suicide.

    “There is insufficient evidence for or against suicide prevention efforts,” explained Mike Colston, a retired Navy captain and former director for Mental Health Programs in DoD’s Health Services Policy and Oversight office. That’s why “program evaluation is essential to research, track outcomes and discover programs that can do both those things,” he told Truthout.

    But, the DoD’s Defense Health Agency (DHA), established to manage military health care, never released the 2019 final report to Congress or military leadership, and abandoned the project infrastructure created to continually assess programs.

    Why?

    In 2011, the Pentagon’s Program Analysis Division — recently formed by then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates to study the DoD’s most complex strategic problems — wanted to know which military psychological health programs actually improved the mental health of service members and their families.

    Many programs had been created or expanded, and no one knew how many existed, their cost or their health outcomes. The problem, explained Rani Hoff, director of Yale’s Northeast Program Evaluation Center, was that the “programs were deployed willy-nilly with no guidelines or oversight,” and had little or no evidence base to know if services were effective.

    In turn, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Cost Assessment & Program Evaluation directed a massive evaluation of the DoD’s growing billion-dollar program network. The job went to the Defense Centers of Excellence. “We had a proliferation of programs that were well-intentioned,” said Jonathan Woodson, a former assistant secretary of defense for health affairs who authorized an expansion of the project. “But we needed a process to vet them.”

    Moreover, a series of directives demanded a reckoning. In 2012, President Barack Obama’s Executive Order 13625 ordered the DoD to review programs and rank them by effectiveness, including health outcomes. Additionally, at least three succeeding annual National Defense Authorization Acts required the DoD to “eliminate gaps and redundancies,” report on “the present state of behavioral health services,” and detail “improvements” in treatments.

    In 2016, then-Navy Captain Colston of the mental health oversight office testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Personnel, explaining that the project was “working internally to make psychological health and traumatic brain injury efforts more effective, cost-efficient, and beneficial to Service Members, Veterans, and their families.” He noted these services “account for more than $1 billion annually.”

    To begin, the project measured a proxy for outcomes — effective administrative function — to at least determine if programs worked as intended. It was, Woodson explained, an “iterative approach,” one that would, eventually, measure health outcomes. But, to do that, programs first had to collect the data.

    Programs wanted to improve — and some were making progress — when the DHA closed the evaluation project in 2019. To explain its decision, the DHA cited a changed “operational landscape” in its response to Truthout’s Freedom of Information Act request, and also claimed releasing the final report “could damage progress” it had “made with more standards and standardization of military treatment facilities.” The DHA did not respond when Truthout followed up, asking for clarification.

    The DHA also cited two non-concurring memos critical of the report. However, Woodson called the agency’s response “an awful explanation.” Hoff called the memos accurate but unfair, and said the project was unable to measure outcomes not because of a flaw in its method, but because programs never collected data to do so. Currently, the report is stuck in bureaucratic limbo, as its findings become increasingly outdated. Still, experts argue there is still a need for rigorous assessment.

    Meanwhile, Captain Landry, now in the Air Force Reserves, “is in a good place,” he said. “I’m on the right medication,” he told Truthout. “I see the right people. I’ve got a good circle of family and friends.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • St. Vincent Nurses Strike Sadly Reaches Eight Months

    The historic St. Vincent Hospital nurses strike will reach the eight-month mark,  another sad milestone in their struggle against Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare, a for-profit corporation that has spent more than $100 million and engaged in a number of unfair labor practices to retaliate against the nurses for exercising their right to advocate for safer patient care. The strike is the longest nurses strike in state history, and one of the longest of several strikes by workers across the nation, who are standing up to corporate greed and the devaluation of essential workers in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    The post St. Vincent Nurses Strike Sadly Reaches Eight Months appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Strikes At Huntington, West Virginia Hospital And Metal Production Facility

    One thousand support staff the Huntington, West Virginia hospital system voted October 21 to authorize a 10-day strike when their current contract expires November 2. The contract covers maintenance and service workers, licensed practical nurses, and other medical support workers at Cabell Huntington Hospital and Saint Mary’s Medical Center organized under the Service Employees International Union.

    The post Strikes At Huntington, West Virginia Hospital And Metal Production Facility appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Nursing Home Residents Are Overlooked in Scramble for COVID Antibody Treatments

    A man enters the Regeneron Clinic at a monoclonal antibody treatment site in Pembroke Pines, Florida, on August 19, 2021.

    Of the dozens of patients Dr. Jim Yates has treated for covid-19 at his long-term care center in rural Alabama, this one made him especially nervous.

    The 60-year-old man, who had been fully vaccinated, was diagnosed with a breakthrough infection in late September. Almost immediately, he required supplemental oxygen, and lung exams showed ominous signs of worsening disease. Yates, who is medical director of Jacksonville Health and Rehabilitation, a skilled nursing facility 75 miles northeast of Birmingham, knew his patient needed more powerful interventions — and fast.

    At the first sign of the man’s symptoms, Yates had placed an order with the Alabama Department of Public Health for monoclonal antibodies, the lab-made proteins that mimic the body’s ability to fight the virus. But six days passed before the vials arrived, nearly missing the window in which the therapy works best to prevent hospitalization and death.

    “We’ve been pushing the limits because of the time frame you have to go through,” Yates said. “Fortunately, once we got it, he responded.”

    Across the country, medical directors of skilled nursing and long-term care sites say they’ve been scrambling to obtain doses of the potent antibody therapies following a change in federal policy that critics say limits supplies for the vulnerable population of frail and elder residents who remain at highest risk of covid infection even after vaccination.

    “There are people dying in nursing homes right now, and we don’t know whether or not they could have been saved, but they didn’t have access to the product,” said Chad Worz, CEO of the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists, which represents 1,500 pharmacies that serve long-term care sites.

    Before mid-September, doctors and other providers could order the antibody treatments directly through drug wholesaler AmerisourceBergen and receive the doses within 24 to 48 hours. While early versions of the authorized treatments required hourlong infusions administered at specialty centers or by trained staff members, a more recent approach allows doses to be administered via injections, which have been rapidly adopted by drive-thru clinics and nursing homes.

    Prompt access to the antibody therapies is essential because they work by rapidly reducing the amount of the virus in a person’s system, lowering the chances of serious disease. The therapies are authorized for infected people who’ve had symptoms for no more than 10 days, but many doctors say they’ve had best results treating patients by Day 5 and no later than Day 7.

    After a slow rollout earlier in the year, use of monoclonal antibody treatments exploded this summer as the delta variant surged, particularly in Southern states with low covid vaccination rates whose leaders were looking for alternative — albeit costlier — remedies.

    By early September, orders from seven states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas — accounted for 70% of total shipments of monoclonals.

    Those Southern states, plus three others — Arkansas, Kentucky and North Carolina — ordered new courses of treatment even faster than they used their supplies. From July 28 to Sept. 8, they collectively increased their antibody stockpiles by 134%, according to a KHN analysis of federal data.

    Concerned the pattern was both uncontrolled and unsustainable given limited national supplies, officials with the Department of Health and Human Services stepped in to equalize distribution. HHS barred individual sites from placing direct orders for the monoclonals. Instead, they took over distribution, basing allocation on case rates and hospitalizations and centralizing the process through state health departments.

    “It was absolutely necessary to make this change to ensure a consistent product for all areas of the country,” Dr. Meredith Chuk, who is leading the allocation, distribution and administration team at HHS, said during a conference call.

    But states have been sending most doses of the monoclonal antibody treatments, known as mAbs, to hospitals and acute care centers, sidestepping the pharmacies that serve long-term care sites and depleting supplies for the most vulnerable patients, said Christopher Laxton, executive director of AMDA, the Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine.

    While vaccination might provide 90% protection or higher against serious covid in younger, healthier people, that’s not the case for the elders who typically live in nursing homes.

    “You have to think of the spectrum of immunity,” Laxton said. “For our residents, it’s closer to 60%. You know that 4 out of 10 are going to have breakthrough infections.”

    The mAb treatments have been authorized for use in high-risk patients exposed to the virus, and experts in elder care say that is key to best practices in preventing outbreaks in senior facilities. That could include, for example, treating the elderly roommate of an infected nursing home patient. But because of newly limited supplies, many long-term care sites have started to restrict use to only those who are infected.

    Still, some states have worked to ensure access to mAbs in long-term care sites. Minnesota health officials rely on a policy that prioritizes residents of skilled nursing facilities for the antibody therapies through a weighted lottery. In Michigan, state Medical Director Dr. William Fales directed emergency medical technicians and paramedics to the Ascension Borgess Hospital system in Kalamazoo to help administer doses during recent outbreaks at two centers.

    “The monoclonal antibodies made a huge difference,” said Renee Birchmeier, a nurse practitioner who cares for patients in nine of the system’s sites. “Even the patients in the assisted living with COPD, they’re doing OK,” she said, referring to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. “They’re not advancing, but they’re doing OK. And they’re alive.”

    Long-term care sites have accounted for a fraction of the orders for the monoclonal treatments, first authorized in November 2020. About 3.2 million doses have been distributed to date, with about 52% already used, according to HHS. Only about 13,500 doses have gone to nursing homes this year, according to federal data. That doesn’t include other long-term care sites such as assisted living centers.

    The use is low in part because the treatments were originally delivered only through IV infusions. But in June, the Regeneron monoclonal antibody treatment was authorized for use via subcutaneous injections — four separate shots, given in the same sitting — and demand surged.

    Use in nursing homes rose to more than 3,200 doses in August and nearly 6,700 in September, federal data shows. But weekly usage dropped sharply from mid-September through early October after the HHS policy change.

    Nursing homes and other long-term care sites were seemingly left behind in the new allocation system, said Cristina Crawford, a spokesperson for the American Health Care Association, a nonprofit trade group representing long-term care operators. “We need federal and state public health officials to readjust their priorities and focus on our seniors,” she said.

    In an Oct. 20 letter to White House policy adviser Amy Chang, advocates for long-term care pharmacists and providers called for a coordinated federal approach to ensure access to the treatments. Such a plan might reserve use of a certain type or formulation of the product for direct order and use in long-term care settings, said Worz, of the pharmacy group.

    So far, neither the HHS nor the White House has responded to the letter, Worz said. Cicely Waters, a spokesperson for HHS, said the agency continues to work with state health departments and other organizations “to help get covid-19 monoclonal antibody products to the areas that need it most.” But she didn’t address whether HHS is considering a specific solution for long-term care sites.

    Demand for monoclonal antibody treatments has eased as cases of covid have declined across the U.S. For the week ending Oct. 27, an average of nearly 72,000 daily cases were reported, a decline of about 20% from two weeks prior. Still, there were 2,669 confirmed cases among nursing home residents the week ending Oct. 24, and 392 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    At least some of those deaths might have been prevented with timely monoclonal antibody therapy, Worz said.

    Resolving the access issue will be key to managing outbreaks as the nation wades into another holiday season, said Dr. Rayvelle Stallings, corporate medical officer at PruittHealth, which serves 24,000 patients in 180 locations in the Southeast.

    PruittHealth pharmacies have a dozen to two dozen doses of monoclonal antibody treatments in stock, just enough to handle expected breakthrough cases, she said.

    “But it’s definitely not enough if we were to have a significant outbreak this winter,” she said. “We would need 40 to 50 doses. If we saw the same or similar surge as we saw in August and September? We would not have enough.”

    Phillip Reese, an assistant professor of journalism at California State University-Sacramento, contributed to this report.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Day of the Dead Protest in Front of Nancy Pelosi’s House

    In a Day of the Dead protest, protesters gathered in a slight drizzle at San Francisco’s Alta Plaza Park and marched to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s house, a few blocks away. The signs they carried declared health care to be a human right and demanded Medicare for All. One, carried by “Red Berets” was an American flag with the year other countries had instituted national health care written on the stripes. “WHAT ABOUT US???” was on the bottom line.

    The post Day of the Dead Protest in Front of Nancy Pelosi’s House appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Deadly US Sanctions Are Exacerbating The Pandemic Globally

    There was a sigh of relief for people who are concerned about the COVID-19 pandemic when President Biden took office in January. After a year of COVID denial, Biden promised to “follow the science” and put more effort into containing the virus than the Trump administration did. But 10 months later, a new report by the Department of the Treasury makes it clear that “following the science” only applies when it protects the profits of the wealthy class.

    On January 21, President Biden issued a National Security Memorandum that, in a section titled, “COVID-19 Sanctions Relief,” ordered various departments to “review existing United States and multilateral financial and economic sanctions to evaluate whether they are unduly hindering responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and provide recommendations to the President.”

    The post Deadly US Sanctions Are Exacerbating The Pandemic Globally appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Nurses Sound Off About Trauma, Solidarity and Why They’re Ready to Strike

    On September 28, nearly 800 people rallied in front of Kaiser’s corporate office in Portland, with union members joined by dozens of organizations and hundreds of supporters.

