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  • Dozens of People Died in Arizona Sober Living Homes as State Officials Fumbled Medicaid Fraud Response

    by Mary Hudetz, ProPublica, and Hannah Bassett, Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting

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

    At least 40 Native American residents of sober living homes and treatment facilities in the Phoenix area died as state Medicaid officials struggled to respond to a massive fraud scheme that targeted Indigenous people with addictions.

    The deaths, almost all from drug and alcohol use, span from the spring of 2022 to the summer of 2024, according to a review of records from the Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner. Over half died as officials ignored calls to address lax oversight later shown to have contributed to thousands of patients being recruited into sham treatment programs.

    Patients continued to die even after Arizona officials in May 2023 announced a sweeping investigation of hundreds of facilities. By then, the fraud was so widespread that officials spent the next year seeking to halt Medicaid reimbursements to behavioral health businesses accused of wrongdoing.

    The state’s Medicaid agency, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, acknowledged the fraud cost taxpayers as much as $2.5 billion. But it has not accounted publicly for the number of deaths tied to the scheme.

    Many of the deaths in sober living homes reviewed by the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica happened as officials — in at least five instances across Republican and Democratic administrations — failed to act on evidence that rampant fraud was imperiling Native Americans whose care was paid for by the agency, according to court documents, agency records and interviews.

    A class-action lawsuit filed last month by families who allege the state’s inaction harmed or killed loved ones seeking addiction treatment names three people who died outside of sober living homes or treatment programs. Their deaths are not among the 40 fatalities tied directly to the facilities in medical examiner records.

    Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who took office in January 2023, blamed her Republican predecessor, Doug Ducey, for failing to relay the scale of the scheme that persisted for years under his leadership. However, AZCIR and ProPublica found that the leader Hobbs appointed at AHCCCS also stalled a key reform the agency would later credit with helping to stem the fraud.

    In a brief statement, Daniel Scarpinato, a Ducey spokesperson, did not comment on missed opportunities to detect and stop the fraud under his administration. But he said that the former governor went to great lengths to ensure a smooth transition for Hobbs and that members of Ducey’s staff continued to make themselves available to her administration after he left office. “All they needed to do was pick up the phone,” Scarpinato said.

    AHCCCS declined to comment or to make Director Carmen Heredia available for an interview because of the ongoing class-action lawsuit.

    Reva Stewart, a community advocate who started a nonprofit to help victims and their families, estimates the crisis led to hundreds of deaths, extending beyond those that occurred in sober living facilities. She said many people recruited into programs were reported missing and some lost access to treatment or became homeless when the state’s crackdown led to the abrupt closure of facilities that housed people.

    Stewart and others fault AHCCCS for not acting sooner.

    “I had family members who died in these group homes,” said Lorenzo Henry, a member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe who said he was recruited into multiple inadequate treatment programs before finding a facility that helped him. “I would like to see at least AHCCCS take accountability for their actions, for how they let this fraud go on for so long.”

    Among the victims was Jeffrey Hustito, a 43-year-old uncle, brother and son from Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico. He had been a caretaker for his father when he was on dialysis and awaiting a kidney transplant. In the fall of 2021, Hustito sought treatment for alcoholism in Arizona, his family said. His father, an Army veteran and custodian for the local Indian Health Service hospital, was relieved to learn about his son’s decision. The two were close, living in the family’s home in a historic tribal village surrounded by high desert and mesas.

    But in Phoenix, the younger Hustito became difficult to keep track of. He was caught up in a murky network of treatment programs, according to interviews with his family, social media posts, and state and county records. Sober living home operators always seemed to be moving him, his father said.

    “We were really thrilled when he decided to get treatment,” said Anders Hustito, who is slender and soft-spoken. “He just got worse over there.”

    Jeffrey Hustito died in a sober living home on Dec. 27, 2022.

    A person walks past the location where, according to Anders Hustito, white vans stopped to collect people and bring them to sober homes in Arizona. (Adriana Zehbrauskas, special to ProPublica) Skyrocketing Reimbursements and Fraud Allegations

    The fraud flourished for years under the state’s American Indian Health Program, a Medicaid insurance option for tribal citizens that allowed providers to set their own reimbursement rates. This fee-for-service model, established as a result of federal requirements, aimed to ensure coverage for Native Americans living in areas not typically served by insurance companies. But with no limit on how much they could bill, some behavioral health providers claimed tens of thousands of dollars for a single counseling or treatment session.

    The first uptick in behavioral health reimbursement claims came in 2019. That same year, Ducey appointed Jami Snyder, a deputy director at AHCCCS and former head of Texas’ Medicaid agency, to serve as director of AHCCCS. She pursued new initiatives, like additional mental health services and housing options for Medicaid recipients. She also had a more hands-off approach to agency operations, including fraud prevention, than her predecessors, according to former AHCCCS employees.

    During the pandemic, Snyder enacted changes to increase access to care. One allowed the state Medicaid program to bypass background checks for providers and in-person inspections of facilities. Another let providers continue collecting Medicaid payments after their health department licenses lapsed, meaning AHCCCS no longer had updated information on clinics’ certifications or ownership. The changes were not communicated beyond Snyder’s senior leadership team for nearly two years, according to documentation provided by an AHCCCS spokesperson.

    Snyder declined requests for an interview or comment for this story.

    Medicaid, which provides essential health care for lower-income people, was known to be susceptible to fraud, in part because of the breadth of services offered; the American Indian Health Program especially was at higher risk because providers could set their own rates with no cap. But the failure to communicate licensing changes to staff made the agency and program even more vulnerable. Markay Adams, former assistant director of the division within AHCCCS that administers the American Indian Health Program, said that had she known about the changes she could have advocated for more audits or staff to safeguard against fraud.

    (Managed care organizations, which oversee services to 90% of Medicaid members, also were unaware of the changes.)

    Between 2020 and 2021, spending on the American Indian Health Program skyrocketed from roughly $690 million to nearly $1 billion, according to internal documents.

    Behavioral health outpatient clinics drove the most significant increase, with officials later saying that many of these facilities were part of the multilayered scheme to defraud Medicaid. The clinics would often coordinate with unregulated sober living homes to house patients eligible for the program. The clinics would then pay the homes for supplying patients, using a cut of the outsize profits they made billing the American Indian Health Program.

    AHCCCS did not appear to grasp the scope and complexity of the fraud scheme for another year, despite red flags and the spike in payments to treatment programs, Adams said. The Arizona Republic last year also reported that a medical director at the agency became concerned in 2021 about unsafe behavioral health settings.

    In June 2021, AHCCCS terminated its contract with a facility that had unlicensed staff, overbilled for services and housed patients in a decommissioned hotel, a matter that Snyder was notified about in internal emails. However, the extent of the agency’s probes, conducted by its Office of Inspector General, weren’t fully shared with other AHCCCS divisions, and the executive team did not effectively coordinate or communicate its response within the agency, Adams said.

    Mark Brnovich, then Arizona’s attorney general, announced indictments in October 2021 of 13 people and 14 businesses accused of defrauding AHCCCS by billing excessively for treatments and claiming to treat patients never served by their behavioral health operations. (All entered plea agreements, except for L&L Investments, which was found guilty at trial last year.)

    Meanwhile, word spread on social media that white vans were appearing on reservations and people with addiction were disappearing, said state Sen. Theresa Hatathlie, a Democrat from Coalmine Mesa on the Navajo Nation. Hatathlie said the behavioral health facilities’ tactics of sending vans to tribal communities grew increasingly aggressive as they recruited clients with promises of free food, housing and clothing. Police intervened but didn’t yet fully understand what was happening, the state senator said.

    “I Thought Everything Would Be OK”

    Jeffrey Hustito decided to seek treatment in Phoenix based on a recommendation from friends at Zuni Pueblo. In the fall of 2021, he entered a program paid for by Medicaid that offered a room at a sober living home, his father said. Hustito believed treatment would provide a stepping stone to steady employment, maybe as a welder or a cook.

