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American Healthcare Is All About Money for Nothing, Nothing for Free |
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Tuesday, 04 December 2018 09:26 |
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Watson writes: "There are a lot of things that make healthcare outcomes incredibly unequal in America."
A healthcare rally. (photo: Health Care for All)
American Healthcare Is All About Money for Nothing, Nothing for Free
By Libby Watson, Splinter
04 December 18
 n the U.S., healthcare is very expensive. There’s a bevy of statistics to prove this—we spend $3.5 trillion a year or more than $10,000 per person, which is twice as much as other countries, for example—but you already knew that. You know how expensive drugs are, and how expensive premiums are, and how big deductibles are—if not for you, then for someone you know. You’ve heard about people trying to raise money for their cancer or surgery or insulin on GoFundMe and how their prayers often go unanswered.
But the crucial point in all this is just how little all that spending buys. For people who oppose single-payer, the implicit or explicit argument against is that American healthcare is that it’s “the best in the world,” because it has a lot of fancy machines, advanced research, and doctors at the top of their field (who charge accordingly). It has the Mayo Clinic! For the richest, those who can pick their doctors and fly wherever, that’s surely true. For the rest of America, it’s like if you spent $500 on a sock from H&M.
A post at Axios today underscores this: In one key aspect—hospital quality—American healthcare fucking sucks. Axios quotes Leah Binder, the CEO of the Leapfrog Group, which creates a hospital safety guide, as saying the U.S. is “unnecessarily killing thousands of people every year because hospital quality is not what it should be.” Woo! We’re number one, baby!
The site also pointed to recent specific examples of hospital failures: A Florida hospital dedicated to treating children with heart defects saw its mortality rate triple between 2015 and 2017, with nearly one in 10 patients dying. And an investigation by WebMD and Georgia Health News found that a third of hospitals in the U.S. have violated standards of emergency care set by the federal government.
Even the hospital where Rep. Steve Scalise was taken after being shot last year scored a D in Leapfrog’s ratings, for quite shocking violations (emphasis added):
Because Washington Hospital Center accepts Medicare, however, CMS has their data on issues known as “never events” because they are so serious and preventable they should never occur. On that, which includes “dangerous objects” such as surgical equipment left inside patients, Washington Hospital Center scored well below average for nearly all measures.
Last year, a Politico story about the Cleveland Clinic—a tax-exempt non-profit hospital—highlighted just how unequal access to America’s supposedly world-leading hospitals is. The hospital’s campus is “a world apart, evoking an upscale resort or an airport’s international terminal,” with farmers markets and a 24-hour Au Bon Pain. In the neighborhood next door, “infant mortality is almost three times the national average,” and over “one-third of residents in the census tract around the Clinic have diabetes, the worst rate in the city.”
There are a lot of things that make healthcare outcomes incredibly unequal in America, not least wealth and race. These are things that would not necessarily be totally fixed by single-payer, although they could be significantly improved, depending on how you structured the program. But one thing that makes healthcare spending so utterly insane is the integration at every level of profit (and, similarly, individual greed: Many hospital CEOs make millions, and doctors are vastly overpaid on average). Health insurance companies exist to make the biggest profit possible. Drug companies, too. Pharmacy benefit managers, a useless class of middlemen who make money by hiking the prices charged to your pharmacy, gotta get their money. Hospitals, even non-profits, vastly overcharge insurance companies.
I don’t really want the U.S. to spend less on healthcare. I do want us to spend the money better. Spending money on healthcare is a good thing to do, because it keeps people alive, and I seek to defeat Death and his armies. I’d just like it if, instead of spending that money on lining the pockets of health insurance and drug companies, we could instead spend that on, for example, allocating resources to struggling small and rural hospitals, or mental health services. Generally, I’d like it if we could spend less healthcare money on “CEO needs a new helicopter” and more money on “people not dying.” A small ask, I think.
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When MAGA Fantasy Meets Rust Belt Reality |
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Monday, 03 December 2018 15:05 |
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Krugman writes: "Trump can't run America by yelling at people. Who knew?"
Economist Paul Krugman. (photo: Getty Images)
When MAGA Fantasy Meets Rust Belt Reality
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
03 December 18
Trump can’t run America by yelling at people. Who knew?
 et’s face it: Make America Great Again was a brilliant political slogan. Why? Because it could mean different things to different people.
For many supporters of Donald Trump, MAGA was basically a promise to return to the good old days of raw racism and sexism. And Trump is delivering on that promise.
But for at least some Trump voters, it was a promise to restore the kind of economy we had 40 or 50 years ago — an economy that still offered lots of manly jobs in manufacturing and mining. Unfortunately for those who trusted Mr. Art of the Deal, Trump never had any idea how to deliver on that promise. And even if he had a clue about policymaking, he couldn’t have changed the long-term trajectory of our economy, which is moving steadily away from making physical stuff and toward providing services.