    “We can’t survive doing the work that we’re asked to do, the way that we’re being asked to do it with the lack of support we’re being asked to do it with,” says nurse Nicole Brun-Cottan. Tens of thousands of nurses in the Kaiser Permanente health care system are poised to go on strike. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Kelly Hayes talks with three nurses who voted to authorize a strike about what’s at stake in their struggle, and how the pandemic has affected frontline labor.

    TRANSCRIPT

    Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

    Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about things you should know, if you want to change the world. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. On this show, we talk a lot about building the relationships and analysis that we need to create movements that can win. Well, it’s Striketober, so this week, we are talking about labor. Health care professionals have been applauded, literally and figuratively, during the pandemic, for their commitment to patient care, despite PPE shortages, traumatic working conditions, and the loss of loved ones and coworkers. But nurses at Kaiser Permanente are not feeling that love at the negotiating table.

    I recently spoke with three nurses who are part of Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals, AFT, AFL-CIO, who are currently squaring off with Kaiser, which is the largest managed care organization in the U.S. The company calls itself “an integrated managed care consortium” — which means that Kaiser members are insured by the same company that provides their medical care. It’s a profitable model that netted the company $6.4 billion last year. Operating in eight states and Washington, D.C. Kaiser boasts over 12 million members and operates 39 hospitals, with more than 700 medical offices, and over 300,000 employees.

    For Kaiser, business is good, but the company claims that to make health care more affordable for consumers, it needs to pay its workers less. While most people would agree that health care is too expensive in the U.S., it seems especially egregious, amid a global pandemic, to claim that nurses and other health care workers are being paid too much. I personally believe we owe health care workers in this country a debt we can’t possibly repay: these people have provided care to the sick and dying, risking their own lives and the lives of their families, and, at times, losing their colleagues to the virus, so that we might have care. According to the World Health Organization, between 80,000 and 180,000 health and care workers may have died, globally, from COVID-19, between January of 2020 and May of 2021. In the United States, nurses have taken the brunt of those losses.

    Throughout this crisis, billionaires have lined their pockets while everyday people have struggled and died. We have seen mass death and skyrocketing levels of inequality, and now, workers, including nurses, are fighting back against companies that would devalue their lives even further.

    Kaiser is currently proposing a two-tier payment system that workers say would devastate the quality of care in their facilities and compound an existing nursing shortage. Steelworkers Local 7600 Vice President Norberto Gomez, who has transported patients for Kaiser as a mobility technician for 23 years, told Labor Notes that Kaiser’s proposal would put some of the company’s new hires “behind the starting rates at McDonald’s or Amazon warehouses.” As Gomez put it, “If given a choice between flipping burgers or moving Covid patients to the morgue for the same money, it’s a no-brainer.” Current Kaiser employees would receive a meager 1 percent raise per year.

    On October 11, nearly 3,400 workers from Kaiser Permanente in Oregon voted to authorize a strike. With a 90 percent participation rate, 96 percent of those who cast a ballot voted to authorize a strike. The workers are part of a 21-union Alliance of Health Care Unions representing 52,000 workers. 35,000 of them have now authorized strikes. I recently spoke with three nurses who work for Kaiser Permanente in Portland about why they voted to authorize a strike, and what they believe is at stake in this fight.

    Hannah Winchester: My name is Hannah Winchester. I am a home health physical therapist. I am also our labor partner. I’m part of the professional bargaining team. I’ve worked for Kaiser for the last four years, and I voted to authorize a strike because I want to make sure that our contract protects the future of health care for those that provide it and those that receive it.

    Nicole Brun-Cottan: My name is Nicole Brun-Cottan. I’m an acute care and critical care physical therapist in a high acuity hospital and a member of the professional bargaining unit bargaining team. And I voted to authorize a strike to protect patient care and access to services for our patients.

    Dylan Olson: My name is Dylan Olson, and I have worked at Kaiser for 14 years now as a mental health therapist in the emergency department doing crisis evaluations. And, I voted to authorize the strike as part of the bargaining team, because our patients need better staffing. They need better turnaround times. It is not ethical for it to take six to eight weeks to get back into a therapy appointment.

    HW: While it seems like in our current climate, COVID is the reason for a lot of conversation, it’s definitely a reason for our employer to make the decisions that they’ve been making…. But I think that we actually got here far before that. I think that trying to make health care an affordable entity and associating it more with an economic ask versus a quality of health care ask has really gotten us here over the course of many, many years, and now, we are just kind of at this breaking point. We’re at this cusp, and it simultaneously lined up with our contract ending, that all of these things have really come to a head, but I think it’s really been happening for quite some time.

    NBC: I think that there’s been a narrative about the affordability of health care specifically that Kaiser Permanente is pushing. And the implications of that narrative are [that] health care is very expensive, we need to make it more affordable so that more people have access to it, and what’s implied is, and the way that we’re going to make it more affordable is by paying labor less. For me, the lens that I look through this contract negotiation with is what is it that’s going to get me help as a frontline health care worker so that I can provide the care to patients that they deserve and that is part of what I signed up for when I agreed to do this work, and went through the training to do this work?

    DO: I’ve been with Kaiser for 14 years and we’ve definitely had bumpy patches in the past but this past couple of years, it seems like [it] has been more contentious. And, I wasn’t that surprised to see their proposal this year.

    KH: Kaiser employees say understaffing has reached crisis levels. To bridge the gap, nurses say the company is offering steep signing bonuses and paying travel nurses as much as $10,000 a week to help keep care systems up and running. So amid an ongoing nursing shortage, how can pay cuts for new employees make sense?

    NBC: We do not have the staff that we need to do the work that we’re being asked to do. As far as the nurses go, and it’s true broadly across health care, there is a staffing shortage. That staffing shortage has been predicted since the early 2000s. So when we see the employer using COVID and the pandemic as a license to make changes in our contract and the way that they run operationally, it’s really disingenuous because not only did we have a pandemic that changed the game, but we also had a problem that was predicted, that we understood was coming based on a bunch of aging baby boomers who, both needed care and were retiring from the health force in droves. So what they’re offering is especially stark when you compare it to the context that they’re offering it in. If we know we’re in a staffing shortage and we’ve known that was coming for a long time, and we know that it’s been worsened by social conditions and the pandemic, how is it possible that they would imagine that they would offer to pay less for the labor that we provide?

    HW: I think that staffing is absolutely our number one ask, but really looking at not just how do we get people into the door, but how do we stop this staffing crisis from getting worse and worse? How do we start to fix it? Where are the problems? What is the root cause of how we got to where we are right now? Why aren’t people walking out of health care at an overwhelming rate? Why are people leaving this company? Why are people abandoning what their career is and figuring out what those actual problems are and what we can do in our scope of influence to stop it and start fixing it so that our patients continue to have access to care? Because that’s a really scary future if things keep continuing the way that they’re going right now, not just for us as healthcare workers, but for us as patients… for our communities, for our families, for our friends.

    It starts with the things that we’re asking for with this contract… to not accept these really dangerous proposals that they’re giving to us to further affect that. This will only make things worse. At this point in time, the proposals that Kaiser’s offered are really focused on economics. Again, they want to… they’ve always said they want to stay affordable, and it sounds like to stay affordable, they just mean that they want their costs to be affordable. What they’re offering is a 1 percent raise, and then for some regions, a 1 percent bonus, although in some other regions, not everywhere, like Hawaii and Georgia, they would only get a 0.5 percent bonus. There are inequities as well in what they’re offering depending on what region you’re in.

    The other thing is they’re actually wanting to decrease the wages. They’re wanting to create this two-tiered wage system for new employees starting in 2023. So somehow, the work that we’re doing now will not be worth the same in a year and a couple of months, despite the fact that for the past 20 months, we’ve been breaking our backs, social security has gone up now, they got a 5.9 percent COLA, CEO wages have obviously gone up, managerial wages have obviously gone up, minimum wage is going up. Somehow, health care workers are not going to be worth as much in 2023 according to what they believe would be fair.

    KH: I find Kaiser’s arguments about making health care more affordable especially disturbing because they play on the fears and bitterness of people who have been victimized by the profit-based healthcare system, or who are simply terrified of getting sick because they don’t want to bankrupt their families. Even those of us who are lucky enough to be insured know that we’re probably one pricy diagnosis away from financial catastrophe, and a lot of people are already there. Patients who cannot afford the cost of health care deserve relief, but who, under this profit-based system, is responsible for their suffering? It reminded me of the vilification of public school teachers, who are blamed for the flaws of a system that has been gutted by austerity. In Chicago, when our neoliberal mayor wants a scapegoat, she points to the benefits and pay teachers have secured through collective bargaining, and claims that they need to make sacrifices. Because if she can direct our anger at the teachers, she can avoid questions, like, why is our public school system so underfunded, and why aren’t we all getting the same benefits the teachers are getting? Kaiser’s arguments similarly vilify its nurses, who it claims are paid “above market rate.”

    According to Axios, “the median pay of a health care CEO in 2020 was more than $9 million, up from 2018 and 2019. Thirty CEOs made more than $30 million each.” In recent years Kaiser’s CEO compensation has ballooned to $16 million — that’s a 166 percent increase since 2015 and double the salary of Blue Cross Blue Shield’s CEO. Some might call that “above market rate.” At Kaiser, over 36 executives make over $1 million dollars, and somehow, these are the people who are arguing that nurses and technicians are overpaid.

    HW: We’ve been backed into this corner where, as Nicole said, it’s our responsibility to make health care affordable. That’s not the case. It’s not our responsibility. Our responsibility is to provide the patient care that we are qualified to do.

    We cannot cut corners. We cannot sacrifice the quality of the care that we are wanting to and we’re tasked with providing just to stay affordable. I think that it’s really difficult to look through that other side of the lens… that sometimes these demands might seem like they’re high. They might seem like they’re costly, but what’s the benefit of them and what’s the risk if we don’t get them? I think what we’re asking for and what the teachers were asking for, and in a lot of other labor struggles, what they’re asking for, is completely appropriate. It’s not their responsibility to fulfill this affordability ask.

    NBC: The way that Kaiser Permanente works is a little bit different than other models of care delivery, in the sense that Kaiser is both the insurer and the provider. So other health care organizations do best when their beds are full, because they’re billing out for their services to other providers. Whereas with Kaiser, it’s a giant kind of pool of money. And I think it’s really important to note that we are Kaiser Permanente members, the vast majority of people who work for Kaiser also get their care at Kaiser.

    So when you look at a movement that’s involving eight different regions where Kaiser provides care and you see that 24,000 members of UNAC [United Nurses Association of California], almost 7,000 members of United Steelworkers, 3,400 members of OFNHP are voting to walk out, part of what that is, or should be, is a real signal that the people who are in the building providing the care are concerned about the level of care that they or their families will get if the plans that are being proposed move forward.

    KH: On October 12, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that 4.3 million Americans, or 2.9 percent of the entire workforce, quit their jobs in August. A survey by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses found that 66 percent of respondents said their pandemic experiences have led them to consider leaving nursing. 92 percent of respondents said they believe “the pandemic has depleted nurses at their hospitals, and because of this, their careers will be shorter than they planned.” A survey of Kaiser’s nurses found that 42 percent of the company’s nurses are considering leaving the field, and over 60 percent say they are considering leaving Kaiser. And yet, these nurses have chosen to fight, not only for the pay they deserve, but for the wages of future employees, and they’re fighting at a time when labor power in the U.S. is rising. I wanted to hear more about what had changed for these workers, in the last year and half, and in recent months, as coal miners, factory workers, film crews and many others have withheld their labor or authorized strikes.

    HW: I personally am seeing people that previously, maybe a couple of years ago, the last time we were bargaining, would have been uncomfortable standing up for what we’re fighting for right now. The prior mentality of “keep your head down, go to work, do your job, go home, and everything will be fine” is a little bit out the window, I think, at this point. I think it’s with this large movement, with this understanding and this momentum of standing up for what you need and what is important in your workplace has really, in my experience, brought people out of the woodwork to feel comfortable enough to use their voice and use their power, use their union, use their resources, to stand up for what they believe is right and what they believe they really need to do their job. Very happy to be part of Striketober. Definitely love the name, and I think it’s exciting. It’s exciting to see these people feel comfortable enough to hear their own voice and to use it.

    Throughout our conversations, throughout our bargaining, our group has asked ourselves, “What do we want to stand for? What do we want our work to show?” We want our work to be safe, sustainable, and ethical. Just like Nicole mentioned, the path that we’re on right now with… I think this is a little bit larger than just us here in this conversation… but the path that we’re on right now with our healthcare system is not sustainable. There’s become this giant divide of those that do the work and those that direct the work. Unfortunately, the people that are directing the work are now no longer necessarily nurses, they’re no longer healthcare workers, they’re no longer therapists or even physicians.