    At home, he liked to make pasta and enchiladas, and he often had dinner ready in the evenings after his father’s custodial shifts at the local Indian Health Service hospital.

    “He was always helpful,” Anders Hustito said.

    The family knew they would miss him when he enrolled in the Phoenix treatment program. But they also knew he needed help.

    The place where he stayed in Phoenix, a two-story house with a hot tub and swimming pool, looked like a mansion in the photos that Jeffrey Hustito shared in text messages, his sister, Katherine Hustito, said. She was pleased he seemed happy, though she was surprised the treatment program operators had helped him get an Arizona identification card and sign up for Medicaid in the state.

    “He was taking pictures of himself in the pool,” his sister said. “I thought everything would be OK.”

    Hope eventually faded. Around February 2022, Hustito called home scared, thirsty and unsure of his whereabouts, she said. His family believed he may have been kicked out of his sober living home, leaving him with no place to stay. By the time his father drove the four and a half hours to Phoenix, Hustito had figured out he was in Maricopa, a bedroom community more than 30 miles south of the city.

    “That’s way out of Phoenix,” Anders Hustito said. “When I finally saw him, boy, I was so glad. We hugged.”

    He said he took his son home, only for him to go back to Phoenix a month later and enter a new treatment program.

    Anders Hustito did not yet know about the fraud in Arizona or that the programs might be enabling his son’s drinking, rather than helping him quit. But according to public records, there were signs of trouble within facilities and problems with providers’ licenses.

    In early February 2022, Brnovich’s office received a 107-page memo from a private citizen that spelled out alleged schemes of more than 30 sober living homes in the Phoenix area believed to be targeting Native Americans and billing for treatment services that were not provided. (Three of the four individuals named in the memo, including a state health department employee, would be indicted by Brnovich’s successor, Kris Mayes, a Democrat, in September 2024.)

    At AHCCCS, staff received news in March of a death inside a residential treatment program, Adams said. In an interview, she could not recall details of the death or the facility where it occurred. But she said a health and safety committee reviewing the death discovered the facility did not have a health department license, a key detail that would repeatedly appear in later investigations.

    Adams, who was present for the review, questioned how the provider could collect Medicaid payments without a license that’s required of every health care provider. Soon after escalating the issue with senior leadership, a top AHCCCS manager disclosed the changes that allowed unlicensed providers to remain in AHCCCS’ enrollment system. The agency would later find more than 13,000 unlicensed providers eligible to receive Medicaid reimbursements, though only a fraction were behavioral health or accused of wrongdoing.

    The Office of Inspector General undertook a manual review of behavioral health residential facilities’ licenses, Adams said, and Snyder began meeting that spring with AHCCCS’ top managers to identify weaknesses that fraudsters could exploit.

    Evening on the edge of Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico (Adriana Zehbrauskas, special to ProPublica) “They Didn’t Really Teach Us Anything”

    By the summer of 2022, Jeffrey Hustito was enrolled in Beyond4Wallz Health and Wellness. The new outpatient treatment program held classes in an office building in north Phoenix and placed its clients in houses throughout Phoenix, according to the owner.

    State records show the business, which received a state health department license in April 2021, was reimbursed $3.5 million from Medicaid that year. The next year, Beyond4Wallz’s Medicaid claims more than tripled, to $11.1 million.

    At the same time, state health inspectors were discovering that Beyond4Wallz failed to supervise staff, according to state health department records. Inspectors also said the company could not provide proof that its counselors were qualified to work with clients.

    A former client, who said she was enrolled in the program at the same time as Hustito, recalled some clients smoked fentanyl in the treatment center’s bathroom. (She asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation from the business’ owner.)

    She said she slept on a mattress on the floor of a rundown house and didn’t get the treatment she needed. “They didn’t really teach us anything. It was just like a room-and-board thing,” she said. Eventually, she left.

    In a brief phone interview, Darielle Magee, the owner of Beyond4Wallz and a hairstylist, said she opened the business after losing loved ones to drugs. She built her clientele by asking people on the street and at her salon if they needed help recovering from addiction. “Some people would say no; some people would say yes,” Magee said, adding that she worked with property owners to find shelter for clients and also bought property to house them. Her former clients were “entitled to their own opinions” about the program, she said.

    Magee didn’t comment on accusations of substance use among clients in her program or the health department citations, which records show were initially resolved with plans to correct each violation. She also would not comment on Hustito’s time at Beyond4Wallz, citing the “sensitive nature of the topic.”

    A Google listing for the business shows photographs of Hustito in a carpeted office with other clients, his husky, 6-foot frame wedged in a small classroom desk. Other photos show him on a trip to California in July 2022, wearing a neon green T-shirt that says “The Sober Life.”

    Hustito’s sister described the trip as a high point for him that year. She keeps photos on her phone that he sent from the beach in Los Angeles. In one, he’s wearing the “Sober Life” shirt and beaming with the ocean behind him.

    “That’s the Jeffrey we know,” Katherine Hustito said. “Always smiling.”

    But as the days passed in California, he no longer appeared to be sober in the photos he sent home. His father wondered if the trip was just a “big old party.”

    Photos of Jeffrey Hustito at the beach in California (top row and bottom left) and the Grand Canyon in Arizona (bottom right), photographed on the Hustitos’ dining room table in Zuni Pueblo (Adriana Zehbrauskas, special to ProPublica) Resistance to Reforms

    Even as AHCCCS struggled to stop the schemes, it was clear the behavioral health care industry was aware of fraudulent billing, according to agency documents.

    That summer, AHCCCS staff were wrestling with how to keep providers from reaping huge profits with a single billing code meant for serving people in need of intensive outpatient help for addiction, including counseling. Reimbursement claims had ranged from roughly $150 to $2,500 for the same service, according to interviews and internal records. Staff would later find one provider charged AHCCCS $60,000 for one treatment session with a single client.

    In July 2022, AHCCCS publicly posted a proposal to set a reimbursement rate of $138 per claim for intensive outpatient addiction treatment. The team responsible for setting rates had determined that amount was in line with industry standards.

    Yet Snyder heard concerns from more than 10 facility operators, some of whom acknowledged certain clinics were abusing billing rates but said capping reimbursements could put them out of business and trigger a surge in homelessness.

    The Arizona Council of Human Service Providers, a group with influential board members, complained the proposed rate change was “premature” and “insufficient” to cover costs of treatment. Among them: Heredia, CEO of Valle del Sol, a behavioral health and primary care organization. She would later replace Snyder as head of AHCCCS, with the agency touting her experience with the two nonprofits.

    The agency scrapped the rate change.

    Cottonwood trees tower over the gravel road leading to Anders Hustito’s home. (Adriana Zehbrauskas, special to ProPublica) “Are You Sure You’re in a Safe Place?”

    In the fall of 2022, Hustito spent a week at home in Zuni Pueblo. His sister recalled asking him to stay in New Mexico for good. But he was anticipating another California trip with his treatment program, she said.

    A white van pulled up to the Hustito family’s house to take him back to Phoenix. Anders Hustito couldn’t believe the driver had the nerve to show up at the family’s home, shaded by a cottonwood tree along a quiet gravel road.

    Things didn’t go as Hustito hoped. The California trip didn’t happen. He was cited for shoplifting. He left Beyond4Wallz, according to the owner. She did not say why.

    Hustito listed three addresses that fall, a medical examiner reviewing his health records said. One was a gray one-story house on the far west edge of Phoenix. Anders Hustito said his son gave the impression that the different sober living homes he stayed in were run by the same family, though he did not say who they were.

    In November, Katherine Hustito noticed a warning on Facebook from the Zuni Police Department. It said to beware of scammers from Arizona who were trying to recruit tribal members into sham treatment centers. She sent it to her brother. “Are you sure you’re in a safe place?” she recalled asking. “I just want to know you’re OK.”

