Saturday, December 22nd, 2018
Maggie Fox, Senior Writer - NBC News
Stephan: This is the latest on a trend that really outrages me and should disgust and enrage you as well. The American illness profit system is so inferior, so callous, and ugly in its outcomes that you would think voters would demand universal single payer healthcare. But, no. Americans are such docile sheep that this kind of situation exists and there is almost no outcry.
American women are still struggling to get good health care compared to women in other advanced nations, a new study finds.
U.S. women are sicker, spend more on medical bills, have to work harder to get good care and are far more likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth than women in other rich nations, the report out Wednesday from the Commonwealth Fund finds.
The only areas where the U.S. comes out ahead? Women are less likely to die of breast cancer here, and have better access to medical specialists.
But in most other measures, the U.S. falls short when compared to 10 other wealthy countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Britain.
The Commonwealth Fund’s Sara Collins, who helped write the report, said the aim was to see if the 2010 Affordable Care Act had made a difference for women’s health. “We wanted to take an assessment of where women are on health care and, particularly, insurance coverage,” Collins said.
And compared to 2009, when 16 percent of Americans had no health insurance, now just 8.8 percent of Americans go without a way to help pay medical bills.
“Women […]
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Saturday, December 22nd, 2018
Stephan: Here is what I hope is a first report based on data concerning what I hope is going to be a major good news trend.
The Green New Deal is the most popular policy hardly anyone has heard of yet.
Eighty-two percent of Americans say they have heard “nothing at all” about the sweeping proposal to generate 100 percent of the nation’s electricity from clean sources within the next 10 years, upgrade the United States’ power grid, invest in energy-efficiency and renewable technology, and provide training for jobs in the new, green economy.
But when asked “how much do you support or oppose” the aforementioned suite of policies, 81 percent of registered voters say they either “somewhat support” or “strongly support” the plan, according to new survey results shared exclusively with HuffPost from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University.
Ninety-two percent of Democrats supported the idea, including 93 percent of liberal Democrats and 90 percent of moderate-to-conservative Democrats. But 64 percent of Republicans ― including 75 percent of moderate-to-liberal Republicans and 57 percent of conservative Republicans ― also backed the […]
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Saturday, December 22nd, 2018
Chris McGreal , - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: The stupidity and incompetence of the Trump-Republican policies is becoming clear to the people impacted by the effects those policies produce. Here is an example of what I mean. Still according to fivethirtyeight.com Trump's approval rating over all polls is still 42%. I don't know how that can be, but there it is.
Richard Oswald stands in a frozen puddle surrounded by unharvested corn. Wet conditions have made harvesting difficult for Oswald and other farmers.
Credit: Amy Kontras/Guardian
LANGDON, MISSOURI — Richard Oswald did not need the latest US government report on the creeping toll of climate change to tell him that farming in the midwest is facing a grim future, and very likely changing forever.
For Oswald, the moment of realisation came in 2011.
The 68-year-old lives in the house he was born in and farms 2,500 acres with his son, some of it settled by his great-great-grandfather. The land sits where the Missouri river valley is about four miles wide.
Growing up, Oswald heard tales of a great flood in 1952 which prompted the army to construct levees.
“The next flood wasn’t for another 40 years, in 1993. Heavy rains day after day after day after day until the runoff water and the rain just overpowered the river and the levees,” said Oswald. “Both the ’52 and ’93 floods lasted three weeks. They were […]
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Friday, December 21st, 2018
Stephan: There will be no edition of the Schwartzreport today. Stephan is without power. SR will resume when power is restored.
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Thursday, December 20th, 2018
Hiroko Tabuchi, Climate Reporter - The New York Times
Stephan: In a society like the United States that only values profit lying, cheating, and working against the general wellbeing is just smart business. Here is a clear example of what I mean. Until we understand that the function of society should be to foster wellbeing at every level we will not be prepared to deal with climate change, and there will be great suffering.
Credit: New York Times
When the Trump administration laid out a plan this year that would eventually allow cars to emit more pollution, automakers, the obvious winners from the proposal, balked. The changes, they said, went too far even for them.
But it turns out that there was a hidden beneficiary of the plan that was pushing for the changes all along: the nation’s oil industry.
In Congress, on Facebook and in statehouses nationwide, Marathon Petroleum, the country’s largest refiner, worked with powerful oil-industry groups and a conservative policy network financed by the billionaire industrialist Charles G. Koch to run a stealth campaign to roll back car emissions standards, a New York Times investigation has found.
The campaign’s main argument for significantly easing fuel efficiency standards — that the United States is so awash in oil it no longer needs to worry about energy conservation — clashed with decades of federal energy and environmental policy.