    They’re MBAs [people with a Master of Business Administration degree]. They’re people that know numbers and they know graphs and they know charts, but they don’t know people. They don’t know our patients. If we continue on this path, I think that divide is going to continue to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. There’s just such a giant misunderstanding, as we’ve seen in these conversations during our bargaining so far, where it’s shocking. It’s so unfortunate to see what they think our workplace is like, what they think our work is worth, and what they think our troubles are… are our own, are self-created. We’ve also had conversations before about burnout versus moral injury. Burnout is, and what we get forced down our throats, is this understanding that we don’t know how to manage our own stress. We don’t know… just go get a pedicure, go get a massage, take some deep breaths, and everything will be fine.

    But what we’re seeing in our workplaces so greatly right now is moral injury… that you can’t just walk away from it. You can’t just box breath it away. This is unsustainable. What we’re doing right now in the conversations that we’re having isn’t just for us right now. This isn’t just about a 1 percent versus a 4 percent raise. This is about stopping something that could really, really damage the health care system and recognizing that people providing that work and people providing this care have to have a larger voice in that and have to have more control over it. This can’t continue to be whittled away. We’ve got to keep the patient at the focus. We’ve got to keep the patient at the center, not a dollar sign.

    NBC: The pandemic isn’t over and I have concern that if we continue on the path that has been laid out in front of us, that we really compromise the ability of our systems to take care of our communities. And it’s been evident for a while that the social fabric was wearing pretty thin, right? When we look at the kind of markers of health in the major institutions, public service, health care, teachers across the board are really struggling to get the work done. And we’ve been hearing that reported for almost a generation now pretty consistently. But I do feel that we’re at a tipping point and I think that we’ve reached a point where people have been pushed so hard, that kind of like Hannah said, they’re coming out of the woodwork, they’re coming out of their holes because the conditions are so unsustainable that they can’t survive. We can’t survive doing the work that we’re asked to do, the way that we’re being asked to do it with the lack of support we’re being asked to do it with.

    And I think there’s a level of exhaustion and personal strife that pushes people into action and that makes you…. When I talk to our members, we talk a little bit about solidarity and about coming to a problem that you cannot solve yourself and I think that in our really individualistic society, we have reached [a] critical mass of a number of problems that individuals cannot solve themselves. And this is part of that. I think that’s part of what the groundswell of Striketober is about. I too am excited to be part of that. I too am encouraged to see people feel called to act. And I hope that that call to action makes them feel brave because we’re going to need it.

    And I think that it’s important to think about how traumatized the people that we’re talking about are. I heard a friend, he was talking about a conversation that he was having with some nurses and some other people at a party and he referred to the people that weren’t nurses as civilians. And I thought about that for a minute. And I thought about my own experiences this summer as we sort of started up social interaction again, and I was talking with my family and friends of my family and my experience of the last two years is really different than theirs. And I think that I’ve really resisted any metaphors that have compared the pandemic to a war, because I think that so much of the time in conditions of war things are so much more stark and untenable than they have been for us.

    But there are aspects of what happened that really do, and is still happening, that really do feel like having survived a war. I really do feel different than a lot of the people that I interact with casually after what I’ve seen in the last two years. And some of that has to do with just the stark trauma of watching so many people die and so many of them alone because they were not able to have visitors. And some of that has to do with being really, truly, and completely having the illusion removed that I was in any way essential or valuable to my community beyond lip service. Because it’s nice to be called a hero, but actually the way that you know that people care is by how they treat you. So I just would like to say that feeling like that, and understanding how many of my colleagues feel like that, and then being pushed to the point by an employer that we feel that we need to walk out as exhausted as we are, as torn up as our communities are.

    I just want to reinforce, we don’t want to walk out of the job in October or November in the pouring rain several weeks before the holidays come, because we’ve been spoiled and we’re not going to continue to get the benefits that we’ve had. The things that it takes to push a workforce to do that at this level, I’m not sure that people broadly realize what’s been going on behind the veil. So I feel especially resentful of the employer for trying to frame this in the way that it has. It’s just like an extra slap in the face.

    DO: In my conversations with people like the Nabisco baker strike and my sister is a part of IATSE [The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees] and in conversations with people in other areas that are also in unions that are also striking or voting to strike, it’s that divide that the pandemic made even sharper. So, these executives who are making these decisions were so far removed from the horrors that a lot of us have experienced in the last year and a half and they’re making these decisions with a background as an MBA. Not as a health care worker. Not as a therapist. Not as a frontline baker. It’s unfortunate what we all had to go through to get to this level of solidarity. But, it’s really exciting to see everybody stand up for themselves. Nurses and healthcare professionals and engineers and housekeeping and baking and John Deere and IATSE. It’s amazing to see everybody finally taking a stand and seeing that solidarity it’s amazing. It just makes me feel so good. And I hope that we continue it.

    KH: I think the sense of moral injury Hannah was talking about runs deep for a lot of U.S. workers right now. People aren’t simply burnt out, because we’ve all had a rough year and a half. They’re fed up, because they’ve experienced new levels of dehumanization and disposability. This is a crucial time for labor, and a crucial time for our health care system. Personally, I believe that we won’t have justice for patients or providers until we have universal health care, but while we are living under this system, we have to support nurses and other health care workers who are squaring off with wealthy executives. And we have to insist that if anyone is going to take a financial hit, in the name of making health care more affordable, it should be the pharmaceutical companies and healthcare executives and monopolistic hospitals that are bleeding us dry. We can also support nurses and health care workers by uplifting their stories and demands. This is a moment of great potential for U.S. workers. If we want to see all of these sparks turn into something more drastic, that could help propel the kind of change we need, we need to support striking workers and amplify their demands. Join them on the picket lines. During the 2012 teachers strike in Chicago, some friends and I read to children on the picket lines so their parents could engage more with the public. There are a lot of ways to show up and a lot of ways to show support. What’s important is paying attention to the needs of the workers you are looking to support. Amplify their messaging, and pay attention to their asks. And I also just want to remind everyone that one of the most important ways we can support the larger fight for worker power is by unionizing our own workplaces. I am very lucky that people put that work in at Truthout before I came along, because without their efforts, we simply wouldn’t be the publication that we are.

    I want to thank Hannah, Nicole and Dylan for talking with me about their experiences and the fight they’re waging. I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

    Show Notes

    • If you need help keeping track of who’s on strike, or potentially going on strike, Jonah Furman’s substack, Who Gets the Bird? is worth checking out.
    • If you want to learn more about ongoing labor struggles, I recommend checking out Dissent Magazine’s Belabored podcast with Sarah Jaffe and Michelle Chen.
    • Did you know South Korean workers recently staged a one day general strike? You can learn more about that here.
    • Looking to support a strike fund? United Left recently put together a Twitter thread featuring links to multiple strike funds.

    Further reading:

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Bernie Sanders stands firm on Medicare expansion: ‘It’s not coming out’

    Common Dreams Logo

    This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 24, 2021. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

    Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday was quick to push back on reporting that two of the most popular provisions in President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan—an expansion of Medicare benefits and guaranteed paid family leave—are poised to be dropped from the proposal due to objections from right-wing Democrats. “It’s not coming out,” Sanders said of a measure that would expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing, and vision care for tens of millions of older Americans—a proposal he has pushed for years and which is supported by 84% of Americans including nearly nine in 10 Democratic voters.

    Politico reported late Saturday that amid negotiations between the White House and Democrats which left the president announcing at a town hall on Thursday that the package may include only four weeks of paid leave instead of 12 as well as leaving out tuition-free community college and a clean electricity program, further discussions have led the White House to consider dropping paid leave and the Medicare expansion entirely.

    A Democratic aide told the outlet that the inclusion of the two programs were “in flux” Saturday while the White House denied that they may be cut. 

    “It is inconceivable and unconscionable to me that there is any risk for a paid leave being on the chopping block… The fact that something this administration has run on and Congress has championed would not be a priority to me is unbelievable.”

    Sanders and other progressives have spent months defending the provisions in the $3.5 trillion, 10-year investment in climate action and social supports for lower- and middle-income families.

    Despite saying in January that he would back a $4 trillion infrastructure package, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) is holding up passage of the bill, insisting he will now only support $1.5 trillion in social spending.

    The New York Times echoed the warning repeated for months by progressives regarding the potential failure to pass an agenda that provides far-reaching support for the voters who sent Biden to the White House and gave the Democratic Party control of the House and Senate last year.

    Sanders has harshly criticized Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.)—another conservative Democrat who is refusing to join the rest of the party in backing Biden’s agenda—comparing their conduct to his hypothetical refusal to support the Build Back Better plan unless it included Medicare for All.

    “My strong criticism is it is wrong when the American people, when the President of the United States, when 96% of your colleagues want to go forward—it is wrong to obstruct,” Sanders said earlier this month.

    Thanks to Manchin and Sinema, author and activist Don Winslow tweeted, the party is prepared to drop two of the most widely supported measures from the president’s agenda.

    “They work for Mitch McConnell and big corporations,” said Winslow of the senators.

    One paid leave expert questioned whether the White House is doing enough to defend the priorities that have been gradually weakened during negotiations with Manchin, Sinema, and other conservative Democrats. 

    “I want to know whether [Biden] is putting his weight behind [paid leave] when he’s behind closed doors with Sen. Manchin and others that he’s negotiating with,” Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow at the think tank New America, told Politico.

    The reporting about the status of the negotiations, which were ongoing Sunday, came as the New York Times echoed the warning repeated for months by progressives regarding the potential failure to pass an agenda that provides far-reaching support for the voters who sent Biden to the White House and gave the Democratic Party control of the House and Senate last year.

    “Strategists say enthusiasm among core Democratic voters is critical to defeating the Republican Party in the midterm elections of 2022 (and perhaps [former President Donald Trump], its leader, two years later),” reported the Times. “If crucial parts of the president’s coalition remain unhappy because they are disappointed in the compromise bill, that could threaten Democratic hopes to remain in power in Congress and the White House.”

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Buffalo Health Care Workers Are on Strike for Better Wages and Patient Safety

    Nurses, technicians, clerical workers and custodians at the city's Mercy Hospital have been on strike for three weeks.

    More than 2,000 health care workers — including nurses, technicians, clerical workers, and custodians — at Mercy Hospital in Buffalo, New York have been on strike since October 1. Similar to other health care workers around the country, the striking workers’ main demand is improved staffing ratios to allow for safer care for patients. In addition, workers are fighting for better wages to attract more qualified staff, to prevent their health insurance plan from being converted to a high deductible plan, and to prevent their pension plans being converted to a 401(k).

    Mercy Hospital is owned by Catholic Health System (CHS), which also owns other hospitals in the area. The striking workers at Mercy Hospital are part of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union and were originally supposed to strike with two other hospitals, the Sisters of Charity Hospital and Kenmore Mercy Hospital. However, as reported by Labor Notes, “recognizing the potential strength of bargaining together against the chain, Locals 1133 and 1168 sought to coordinate the expiration dates of their contracts and force a master agreement in the last round of negotiations in 2019.” CHS tried to push back against this tactic, and a no-strike clause was eventually agreed to for two out of three of the hospitals, leaving Mercy Hospital as the one location able to strike on behalf of all three.

    Although negotiations were supposed to begin in the middle of last year, health care workers agreed to delay bargaining during Covid-19 as the hospital claimed to be struggling financially — despite the CEO’s $2 million per year salary. The union health care workers agreed to continue working and accepted a temporary contract extension with a raise of just half a percent for the year. But despite these sacrifices, the hospital continues to refuse to give health care workers what they need. Hospital management’s proposals do not go nearly far enough: They proposed to add 250 new positions, similar to a proposal made back in 2016, which did nothing to resolve staffing crises.

    Management Lies

    It is clear that CHS management is trying to frame the ongoing lack of a contract as the fault of the workers and the union itself. In a recent interview with local press, CHS CEO Mark Sullivan stated he was optimistic a deal would be reached, but “only CWA can end the strike.” Nurses Left Voice spoke with say that when they initially announced the plan to strike, the hospital tried to frame it as workers abandoning patients, putting press releases out to the community.

    But health care workers know how hypocritical this rhetoric is, and they know they care about their patients more than anyone. Workers put their lives on line throughout the pandemic — the striking health care workers created Covid-19 Memorial Walls around each of the picket areas commemorating both those who became ill and those who lost their lives during the pandemic’s peaks — and were called “heroes” when the label could be used as propaganda by management. Workers were even given “healthcare heroes” shirts from CHS, but now, they say they’re seen as “zeroes” and are told they are “abandoning” patients. These claims of abandoning patients are especially ironic because, as one nurse pointed out, not only are these striking health care workers the ones who actually care about patient well-being — hence their resistance to the continual drive to cut staffing and costs to increase profits — but the hospital’s CEO, Mark Sullivan, who makes between $1.5-2 million a year, was planning on abandoning contract negotiations midway for vacation to Europe.

    It appears the hospital’s rhetoric backfired, as there has been an outpouring of community support, with many residents of the neighborhoods around the hospital putting union signs in their front lawns. Health care workers from the two other hospitals not currently striking have been working in solidarity, raising money at Buffalo Bills games and other community events for the union strike fund. Health care workers want to get back to work, but they refuse to accept horrible working conditions that lead to poor patient outcomes. Contrary to CHS’s claims, health care workers actually care so much about patients that they are willing to strike to see their demands met. They refuse to let the hospital force them into a poor contract that will ultimately threaten the health of patients.