    Jeffrey Hustito responded that he was fine, though that fall he also cried on a phone call with his sister and told her that he hated where he was. He was homesick and said he wanted to return home for an annual tribal ceremony. When that event came and went, he said he would be home by Christmas. He continued sending his sister texts each day to say good morning. She wondered what he wasn’t telling her.

    A medical examiner would later note that in his final weeks, Hustito made multiple emergency room visits. One trip to Banner Desert Medical Center was on Dec. 9, a day after he turned 43. Authorities said he drank a half bottle of rum and smoked fentanyl at his sober living home. He was treated and released.

    Two days later, he needed medical treatment again, for alcohol poisoning. He was taken to another hospital and released to his sober living home.

    On Dec. 23, AHCCCS published for the first time an alert on its website warning of fraudulent sober living homes recruiting Native Americans from reservations.

    “We Let Them Drink a Little Bit to Calm Down”

    Anders Hustito last heard from his son on Christmas. Jeffrey Hustito was upset about not getting to see the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals play that day, even though he believed his behavioral health provider planned to give him tickets. His family said they sent him money for the game, only for him to learn he was being disciplined and wouldn’t attend the game after all.

    His father couldn’t reach him after that.

    According to police, Jeffrey Hustito checked into another sober living home on Dec. 26, this one in the suburb of Glendale. He later smoked fentanyl with another resident and laid down to sleep around 1 a.m. People in the house found him unresponsive 45 minutes later, police said. In addition to the drugs, he had alcohol in his system.

    Authorities called Anders Hustito on Dec. 27 to tell him his son had died. He blamed himself for not driving to Phoenix a day earlier to search for his son.

    But he was also angry with the sober living home owner. When Anders arrived to collect Jeffrey’s belongings with his oldest son and daughter-in-law, Anders asked a man who came to the door how residents could have access to alcohol while seeking treatment.

    The answer infuriated him. “He said, ‘Since they have an alcohol problem, we let them drink a little bit to calm down,’” Anders recalled.

    Anders Hustito last heard from his son on Christmas in 2022. (Adriana Zehbrauskas, special to ProPublica) “It Was Obviously a Systemic Issue”

    Jeffrey Hustito was one of at least two Native Americans to die in sober living homes in December 2022 as AHCCCS tried to root out fraud by suspending payments to providers. At least 10 behavioral health providers, including Beyond4Wallz, received suspension notices from AHCCCS that month.

    In a letter sent the day after Hustito died, officials accused Beyond4Wallz of billing excessively for services that could not have been provided to patients. Magee, the Beyond4Wallz owner, said she tried to address the state’s allegations and stay open, but eventually closed. Despite the timing, there’s no indication the letter was spurred by Hustito’s death. Magee said she had no ties to sober living homes Hustito entered after he was no longer her client, including the one where he died. And Magee is not facing charges related to the defrauding of AHCCCS.

    “So many people were being closed, and we were just one of the first,” said Magee.

    Meanwhile, Native Health and Native American Connections, two well-established providers in Phoenix, pressed authorities to do more. As Hobbs took office in January 2023, the organizations held a meeting with other community health centers, law enforcement, AHCCCS and state health officials to discuss human trafficking and Medicaid fraud.

    “It was obviously a systemic issue,” Walter Murillo, chief executive officer of Native Health, said in an interview. “I assume that they had to be aware of it by then.”

    Snyder did not mention the fraudulent facilities several days later when she went before a legislative committee to discuss a recent audit shortly before stepping down as AHCCCS director. The audit, conducted every 10 years, is used by legislators to evaluate the future of state agencies. It determined, among other findings, that AHCCCS could have made more than $1.7 billion in improper payments between 2019 and 2020 because it did not properly determine providers’ eligibility before making reimbursements. The audit did not indicate if this was related to the growing crisis. Snyder defended the agency’s handling of Medicaid funds.

    “It has nothing to do with member abuse,” she said of the payments.

    The Hobbs administration began to grasp the scope of the fraud scheme in the weeks that followed, said Christian Slater, the governor’s spokesperson. Hobbs asked the health department to develop a plan to address it, and asked AHCCCS to prepare for a humanitarian response and create a list of providers suspected of fraudulently billing Medicaid.

    But if Arizona’s top leaders had made a response to the fraud a priority, key staff members within AHCCCS said the recommendations they provided AHCCCS’ new director were dismissed. Adams and another former staffer, who helped prepare AHCCCS’ financial records but asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said they each presented Heredia with financial reports that showed skyrocketing spending under the American Indian Health Program. (Adams resigned from AHCCCS in April 2023.)

    Heredia then briefly blocked another attempt by AHCCCS’s billing experts to cap reimbursement rates, this time at $158, records obtained by ProPublica and AZCIR show. Public responses to the proposed change, including from long-standing community health organization Native American Connections, said capping the existing rate would help curtail massive amounts of fraud and the exploitation of Native Americans.

    On April 17, 2023, Heredia emailed the CEO of the Arizona Council of Human Service Providers, the industry group where she had been a board member. The proposal was “completely being pulled off the table for the time being,” she said.

    “I apologize for the confusion and stress it caused,” she added in her email. “In the event that anything similar is rolled out, we will do so in collaboration with the Arizona Council and with other stakeholder input.”

    At the same time, records show, the human toll of the crisis was escalating. At least five people died in sober living homes in April 2023 from drug and alcohol use, medical examiner records show. And at the end of the month, AHCCCS and health department officials found a distressing scene at a former hotel where a treatment program operator was housing dozens of patients, including children. Armed guards patrolled the exits to keep people from leaving, the governor’s office said.

    In May, the cap on reimbursement rates went into effect, though it’s not clear what prompted AHCCCS to address vulnerabilities that staff had identified more than a year earlier.

    Within weeks, Heredia and the governor stood with tribal leaders and law enforcement officials to announce a sweeping investigation into fraudulent facilities. AHCCCS also created a hotline that victims displaced from shuttered programs could use to request temporary housing, transportation back to their tribal communities and treatment. More than 11,700 people called it over the next year and a half, state figures show.

    But many people still became homeless as facilities closed their doors with little notice or coordinated care for patients, according to advocates.

    “The state of Arizona owes our tribal nations an apology,” Mayes, the attorney general, said during the May 2023 press conference. In November 2024, her office announced a $6 million grant program for tribal nations affected by the sober living home fraud. A spokesperson said only tribes and nonprofits in Arizona can apply for the money.

    The Hustitos never received an apology. Nor have they received an acknowledgment of their loss — not from AHCCCS or the owners of the sober living homes where he stayed. Anders Hustito said he continues to grieve.

    “I’m still hurting,” he said.

    “We owe it to him to get justice for him,” Katherine Hustito said.

    Mariam Elba contributed research. Nicole Santa Cruz contributed reporting.

    This post was originally published on ProPublica.

  • Thousands Of Resident Physicians In Philadelphia Voted To Unionize

    Eight in 10 doctors-in-training in Philadelphia are now represented by unions, following a wave of labor organizing across major health systems in the region.

    Doctors at three Philadelphia health systems and Delaware’s largest health provider voted to join the Committee of Interns and Residents, a division of the Service Employees International Union.

    The move follows a national trend of physicians unionizing around the country, as doctors increasingly look for solutions to burnout in a field now dominated by large health system employers.

    The post Thousands Of Resident Physicians In Philadelphia Voted To Unionize appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Patients Are Dying Because Of Profit-Driven Political Decisions

    In 2025, campaign group EveryDoctor is stepping up its work to save the NHS from privatisation, and build a functioning, flourishing healthcare system for patients and staff alike.

    However, there’s work to do. The group wants to grow its following from thousands, to a vibrant patient and staff community of millions. It feels it will take nothing short of this to turn things around because:

    millions of people are currently being profoundly failed by politicians

    In short, the group aims to transform its campaign community into something more: a movement.

    Its ambitious goal comes amidst another spate of alarming news stories over the appalling state of things in the NHS.

