Yet another horror story about the American illness profit system and the corporations that devised and control it. Note something in this story though. The only people trying to do anything about this nastiness are Democrats. Not a single Republican gives a damn about this racket built on exploiting foster children.
The first time Katrina Edwards was locked in a psychiatric hospital for children, she was sure a foster parent would pick her up the next day.
It was a spring night in 2012 when Edwards, then 12 years old, was admitted to North Star Behavioral Health in Anchorage. In a photo taken upon her arrival, Edwards wears an Abercrombie hoodie and has dark circles under her eyes, her expression skeptical. During her initial evaluation, a psychiatrist asked a battery of questions, including what Edwards wanted to be when she grew up (a police officer), what she did for fun (sports), and how she slept (poorly, with nightmares).
Alaska’s Office of Children’s Services had put Edwards in foster care earlier that year after she reported being sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend. Asked why she’d ended up at North Star, Edwards explained that she had threatened to run away from her foster home and commit suicide. Medical records from her admission noted that she had a history of fleeting suicidal ideation, but that Edwards said she didn’t […]
The Republicans as this story makes glaringly clear just do not care about the wellbeing of the people they purport to serve. They say they do, but they don’t, and they don’t care about societal wellbeing. Their actions on a wide range of issues demonstrate this again and again. And yet, Americans just don’t seem to comprehend it.
The states’ emergency application asks justices to overrule an appeals court decision and halt enforcement of a federal rule that requires 23 states to reduce emissions in power generation and other industries to help reduce smog and other air pollution in neighboring states. Credit: Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call
A group of GOP-led states and industry groups on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to prevent the EPA from enforcing a Biden administration emissions and clean air rule.
Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia filed a lawsuit to challenge the so-called Good Neighbor Rule, and last month a federal appeals court in Washington declined to stop the program as that case moves through the legal process.
The states filed an emergency application that asks the justices to overrule that appeals court decision and halt enforcement, as did two industry groups in separate applications also filed Wednesday.
Among other reasons, the states contend that leaving the rule in place harms them because of “the time, money, and other resources spent on complying with an unlawful federal […]
You probably see the advertisements several times everyday on your television, get Medicare Advantage for better healthcare. DON’T DO IT. Medicare Advantage has nothing to do with Medicare. It is just another insurance industry scam, and it can really screw up your life, even bankrupt you. It is a measure to the corruption of the Congress that nothing is being done about this evil racket. The Physicians for a National Health Program have published a report referenced in this article by Thom Hartmann. It is horrifying. Please read this article then click through to the link I provided to read the full report. This is important particularly if you are older.
If you would like to read the research study uppon which this report is based, and I encourage you to do so see: Our Paymeents Their Profits
Republican former president George W. Bush, one of the worst presidents in American history Credit: ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock
President George W. Bush and Republicans (and a handful of on-the-take Democrats) in Congress created the Medicare Advantage scam in 2003 as a way of routing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of for-profit insurance companies.
Those companies, and their executives, then recycle some of that profit back into politicians’ pockets via the Citizens United legalized bribery loophole created by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.
Just the overcharges happening right now in that scam are costing Americans over $140 billion a year: more than the entire budget for the Medicare Part B or Part D programs. These ripoffs — that our federal government seems to have no interest in stopping — are draining the Medicare trust fund while ensnaring gullible seniors in private insurance programs where they’re often denied life-saving care.
Real Medicare pays bills when they’re presented. Medicare Advantage insurance companies, on the other hand, get a fixed dollar amount every year […]
Aaron Gregg and Jaclyn Peiser, Reporters - The Washington Post
Stephan:
Where my wife and I live there are only two drugstores separated by about 15 miles. One, a non-chain pharmacy charges absurd prices, the other that we and most of the people we know use is a Rite Aid. It has left us wondering if we are going to lose our only functional pharmacy. Like the medical deserts that are growing up around the United States, pharmacies are now becoming an endangered business species in rural areas like ours. Healthcare in America is deteriorating before our eyes as Congress fights like bratty spoiled children in a sandbox.
Rite Aid, which filed for bankruptcy last week, is poised to shrink its retail footprint as it grapples with falling sales, mounting debt and a slew of lawsuits tied to the opioid epidemic. Credit: Mike Blake / Reuters
After decades of expansion, the nation’s largest drugstore chains are closing hundreds of stores as they reorient their operations against rising competition, a crush of opioid lawsuits and other forces — relegating many already-vulnerable communities into pharmacy deserts.
Rite Aid, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last week, CVS and Walgreens have signaled over the past two years plans to collectively shutter more than 1,500 stores. Public health experts have already seen the fallout, noting that the first neighborhoods to lose their pharmacies are often predominantly Black, Latinx and low-income.
“According to our estimates, about one in four neighborhoods are pharmacy deserts across the country,” said Dima Qato, an associate professor at the University of Southern California who studies pharmacy access and health equity. “These closures are disproportionately affecting communities that need […]
FRED PEARCE, Contributing Writer - Yale Environment 360
Stephan:
The abandonment of farmland and forests is an important trend you never hear media talking about yet, as this article, points out it is going to play an important role in humanitys future. One thing I particularly note in this and other stories I have done in SR, is the reality that farming all over the world is increasingly an activity for older people. The young have abandoned the land to move to cities and better paying jobs. It doesn’t surprise me, but it does depress me that the skills of farming, and they are skills, are disappearing, and farming itself is increasingly a corporate activity.
Overgrown agricultural machinery on a vacant farm near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. Credit: Okla Michel / CTK / AP
Gergana Daskalova was nine months old when she was taken in by her grandparents in their small village in Bulgaria. It was soon after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and her parents had left for the city after the closure of the village’s state-run collective farm.
She grew up in a countryside emptying of people and with large areas of farmland lying abandoned. She eventually left too, traveling abroad and forging an academic career as an ecologist. But she never forgot her home village, where her childhood saw an ecological transformation paralleling the social one. As people left Tyurkmen, in Plovdiv province in southern Bulgaria, nature returned with a vengeance.
“Over the last three decades, I have seen Tyurkmen change as houses were abandoned, gardens engulfed by vegetation, and birds like pheasants and hoopoes became a more common sight than people,” she says. “The brambles are so thick, stepping on them […]