    The Hospital System’s Response: Scabs and Security Firms

    Those who run hospital firms like CHS know what the threat of striking and winning demands could mean for other hospital systems in the area or the country, so instead of simply meeting the health care workers’ demands, they continue to resist. CHS has hired the global parasitic, blood-sucking, anti-strike firm Huffmaster to not just provide scabs, but also provide security. Per their website, “Huffmaster is a master staffing agency for healthcare, security, and other industries. Specializing in rapid strike staffing, we keep business in business.” Huffmaster advertises for job fulfillment and provides housing, travel, and meals for scabs in order to break strikes. As WNYLaborToday.com reported, CHS is paying Huffmaster to pay these scabs between $100 and $150 an hour, plus $45 per day for their meals, but they are not willing to pay their regular unionized employees anywhere near as much. Even the pay for the X-ray technicians, one of the higher-paid positions among the striking workers, only reaches $80 per hour — far less than the scabs are being paid.

    In their effort to claim the title for one of the worst companies in the world, not only does Huffmaster provide scab health care workers, but also violent security personnel. Health care workers at Mercy Hospital showed Left Voice reporters video footage and photos of how the security personnel at Mercy are the same security that were hired to help break the Nabisco strike and brutally attacked workers. Now there is an injunction from New York State Attorney General Letitia James claiming the company is not licensed to do work in New York State, but as of October 21, Left Voice observed Huffmaster security personnel still on the hospital property, protecting scabs and using fake badges to hide their company logo. In addition to the hired security, Buffalo police were also present and coordinated with the drivers of the scab vehicles.

    CHS CEO Trying to Deflect: CEOs Gonna CEO

    In the early days of the strike, CEO Mark Sullivan said healthcare staffing is a struggle across the nation, not just at Catholic Health: “One in five healthcare workers, since the pandemic has started, has left healthcare. This is not a Mercy Hospital staffing crisis, this is not a Catholic Health staffing crisis, this is a national staffing crisis. Healthcare, overall, is broken.” And he’s right: Health care is “broken,” but not because of the workers. Rather, healthcare is broken because under capitalist health care, the primary goal is to maximize profit from people’s bodies. Everything else, including patient care, is secondary. Therefore, under this model, it becomes logical to cut costs whenever possible — for example, by decreasing staffing ratios. Health care workers have left the industry because they are tired of working in a system that does not care about patient well-being and continues to put money over lives. They joined their workplaces hoping to help others, but many workers soon find out that the system itself does not hold this priority.

    Health care is “broken” because the system as it stands was never meant for the maintenance of health for health’s sake — instead, its origins lie in racism, white supremacy, and maintaining worker wellbeing just enough to be tools of labor. In some respects it isn’t “broken” but functions just how CEOs like Sullivan — along with the heads of other sectors of the medical industrial complex such as insurance companies, device manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies — want it to, as they have the main same goal: profit maximization at all cost. This leads them to constantly work to uphold a destructive healthcare system, while the actual maintenance of health and well being remains secondary. Since a CEO like Sullivan can’t say “I am horrible and part of upholding a horrible system,” he must resort to a refrain like “healthcare is broken” to misdirect the public gaze. Executives like to pretend everyone is “on the same team” wanting to care for patients, but this is not the case. It is the health care workers who actually care for patients and communities, and CEOs like Sullivan who are a barrier to providing adequate care.

    It Isn’t Just Healthcare

    Health care workers are fighting this dynamic around the country as health care systems continue to exploit workers and harm patients. Luckily those at Mercy Hospital, along with other workers such as the 24,000 workers who voted to authorize a strike at Kaiser Permanente, and the nurses at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Massachusetts — who have been on strike for 7 months and counting — are rising up. These workers are an inspiration for other workers in the United States. If the workers at Mercy Hospital win their demands, for example, they could be a national example of fighting for better staffing ratios and, more broadly, a better health care system. A triumph for Mercy health care workers is a triumph for health care workers around the country and for the growing uptick in labor militancy many are calling “Striketober.”

    At the same time, the health care workers at Mercy Hospital are fighting a dynamic that isn’t just exclusive to health care. Around the country, companies are attempting to drive down wages, cut benefits, and force workers into increasingly horrible working conditions, all in a seemingly endless drive to increase profits. Whether it is the striking workers at John Deere, the film and television workers threatening to strike with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) union, oil workers with ​United Metro Energy Corp. (UMEC), the striking workers at Kellogg, or the countless other workers rising up, it is clear many are saying enough is enough. The working class is what keeps this country running and the working class has the ability to shut things down. The only way to battle the ongoing exploitation is for workers to organize and unite to confront this system that puts profits above all else.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Profile in Persecution: Sayed Adnan Majed Hashem

    Updated: Sayed Adnan Majed Hashem was a 22-year-old worker at the Al-Manhal water factory when he was arrested in October 2018, for the fourth time, from a house in AlDair. During his detention, Sayed Adnan endured physical and psychological torture, forced disappearance, medical neglect, and denial of contact with his family and attorney. He was also subjected to an unfair trial based on confessions extracted under torture. Furthermore, he faced sectarian-based insults and medical negligence at the hands of the Bahraini authorities. Currently, he is held in Jau Prison, serving a sentence of nearly three decades on politically motivated charges.

     

    Sayed Adnan was first arrested in 2014 as he returned from the Etehad AlReef Club Stadium in the Shahrakan area. He was with a group of players from the Abu Quwa team after their victory in the Youth Championship. They were on a bus, honking the horn in celebration of their victory when security forces stopped and arrested them, alleging their honking was illegal. Sayed Adnan’s second arrest occurred in mid-September 2015 while visiting his grandfather’s house in Al-Daih. On that day, amid political demonstrations, Sayed Adnan was chased and arrested by security forces. He was detained for around a month and a half before being released without any judgment being issued against him.

    In 2016, Sayed Adnan was arrested for the third time when security forces and armed masked men affiliated with the Ministry of Interior stormed into his father’s house late at night, arresting him without presenting any arrest warrant or order from the Public Prosecution Office (PPO). Upon his arrest, Sayed Adnan was taken to the CID, where he was held for 12 days. On the twelfth day, he called his family, asking them to bring him clothes as he was being transferred to the Dry Dock Detention Center. Shortly after, he was released from prison on bail, awaiting trial. Following his release, as his case proceeded, Sayed Adnan was summoned multiple times, and his house was frequently raided, though he would not be present. Knowing he was wanted, Sayed Adnan did not attend his trial sessions out of fear of being arrested in court. During Sayed Adnan’s arrest in 2016, his father visited him and observed traces of torture on his face and other parts of his body. He informed Sayed Adnan’s lawyer about the matter, who filed a complaint requesting accountability for the policeman responsible for Sayed Adnan’s torture. However, Sayed Adnan was unable to attend his court sessions out of fear of being arrested, as he was being pursued by authorities.

     

    Sayed Adnan’s latest arrest occurred on 30 October 2018 when officers in civilian clothing apprehended him from a house in AlDair. He was subsequently taken to the investigations unit in Jau Prison and then to the Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) building in Adliya. Sayed Adnan forcibly disappeared for 10 to 12 days as his family was unaware of his fate or whereabouts. They contacted the Ombudsman and the CID to inquire about Sayed Adnan but received no response. After 10 to 12 days, Sayed Adnan contacted them and informed them of his location.

    During Sayed Adnan’s enforced disappearance, he was interrogated without legal representation both at the investigations unit in Jau Prison and at the CID in Adliya. There, armed masked officers in civilian clothing subjected him to psychological and physical torture to coerce false confessions. They threatened to harm one of his sisters and sexually assault her if he didn’t cooperate, and they insulted his religious sect and its symbols. Sayed Adnan was severely beaten on parts of his body that wouldn’t be visible, such as his stomach, back, and thighs, to conceal the injuries from his parents during visits. He was blindfolded, prevented from contacting his family, and coerced into making fabricated confessions under duress and torture.

    Sayed Adnan suffers from severe knee pain due to shotgun bullet injuries sustained while he was chased by authorities after participating in a peaceful demonstration in 2014. Despite requesting medical attention, he has not been examined, and the prison administration has refused to provide him with pain relief cream.

    Sayed Adnan faced numerous charges related to committing terrorist acts, including arson, negligent destruction, manufacturing explosives, illegal assembly, and rioting, involving nine cases. Between 2016 and 2020, he was sentenced to a total of 27 and a half years in prison and fined approximately 101,000 Bahraini Dinars. Throughout the interrogation and trial period, Sayed Adnan was denied access to his lawyer, and his confessions, obtained under torture, were used in court as evidence against him. Approximately a month and a half after his arrest, Sayed Adnan was transferred from the CID to Jau Prison following judgments issued against him in absentia.

    Sayed Adnan was only able to meet his family over a month after his arrest. In mid-2019, communication with Sayed Adnan was abruptly cut off. His family learned from other inmates that he had been transferred to the CID building, where he remained for 14 days. One inmate reported seeing him in court and noticed signs of torture on his body. He later contacted Sayed Adnan’s family, explaining that the torture was aimed at extracting confessions related to the charges against him.

    Update: On 26 March 2024, the administration at Jau Prison initiated pressure tactics on political prisoners to cease their sit-in protest against retaliatory policies that caused the death of medical neglect victim Husain Khalil Ebrahim on 25 March. This pressure was executed under directives from officers AbdulSalam AlAraifi, Hisham AlZayani, Nasser AbdulRahman AlKhalifa, and Ahmed AlEmadi. Retaliatory measures included severing communication with the outside world by suspending family visits and communications, blocking TV broadcasts, and confiscating newspapers.

    On 8 May 2024, about 500 detainees, including Sayed Adnan, refused meals after the prison administration reduced the quantity of food in retaliation for their demands for improved food quality that meets health standards. The administration targeted buildings where detainees were protesting, excluding those housing criminal inmates, thereby depriving them of their primary food source after blocking their access to necessities from the prison store.

     

    Sayed Adnan’s mother posted an audio message detailing some of the detainees’ hardships. Alongside reduced meals, political prisoners also endure shortages of food supplies, lack of clothing and footwear, and the absence of personal hygiene items they previously purchased with their monthly allowances sent by their families. She warned of the consequences of these measures, including the risk of epidemics and diseases due to the lack of cleaning supplies. She expressed concerns for her son’s health, who suffers from knee problems and skin diseases, having previously contracted scabies due to the poor conditions inside Jau Prison. Sayed Adnan’s mother reported that she contacted the Emergency Police Services and informed them of the violations against her son. They promised to take certain measures but to no avail. She also complained about the retaliation practiced by the prison administration against prisoners after families staged sit-in protests and sought support from human rights organizations for their children’s cases.

    Sayed Adnan continues to endure deliberate medical neglect. Despite severe pain, he has been denied treatment for the injury he sustained in his knee when security forces used shotguns against peaceful protesters in 2014. He has been deprived of treatment, and appropriate medications have not been prescribed. Additionally, the prison administration has refused to provide pain relief medication for his excruciating pain.

    Sayed Adnan’s family submitted several complaints to the National Institution for Human Rights (NIHR) and the Ombudsman regarding his torture and ill-treatment, but to no avail. They also lodged a complaint following the events of 17 April 2021 at Jau Prison, yet there was no follow-up by authorities. Sayed Adnan is also subjected to discrimination in prison based on his belonging to the Shia religious sect.

    Sayed Adnan’s warrantless arrests, mental and physical torture, forced disappearance, solitary confinement, deprivation of contact with his family and lawyer, denial of a fair trial, religious discrimination, and medical neglect constitute violations of Bahrain’s obligations under international treaties, namely the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), 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.

    Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) calls on the Bahraini authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Sayed Adnan. ADHRB also urges the Bahraini government to investigate allegations of arbitrary arrest, torture, forced disappearance, solitary confinement, medical neglect, denial of legal consultation, and religious discrimination, holding perpetrators accountable. ADHRB further calls for an immediate end to discriminatory policies against Sayed Adnan, including denying him communication with his family. ADHRB urges the Jau Prison administration to ensure the rights of all political prisoners, including providing adequate meals that adhere to health standards, as well as supplying personal hygiene essentials to prevent the spread of diseases and epidemics, holding it responsible for any deterioration in detainees’ conditions.

    The post Profile in Persecution: Sayed Adnan Majed Hashem appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

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

  • How Digital Vaccine Passports Pave Way For Unprecedented Surveillance Capitalism

    The titans of global capitalism are exploiting the Covid-19 crisis to institute social credit-style digital ID systems across the West.