    The post Patients Are Dying Because Of Profit-Driven Political Decisions appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Improved Medicare For All Can Heal This Sick Country

    It’s the beginning of the end for corporate control of health care. The tsunami of outrage against the health insurance industry in the wake of the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, can propel an urgent, unyielding demand for the removal of profit from healthcare and the enactment of a universal, national single payer system. That is, if the single payer, Medicare for All, national health service movement can summon the vision and audacity to rise to the occasion.

    The post Improved Medicare For All Can Heal This Sick Country appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Essentia Health Workers Hold Solidarity Picket On Day 38 Of Strike

    Duluth, MN – At 4 p.m. on a blustery January 15 in Duluth, workers from Essentia Health-Deer River pulled up in a bus in front of the Essentia Health-Duluth hospital and began a solidarity picket in front of the main entrance to the hospital.

    The Deer River Essentia workers are represented by the Service Employees International Union, Healthcare Minnesota and Iowa (SEIU HCMNIA). January 15 marked their 38th day of an open-ended strike at their hospital and nursing home.

    The healthcare workers are striking over pay, saying that cost of living has gone up and they need real raises to keep paying the bills.

    The post Essentia Health Workers Hold Solidarity Picket On Day 38 Of Strike appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Health Care Profiteers Encounter Protest At ‘Investors’ Gathering

    One of the wealthiest gangsters, JP Morgan Chase Bank, convened into the posh Westin St. Francis hotel a gathering of fellow “investors” involved in the organized looting known as the “Health care” industry.

    Sensing public anger inspired by the recent killing of a UnitedHealthcare executive, a heavy police presence surrounded the hotel and the adjoining streets.

    The largest health “insurer” in the country is UnitedHealthcare. Its 2023 profit was $22 billion. Estimates of what a single payer health care system to care for every man, woman and child in the country are about $20 billion per year.

    The post Health Care Profiteers Encounter Protest At ‘Investors’ Gathering appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The ‘Uber Model’ Comes For Nursing

    The “gig” model of labor popularized by Uber has found a new sector to upend: health care. On-demand nursing companies likeCareRev, Clipboard Health, ShiftKey, and ShiftMed promise understaffed hospitals more control and overworked nurses more flexibility. But this labor model and the companies that push it endanger workers and patients alike.

    In a recently published brief for the Roosevelt Institute, Groundwork Collaborative Fellow Katie J. Wells and Funda Ustek Spilda, senior lecturer at King’s College London, dig into the harms and pitfalls of what is being called “Uber for nursing.”

    The post The ‘Uber Model’ Comes For Nursing appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Nurses And Doctors Are On Strike At Eight Oregon Hospitals

    Declaring that understaffing had them “running on empty,” 5,000 nurses, doctors, midwives, and nurse practitioners walked off the job January 10 in an open-ended strike at Providence Health and Services, the dominant hospital chain in the Pacific Northwest.

    The strikers work at eight hospitals plus women’s health clinics across Oregon. They’re demanding proper staffing, affordable health insurance, and competitive pay that can attract and retain seasoned workers.

    “I’ve been with Providence for over 30 years, and I have seen what’s changed,” said medical-surgical nurse Kim Martin at Providence Portland Medical Center.

    The post Nurses And Doctors Are On Strike At Eight Oregon Hospitals appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The CDC, Palantir And The AI-Healthcare Revolution

    The Pentagon and Silicon Valley are in the midst of cultivating an even closer relationship as the Department of Defense (DoD) and Big Tech companies seek to jointly transform the American healthcare system into one that is “artificial intelligence (AI)-driven.” The alleged advantages of such a system, espoused by the Army itself, Big Tech and Pharma executives as well as intelligence officers, would be unleashed by the rapidly developing power of so-called “predictive medicine,” or “a branch of medicine that aims to identify patients at risk of developing a disease, thereby enabling either prevention or early treatment of that disease.”

    The post The CDC, Palantir And The AI-Healthcare Revolution appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • New York City Doctors Are Ready To Strike

    Nearly 1000 doctors in NYC Health and Hospitals (H+H) are ready to go on strike. They may work at public (H+H) hospitals, but their employers are corporate health systems, such as Mount Sinai, NYU, and PAGNY. The doctors — who are organized with the Doctors Council, an SEIU affiliate (DC-SEIU) — are denouncing chronic understaffing. They understand this problem to be the result of uncompetitive contracts, both in terms of salary and benefits. Since the announcement on January 2, Mayor Eric Adams interceded to ask for a 60-day “cooling-off” period, trying to avert the work stoppage, and negotiations are still underway.

    The post New York City Doctors Are Ready To Strike appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Tooth Decay Rose in Canadian Cities Without Fluoride. RFK Wants This for the US.

    It’s not uncommon for Canadian dentist Brandon Doucet to see patients who are in so much pain that they’ve tried to extract their own teeth. As a dental student, Doucet was inspired by Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign and realized that he needed to take action where he was, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In 2019, Doucet founded a group called the Coalition for Dental Care to advocate…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • I’m a Trans Teen in Texas — Politicians and Anti-Trans Bigots Cannot Erase Me

    As I write this, it has been about a week since my 17th birthday. It feels weird to me. Six years ago, I came out as transgender, and four years ago I thought my life was over. Back then, I never dreamed of making it this far, of reaching my dream — accessing hormone replacement therapy (HRT), finally feeling excited for my future and the person I’m going to be. Now I’m almost an adult…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Gaza Patients, Including Newborns, at “Grave Risk” as Israel Blocks Fuel

    Hospitals across the Gaza Strip are at imminent risk of shutdown or have already been forced to reduce operations as they run out of fuel due to Israel’s near-total blockade of fuel across the strip, officials and human rights groups have warned. Gaza health officials warned this week that all of the remaining hospitals in the besieged enclave no longer have any fuel reserves to operate…

    Source

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  • Profile in Persecution: Ali Husain Matrook Abdulla

    Ali Husain Matrook Abdulla was a 15-year-old minor and school student when Bahraini authorities arrested him on 26 August 2024 in Karranah while spending time with friends. The arrest was carried out without a warrant. During his detention, he endured torture, denial of family visits, denial of access to his lawyer, deprivation of his right to education, and medical neglect. He has been held at the Dry Dock Detention Center for five months without trial, as Bahraini authorities repeatedly delay and continue to postpone his hearings.

    On the evening of 26 August 2024, Ali was with his friends in the village of Karranah when plainclothes officers and officers from the Ministry of Interior (MOI) arrested him without presenting an arrest warrant. During the arrest, an officer slapped him on the face. The officers then transferred him to Budaiya Police Station before sending him for medical examinations. Unaware of Ali’s arrest, his parents attempted to contact him, but their calls went unanswered. They later learned of his detention from witnesses who saw him being apprehended and taken to Budaiya Police Station. When his family inquired at the station, officers at the police station denied he was being held there. In reality, Ali was not at the station at the time, as he had been sent for a medical examination, a detail the officers failed to disclose. Ten hours later, the station called to inform the family that Ali was there and requested they send him clothes and shoes. Ten minutes later, Ali called his family, informing them he was being transferred to Roundabout 17 Police Station and asked for the clothes to be sent there instead.

    On 27 August 2024, the day after Ali’s arrest, at approximately 8:30 A.M., Ali’s mother visited Budaiya Police Station to inquire about him and requested to see him, unaware that he had already been transferred for interrogation at Roundabout 17 Police Station. Officers informed her that he was charged with arson and possession of Molotov cocktails but stated that Ali was no longer at the station and had been transferred for interrogation without disclosing his destination.

     

    During interrogation at Roundabout 17 Police Station, officers slapped Ali in the face and subjected him to psychological torture to force a confession. One officer threatened him, saying, “If you don’t talk and confess, I’ll beat you with this stick or bring something else from outside.” Fearing further abuse, Ali falsely confessed. His lawyer was not allowed to be present during the interrogation. The following day, 28 August 2024, Ali was brought before the Public Prosecution Office (PPO). Although his lawyer was present, he was only allowed to exchange greetings with Ali and was not permitted to consult with him. Consequently, the Juvenile and Family Prosecution decided to detain him for one week pending investigation. Following this, Ali was transferred to the Dry Dock Detention Center.