READ MORE
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Refusing to Hide: Migrants Find Power in Caravans |
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Monday, 03 December 2018 15:02 |
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Pérez writes: "No longer willing to collude in their oppression, Central Americans are coming to the U.S. in the open and en masse."
Members of the caravan are being met with growing resistance in Tijuana, where that city's mayor has declared a humanitarian crisis. Conditions escalated on November 25 when U.S. authorities closed the busiest port of entry there and fired tear gas on refugees and migrants who had rushed the fencing between the two countries. (photo: Rob Wilson)
Refusing to Hide: Migrants Find Power in Caravans
By Ana Cecilia Pérez, YES! Magazine
03 December 18
No longer willing to collude in their oppression, Central Americans are coming to the U.S. in the open and en masse.
 ost of the people arriving at the U.S. border as part of a bold exodus are historically excluded Central Americans who are revolutionizing the way people migrate south to north.
These caravans of thousands mark a dramatic shift for poor and marginalized people, who for decades have made this journey alone, or in family groups—begging and borrowing the small fortunes they pay smugglers to guide them.
Traveling en masse ensures they will not be ignored.
Clearly, it’s not without peril. Members of the caravan are being met with growing resistance in Tijuana, where that city’s mayor has declared a humanitarian crisis. Conditions escalated on Sunday when U.S. authorities closed the busiest port of entry there and fired tear gas on refugees and migrants who had rushed the fencing between the two countries.
Each year, untold numbers of these refugees and asylum seekers die in the desert before reaching the U.S., where they join the ranks of millions of undocumented immigrants helping to fuel the U.S. economy, toiling in agricultural fields in California or back of the house in New York City restaurants.
I know this firsthand because my own family was among them.
More than 40 years ago, my mother, brother, and I traveled from El Salvador and across three countries to reach the U.S.—much like the thousands of migrants and refugees who have been arriving in Tijuana.
Our family came to the U.S. to escape certain death at the hands of the Salvadoran military that was being funded by the U.S. to wage a war against the poor in El Salvador. The war left 75,000 people dead in a country the size of Massachusetts. Our family had left everything we owned and had borrowed money from family and friends to make the journey. Along the way, we were robbed and harassed, and ultimately jailed in the Sonora desert until my mother paid the Mexican military a large mordida, a bribe.
We paid a smuggler, a coyote, thousands of dollars to bring us across the U.S.-Mexico border. We risked our lives. In addition to the countless mass graves the Mexican government discovers along routes going north, hundreds of Guatemalan, Salvadoran, and Honduran women and children can be found in brothels throughout Mexico—many of them human trafficking victims who had begun the journey in much the same way my own family had.
Many people ask: Why do we do this? Why do we risk this unfathomable journey, potential attacks by drug and human trafficking rings, harassment by the Mexican government, possible rejection at the U.S. border, and separation from our children?
And now in this new fashion?
The grim statistics about the economic hardships Hondurans or Salvadorans continue to face in their country no longer move people to action, nor does pointing out the history of U.S. involvement in the region. People have been hardened to the stories of atrocities by drug gangs against the innocent or the political instabilities that have uprooted countless lives.
By coming to the U.S. in such large numbers, migrants are loudly demanding to be seen and to have their legal rights to seek political asylum respected, not as individuals but as a class of disposed people.
Black Indigenous people suffer from discrimination and exclusion because many countries in the region do not even legally recognize their existence. Yet they, along with other Indigenous people and peasants of the region, are the ones most affected by poverty. These are the people who migrate out of desperation because they lack the means to provide for their families.
What is most meaningful about this new movement is that the marginalized have determined they will no longer collude in their own oppression by hiding their journeys.
Every step is a collective action to expose the failures of governments throughout the region. Their courageous, albeit dangerous, journey exposes the impact of U.S imperialism in countries where our government is directly implicated in multiple coups. They elucidate for us the trade policies that are grounded in economies of extraction, at the expense of local economies—all for the benefit of U.S. corporations.
Images of parents carrying toddlers on their shoulders as they cross rivers and of mothers lying on sidewalks comforting their children are in sharp contrast with the narratives the 45th president of the United States conjures up as he continues to sow hate, division, and lies.
Make no mistake: What is at stake here is our country’s values and our very own humanity as citizens and residents of the United States. Will we turn our backs on dispossessed families, or will we fight to uphold the aspirational principles on which this country was founded?
The time has come to see Latin American nations not as “shithole countries,” but as real partners in the geopolitical arena. This means creating trade and foreign-relations policies that support alternative and sustainable economic development, local industries, and the creation of jobs with a living wage. Policies focused on people, the planet, and the well-being of all people. We all deserve that.