    The post How Digital Vaccine Passports Pave Way For Unprecedented Surveillance Capitalism appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Corporate Democrats’ Toothless Drug Pricing Alternative Is A Coup For Big Pharma

    It wasn’t enough for Democratic Representatives Kurt Schrader of Oregon, Scott Peters of California, Kathleen Rice of New York and Stephanie Murphy of Florida to vote against a robust bill that would allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act (H.R. 3). These politicians — compelled by their unhappy corporate donors — tried to derail efforts to lower the cost of prescription drugs by introducing a toothless alternative in a pathetic public stunt to appease the industry.

    The post Corporate Democrats’ Toothless Drug Pricing Alternative Is A Coup For Big Pharma appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • GP Bob Gill Outlines The Us Corporate Takeover Of The British NHS

    The British National Health Service (NHS) once stood as an internationally renowned example of a tax-funded health system that delivered public-health services to millions of British citizens, lifting a huge burden from the sick. However, the rise of neoliberal policies in the United Kingdom has targeted the NHS to become the latest victim of a U.S.-U.K. economic trade deal that would put health care services in the hands of private U.S. corporations.

    The post GP Bob Gill Outlines The Us Corporate Takeover Of The British NHS appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Labor Unions Band Together To Tackle NY’s High Hospital Prices

    The Coalition for Affordable Hospitals launched Friday morning and held a rally in Manhattan’s City Hall Park ahead of a City Council hearing on hospital costs. The effort includes nine unions that represent New Yorkers as well as the New York State Council of Churches and PatientRightsAdvocate.org, a nonprofit that promotes transparency in health care prices. The group is pushing legislation in Albany that would give health plans — including those managed by labor unions — more leverage to haggle over the price of health care.

    The post Labor Unions Band Together To Tackle NY’s High Hospital Prices appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Scientists Search for Cause of Mysterious COVID-Related Inflammation in Children

    Dante DeMaino of Danvers, Massachusetts, was diagnosed with MIS-C in March. MIS-C — multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children — is a rare but life-threatening complication of COVID in which a hyperactive immune system causes damage throughout the body.

    Like most other kids with COVID, Dante and Michael DeMaino seemed to have no serious symptoms.

    Infected in mid-February, both lost their senses of taste and smell. Dante, 9, had a low-grade fever for a day or so. Michael, 13, had a “tickle in his throat,” said their mother, Michele DeMaino, of Danvers, Massachusetts.

    At a follow-up appointment, “the pediatrician checked their hearts, their lungs, and everything sounded perfect,” DeMaino said.

    Then, in late March, Dante developed another fever. After examining him, Dante’s doctor said his illness was likely “nothing to worry about” but told DeMaino to take him to the emergency room if his fever climbed above 104.

    Two days later, Dante remained feverish, with a headache, and began throwing up. His mother took him to the ER, where his fever spiked to 104.5. In the hospital, Dante’s eyes became puffy, his eyelids turned red, his hands began to swell and a bright red rash spread across his body.

    Hospital staffers diagnosed Dante with multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C, a rare but life-threatening complication of COVID-19 in which a hyperactive immune system attacks a child’s body. Symptoms — fever, stomach pain, vomiting, diarrhea, bloodshot eyes, rash and dizziness — typically appear two to six weeks after what is usually a mild or even asymptomatic infection.

    More than 5,200 of the 6.2 million U.S. children diagnosed with COVID have developed MIS-C. About 80% of MIS-C patients are treated in intensive care units, 20% require mechanical ventilation, and 46 have died.

    Throughout the pandemic, MIS-C has followed a predictable pattern, sending waves of children to the hospital about a month after a COVID surge. Pediatric intensive care units — which treated thousands of young patients during the late-summer delta surge — are now struggling to save the latest round of extremely sick children.

    The South has been hit especially hard. At the Medical University of South Carolina Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital, for example, doctors in September treated 37 children with COVID and nine with MIS-C — the highest monthly totals since the pandemic began.

    Doctors have no way to prevent MIS-C, because they still don’t know exactly what causes it, said Dr. Michael Chang, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston. All doctors can do is urge parents to vaccinate eligible children and surround younger children with vaccinated people.

    Given the massive scale of the pandemic, scientists around the world are now searching for answers.

    Although most children who develop MIS-C were previously healthy, 80% develop heart complications. Dante’s coronary arteries became dilated, making it harder for his heart to pump blood and deliver nutrients to his organs. If not treated quickly, a child could go into shock. Some patients develop heart rhythm abnormalities or aneurysms, in which artery walls balloon out and threaten to burst.

    “It was traumatic,” DeMaino said. “I stayed with him at the hospital the whole time.”

    Such stories raise important questions about what causes MIS-C.

    “It’s the same virus and the same family, so why does one child get MIS-C and the other doesn’t?” asked Dr. Natasha Halasa of the Vanderbilt Institute for Infection, Immunology and Inflammation.

    Doctors have gotten better at diagnosing and treating MIS-C; the mortality rate has fallen from 2.4% to 0.7% since the beginning of the pandemic. Adults also can develop a post-COVID inflammatory syndrome, called MIS-A; it’s even rarer than MIS-C, with a mortality rate seven times as high as that seen in children.

    Although MIS-C is new, doctors can treat it with decades-old therapies used for Kawasaki disease, a pediatric syndrome that also causes systemic inflammation. Although scientists have never identified the cause of Kawasaki disease, many suspect it develops after an infection.

    Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and other institutions are looking for clues in children’s genes.

    In a July study, the researchers identified rare genetic variants in three of 18 children studied. Significantly, the genes are all involved in “removing the brakes” from the immune system, which could contribute to the hyperinflammation seen in MIS-C, said Dr. Janet Chou, chief of clinical immunology at Boston Children’s, who led the study.

    Chou acknowledges that her study — which found genetic variants in just 17% of patients — doesn’t solve the puzzle. And it raises new questions: If these children are genetically susceptible to immune problems, why didn’t they become seriously ill from earlier childhood infections?

    Some researchers say the increased rates of MIS-C among racial and ethnic minorities around the world — in the United States, France and the United Kingdom — must be driven by genetics.

    Others note that rates of MIS-C mirror the higher COVID rates in these communities, which have been driven by socioeconomic factors such as high-risk working and living conditions.

    “I don’t know why some kids get this and some don’t,” said Dr. Dusan Bogunovic, a researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who has studied antibody responses in MIS-C. “Is it due to genetics or environmental exposure? The truth may lie somewhere in between.”

    A Hidden Enemy and a Leaky Gut

    Most children with MIS-C test negative for COVID, suggesting that the body has already cleared the novel coronavirus from the nose and upper airways.

    That led doctors to assume MIS-C was a “postinfectious” disease, developing after “the virus has completely gone away,” said Dr. Hamid Bassiri, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist and co-director of the immune dysregulation program at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

    Now, however, “there is emerging evidence that perhaps that is not the case,” Bassiri said.

    Even if the virus has disappeared from a child’s nose, it could be lurking — and shedding — elsewhere in the body, Chou said. That might explain why symptoms occur so long after a child’s initial infection.

    Dr. Lael Yonker noticed that children with MIS-C are far more likely to develop gastrointestinal symptoms — such as stomach pain, diarrhea and vomiting — than the breathing problems often seen in acute COVID.

    In some children with MIS-C, abdominal pain has been so severe that doctors misdiagnosed them with appendicitis; some actually underwent surgery before their doctors realized the true source of their pain.

    Yonker, a pediatric pulmonologist at Boston’s MassGeneral Hospital for Children, recently found evidence that the source of those symptoms could be the coronavirus, which can survive in the gut for weeks after it disappears from the nasal passages, Yonker said.

    In a May study in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Yonker and her colleagues showed that more than half of patients with MIS-C had genetic material — called RNA — from the coronavirus in their stool.

    The body breaks down viral RNA very quickly, Chou said, so it’s unlikely that genetic material from a COVID infection would still be found in a child’s stool one month later. If it is, it’s most likely because the coronavirus has set up shop inside an organ, such as the gut.

    While the coronavirus may thrive in our gut, it’s a terrible houseguest.

    In some children, the virus irritates the intestinal lining, creating microscopic gaps that allow viral particles to escape into the bloodstream, Yonker said.

    Blood tests in children with MIS-C found that they had a high level of the coronavirus spike antigen — an important protein that allows the virus to enter human cells. Scientists have devoted more time to studying the spike antigen than any other part of the virus; it’s the target of COVID vaccines, as well as antibodies made naturally during infection.

    “We don’t see live virus replicating in the blood,” Yonker said. “But spike proteins are breaking off and leaking into the blood.”

    Viral particles in the blood could cause problems far beyond upset stomachs, Yonker said. It’s possible they stimulate the immune system into overdrive.

    In her study, Yonker describes treating a critically ill 17-month-old boy who grew sicker despite standard treatments. She received regulatory permission to treat him with an experimental drug, larazotide, designed to heal leaky guts. It worked.

    Yonker prescribed larazotide for four other children, including Dante, who also received a drug used to treat rheumatoid arthritis. He got better.

    But most kids with MIS-C get better, even without experimental drugs. Without a comparison group, there’s no way to know if larazotide really works. That’s why Yonker is enrolling 20 children in a small randomized clinical trial of larazotide, which will provide stronger evidence.

    Rogue Soldiers

    Dr. Moshe Arditi has also drawn connections between children’s symptoms and what might be causing them.

    Although the first doctors to treat MIS-C compared it to Kawasaki disease — which also causes red eyes, rashes and high fevers — Arditi notes that MIS-C more closely resembles toxic shock syndrome, a life-threatening condition caused by particular types of strep or staph bacteria releasing toxins into the blood. Both syndromes cause high fever, gastrointestinal distress, heart muscle dysfunction, plummeting blood pressure and neurological symptoms, such as headache and confusion.

    Toxic shock can occur after childbirth or a wound infection, although the best-known cases occurred in the 1970s and ’80s in women who used a type of tampon no longer in use.

    Toxins released by these bacteria can trigger a massive overreaction from key immune system fighters called T cells, which coordinate the immune system’s response, said Arditi, director of the pediatric infectious diseases division at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

    T cells are tremendously powerful, so the body normally activates them in precise and controlled ways, Bassiri said. One of the most important lessons T cells need to learn is to target specific bad guys and leave civilians alone. In fact, a healthy immune system normally destroys many T cells that can’t distinguish between germs and healthy tissue in order to prevent autoimmune disease.

    In a typical response to a foreign substance — known as an antigen — the immune system activates only about 0.01% of all T cells, Arditi said.

    Toxins produced by certain viruses and the bacteria that cause toxic shock, however, contain “superantigens,” which bypass the body’s normal safeguards and attach directly to T cells. That allows superantigens to activate 20% to 30% of T cells at once, generating a dangerous swarm of white blood cells and inflammatory proteins called cytokines, Arditi said.

    This massive inflammatory response causes damage throughout the body, from the heart to the blood vessels to the kidneys.

    Although multiple studies have found that children with MIS-C have fewer total T cells than normal, Arditi’s team has found an explosive increase in a subtype of T cells capable of interacting with a superantigen.

    Several independent research groups — including researchers at Yale School of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health and France’s University of Lyon — have confirmed Arditi’s findings, suggesting that something, most likely a superantigen, caused a huge increase in this T cell subtype.

    Although Arditi has proposed that parts of the coronavirus spike protein could act like a superantigen, other scientists say the superantigen could come from other microbes, such as bacteria.

    “People are now urgently looking for the source of the superantigen,” said Dr. Carrie Lucas, an assistant professor of immunobiology at Yale, whose team has identified changes in immune cells and proteins in the blood of children with MIS-C.

    Uncertain Futures

    One month after Dante left the hospital, doctors examined his heart with an echocardiogram to see if he had lingering damage.

    To his mother’s relief, his heart had returned to normal.

    Today, Dante is an energetic 10-year-old who has resumed playing hockey and baseball, swimming and rollerblading.

    “He’s back to all these activities,” said DeMaino, noting that Dante’s doctors rechecked his heart six months after his illness and will check again after a year.

    Like Dante, most other kids who survive MIS-C appear to recover fully, according to a March study in JAMA.

    Such rapid recoveries suggest that MIS-C-related cardiovascular problems result from “severe inflammation and acute stress” rather than underlying heart disease, according to the authors of the study, called Overcoming COVID-19.

    Although children who survive Kawasaki disease have a higher risk of long-term heart problems, doctors don’t know how MIS-C survivors will fare.

    The NIH and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have launched several long-term trials to study young COVID patients and survivors. Researchers will study children’s immune systems to uncover clues to the cause of MIS-C, check their hearts for signs of long-term damage and monitor their health over time.

    DeMaino said she remains far more worried about Dante’s health than he is.

    “He doesn’t have a care in the world,” she said. “I was worried about the latest cardiology appointment, but he said, ‘Mom, I don’t have any problems breathing. I feel totally fine.’”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Activists Should Continue To Fight For National Single Payer

    It is a mistake for activists to once again allow Democratic politicians corrupted by big money to determine the nature of the struggle for single-payer Healthcare. We must have a strong fight on the national level in order to win this. Otherwise, we are abandoning a struggle that has strong public support and giving Congress a free pass to do nothing.