    On 4 September 2024, Ali appeared before the Juvenile and Family Prosecution for the second time, where his detention was extended for another two weeks pending investigation, based on his coerced confessions obtained under threats and torture. This pattern of extending his detention every two weeks continued after each appearance before the Prosecution, relying on the same coerced confessions, until his referral to trial on 19 December 2024. During these sessions, Ali’s lawyer was consistently prohibited from attending. As of 6 January 2025, it was revealed that Ali faced charges in two separate arson cases. On 8 January 2025, he discovered a third arson charge against him, related to an arson incident in Karranah on 24 August 2024, which had been referred to the High Criminal Court.

    Ali was not brought before a judge within 24 hours of his arrest, does not have adequate time and facilities to prepare for trial, is unable to present or challenge evidence, and is denied access to his attorney. As a result, his mother serves as an intermediary, communicating with the lawyer and relaying the information to her son through phone calls. On 19 December 2024, after nearly four months of arbitrary pre-trial detention, Ali and several of his peers were referred to trial, with the first court session initially scheduled for 23 December 2024. However, the session was later postponed to 30 December 2024. He remains detained at Dry Dock Detention Center, awaiting trial, as his court sessions continue to be postponed. 

    Ali has been subjected to medical neglect while in detention. Before his arrest, he was receiving dental treatment at a private clinic, but his detention prevented him from completing the treatment. As a result, his front teeth remained exposed after nerve extraction and gum surgery, causing him frequent, severe pain. Initially, authorities denied him medical care and even refused to provide painkillers. After a complaint was filed with the Ombudsman, treatment resumed, with one tooth being treated and a promise to continue treatment on one tooth per week. However, this treatment was later discontinued, and his care was limited to pain relief medication. Ali experienced three consecutive fainting episodes due to severe pain. Additionally, comprehensive medical examinations revealed low blood pressure, but neither he nor his family were provided with detailed results.

    Ali, a first-year high school student, has been deprived of his education while in detention. The Ministry of Education refused to allow him to take exams or continue his studies. His mother was summoned to the ministry and presented with two options: either withdraw Ali from school or accept a certificate marked “Deprived” with a zero average. The Ministry of Education justified this by stating that Ali had not attended any school days due to his detention.

    Since his arrest, Ali’s family has been denied visits with him in detention. They submitted multiple complaints to both the Ombudsman and the National Institute for Human Rights (NIHR) regarding mistreatment, denial of medical care, and the deprivation of his right to education. However, most of these complaints have yielded no results.

    Ali’s warrantless arrest as a minor, torture, denial of family visits and lawyer access, deprivation of his right to education, medical neglect, and prolonged arbitrary pre-trial detention are clear violations of the Convention Against Torture (CAT), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), all of which Bahrain is a party to.

    Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) calls upon Bahraini authorities to fulfill their human rights obligations by immediately and unconditionally releasing Ali. It calls on the Bahraini government to investigate allegations of arbitrary arrest, torture, coerced confessions, denial of family visits and lawyer access, deprivation of the right to education, and medical neglect, and to hold the perpetrators accountable. ADHRB also demands compensation for the violations Ali has suffered in detention. At the very least, ADHRB advocates for a prompt, fair trial for Ali under the Bahraini Restorative Justice Law for Children, and in accordance with international legal standards, leading to his release. Furthermore, ADHRB calls on the Dry Dock Detention Center administration to provide Ali with immediate, appropriate medical care, including the completion of his dental treatment, holding it responsible for any further deterioration in his health. It also demands that the center allow Ali to resume his education and permit family visits without delay.

    The post Profile in Persecution: Ali Husain Matrook Abdulla appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

  • Annual ‘Winners’ For Most Egregious US Healthcare Profiteering Announced

    The 2024 “winners” of the annual Shkreli awards, given each year to perpetrators of the most egregious examples of profiteering and dysfunction within the healthcare industry, have been released from the Lown Institute, an independent healthcare thinktank.

    The recipients are chosen by a panel made up of health policy experts, clinicians, journalists and advocates. The awards are named after Martin Shkreli, the infamous “pharma bro” who rose to international notoriety after increasing the price of lifesaving anti-parasitic drug Daraprim 50-fold.

    The post Annual ‘Winners’ For Most Egregious US Healthcare Profiteering Announced appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Philadelphia’s Doctors-In-Training Are Unionizing By The Thousands

    I think pretty universally in medical training, there’s an under-appreciation and under-compensation of medical residents. A lot of it comes down to pay, because that’s so fundamental, but other benefits, like time off and parental leave, are certainly a major concern for people, and moonlighting and overtime and things like that generally are under-compensated as well. At my hospital specifically, there are concerns about access to appropriate equipment and basic medical supplies. So, a lot of this becomes very much like logistical issues.

    The post Philadelphia’s Doctors-In-Training Are Unionizing By The Thousands appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Gaza Health Ministry Warns Of ‘Real Disaster Sweeping Hospitals’

    The Health Ministry in Gaza warned on 7 January that the medical sector in the strip is facing a disaster due to crippling shortages of essential supplies and humanitarian aid.

    The ministry released a statement warning “of a real disaster that is sweeping hospitals, oxygen stations, medicine refrigerators, and nurseries in all health facilities remaining in operation in the Gaza Strip.”

    “There is no fuel stock in hospitals due to the policy of dripping in fuel that the occupation has been following in bringing in since the beginning of the war on Gaza.

    The post Gaza Health Ministry Warns Of ‘Real Disaster Sweeping Hospitals’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • ‘Delay, Deny, Defend’ Author: Americans’ Rage At Insurers

    My book “Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It” was thrust into the spotlight recently, after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed in what authorities say was a targeted attack outside the company’s annual investors conference. Investigators at the scene found bullet casings inscribed with the words “delay,” “deny” and “depose.”

    The unsettling echo of the book’s title struck me and many others.

    That killing – and the torrent of online outrage that followed – put Americans’ unhappiness with health insurers at the front of the national conversation.

    The post ‘Delay, Deny, Defend’ Author: Americans’ Rage At Insurers appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • New Federal Rule Will Erase All Americans’ Medical Debt From Credit Reports

    Medical debt will be removed from consumer credit reports for all Americans under a final rule announced Tuesday by Vice President Kamala Harris. The rule will affect more than 15 million Americans, raising their credit scores by an estimated average of 20 points. No Americans will have medical debt listed on their credit report — down from approximately 46 million Americans who had this…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Destruction Of Gaza’s Healthcare Is A Blueprint For Future Wars

    “Kamal Adwan Hospital is no more,” stated Dr. Mustafa Barghouti during a webinar organized by the People’s Health Movement (PHM) on December 28, 2024. As he spoke, reports of the latest Israeli attacks on the hospital were still emerging. These included the near-total destruction of its laboratory, storage, surgical units, and other critical facilities, alongside the arbitrary detention of its director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya.

    The devastating outcome was all too predictable, given Israel’s systematic assaults on Gaza’s healthcare system during the ongoing genocide.

    The post Destruction Of Gaza’s Healthcare Is A Blueprint For Future Wars appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Indians in Flood-Prone Areas Are on Front Lines of Growing Mental Health Crisis

    Whenever farmer Namdev Kamble visits a doctor, he remembers the hundreds of trees that once surrounded him. “We live in the same area today, but everything around us has changed completely,” he said in a voice heavy with nostalgia and loss. On his way to his farmland in Shirdhon village of India’s Maharashtra state, Kamble would see the giant tamarind, babul, neem, and several other types of…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Psychiatry’s Latest Insane Magic-Bullet Treatment For Depression

    Clinics offering ketamine infusions and injections for “treatment-resistant depression” are today claiming 24-48 hours remission, and ketamine is also being marketed for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, and anxiety disorder.

