I read stories like this one and ask myself, how is it possible we are having a presidential election in 8 months, we have the worst healthcare amongst all developed democracies, and yet we hear not a single word about creating universal birthright single-payer healthcare. We go on year after year with this desperately poor healthcare system that costs more than any other system in the world, and there is no serious discussion about it. Maybe voters just don’t know any better. What do you think?
Robert Morris, CEO of Complete Care
If freestanding emergency centers (FECs) are to survive and help underserved rural communities, they should be allowed to receive Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, which they cannot currently do, an FEC executive told members of the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Monday.
“The model doesn’t work unless we can get Medicare and Medicaid,” Robert Morris, CEO of Complete Care, a company that runs 15 FECs in Texas and Colorado, said during a subcommittee field hearingopens in a new tab or window held at Global Medical Response, a ground and air transportation service provider in Denton, Texas. “But there’s a lot of us in this space that would love to go out to those underserved areas.”
Millions in Uncompensated Care
FECs are one type of rural emergency care provider that has sprung up in the wake of many rural hospital closures. They are state-licensed facilities that offer the same level of care as hospital-based emergency departments, with doctors, nurses, and radiology technologists always on site, Morris, who is also president of the National Association of Freestanding Emergency Centers, said in his written testimony.
“Our facilities provide advanced imaging, laboratory, and […]
I was about to use the JAMA paper but was concerned it was too technical when I found this Hartmann article, which makes the same point on basically the same data, citing the JAMA paper. The sad truth is there are a lot of Handmaidens in the U.S. who vote year after year for the Trump Christofascist Party candidates, even though it oftentimes puts their own life, or the life of their daughters, at risk. I think it is going to take thousands of more female deaths in Red states before the Hand Maids wake up, and I find that very sad.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
It sure looks like Republicans want women to die. Particularly if they’re teenagers and have the temerity to be sexually active.
This is highlighted by what has to qualify as the most shocking scientific study of the year, published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network and titled Teen Pregnancy and Risk of Premature Mortality.
The result of the study of over 2.2 million women who experienced teen and pre-teen pregnancies (the youngest in the study gave birth at 9 years of age, although most were older teens) is best summarized by the subhead in the article about it in March 14th’s New York Times:
“A large analysis in Canada finds that teenagers who had babies were twice as likely to die before age 31.”
This is not a statistic you’ll hear on Fox “News” or in rightwing hate media. Instead, they’re cheer-leading for raped little girls to experience “the miracle of birth.”
Leonard Leo is the Joseph Goebbels of the Trump Christofasct Party (TCP), and it is amazing to me that the media pays so little attention to him considering what he has accomplished for the christofascists and Trump. Just as Hitler and the Nazis were very clear about what they are trying to do, so the TCP and Trump are quite explicit, and their followers lap it up and ask for more. Listen to any Trump rally and it is very clear.
Leonard Leo, co-chair of the Federalist Society, speaks at its National Lawyers Convention in Washington on Nov. 16, 2017. Credit: Sait Serkan Gurbuz / AP
Conservative Activist and Supreme Court puppetmaster Leonard Leo recently outlined his pitch for billionaires on how they can help move the United States government and society to the right.
“It’s really important that we flood the zone with cases that challenge misuse of the Constitution by the administrative state and by Congress,” Leo said in a new podcast interview, calling on the ultra-wealthy to support these litigation efforts.
“We have a great Overton window in the next couple of decades to really try to create a free society,” Leo said of the Supreme Court. “And I think we should take full advantage of it.”
The co-chair of the Federalist Society, the conservative lawyers network, Leo is best known as the man who helped build the Supreme Court’s conservative 6-3 supermajority, in his role as President Donald Trump’s judicial adviser. Leo’s dark money network, which received a historic $1.6 billion infusion in 2021, additionally helps bring cases before the high court, influence which cases the justices consider, […]
The reality that there are already people who are richer than some countries, and they are getting still richer is a sign of how dysfunctional our national economy has become. This all happened because over and over the Trump Chritofascist Party (the former Republican Party) has cut taxes for the rich and rigged the tax system to favor them. On top of that the Supreme Court fascists legalized the bribery of politicians. These changes are the source of most of the problems the United States faces.
Illustration: Elia Barbieri / The Guardian
At the beginning of each year, the world’s corporate and political elite gather in the Swiss ski resort of Davos to pat each other on the back, attend seminars on “the fourth Industrial Revolution” – whatever that might be – and generally mull over the state of the world. Rarely is so much wealth to be found in so few conference rooms. And each year, Oxfam, the global development charity, takes the opportunity to run the numbers on the state of global inequality. Oxfam’s findings are often eye-catching, but this year especially so.
The wealth of the five richest people in the world, they found, has more than doubled, from $405bn (£320bn) in 2020 to $869bn in late 2023. That’s an increase of about $14m an hour, which is not bad going by anyone’s reckoning. Perhaps more strikingly, Oxfam calculates that on current trends the world is due to welcome its first dollar trillionaire within a decade. Elon Musk, the richest person at the time of writing, is worth about a fifth of that, at $210bn.
It may of course take longer than Oxfam predicts, but the global trends are […]
Here is a writer in the U.K. saying what I have been telling you for 20 years. I take this as a sign of the general awakening by journalists that all life is interconnected and interdependent. I did a media interview today, with Jeff Lippman, and most of the questions he asked me in essence dealt with this same realization. It is my view what has created the Trump Christofascist Party base is the precognitive but unconscious fear of what climate change is going to do to civilization.
“The health of humans, animals and our environment are woven together in a bond that is inextricable, yet fragile.” Credit: Surachet1 / iStock)
If our planet were a patient, it would be admitted to intensive care. Its vital signs are alarming.
It is running a fever, with each of the last nine months the hottest on record, as we hurtle towards the 1.5 degree threshold.
Its lung capacity is compromised, with the destruction of forests that absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen.
And many of the earth’s water sources – its lifeblood – are contaminated.
Most concerning of all, its condition is deteriorating rapidly.
Is it any wonder, then, that human health is suffering, when the health of the planet on which we depend is in peril?
The health of humans, animals and our environment are woven together in a bond that is inextricable, yet fragile. We belong to the same unique, finely balanced ecosystem.
This is not a new realisation. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, wrote in the 5th century BCE that, “The physician treats, but nature heals.”
We are now re-learning what humans have always known, but which, since the industrial revolution, we have forgotten or ignored – that […]