    The post Activists Should Continue To Fight For National Single Payer appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Migrant Farmworkers Are Being Left Out Of Roundup Cancer Compensation

    In 2018, a California school groundskeeper took Monsanto Company to court, alleging that Roundup, one of America’s most popular weed killers, caused his Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma cancer. The jury agreed and ordered Monsanto to pay the man $289 million in damages, concluding the world’s first Roundup cancer trial. Legal experts say migrant farmworkers, who are at the forefront of pesticide and herbicide exposures—including Roundup—are expected to be left out.

    The post Migrant Farmworkers Are Being Left Out Of Roundup Cancer Compensation appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • ‘Days Of Shame’ Highlights Failure To Back TRIPS Waiver Proposal For COVID Vaccines

    Health activists gathered at Geneva’s central train station on Wednesday, October 13, calling on the EU, the UK, Norway and Switzerland to endorse the TRIPS waiver proposal at the World Trade Organization (WTO). “As Europeans, we are ashamed that our political leaders are among the last opponents to a just solution to end the pandemic and save lives,” said the campaigners in a press release.

    The post ‘Days Of Shame’ Highlights Failure To Back TRIPS Waiver Proposal For COVID Vaccines appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Corporate Democrats’ Toothless Drug Pricing Alternative Is a Coup for Big Pharma

    Rep. Scott Peters

    Under the Build Back Better Act, Congress can expand and strengthen Medicare and Medicaid, improving the lives of millions of seniors while also throwing a lifeline to folks living in states where GOP politicians are strangling public benefits.

    But to win these popular reforms, we have to defeat the efforts of Big Pharma, their greedy lobbyists and the politicians who take their money.

    It wasn’t enough for Democratic Representatives Kurt Schrader of Oregon, Scott Peters of California, Kathleen Rice of New York and Stephanie Murphy of Florida to vote against a robust bill that would allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act (H.R. 3). These politicians — compelled by their unhappy corporate donors — tried to derail efforts to lower the cost of prescription drugs by introducing a toothless alternative in a pathetic public stunt to appease the industry. Their bill excludes most drugs, letting Big Pharma continue to price-gouge.

    This was a coup for corporate interests. The savings from the Lower Drug Costs Now Act will provide funds to let Medicare cover dental, hearing and vision care, and to expand Medicaid. But by taking the side of greedy lobbyists, this handful of contrarians dealt a huge blow to President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda and put the health and well-being of millions of working-class and poor people in jeopardy.

    Representatives in the pockets of the corporations — which spent $18 million since July on ads opposing drug price negotiations — are trying to pit Medicaid against Medicare by saying we cannot afford to do both.

    This is a false choice. We can and should expand both. Yet wealthy CEOs and greedy lobbyists are posing a false dilemma by trying to force Congress to choose one or the other.

    But grassroots voices from across the country are fighting back.

    A few weeks ago, my organization, People’s Action, held a direct action in front of Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) headquarters in Washington, D.C. alongside Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and our allies where we shared stories of real people in pain thanks to Big Pharma’s greed. PhRMA is the third-largest lobbying organization in the country, and represents companies like Gilead, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Merck & Co., which place misleading ads and spend millions more in dark money and direct campaign contributions to keep drug prices high.

    At the rally, we told Judy Cross’s story. Cross lives in Idaho and has worked as a nurse for 51 years. Now, at 74, she relies on an oxygen tank and is unable to travel or see her grandchildren because she cannot afford her $10,000 per month medications to treat pulmonary fibrosis. She has a life expectancy of three to five years without the medication that she can’t get.

    We also shared Joey Izaguirre’s story. Facing health issues, Izaguirre lost his job and shortly after was diagnosed with diabetes. He couldn’t afford insulin, doctor’s visits and equipment to test his blood, and rather than continue to feel like a burden on his family, he took his own life.

    These stories are horrific, and they are only two of so many others. Pain, suffering, further health complications and even death are the costs that people in our country pay for Big Pharma’s greed. So we aren’t stopping.

    Recently, People’s Action released a new report with Dēmos that spells out the corporate sabotage of democracy and the plot to kill the Build Back Better agenda. It coincided with a day of action on which 13 of our member organizations held direct actions in states from Colorado to West Virginia, holding these same corporations or the entities that represent them to account and exposing their role in undermining the progressive agenda our communities need.

    Corporate influence over Congress is no secret. Companies like JPMorgan Chase, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield and Exxon have spent millions in lobbying to derail popular, progressive investments in our communities.

    For example, the American Dental Association recently pushed for means-testing as a way to restrict access for seniors to dental, hearing and vision benefits in Medicare.

    Adding these benefits to Medicare, which is part of the Build Back Better plan, would be critical for millions of seniors. Carmen Betances could not afford the preventative dental visits she needed years ago. So today, she needs $8,000 tooth implants to prevent more pain, infections and lost teeth. She has no idea how or if she will afford the care she desperately needs. Her story is common: Almost half of all Medicare beneficiaries go without dental care, and those rates jump when it comes to seniors of color, like Betances.

    Big Pharma is orchestrating this horror story. While PhRMA presses corporate Democrats to put profit before people and weaken Medicare drug price negotiations, organizations like the American Dental Association are squeezing the same elected officials to limit care. The result? It will be harder for seniors, particularly seniors of color, to stay healthy.

    But these conservative Democratic sellouts are only considering cutting dental, vision and hearing because there wouldn’t be enough savings from the watered-down drug price negotiations to pay for them. Drug companies think they have us cornered, and they are gearing up to pounce.

    That’s why our elected officials need to stand up to Big Pharma. The health and well-being of millions of people like Cross, Izaguirre, and Betances is at stake.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Connecticut Group Home Workers Launch Strike Against Low Wages And Benefits

    Group home workers in Connecticut went on strike on Tuesday morning after talks with their employer, Sunrise Northeast, broke down. The workers are demanding higher wages, affordable health benefits and pensions. Sunrise runs 28 group home and day care programs for the intellectually disabled throughout Connecticut. Workers formed picket lines in front of the company’s homes in New London, Hartford, Danielson and Columbia.

    The post Connecticut Group Home Workers Launch Strike Against Low Wages And Benefits appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Hospitals Brace For Strikes As California Workers Protest Staff Shortages

    As weary health care workers across California enter the 19th month of the pandemic, thousands are walking off the job and onto the picket line, demanding more staffing. The strikes and rallies threaten to cripple hospital operations that have been inundated by the COVID-19 Delta surge as well as patients seeking long-delayed care. More than two dozen hospitals across the state have experienced strikes by engineers, janitorial staff, respiratory therapists, nurses, midwives, physical therapists and technicians over the past four months.

    The post Hospitals Brace For Strikes As California Workers Protest Staff Shortages appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • I’ve Spent 35 Years in Prison. I Live Each Day Fearing Another Wave of COVID.

    People display a sign reading "COVID BEHIND BARS = DEATH" during an outdoor protest

    For me and many others in prison, COVID-19 has been an emotional roller coaster. The Delta variant wave is just one more ride. I made it through the first round, will I make it through this one?

    I’m 53 years old and I’ve spent 35 years of life in prison. I’ve long since come to grips with the powerlessness that is every prisoner’s lot. But COVID has taken that powerlessness to another level.

    Many of us don’t know if we are going to live long enough to finish our prison sentence no matter how short it is. The vaccine, for those of us who have gotten it, has reduced the risk of death drastically. Many haven’t gotten the vaccine due to lack of trust in the government. But I got it, because after what I have witnessed during the first wave, I felt it may be my only way to get out alive.

    But that is not our only concern. An immediate concern now is how the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) is going to respond to the new wave of the pandemic and what policies they are going to enact this time. Throughout the pandemic and long before that, DOCCS has lost trust through its actions. The pandemic only gave more proof of how cruel the prison system is.

    COVID Exacerbates Abuse and Neglect of Incarcerated People

    In prison, our medical care is subpar to begin with during the best of times. Since the pandemic started it has gotten much worse. The State of New York has used COVID-19 as an excuse to take away our rights and privileges as well as to abuse and assault prisoners. The state also refuses to provide necessary medical care, including in my own case.

    I myself had two issues that needed addressing when the pandemic hit: a sebaceous cyst that was pushing against a nerve in my neck and was scheduled to be removed, as well as a molar tooth that broke off at the root. When the pandemic started, all outside appointments were canceled. Over 18 months later, I still have not received treatment for either issue despite multiple requests. I deal with constant untreated nerve pain and chewing my food is extremely difficult and painful.

    My story is far from unique. Many people I have talked to have had their medical issues sidelined since the pandemic began. Since the Spring of 2020, all outside medical appointments and only the most immediate emergencies were seen in the prison hospital.

    I am known as a guy who writes about what occurs in prison, so people talk to me about what is happening. In addition to medical issues, I hear about physical abuse at the hands of guards, which has increased as well. Neglect and physical assaults of prisoners by guards in New York State has been the worst that I’ve seen in the four states I’ve done time in over the past four decades.

    In recent years, these assaults and deaths by lack of medical treatment have led to lawsuits and news stories that have brought attention to the issue. For example, in 2015, Samuel Harrell was killed in Fishkill Correctional Facility by guards known as the “beat up squad.” And more recently, Layleen Polanco died at Rikers while in solitary confinement, after the jail’s failure to treat her medical condition.

    The state has placed more cameras in the facilities and mandated that body cameras be worn by some officers. The problem is that the guards know where the cameras’ blind spots are and who is wearing a body camera. They are then able to abuse people out of sight of the cameras, and I have witnessed this several times.

    And I have also experienced abuse. I have been relocated to many different facilities throughout the state. The medium-security facilities are worse than the maximum-security ones. There are many more blind spots.

    The main “beat down” spot in Franklin Correctional Facility is in the back of a van they use to take you to the box (solitary confinement). The driver takes the long way, and the guards in the back dump you on the floor (while you are handcuffed behind the back) and proceed to “tune you up.” This can include knees, feet, elbows and fists applied to your face, head and torso.

    When it happened to me, they pulled my legs out from under me so I landed hard face first, taking most of the fall on my shoulder (by ducking my head and twisting), and then they kicked me once in the kidneys and left me there.

    Maybe it was the gray in my beard and possibly my white skin that got me off light. I have heard about and witnessed the results of much worse attacks. When I was in Upstate Correctional, a special housing unit/restrictive housing facility, they put a kid in the cell next to me who had both eyes closed and what looked like a broken nose. He screamed when he used the bathroom to urinate.

    As bad as you think you have it these days, try experiencing this crisis from a position where you had very little control to begin with, then having that stripped away entirely. There’s an old saying in prison: Shit runs downhill, and prisoners are at the bottom of that hill. At no time has that been clearer than now.

    While things have gotten better since the vaccine was offered, DOCCS has continued to deny people basic rights and privileges. For a long time, there were no regular visits from family and friends or “family reunion visits,” which are overnight trailer visits with partners and kids. These are crucial for families to stay connected. As of September 2021, DOCCS has reinstated family reunion visits. But as a result of not having these visits for a year and a half, people had much less contact with loved ones, and this has led to increased tension, violence and mental health-related incidents.

    I am very concerned about what this new phase of COVID will bring. While the Delta variant is much less deadly for those who are vaccinated, we can still get very ill if we catch the virus. Add to that the fact that a large number of people in prison are not vaccinated, partly due to the mistrust generated by DOCCS since the pandemic began.

    So we will see what the next round has in store. I’m not optimistic. Just like everyone else in the world, we wonder: Will it ever end? Will I survive? But in prison, we are even more powerless to protect ourselves, especially since COVID is only one of the threats we face. We also contend on a daily basis with abuse from correctional officers and lack of medical care. The pandemic has only exacerbated the poor conditions that I’ve experienced for 35 years in prison.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • For The Sake Of Global Health: USA, Stop Lying About Cuba!

    Today a People’s Peace Prize was awarded to Cuba’s Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade — not the Nobel Peace Prize, although more than 100 organizations and 40,000 individuals from the U.S. alone supported the Henry Reeve Brigade’s nomination.

    The post For The Sake Of Global Health: USA, Stop Lying About Cuba! appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • ALEC Leaders Boast About Anti-Abortion, Anti-Trans Bills

    The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a pay-to-play network of conservative state lawmakers and business lobbyists that writes model legislation, claims that it no longer works on social policy. But videos of ALEC-led events, obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), tell a very different story.

    The post ALEC Leaders Boast About Anti-Abortion, Anti-Trans Bills appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Henrietta Lacks Family Sues Over “Racist” Use of Stolen Cells for Biotech Profit

    Family of Henrietta Lacks Files Lawsuit over Use of Stolen Cells, Lambasts Racist Medical System

    The family of Henrietta Lacks has filed a lawsuit against biotech company Thermo Fisher Scientific for making billions in profit from the “HeLa” cell line. Henrietta Lacks was an African American patient at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. Doctors kept her tissue samples without her consent for experimental studies while treating her for cervical cancer in 1951. Benjamin Crump, one of the lawyers for the case, filed 70 years after her death, calls Henrietta Lacks a “cornerstone of modern medicine,” as her cells have since played a part in cancer research, the polio vaccine and even COVID-19 vaccines. Ron Lacks, author and grandson of Henrietta Lacks, laments the fact that the family was never notified when his grandmother died, and that part of what motivates the lawsuit is to ensure “no other family should ever go through this.”