    “Between 500 and 750 ketamine clinics have cropped up across the United States,” NPR reported early in 2024 (“The Ketamine Economy: New Mental Health Clinics are a ‘Wild West’ with Few Rules”). This may be an underestimation, as Psychiatric News reported later in 2024, “More than 1,500 intravenous (IV) infusion clinics have proliferated nationwide.”

    The post Psychiatry’s Latest Insane Magic-Bullet Treatment For Depression appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Pirate Care As A Revolutionary Act

    Providing care to people in need is usually seen as supremely humane and ethical. But look more closely and you’ll find that “care” is often a vehicle for self-serving social and political control. It’s often considered acceptable to withhold care from people who don’t have the “right” citizenship, skin color, cultural background, or gender identity, or who don’t have money to buy the care they need. 

    For an illuminating deep dive on the politics of care, check out a new book, Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity (Pluto Press). I interviewed two of the co-authors.

    The post Pirate Care As A Revolutionary Act appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Judges Said These Doctors Wrongly Denied Coverage. Insurers Still Employ Them.

    In a New Orleans courtroom one afternoon this April, three federal appeals court judges questioned a lawyer for the country’s largest health insurance company. They wanted to know why United Healthcare had denied coverage for a 15-year-old girl named Emily Dwyer, whose anorexia had taken such a toll on her body that she had arrived at a residential treatment facility wearing her 8-year-old…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • America’s Health Insurance Grinches

    In the past two weeks, one thing has become crystal clear in America: the public outrage after the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson exposed a seething fury over the health insurance racket. No amount of media finger-wagging at public perversity or partisan attempts to frame Luigi Mangione’s act as a statement from the left or right can hide the reality: the people, from all sides, are livid about the healthcare system—and with good reason.

    In the 21st century, Americans have expressed their view that healthcare is deteriorating, not advancing.

    The post America’s Health Insurance Grinches appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Nearly 7 in 10 Americans Say Insurance Industry Is to Blame in UHC CEO Killing

    In the wake of the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in early December, some political observers were taken aback by the public response to the event, which included morbid humor and expressions of “Schadenfreude,” in the words of one woman who had battled an insurance company to secure treatment for her mother’s cancer. But according to a new poll released by NORC at the…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Cuban Healthcare System And Its Lessons For The US

    I was in Cuba (again) during the first week of December. I traveled with a delegation of members of the National Single Payer organization, which is working to achieve a national healthcare system in the US that would fully cover everyone under a single, comprehensive, government-funded program. We visited a variety of healthcare institutions in the cities of Havana and Matanzas, the capital of the province of the same name.

    One of the most memorable interactions took place at the University of Medical Sciences in Matanzas. After receiving a presentation about the organization and curriculum by one of the leaders of the institution, I asked the assembled academic and clinical professors how many of them had participated in international medical missions.

    The post The Cuban Healthcare System And Its Lessons For The US appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • I Got Cancer at 35. The Health Insurance System Delayed My Treatment for Months.

    My gastroenterologist gulped as he read the results of my colonoscopy. The images confirmed what I had already been told: A malignant tumor was blocking nearly the entire pathway of my colon. I could sense his guilt. After all, he had initially placed me on a two-month waiting list for the procedure — on top of the three months it had taken just to get an appointment with his office.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Healing Justice: A Black Panther legacy

    Popular representations of the Black Panthers often focus on their armed self-defense activities, but medical services and health justice were a tremendous part of the party’s work. This legacy continues today as Black activists work to transform the medical industrial complex and its relationship to the prison system. Erica Woodland (he/him), co-author of Healing Justice Lineages, joins Rattling the Bars to discuss this history, his current activism, and the role of The Real News’s own beloved Eddie Conway in influencing his path.

    Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

    Transcript

    Mansa Musa:  Marshall Eddie Conway, former Black Panther and political prisoner, served approximately 44 years in captivity before he was released. While in prison, he and his wife, Dominque Conway, created a series of programs designed to raise prisoners’ consciousness. One program was Friend of a Friend. Friend of a Friend was a mentor program that taught prisoners critical thinking skills.

    Throughout his imprisonment, Eddie Conway advocated for the liberation of all political prisoners and the abolishment of the prison-industrial complex. After his release in 2014, Eddie joined The Real News Network and started this very program, Rattling the Bars.

    Recently I interviewed Baltimore native Erica Woodland, one of the many people influenced by Eddie Conway and Dominque Conway.

    Welcome to Rattling the Bars, Erica.

    Erica Woodland:  Thank you for having me, Mansa. It’s good to see you.

    Mansa Musa:  All right, tell our audience a little bit about yourself and one of your latest projects.

    Erica Woodland:  Yeah, for sure. So I’m born, bred, and raised in Baltimore, East Baltimore, to be specific. And for the past 20 years, it’s been really an honor to be part of abolition work and liberatory harm reduction work, and work that’s really thinking about how to disrupt every single aspect of the way the criminal justice system disappears our communities.

    And so I had the great pleasure of meeting Eddie Conway 20 years ago, and when we met, he immediately decided that I was going to be part [Musa laughs] of his liberation struggle — And you know Eddie, you can’t really tell him no. And also through organizing on behalf of his liberation and liberation of all political prisoners and being mentored by him and Dominque Conway, it really, as a young person, shaped the work that I’m doing now, which is primarily focused on Healing Justice.

    And Healing Justice is a political and spiritual framework that helps to remind our people that, in addition to us liberating our minds and revolutionizing our consciousness, we have to also make sure that we’re taking care of people. So feeding people, making sure people have access to healthcare, making sure people have access to spaces for healing and collective grief.

    And a lot of this work might sound familiar because it’s the work that the Black Panther Party was up to. But unfortunately in our movements now, a lot of that care and safety work has been forgotten, in part because the state has been extremely strategic and successful, in many ways, of co-opting our movements and then criminalizing our traditions.

    So the project that I am spending a lot of my time with today is called Healing Justice Lineages. And so, it started off as an anthology, and I was able to contribute to this with my dear comrade Kara Page, who is one of the co-architects of this framework. But Healing Justice Lineages is an opportunity to tell the true lineage of this framework, which is actually having us think about what are the ways that historical and generational trauma are affecting our minds, our bodies, our spirits, our organizations, our revolutionary groups, and our ability to actually build power to get free, right?

    Mansa Musa:  Right.

    Erica Woodland:  So when you have communities that are highly traumatized, cut off from basic human needs, they’ve stolen our traditions — White people are selling our traditions back to us.

    Mansa Musa:  Right.

    Erica Woodland:  — And they’ve demonized our traditions. You have communities that are more easily surveilled and controlled and disappear.

    And so the project has tried to map a lot of different voices and trying to bring up examples like, here are people who are doing liberation work, but also thinking about how do we feed people? How do we love up on people when they’ve experienced grief, loss, and violence?

    But that project has led to a lot of other aspects, including a listening and cultural memory tour that we did in 2023. We went to seven cities across the country to actually lift up local work around healing justice and collective care and safety. And then we also did strategy sessions with organizers and practitioners in particular to say, what’s possible when you have health healing practitioners and organizers at the same table before we turn up on the state?

    Mansa Musa:  Right, right, right. And that’s a good observation, because me and Dominque talked about this oftentimes, about, as revolutionaries, we find ourselves in a space that we human, we made a decision to fight for our liberation, but in that, oftentimes, a lot of our emotions get wrapped up in that. And we look recognized that in the Black Panther Party — And our anniversary just passed — We recognized that, during that period, and which is a good observation on your part about the healing aspect of, is during that period they ain’t have no therapy. They ain’t have no, oh, this is trauma. They ain’t have no, oh, yeah, well, you an alcoholic, and it’s a result of the police wanting to kill you, or the police been locked you up seven times, and you been locked up, in the seven times you done spent a total of five years in and out of county jail. You ain’t have that then.