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RSN: The Two Magical Words That Could Have Trump Gone by Earth Day |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6004"><span class="small">Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 03 December 2018 13:18 |
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Wasserman writes: "Our long-awaited 'Mueller Time' has filled the punditocracy with tales of collusion and delusion. But most have missed the two-word trap door through which Donald Trump is likeliest to fall."
Michael Cohen exits the federal court in New York on Aug. 21. (photo: Mark Kauzlarich/Bloomberg)
The Two Magical Words That Could Have Trump Gone by Earth Day
By Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
03 December 18
 ur long-awaited “Mueller Time” has filled the punditocracy with tales of collusion and delusion. But most have missed the two-word trap door through which Donald Trump is likeliest to fall.
Yes, the Trumputins did steal 2016.
Collusion, technically, is not a crime. Treason is. So is conspiracy. But they may be hard to prove.
Yes, the Don Jr.-Eric-Ivanka-Kushner-Cohen-Manafort cabal has lied to Congress, the courts, and the people. More will arise as the Trump consiglieri flee the sinking ship.
But as predicted by Steve Bannon, here are the two words most likely to bring Trump down: MONEY LAUNDERING.
To source this for yourself, start with David Cay Johnston’s It’s Even Worse than You Think and Craig Unger’s House of Putin House of Trump.
These Rosetta Stones let us view the evolution of Trump’s most obvious illegalities:
• The Donald was born into organized crime.
• His grandfather (a German immigrant) ran a mobbed-up brothel in California.
• His father, a mobbed-up Queens slumlord, was a KKK-supporting, federally-prosecuted racist intimately linked to at least two of the city’s infamous Five Families.
• From age six, Donald helped launder dad’s money with a six-figure income that did not come from his youthful paper route.
• Infamous for stiffing those who backed and worked for him, Donald plunged into billions of debt and at least four bankruptcies.
• But after the Soviet Union fell, a new mobster class of Russian billionaires needed to launder cash into the U.S.
• Many favored Germany’s Deutsche Bank, which became the only financial institution willing to loan Trump money.
• As a shady real estate developer who took cash and asked few questions, The Donald became a Russo-American bag man.
• Trump obliged his ex-Soviet saviors with at least 1300 real estate transactions allowing them to slip countless rubles into the American banking system.
• At the peak sits Vladimir “don” Putin, who took power at the moment of Y2K, to whom nearly all the new Russian billionaires owe fealty, and whose files (forget about that “pee tape”) undoubtedly contain more than enough documentation to sink the entire Trump apparatus in a single afternoon.
• Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue has became largely a dormitory for Putin’s billionaire cohorts.
• Trump and his family have used the White House as a personal laundromat, leveraging licenses, a bailout for Kushner’s disastrous investments in 666 Fifth Avenue, and much more.
• Much of this has happened in New York, where prosecutions will be beyond the reach of White House pardons.
• Deutsche Bank, which has paid more than $600 million in fines related to money laundering, has just been freshly raided.
There is much, much more. (For a riveting run-down of how the legalities might shake out, a recent show at Progressive Radio Network offers some critical insight).
But the methodical Mueller clearly has Trump’s tax returns. The Donald’s net worth may well be negligible, all in rubles, defined by mobster illegalities dating back at least three decades, many of them prosecutable in Manhattan, where his enemies are legion.
Will Trump’s fake House of Cards then collapse, and his presidency with it?
The real bottom line to the Trump trifecta of collusion, mass perjury, and fiscal felony will not require likely impeachment by a Democratic House or unlikely removal by a GOP Senate.
It could come instead with Trump desperately trying to negotiate pardons for his children … facing post-presidency jail time for the money-laundering buried in those Deutsche Bank files and the testimony of so many desperate consiglieri trying to avoid prison … with the almost certain collapse of his phony financial empire … and with the fury of a media and public to whom he’s been lying nonstop with felonious contempt dating at least from the 1980s.
At some point, the stability-loving corporations that really run this world just might say (as with Dick Nixon):
“ENOUGH!… He got us our tax break and gutted environmental regulation … now he needs to leave.”
The collapse could come in months and weeks, not years. Given his relentless assault on the planet, let’s project Donald’s departure to happen by Earth Day. Nature always bats last.
So, too, might Mueller and New York.
But ultimately, the real push must come from an awakened public, bouncing back at last (in a process begun with 2018’s Rainbow Tsunami) with a rebirth of grassroots outrage and social democracy.
Harvey “Sluggo” Wasserman’s Life & Death Spiral of US History: From Deganawidah to Trump to Solartopia, will be published around Earth Day, hopefully in sync with Trump’s departure. His Green Power & Wellness Show podcasts at prn.fm; California Solartopia broadcasts at KPFA-Pacifica 90.7FM in Los Angeles.
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pecial counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors have told defense lawyers in recent weeks that they are “tying up loose ends” in their investigation, providing the clearest clues yet that the long-running probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election may be coming to its climax, potentially in the next few weeks, according to multiple sources close to the matter.