    Please check back later for full transcript.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Some States Are Rationing Who Gets COVID Care Once Again

    Houston Fire Department paramedics prepare to transport a COVID-19 positive woman to a hospital on September 15, 2021, in Houston, Texas.

    More than 18 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, some states are once again facing shortages of medical resources needed to care for sick patients — leaving some to enter crisis mode or consider rationing vital resources, such as intensive care unit beds.

    In Idaho a shortage of ICU beds is postponing non-emergency surgeries, while hospitals contend with fewer staffers to care for patients. As of Oct. 1, Idaho has the lowest percentage of people who’ve received one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine of any state.

    In September, Idaho implemented statewide crisis standards of care, a plan for allocating resources amid shortages, in an attempt to save as many lives as possible and giving a lower priority for ICU beds to those less likely to survive.

    Late last month, the legal advocacy group Justice in Aging asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to investigate the state’s rationing plan, saying it discriminates based on age. Idaho’s crisis policy includes a scoring system for “tiebreakers” that prioritizes patients that have “lived through fewer lifecycles.”

    Prioritizing certain groups of people over others was the subject of an April 2020 investigation by the Center for Public Integrity showing that in the early months of the pandemic, at least 25 states had crisis standards of care that could put people with disabilities at the back of the line for ventilators and other critical care.

    Citing Public Integrity’s reporting, U.S. Senator Ben Sasse, R-Nebraska, announced proposed legislation that would deny states health-care resources from the federal government if their policies discriminated against people with disabilities. And a group of Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bob Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania, asked the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure patients received fair access to medical care.

    Sasse’s proposal, the EQUAL Care Act, died at the end of the last Congress. He reintroduced it in June, but even as the delta variant and low vaccination rates have created shortages in some states, there has been no movement on the bill.

    Sasse’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

    After The Arc, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, filed nine federal complaints last year to try to get HHS to step in, multiple states changed their policies, specifying that health care workers should not discriminate.

    “Rather than making assumptions about a patient’s ability to respond to treatment based solely on stereotypes, doctors have to perform an individual assessment of each patient based on the best objective medical evidence,” said Shira Wakschlag, legal director of The Arc.

    Multiple civil rights laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act, already prohibit the denial of care on the basis of disability to an individual who would benefit from it. In March 2020, the AARP, which represents older Americans, released a statement opposing the use of age or disability to deny people access to treatments.

    New Variant Prompts New Shortages

    Earlier on in the pandemic, health care professionals worried they might run out of ventilators for all the patients who needed them. ProPublica reported last year that some doctors even considered putting two patients on one ventilator.

    Now, hospitals continue to face shortages of ICU beds and staff, an issue leading to continued debate over delaying non-emergency surgeries for non-COVID-19 patients.

    Govind Persad, a professor at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, said rationing policies center around how much life doctors can save. However, they should not make stereotypical judgments about how long patients could live, Persad said.

    Alaska recently implemented crisis standards of care for 20 healthcare facilities.

    Hawaii’s crisis standards of care framework, released in September, came under criticism from AARP Hawai’i and other groups for including age as a “tie-breaker” criteria for deciding who gets care.

    Bernard Lo, professor of medicine emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, said the higher contagiousness and deadliness of the delta variant caused surges in hospitalizations, leading to strained resources.

    Lo co-authored an article, published in February by the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, that details recommendations for equitably allocating ICU beds when shortages occur during a crisis. Those recommendations include considering whether patients live in poorer neighborhoods, prioritizing people whose jobs put them at high risk of infection, and not using long-term life expectancy as a criterion for resource access.

    “If you look at people who have multiple social vulnerabilities — they live in neighborhoods where there’s low income, people tend to have low educational status, a lot of unemployment — all these social factors that we know are associated with poor health outcomes,” Lo said. “Those people have had a disproportionate number of COVID deaths. Many of them are people of color as well.”

    Role of Doctors

    Matthew Wynia, director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said individual doctors should not have to decide who might receive certain resources when they may not be as focused on how many resources are available more broadly.

    “You want the doctor at the bedside to be able to serve as the advocate for their patient,” Wynia said. “You don’t want them being the judge deciding between their patients.”

    A December 2020 NPR investigation found reports of Oregon “doctors and hospitals denying equipment like ventilators; insisting that an elderly or disabled person sign a DNR — maybe when they couldn’t understand it and in the middle of a crisis.”

    Steven Joffe, a professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, said another debate that’s gone on in the medical field is whether to prioritize vaccinated or unvaccinated patients when allocating monoclonal antibody treatments.

    “We ought to actually be prioritizing the unvaccinated and immunocompromised, so that they don’t go on to get severe disease, and so that they don’t fill up the hospitals and we don’t need to use our crisis standards of care,” Joffe said.

    Meanwhile, The Arc will keep watch on how rationing policies are implemented on the ground, Wakschlag said. “We’re going to be continuing to monitor that situation and advocate wherever we see discrimination happening.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A New Deal For Eds And Meds

    Now, organizers who have built power at the local level are beginning to unite nationally. Earlier in the pandemic, higher education workers had to struggle for survival mostly on their own. The battles, even when successful, took place in isolation; each group of workers in each separate institution, system, or state focused on its own specific setting, even though the problems are national phenomena demanding national solutions. In recent months, organizers have shifted their attention. They recognize that to reconstruct higher education as a public good—one that converts adjunct, outsourced, part-time, and precarious jobs into full-time, well-paid, dignified, stable positions at scale; one that ends the student and institutional debt crises; and one that rebuilds in the interests of students, workers, and communities—they must fight and win at a national scale.

    The post A New Deal For Eds And Meds appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Black Women Are Leading Efforts to Combat Rising Maternal and Infant Mortality

    Close-up of baby hand holding mommy's fingers.

    Black women and their newborn babies are trapped in a public health crisis that is rooted in enslavement and perpetuated by systemic racism. Centuries of marginalization, exposure to environmental toxins, use of Black women’s bodies for scientific and pseudo-scientific experimentation, poor housing, substandard education, and the food apartheid that denies Black people self-determination in nutritional health have conspired over centuries to produce alarming health disparities and literally kill Black women and infants. These deaths are preventable, yet the numbers of the dead have risen. Looking forward, experts fear that the COVID-19 pandemic will only exacerbate racial disparities in maternal and infant health.

    Across racial lines, the United States has the highest rates of maternal mortality than any other developed country in the world, with 17.4 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2018. According to the American Medical Association (AMA), this rate of maternal death was more than double the rates of maternal mortality in countries of comparable wealth. The following year, in 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that the U.S. maternal mortality rate rose to 20.1 deaths per 100,000 live births.

    Black maternal mortality ranks even worse. Maternal mortality rates for non-Hispanic African American women rose from 37.3 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2018 to 44.0 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2019. Black women’s maternal mortality exceeds that of other BIPOC women, including Latinx women, whose rates of maternal mortality (11.8 in 2018 and 12.6 in 2019) are lower than white women (17.4 in 2018 and 17.9 in 2019).

    The CDC 2018 statistics on maternal mortality do not include data on Indigenous women, even though statistics on racial disparities were included in the report. (Indigenous women’s exclusion from the 2018 CDC report is consistent with their experience of marginalization in U.S. politics and policies, as well as silencing in the public discourse.) The CDC does have rates of maternal mortality for Indian and Alaska Native women for 2014-2017: 28.3 per 100,000 live births compared to 41.7 per 100,000 live births for African American women during that same period. During that period, white women and Asian and Pacific Islander women were statistically tied, at 13.4 per 100,000 live births and 13.8 per 100,000 live births respectively, while Latinx women had the lowest rates of maternal mortality, at 11.6 per 100,000 live births.

    A History of Medical Apartheid

    In a stunning 2018 New York Times article, Linda Villarosa, journalist-in-residence at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, identified the stress related to Black life in the U.S. as one cause of the racial disparities in Black maternal health. The impact of racism on maternal health has specific expressions on women of African descent when compared to other BIPOC women, including Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander, and Indigenous women.

    “The racial disparity in maternal and infant mortality between Black and white women is stark — but Black women have the worst outcomes in America because we have been the targets of harm for so long,” Villarosa told Truthout. “Institutional and structural racism have affected our communities for centuries, beginning with slavery and continuing with Jim Crow, segregation in housing and education, redlining and the poisoning of our neighborhoods with pollution. Our bodies have also been studied closely, at first because of the commodification tied to enslavement, later as test subjects.”

    Black babies are also locked in this death grip. According to the CDC, in 2018, the infant mortality rate in this country was 5.7 deaths per 1,000 live births. However, the rate of Black infant mortality was, alarmingly, double that, at 10.8 deaths per 1,000 live births.

    Higher socioeconomic status does not liberate African Americans from the risk of maternal or infant mortality, as Serena Williams’s experience after giving birth to her daughter Olympia made clear. While income inequality certainly impacts infant and maternal health, infant mortality rates are higher among babies born to well-educated, middle-class Black women than in babies whose mothers are low-income white women with only a high school education.

    “What is interesting about this question regarding the impact of poor maternal health on Black communities is that, despite education, income and employment, we are still dying,” Simone Toomer, a certified birth and postpartum doula, childbirth educator and international board-certified lactation consultant, says. “This shows it is beyond us and our efforts, although being informed and advocating for ourselves does make a difference.” Toomer adds that these disparities, despite wealth and education, impact Black families in ways maternal and infant mortality rates do not quantify when mother and baby survive but do not thrive. “Poor maternal health care trickles down into poor breastfeeding rates amongst our infants, higher percentage of Black mothers being readmitted to the hospital after delivery and higher rates of PMADs [perinatal or postpartum mood and anxiety disorder].” These health outcomes have reverberating impacts on Black communities across income levels and through U.S. society more broadly.

    Villarosa, who is author of the forthcoming book on race and public health titled, Under the Skin: Racism, Inequality and the Health of a Nation, does have numbers to place poor maternal and infant care in perspective: “Racial disparity in maternal and infant mortality has led to tens of thousands of lost lives. For every woman that dies as a result of pregnancy, childbirth and the months after a birth, nearly 100 women almost die. This is traumatizing for individuals and families.”

    The reasons for these racial disparities and the overwhelming trauma they cause across income and education levels are vast and complex, according to Chi Chi Okwu, executive director of EverThrive Illinois, a social services agency dedicated to achieving health equity. “What we do know is that the combination and crushing weight of racism and sexism has a profound impact on the health of BIPOC women,” Okwu says. “This is a complex issue that requires us to look at the entire health ecosystem in addition to dismantling the racist and sexist institutions in our society.” In a state where, according to a 2016-2017 report from the Illinois Department of Public Health, Black women are three times likely to die from pregnancy-related medical conditions as white women, Okwu and her colleagues at EverThrive are focused on changing policy to improve birth outcomes. At the state level, these policies include expanding Medicaid to provide doula, lactation consulting and home-visiting services.

    Black Women Are Doing the Work

    To produce healthier outcomes, African American women are working to disrupt the policies, systems and the inherent bias among health care workers that harm vulnerable Black mothers and their babies. Policymakers in the Biden administration seeking to improve Black maternal and infant health should listen to these women.

    In addition to policy, EverThrive Illinois also supports initiatives developed through strategic partnerships that center women and babies most impacted by racial and economic inequalities in health. The Family Connects Chicago program is one initiative Okwu’s organization supports to promote positive health outcomes for Black women and their newborns. In a city where Black unemployment far outpaced other racial groups well before COVID, Family Connects provides a visiting nurse for parents who are having difficulty getting to doctor’s appointments. Okwu says a home visitation nurse can work with the parents to identify the barriers to care and obtain the support they need to overcome them.

    To afford a baby nurse that comes into the home to support mother and child, wealthy families in the Chicago area must pay salaries averaging in the high-five to low-six figures. The median baby nurse salary in Chicago is nearly $80,000. Through Family Connects, parents who can’t afford to pay more than they make themselves receive the same privilege of in-home care. “Home visiting provides an opportunity for parents to conveniently receive additional support in their own home. This is not a substitute to going to their OB-GYN or pediatrician,” Okwu explains. “Parents need all the support they can get after giving birth, and home visiting is just one part of the support network to ensure both the parent and child are getting all of the help they need in the postpartum period.”

    Improving the relationship between health care systems and African American homes requires shifts in both policy and the public conversation in order to address racism in medical settings. The AMA and The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists (ACOG) have identified racism as a public health crisis. To dismantle racism in health care and improve outcomes in Black maternal and infant health, professionals must focus on policies and systems that directly impact Black families. “Dismantling racism in health care will take a multi-pronged systemic and localized approach. We need to ensure that all people have access to high-quality, comprehensive health care,” Okwu says. “We also need to ensure that the care being provided is culturally competent and patient-centered.”