    Now that particular aspect of the contradiction didn’t subsided, where the antagonism don’t exist because the formation is not in the same space. What do we do now? What do we do? But more importantly, the lessons learned and how do we pass it on? I think this is what you are telling us right now. That, OK, we need to be in this space right now because we ultimately going to have to turn it up.

    Erica Woodland:  Exactly.

    Mansa Musa:  And when we do turn it up, we want to be in a space where we don’t find ourselves so burned out that we become suicidal, even if it be in the form of substance use, it be in the form of spousal abuse, all the things that we oppose, if we don’t take and look at our mental health as it relates to our struggle. Talk about that.

    Erica Woodland:  Yeah. No, this is really important, and I also want to just name that I’m a therapist, but mostly my work is organizing therapists to understand their role as politicized. Because for me, the prison-industrial complex is actually deeply connected to the medical-industrial complex. And we saw that very clearly with Eddie’s experience at the end of his life. That you have social workers like me who are in positions where we’re actually facilitating the dissolution of families, where we are facilitating people experiencing psychiatric detention and psych hospitals.

    And so, one of the things I want to bring attention to is I was able to interview Eddie for the book. And Eddie’s interview is a lot of people’s favorite, because what we know is that Eddie was willing to talk about things that a lot of other folks weren’t willing to talk about.

    Mansa Musa:  Right, right.

    Erica Woodland:  And so in this conversation… I’ve been talking to Eddie about trauma, probably our whole relationship, even if I didn’t use that language, because I want to understand what made it possible for him to survive those conditions and hold onto his humanity, when many, many people are out here and they have survived much less and they don’t have that same connection to their humanity.

    So I’m always thinking about, where are the ways that we’re already knowing how to heal without an external person or professional? And what are the consequences of us not taking that work seriously? So therapy is one aspect, but we have traditions in Black community, the ways that we come together when we experience a loss, the way that we pour a little bit out for the homie that we lost to violence. That these are all things that are happening. But if we don’t understand trauma, then the state can exploit that.

    And so in the interview, which is the chapter’s title, “Don’t Give Up and Don’t Make the Same Mistakes”, because one of the things I really appreciated about my relationship with Eddie is that he was very generous with his wisdom. He’s very generous about, here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t know, and here’s the things we did not think about because we didn’t have the language, we didn’t have the tools.

    And the reality is when COINTELPRO came on the scene, it hadn’t existed before. It’s not like the Panthers had the knowledge, they didn’t have the playbook. They were writing the playbook down.

    So one of the things that I’m committed to is documenting and preserving our political and spiritual traditions. Because disconnection from those traditions, that’s a tool of genocide. That’s essentially how the state continues to dominate and control our minds, first and foremost, and our radical imagination.

    So that interview we got to talk about… You know, Eddie didn’t necessarily call his work healing justice, but I’m like, I wouldn’t even be talking about healing justice if it wasn’t for the Black Panther Party and their commitment to making sure our people were well. To making sure that we preserved our dignity and wholeness, and to say, there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s something wrong with these conditions, and we actually have to build power to change the conditions. We don’t heal just to heal. That’s cute, but I don’t want to heal, I don’t want to learn how to cope with this, I want to actually figure out how we change this, because it’s unacceptable.

    Mansa Musa:  And you know what I was thinking about what you were saying when you were saying how you title the chapter of Eddie and “Don’t Give Up”. Because me and him did a lot of time together, we was incarcerated together. And he was my mentor. And I used to always joke about him having gray hairs, and I would say 80% of them gray hairs in his head I put it in there myself, from him dealing with me.

    But in terms of how you articulate his outlook, that’s just how it was. I recall when I hadn’t seen him for a while, we wound up in an institution together, now JCI, and he said, man, let’s go up to the library and talk. So we made a schedule, we would go to the library once a week and talk. And I didn’t think too much of it at the time. I hadn’t seen you in a while, so we just catching up. But as we talking, we’re talking about events. We’re talking about stuff that’s going on around the world. We’re talking about what I’ve been doing. We’re talking about what he’s doing.

    And then it got to a point where he said, we was getting ready to bring friends of the friends in. It got to a point where he said like, yeah, well, we don’t have to come to the library no more, and we getting ready to do this with this group. And the reason why I had you come up here is because I wanted to see where your thinking was at. Because I didn’t come in contact with a lot of people in the system that started out a certain way, but as time went on, their thinking didn’t evolve. They regressed, and they abandoned any politics, they abandoned any instinct to survive, they just allowed themselves mentally to accept where they was at.

    And he say, and he was telling me, he said, well, that ain’t you. And I was like, man, what you think? You the one that educated me. So I’m a product of this education in terms of, like you said, we didn’t say trauma, we didn’t say healing. If something went on. This is what we did.

    And I think that, and I want you to speak on this, how you unpack that within the community. Because traditionally we always done that. And traditionally we don’t call it, we don’t give it no clinical definition. This is what we did. This is our nature, to be there for each other. What happened?

    Erica Woodland:  A lot of things happened [Musa laughs]. So this is a great way to bring in the medical-industrial complex, which includes, obviously, hospitals, health clinics, doctors, nurses. But it’s a broader system that includes pharmaceutical companies. And that’s basically a for-profit system that is trying to surveil, control us, and preserve the life of certain people, primarily white men of wealth, and to exterminate or extract labor from the rest of us.

    So part of what happened is, you take people, even if you just think about the attempted genocide against Indigenous people on this land. They literally cut you off. They put you in a residential boarding school, cut you off from your language, cut you off… I mean, this happened to Black Americans, too. But I want to just make that connection because I think we forget. And all of these things we innately know how to do, they turn you against them. They tell you that is uncivilized. That’s not the way to do it.

    Then you bring in somebody who’s deemed professional. So, I have what one of my comrades called colonial credentials. So I’m a licensed clinical social worker. I didn’t get that license to be an arm of the state, I got that to be able to disrupt and understand how the state is working through things like social work and therapy and the mental health system. So I’m a professional, so I get told I’m legitimate. You’re allowed to work with survivors, you’re allowed to do all this healing work.

    Meanwhile, this work is happening not paid. People aren’t getting support in community all the time because the vast majority of marginalized people’s mental health support comes from their friends, it comes from their family members, comes from their homies. Most people don’t have access to therapy. And those therapeutic interventions weren’t designed for us. They were designed to control us.

    So one of the things that I do in my work in my organization is we really disrupt that. So we organize mental health practitioners — And that includes people like me who are licensed, but it includes all the other people who are attending to the emotional and spiritual well-being, specifically in my work of queer and trans people of color. So we don’t prioritize my training over the actual lived experience, but you’re getting on-the-job training. Actually, nobody trains you at all. You’re self-taught. You’re taught by community.

    But those relationships is what the state has tried to disrupt. So we wouldn’t need a whole… Nothing’s wrong with therapy. I think therapy is actually a great tool, but it’s not a cure-all. But we wouldn’t actually need therapists in the same way if our siblings and our family members who were behind these walls were home, if we had food, if the air we were breathing was not toxic. If we actually restored our ability to be in right relationship with the land and every other being that we have to be on this planet with, we wouldn’t have this kind of trauma.

    It doesn’t mean we wouldn’t suffer. But what we’re seeing at this point, at this scale, especially with the genocides happening across the globe, is this is unnecessary, manufactured suffering. And if we don’t understand how it’s affecting not just the way we treat each other, but how are you going to strategize? How are you going to make a strategy that’s actually going to work when you are highly traumatized? And the ways that you’re attempting to heal, the state is saying, oh, you have a substance abuse problem? You’re getting locked up. Oh, you are hallucinating, for instance. We’re going to lock you up in a psychiatric facility and potentially give you forced treatment — Not potentially, give you forced treatment that then takes away your rights the same way that happens when you’re incarcerated.

    So it’s a setup and it’s a scam, but I think there’s a growing conversation in the communities that I’m in of Black and Brown people who are like, we are going to figure out how these systems work, to tear them down, and to abolish them. And we’re also going to create alternatives because that’s what we need.

