Stephan: Here is yet another report illustrating how all decisions about healthcare in the United States are made not on the basis of fostering wellbeing but, instead, on how to preserve and increase profit. That's why we have the worst healthcare in the developed world.
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty
Physicians and progressive advocates on Tuesday urged the Department of Health and Human Services to reject an industry appeal to tweak and rebrand—not end altogether—a Medicare privatization scheme known as Direct Contracting, which the Trump administration launched in 2020.
Members of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), which represents 24,000 doctors and other health professionals, has been working for months to bring lawmakers’ attention to the DC program and pressure the Biden administration to terminate it while it’s still in an experimental phase.
“The Biden administration must completely eliminate Direct Contracting—nothing less than that is acceptable.”
As a result of PNHP’s efforts, dozens of Democrats—including Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—have spoken out against the DC pilot, opposition that appears to have caught the notice of healthcare industry groups that stand to benefit from the program.
In a letter sent earlier this week, more than 220 healthcare organizations—including active participants in the DC program known as Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs)—implored […]
Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate Economist, Distiguished Professor City University of New York, Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: Paul Krugman, as usual, gives us the truth about another of the gross incompetencies of Donald Trump, his moronic orc Peter Navarro, and the damage they have done to the United States economy.
Do you remember Donald Trump’s trade war? You can be forgiven for having forgotten all about it, given everything that has happened since; it sounds trivial compared with his effort to stay in power by overturning a fair election. Even in terms of policy while in office, it was far less important than his pandemic denial, and probably less important than his tax cuts or his sabotage of health care.
But the trade war was uniquely Trumpian. His other policy actions were standard-issue Republicanism, but the rest of his party didn’t share his obsession with trade deficits; indeed, he probably wouldn’t have been able to do much on that front except for the fact that U.S. law gives presidents enormous discretion when setting tariffs. Only Trump really considered trade deficits an important issue; and he, er, trumpeted what he called a “historic trade deal” under which China agreed to buy an additional $200 billion in U.S. goods and services by the end of 2021.
Now, Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who has been the […]
Stephan: If you read me regularly then you know that in my opinion, after studying all the available research I could track down, my assessment is that we are going to have three major internal migrations: Away from the coasts, ocean, lake, and river because of too much water; out of the Southwest because of inadequate water and temperatures that are too high, and out of the Central states because of disasters brought on by dramatic weather events like tornadoes. Here, in this report, you see the latest data from the Southwest that supports my conclusions.
Houseboats float, amid extreme drought, on California’s Lake Oroville in October 2021. Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News
The extreme heat and dry conditions of the past few years pushed what was already an epic, decades-long drought in the American West into a historic disaster that bears the unmistakable fingerprints of climate change. The long-running drought, which has persisted since 2000, can now be considered the driest 22-year period of the past 1,200 years, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Previous work by some of the same authors of the new study had identified the period of 2000 through 2018 as the second-worst megadrought since the year 800 — exceeded only by an especially severe and prolonged drought in the 1500s. But with the past three scorching years added to the picture, the Southwest’s megadrought stands out in the record as the “worst” or driest in more than a millennium.
“Without climate change, this would not be even close to as bad as one of those historical megadroughts,” […]
Stephan: As the months have gone by I have seen more and more research papers in the scientific journals on the long-term consequences of Covid. I have published articles on a number of them, and this is the latest. If you have had Covid, young or old, I urge you to contact a physician, particularly a cardiologist, for an evaluation.
Citation: to access the research discussed in this article: doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00403-0
Reference: Xie, Y., Xu, E., Bowe, B. & Al-Aly, Z. Nature Med. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01689-3 (2022).
The risk of 20 diseases of the heart and blood vessels is high for at least a year after a COVID-19 diagnosis. Credit: Living Art Enterprises/Science Photo Library
Even a mild case of COVID-19 can increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular problems for at least a year after diagnosis, a new study1 shows. Researchers found that rates of many conditions, such as heart failure and stroke, were substantially higher in people who had recovered from COVID-19 than in similar people who hadn’t had the disease.
What’s more, the risk was elevated even for those who were under 65 years of age and lacked risk factors, such as obesity or diabetes.
“It doesn’t matter if you are young or old, it doesn’t matter if you smoked, or you didn’t,” says study co-author Ziyad Al-Aly at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and the chief of research and development for the Veterans Affairs (VA) St. Louis Health Care System. “The risk was there.”
Al-Aly and his colleagues based their research on an extensive health-record database curated by the United […]
Stephan: This article by Chauncey DeVega lays out the neofascism of the Republican Party about as clearly as one could make it. What appalls me is that a very large percentage, not a majority but over a third of the country, and mostly White, is either uninterested or supportive of what the Republican Party has become. In fact, many political commentators think the Republicans will take both houses of Congress in November. If so that will be the end of democracy in the United States. The forms may remain, but the substance of power will be fatally altered. And what I really am coming to resent is that Merrick Garland and his DOJ have done little or nothing to hold Trump, his orcs, and the Republican election fraudsters of the 2020 election accountable. Day after day more criminality emerges but from the DOJ... crickets.
Donald Trump and The US Capitol Riot on January 6, 2021 Photo illustration by Salon/Getty
Those of us who have repeatedly sounded the alarm about the Republican Party’s threat to democracy and American society have often been told we were exaggerating or being ridiculous. We were hyperbolic, attention-seeking or just plain wrong — because, after all, the Republican Party’s leaders and voters really do love America.
Last week the Republican National Committee dropped any remaining pretexts of patriotism or love of democracy with its now-infamous statement that those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” Reports suggest that a draft version of that RNC statement was even bolder in its embrace of right-wing terrorism.
Last Friday’s statement of support for fascism announced that the Republican Party has birthed a monster that will ultimately eat it alive. But looking beyond outrage and disgust, what does this tell us about America in this moment of existential crisis?
In terms of the mainstream news media and America’s political class, it reveals how […]