    Reducing racial health disparities requires such significant change, but Black women like Okwu are already producing outcomes that health care professionals in ACOG and the AMA, as well as policymakers in Biden administration, should consider. In Okwu’s state, participation in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program had declined, reducing the opportunities for Black women and babies to benefit from the breastfeeding support and healthy food WIC provides. In response, EverThrive Illinois convened a group of partners — those who run WIC sites and WIC program participants — to form the Making WIC Work Coalition and, in 2019, published a landmark Making WIC Work Report. In response to the coalition’s advocacy, the State of Illinois has made significant improvements to the way it runs WIC, including eliminating a discriminatory coupon system which has limited access to food for mostly Black and Brown families in Chicago for more than 20 years; offering more choices so people shopping with WIC can redeem their benefits for a wider variety of foods; providing updated guidance so that all WIC sites provide consistent services and implement streamlined application procedures; and adapting quickly to provide flexibility in WIC enrollment and redemption of benefits so families can care for themselves during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Though the data is not yet available, certainly the global pandemic has exacerbated racial disparities in health outcomes for Black women and babies. The California Health Care Foundation has documented these complications, but the problems of Black women’s access to quality maternal and infant care through the pandemic are national in scope.

    Black-led organizations lead the efforts to fill COVID-related gaps. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is studying the work done in Cleveland, Ohio, by Birthing Beautiful Communities (BBC), a Black-owned and run perinatal support agency. By studying service shifts caused by the COVID pandemic, including the use of technology in infant mortality prevention programming, SSRC expects “the findings to have implications for healthcare service delivery for Black women and their families.”

    Black Women and Doulas

    One successful program initiative at BBC is the community-based doula program, which provides overnight postpartum care. Doulas can fill wide gaps created by racism in health care. According to Toomer, “The data is limited on how doulas reduce the Black maternal and infant mortality; however, across the board, we know continuous doula support increases positive outcomes for both the birthing person and infant through emotional and physical support, advocacy and preparation.”

    Toomer, who works at New York Presbyterian Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn as a doula and lactation consultant providing prenatal education and support in the clinic and on the Mother Baby Unit, and who also has a thriving private practice, explains that doulas provide multiple beams of support for families. Depending on their training, birth doulas support families through pregnancy, with some trained to support people as they undergo the assisted reproductive technology known as in vitro fertilization (IVF), in which eggs and sperm are combined in a laboratory. Toomer explains that “Doulas provide resources, educate and empower families around their birth options before the baby is here and in the laboring room. We assist within that first hour with latching baby and ensuring a smooth transition once home.” Consistent with the efforts of organizations like EverThrive Illinois and the BBC, doulas also provide critical care to support mothers and give infants a better chance at surviving the first year after birth. Toomer says, “Postpartum doulas come into the home to support newborn feeding, assessing for PMADS, the need for sleep and food, newborn education and ensuring everyone continues to transition smoothly.”

    Toomer says that doulas fill gaps that are the standard in maternal care throughout in the medical community. “All parents have to bring their infant to the pediatrician in the first 24-28 hours after discharge; however, oftentimes, no one is checking in on the parents. Many things can happen in those six weeks but unfortunately that is the next time most birthing people are seeing their care providers after delivery.”

    Toomer worked with the Healthy Start Brooklyn’s By My Side Support Program for four years. She says that, as a doula, “at every monthly meeting we would hear how our support prenatally, through delivery and postpartum, affirmed families, empowered them and provided that continuity of care that is lacking from the American health care system.”

    Systemic Change Is Needed

    From her vantage point on the front lines of the Black maternal and infant mortality crisis, Toomer hears “in many stories regarding Black maternal death, accountability is lacking. Accountability of these providers.” She insists that the work she does will never be enough to save Black women and their babies, and that this country’s health care system needs significant institutional change. “It is nice to be on the radar; however, it is beyond providing a doula for every Black mom. We are a small piece in the big puzzle.”

    Change needs to start at the top with establishments such as hospitals, Toomer asserts. “Anti-racism health professionals need to continue training in cultural humility. Black women need to be heard and listened to. Biases need to be erased. We need to be looked at as human and respected as such.”

    Villarosa says California is providing a template to address the needs that Black women like she and Toomer have identified. “Our country should follow the lead of California, which made implicit bias training mandatory for all health care providers who work with pregnant and birthing people,” Villarosa says. “During the pandemic, the state became the first to make implicit bias training mandatory for all providers, which will go in effect in January. The U.S. should do the same.”

    The California Health Care Foundation says that exposing people to their unconscious bias and providing “a historical context for modern-day inequities in maternal health” can help professionals produce healthier outcomes as they “begin to understand how even well-meaning routine responses to patients can inadvertently cause harm and even death.”

    Despite this promising commitment to dismantling racism in health care, Villarosa says that, in researching her book, the most surprising thing she discovered “is how well discrimination in our medical system has been documented — yet, there’s still a call for more ‘proof.’” This is more than unnerving as Black women and their babies continue to die at disproportionate rates, and experience poor health outcomes even when Black mothers survive the birthing process and Black babies survive the first year of life. These poor maternal and infant outcomes are the shame of a system that, as Toomer says, “is a broken system never meant to help us.”

    Villarosa testifies to a consistent national truth: “Racial health disparities have been part of the American story since the founding of our country. Black mothers and babies should not be dying for reasons that are largely preventable. This isn’t how a just society treats a segment of its population.” The U.S. has the most advanced, expensive health care system in the world, she points out, “so why are we the only wealthy country where the overall rates of women dying or almost dying related to pregnancy are rising? And why do we have the highest rate of infant mortality of all the wealthy countries? These poor health outcomes are shameful, driven by the disproportionate death rates of Black mothers and babies, and are revealing that nation’s inequality.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • This Abortion Fund Is at the Front Lines of the Struggle for Access in Texas

    Protesters take part in the Women's March and Rally for Abortion Justice in Austin, Texas, on October 2, 2021.

    As state-level attacks on abortion rights intensify — not only in Texas but also in at least seven GOP-controlled states that are seeking to copy its draconian abortion ban — local abortion funds like the Texas-based Lilith Fund are serving as a locus of resistance.

    These local abortion funds pair direct service (providing the resources to enable people to access an abortion) with an organizing effort to defend and expand access to abortion through collective action and consciousness raising. Erika Galindo, the Lilith Fund’s organizing program manager, spoke with Truthout about some of the reasons why organizing beyond service provision is important, as well as what is really necessary and at stake in the fight to preserve Roe.

    As a Texas-based organization, the Lilith Fund is on the front lines of the fight to protect abortion rights in the U.S., contending with the state’s regressive new anti-abortion law that is part pre-viability ban and part vigilante justice.

    The law, S.B. 8, prohibits free exercise to what should be an ordinary health care decision. Banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and providing a private cause of action for individuals to sue people who defy the law, S.B. 8 is an affront to the very spirit of Roe v. Wade. And yet the Supreme Court refused to stop the law from going into effect, claiming it was merely a procedural determination.

    Galindo argues that even as we fight to defend Roe v. Wade from right-wing attacks, it shouldn’t be seen as an adequate standard for abortion access. Speaking in concert with a growing chorus of organizers of color across the country, she argues that beyond extreme six-week bans, many other restrictions prevent many people from accessing abortion — for example, restrictions involving multi-day visits before a procedure, prohibitions on using public funding or insurance for procedures, or even the various targeted restrictions on abortion providers (TRAP) laws. Despite the historic House vote protecting women’s health expressly prohibiting unnecessary restrictions on abortion access like S.B. 8, organizers like Galindo aren’t waiting for federal intervention.

    Anoa Changa: How does the Lilith Fund engage in organizing, beyond the service of covering the costs of abortion for people?

    Erika Galindo: We really think our work is like a two-pronged approach. There’s a direct service part, which is just like getting people to their abortions when you truly can’t afford them. But then there’s the organizing part because we know that, for one, there’s a lot of abortion policy being made right now, but hardly ever with people who’ve had abortions in the room, like an advocacy space, and just like spaces where these decisions are being made. And so, I think the idea was to get people who call our fund directly involved in the organizing to defend and expand abortion access.

    We also know that because a lot of the funds that make up our hotline budget is through grassroots support. That is organizing when people are fundraising amongst their communities, and they’re talking to their friends about why it is that they are supporting the fund or why they support abortion funds. That in itself is like an educational moment.

    Can you talk to me a little more about why looking at abortion as health care instead of some philosophically debated procedure is the better framing?

    Yeah. Abortion is health care. Because, quite frankly, anything that you need to go see a doctor for is immediately health care. People need abortions, yes, because they don’t want to be pregnant anymore. But that can be for a plethora of reasons. And pregnancy itself is not just a super casual thing. It’s like the most dangerous thing that somebody can do. And I think we forget that. But in Texas, especially, it’s really dangerous for women — particularly Black women — to be pregnant, unfortunately, because we don’t have a health care system that isn’t anti-racist yet or fully just not without the biases or ills of the world.

    What I mean when I say that abortion is health care is [that it is] a common procedure; it is safer than some dental procedures. People should be able to access it without having to pay out of pocket. And in Texas, you currently have to pay out of pocket for your abortion, because there’s not even private coverage for it. We do believe that all health care should be accessible to everyone. And that includes abortion.

    It sounds like what you’re saying is we should be providing total coverage for the health care needs that people have, whether they’re choosing to have a baby or choosing to have an abortion whatever the case may be.

    Exactly.

    Much of the focus nationally has been on saving Roe. Is saving Roe enough to protect abortion access and rights for pregnant people in the communities y’all serve or in other parts of the country?

    No. Saving Roe is crucial, but it’s not enough. And it’s never been enough. S.B. 8 is the latest anti-abortion restriction to go into effect. But it’s not the first abortion restriction to successfully be passed and implemented in Texas. We’ve had decades of anti-abortion restrictions like TRAP. We have had Roe eroded in states in the South for years, Texas in particular.

    Roe has never guaranteed that there will be public coverage for abortion, and even in the two years after Roe, there were already attacks through the Hyde Amendment. Roe is like the baseline. It’s the floor, not the ceiling as a lot of people have described it, because it’s like the bare minimum that our country can do. But we need a whole lot more. Roe assumes that there’s a lot of things already functioning well. And there’s not, unfortunately. It’s operating obviously within capitalism.

    When Roe was passed, it was focusing more on a doctor’s right to provide abortions, and that’s assuming that someone can get in front of a doctor, but that’s a huge assumption to make. Especially because health care is also just generally not accessible or a right in this country (or cheap). And because TRAP laws and coverage restrictions have only eroded Roe, it means that it has only gotten harder, because people have to pay out of pocket, take more time off work, find child care, etc.
    We need budgets that support people getting health care, including abortion.

    What would you like people to understand about what’s actually happening in Texas and the work that people are doing?

    I think people in Texas right now are being held hostage. And I say that because Texas is not a red state. Texas is a state that has so many things that are working against regular Texans — like gerrymandering, voter suppression, just like all sorts of things. Then I keep thinking about the fact that this extreme abortion ban was passed in a year where Texans were so bogged down and distracted. We had the winter storm happen. COVID is still happening. Our legislators made no effort to make the legislature accessible and pandemic-safe.

    The legislature has never been accessible. But they really took advantage of the fact that people really can’t travel and go and drop things at a moment’s notice to go to a building where masks are not required. And try to intervene in this process. We had the cards stacked against us from the beginning. I think I just get very frustrated when people tend to write Texas off or the South off as like, a lost cause.

    Texans do not want abortion restrictions. Texans wanted COVID relief and our legislators to fix the grid. That hasn’t happened. And we know that attacking abortion, attacking trans kids … it’s because they don’t want to give Texans or the South the legislation that could actually benefit us.

    Is there anything else that you think is important for people to know?

    I feel like if folks want to help Texas or get in coordination with Texas, I think folks need to of course donate to a fund and figure out how you can volunteer. But I think also getting involved in your own locality is super important.

    Because even if you feel like maybe your state is in a better position, it could very easily not be. Also, even if your state doesn’t have harmful abortion restrictions, folks might still be struggling to pay for their care. So, I would encourage anybody to get involved with their local abortion fund and look to whoever’s been doing this work in your area because they will likely have so much expertise and can tell you exactly where you need to go to fight abortion restrictions.

    This interview has been edited lightly for clarity.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • More Than 2,000 Nurses And Other Health Care Workers Strike In Buffalo

    Roughly 2,200 nurses, aides and health care staff walked off the job Friday morning in Buffalo, New York, to fight for better wages, staffing and working conditions at Mercy Hospital of Buffalo. Workers on the picket line describe horrific conditions at the hospital. Patients’ rooms, hallways, cafeterias and even medical equipment are filthy because the hospital refuses to hire enough workers.

    The post More Than 2,000 Nurses And Other Health Care Workers Strike In Buffalo appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.