Here is the truth about senior care, and it is not good. I don’t know what it is going to take to finally get America to move from the failure of the illness profit system to the success of a universal birthright single payer healthcare system.
Americans give nursing homes an average D+ grade for quality of care, and few say they would be comfortable living in a nursing home if they could no longer care for themselves, according to a new survey from West Health and Gallup.
The survey, which was conducted by web July 5-24 via the nationally representative Gallup Panel, also found most U.S. adults would be reluctant to admit a relative to a nursing home. Quality of care, cost, and the potential emotional and mental toll of nursing-home living are Americans’ top concerns. Perceived safety is mentioned by a smaller, but still sizable, segment.
Nursing Homes Graded Poorly for Overall Quality of Care
More than four in 10 U.S. adults grade nursing homes negatively for overall quality of care — 36% give them a “D” (poor) and 6% an “F” (fail). Another 33% grade nursing homes as satisfactory, a “C,” while few rate them positively with an excellent “A” (1%) or good “B” (8%) grade. These ratings average out to a D+ grade […]
Here is an early report on the internal migration trend I have been describing. This is just the beginning of what I think os going to become a much bigger issue, and a major factor in the Red Blue Great Schism Trend.
Rural America is booming, but the population growth that’s boosting local economies is also putting a strain on everything from schools to housing and roads.
The influx — which started during the pandemic — has continued even as Covid restrictions have lifted. The latest government data released just last month points to a second year of increases in 2022 after years of declines.
The trend is sparking resentment as house prices in the top 10 rural counties that have seen the biggest population increases surging more than 40% over the past three years. Schools are overloaded and the shift is even impacting farmland prices.
“There’s a lot of resentment,” said Maggie Doherty, a writer and columnist who lives in Flathead County, Montana. “There’s bumper stickers that say ‘Montana’s full’ or ‘Don’t California my Montana.’”
The number of people living in non-metro areas outgrew the urban population for the first time in three decades in 2021, and the rural population expanded again last year. But growth wasn’t evenly distributed, with the top 10 counties with the largest population gains growing by […]
In the United States we are experiencing a very dangerous trend that is not getting anywhere near the attention it deserves. I am speaking here of White Nationalist terrorism that is increasingly attacking the infrastructure upon which all our lives depend. Here is the story of the dozens of attacks against the electrical infrastructure that supplies you and your family with electricity. In my view we need to be taking a much more aggressive approach to these White cretins or matters are going to get worse, possibly much worse.
Maryland’s top utility regulator was watching the news one February morning when a headline blindsided him: Two suspects with neo-Nazi ties had been charged with plotting to take down Baltimore’s power grid.
Jason Stanek, the then-chair of the state’s Public Service Commission, said Maryland regulators were “caught flat-footed,” not hearing a word from law enforcement before the news broke — or in the months afterward. Federal prosecutors have alleged the defendants were driven by “racially motivated hatred” to try to cut power to hundreds of thousands of people in the state’s largest city, which has a predominantly Black population.
The FBI declined to comment on its communications with the Maryland commission. But Stanek’s experience is not uncommon.
A POLITICO analysis of federal data and interviews with a dozen security, extremism and electricity experts revealed that despite a record surge in attacks on the grid nationwide, communication gaps between law enforcement and state and federal regulators have left many officials largely in the dark about the extent of the threat. They have also hampered […]
Here is another positive climate decision from President Biden and his administration. I find it increasingly concerning that Americans cannot seem to distinguish whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden has their wellbeing at heart.
A member of the Porcupine caribou herd is seen in the Arctic Refuge in Alaska. Credit: G MacRae / flickr / cc
Indigenous tribes and climate campaigners applauded the Biden administration’s announcement Wednesday that it will cancel all existing oil and gas drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and ban drilling across 13 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve, while hundreds of groups also called on the U.S. Interior Department to go further on fossil fuel leasing.
Biden’s move in Alaska will reverse former Republican President Donald Trump’s approval of a 2017 law that required leasing in the Arctic Refuge, the nation’s largest area of pristine wilderness which is home to vulnerable species including polar bears, migratory birds, and caribou.
The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA) holds the last remaining leases in the refuge, after two other lessees canceled drilling plans. AIDEA’s leases would have allowed it to drill in 365,000 acres in the Arctic Refuge’s coastal plain.
The Biden administration conducted an environmental analysis of the lease sale which […]
Paul Tough, Contributing Writer - The New York Times
Stephan:
There aren’t many examples in history when a culture, a nation, chooses to become willfully ignorant, but the United States is doing exactly that. I hope you note the difference between those affiliated with the Republicans and those affiliated the Democrats. Note also what a racket college education has become, who gets in, who doesn’t. Then consider what has happened to the cost of a college education. The United States is a nation destroying its future in every way it can. Poor healthcare, poor education, horrible social outcome data, growing White supremacy racism, one party actively working to destroy an over two-hundred-year-old democracy. Increasingly, I think 2024 is going to be the decision point that determines which way this is going to end up.
A decade or so ago, Americans were feeling pretty positive about higher education. Public-opinion polls in the early 2010s all told the same story. In one survey, 86 percent of college graduates said that college had been a good investment; in another, 74 percent of young adults said a college education was “very important”; in a third, 60 percent of Americans said that colleges and universities were having a positive impact on the country. Ninety-six percent of parents who identified as Democrats said they expected their kids to attend college — only to be outdone by Republican parents, 99 percent of whom said they expected their kids to go to college.
In the fall of 2009, 70 percent of that year’s crop of high school graduates did in fact go straight to college. That was the highest percentage ever, and the college going rate stayed near that elevated level for the next few years. The motivation of these students was largely financial. The 2008 recession devastated many of the industries that […]