    So that story you just told about Eddie sitting with you weekly, I was like, that was therapy.

    Mansa Musa:  Exactly.

    Erica Woodland:  That was you having human to human connection. That was also a vetting. I keep that. I’m like, we need to bring vetting back. I just had a conversation about that earlier. I’m like, we just out here trusting people that have not demonstrated that they’re trustworthy with the kind of liberation work that we’re talking about.

    Mansa Musa:  And that’s a good segue to talk about Eddie, but I wanted to unpack that a little bit more. Because right now you have trauma, and they starting to monetize trauma, saying trauma, resilience, and define it, [inaudible] and everybody and their mother coming around with an approach. But at the same token, it’s the same old story and the same old song. It’s just a different band playing it.

    But speaking of Eddie, so let’s talk about the campaign to exonerate Eddie. And for the benefit of our viewers, this is one of the posters that was put out by some college students in conjunction with myself, Erica, and Dominque comrade, and some other comrade that’s advocating for Eddie to be exonerated. Speak on why do you think that Eddie’s been transitioned? Why is it important that, in your mind, or that our audience should want to know, that we should try to have Eddie exonerated? He’s gone, he was out, he lived his life, and he lived his life to his fullest, or what was left of it.

    Erica Woodland:  Right. This is a really good question and I think it ties into a lot of the archival work that I’ve been a part of over the past three years, that we have to hold on to the truth of Eddie’s life, Eddie’s work, and what the state did to Eddie. There has been no redress. Eddie’s name has not been cleared, and Eddie was innocent.

    So one of the things that, it happens with a lot of revolutionaries, we’ve seen it many times, is the sanitization of their actual work. And there’s a way that we all then kind of forget. You could actually make this sound like some kind of happy story in the end. Oh look, this person, wrongfully convicted. Well, they got out [Musa laughs] in the end of their life, they were able to do this, that and the third. No, let’s go back to the fact that this person literally did almost 44 years for their political work, and they were targeted by the state. And that is happening now.

    Mansa Musa:  Exactly.

    Erica Woodland:  So to me, part of the campaign is about telling the truth. That is always, to me, a healing act. To tell the truth of what actually happened, to move with the knowing that this was a wrongdoing. And if we do not prioritize the exoneration of Eddie and all political prisoners, then when this… Political prisoners are being manufactured right now.

    Mansa Musa:  That’s right.

    Erica Woodland:  They’re being manufactured right now.

    Mansa Musa:  That’s right.

    Erica Woodland:  Young people are political prisoners right now. So this is part of a larger struggle to combat state repression. And I think spiritually it’s also really important to preserve Eddie’s legacy by telling the truth. And then it’s also really important to think about how that supports our generational healing, our healing as a community. Somebody who did nothing but sacrifice on our behalf, and we’re going to let the state continue to lie? We’re going to let the state continue to try to manipulate the story of what really happened.

    Mansa Musa:  When me and Dominque was having this conversation and we decided like, well, this is something that we want to look at. And we start organizing, got some of the supporters together and start talking about it. Everybody had the same perspective, just like you said, it is about we want to be able to say, like you say, tell the truth. And it’s important that we tell the truth about what happened to Geronimo Pratt, what happened to Fred Hampton, what happened to Malcolm. That because of their political views and their aspiration to be free, that they was targeted and set up and, in most cases, assassinated or died a death of a thousand cuts.

    And they did the same thing with Eddie. And only for no reason other than the fact that he believed in his right to self-determination. He believed that he had a right to be treated as a human being. He had a right to our people being free.

    Talk about where we at in terms of some of the things that we’re doing with the campaign, for the benefit of our viewers and listeners.

    Erica Woodland:  Yeah, absolutely. So we’re doing a couple of things. We currently have a petition and a website, which is at marshalleddieconway.com where you can get information about Eddie’s case and why exoneration is so important. But you can also sign the petition so that we can actually put some pressure on Gov. Wes Moore to move forward with this exoneration.

    Part of what we’re also doing with the website and with some filmmakers is to help to document more of Eddie’s story, in particular how we build a case for exoneration and why that’s so important, I think, to Baltimore City in particular. The history, the legacy, the revolutionary lineage here, I only know about that because of Eddie. And so this is part of a larger effort to get Eddie’s story out so we can have redress and justice in this situation, as much justice as you can have with how much harm and violence the state has engaged in towards Eddie. But this campaign is really, really important.

    And so, I know we’re also doing some things coming up in 2025 to help honor Eddie’s legacy around his birthday in April. So there’ll be more information about that. I’m sure you’ll get the word out, Mansa.

    Mansa Musa:  Yeah, most definitely.

    Erica Woodland:  But right now we need people to educate themselves and to sign the petition and get the word out.

    Mansa Musa:  And we was real strategic in making sure that all this information that’s coming out about Eddie is not being repackaged for the benefit of changing the narrative or minimizing his contribution. We was real mindful to make sure that the social media that have any representation of Eddie is authorized by us. To ensure that the truth — Because it’s all about the truth.

    And in this case, it might sound cliché, but they say the truth will set you free. What we talking about, the freedom of the truth setting Eddie free in terms of him being recognized for the person that he was and the impact that he had on people that exists today. Whenever anybody come in contact with Eddie, even to this day, they make the observation that the impact that he had on them, how he was able to tap into their thinking, how he was able to get them to maximize on their potential.

    And this is something that we want to make sure that people understand. That had he not been set up, had charges [not been] fabricated against him, no telling what he would have done. And he done a lot while he was incarcerated, while he was on the plantation. But no telling what he would’ve done.

    And I want to go back to your point. Political prisoners, young people right now are being manufactured to be political prisoners. And as we move forward in this country, it is going to come a time where they going to be like 1984. Like your thoughts, literally going to be the law saying, if you think this way and then you going to be charged with being a terrorist or whatever.

    But as we close out, Erica, tell people how they can get the book and where we at in terms of the exoneration.

    Erica Woodland:  Absolutely. So again, if you want more information about the exoneration campaign, that’s at marshalleddieconway.com. And then if you want any information about the Healing Justice Lineages project, we’re at healingjusticelineages.com. And we have a digital archive that we’re building out there so you can hear more voices about the work.

    Mansa Musa:  All right, and you got the last word on this subject matter. What you want to tell our viewers and our audience as you rattle the bars?

    Erica Woodland:  I appreciate the last word. I neglected to say, the work that we’re doing right now around Eddie’s legacy is also about getting ahead of and interrupting co-optation. And there’s a lot of co-optation that happens here in Baltimore City. It happens everywhere. But there’s a particular way that people like to manipulate the story of revolutionaries to actually fuel work that is deeply harmful to Black people. And so, I just wanted to end on that. That we actually need to be very clear about we’re protecting Eddie’s work and Eddie’s lineage because it deserves that much. And co-optation is a tool of the state. And even if our own people are doing it, it’s unacceptable.

    Mansa Musa:  There you have it. The Real News round about. Erica, you rattled the bars today. And I’m reminded of what you just say. Dominque reminds us that she owns… She don’t own Eddie, but she’s not going to let nobody co-opt the narrative or taking change who he was. And this is something important that we must always be mindful of, that we should never let people continue to define us, tell us who we are, what we are, and what we’re doing, and then give us some money to accept that what you just said about me is acceptable because I’m getting paid. No. Our legacy, our image, our heritage is not for sale.

    There you have it. And we ask you to continue to support The Real News and Rattling the Bars. It’s only on Real News and Rattling the Bars that you get this kind of information. That we have a professional therapist. We don’t have a professional clinical therapist that’s certified by the state and recognize their state credential. We got somebody certified by the people and recognize their people credentials, which is way more important than any credentials that they can get, even though they do have the documentation that the state say they should have. But in terms of their application and practice, it’s all about the people.

    Thank you, Erica. Continue to rattle the bars, and we ask you to continue to support The Real News and Rattling the Bars. Because guess what? We really are the news.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

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