A Marriage Made in Hell — Joe Biden and the Medical Industrial Complex

NO MFA

How’s this for a healthcare system to be proud of? The most expensive in the world yet with the lowest life expectancy and highest suicide rates among the top eleven economically advanced nations. The U.S. is number one in the prevalence of chronic diseases and in a shockingly high obesity rate. Yet the former vice-president and probable next president Joe Biden thinks that Obama’s refashioning of the U.S. healthcare system popularly known as Obamacare is “the crown jewel of the Obama administration.” Written by a bunch of health insurance hacks and borrowing liberally from the brain child of a conservative think tank, Obamacare is an expensive mess. Even after it was passed, 29 million were still uninsured and another 38 million underinsured. The pandemic has made matters worse hiking the number of uninsured to over 45 million. Not letting the desperate plight of many Americans get in the way of cold, hard donor cash, Biden dismisses a national single payer healthcare system. In fact, Biden has promised all his major donors that “nothing would change” in his administration. In grateful thanks, the pharmaceutical industry stuffed his campaign stocking with over $7 million. As the dreary statistics on the inadequacies of U.S. healthcare continue to bedevil, we wonder why that $3.65 trillion the U.S. spent in 2019 on healthcare isn’t saving more lives. With billions going into the pockets of predator investors who own 70% of nursing homes, 25% of hospitals, 47% of doctors’ practices and 45% of emergency departments, there is precious little left to make Americans healthier. U.S. medical care has become a push for immense profits at the expense of people’s lives and well-being. What will President Biden do to remedy the situation? Read “A Marriage Made In Hell — Joe Biden and the Medical Industrial Complex” and weep.

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Patients Lose When Corporate Looters Suck Billions of Your Dollars out of Healthcare — Is it Too Late to Stop Them?

Patients Over Profits

The corporate capture of Americans’ health care dollars is underway. Last year private equity firms spent a dizzying $63 billion gobbling up doctors’ practices, emergency rooms, surgical centers and more to corner the healthcare market. Patients, stuck with oversized premiums, unconscionable deductibles and rapacious copays, are subsidizing corporate larceny to the tune of $3.65 trillion (as of 2018). Free market bloodsuckers armed with $2.5 trillion of unspent cash from the ballooning stock market and Trump‘s tax cuts masquerading as tax policy, are licking their chops as they anticipate returns of 25% from the misery of Americans struggling to afford medical care. Why should you be concerned that free-market corporations and banksters are looking to monetize your health? For a possible answer, read “Patients Lose When Corporate Looters Suck Billions of Your Dollars Out of Healthcare.— Is It Too Late to Stop Them?

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A Peoples’ History of the Obama Presidency

Obama - Trump

In two and one-half years, the Trump house of horrors has produced poisonous legislation to further oppress millions of poor and working class Americans and erode what’s left of the fraying social safety net. Even the Obama administration is starting to look good in retrospect instead of what it really was a business-as-usual administration whose campaign was big on promises — affordable, universal healthcare, legislation to advance labor’s right to organize and bargain collectively, and curtailment of the militarized surveillance state and its corollary perpetual war —and whose presidency was a repudiation of all that came before — expanding two wars to seven, becoming the official deporter-in-chief, selecting targets for assassination on Terror Tuesdays, including an American teenager, using a 1917 law passed by another failed president to lock up whistleblowers, passing a corporate welfare bill promoted as universal healthcare and generally selling out the hope and change promises candidate Obama had made. Can we be hornswoggled again, this time by his partner in crime, Joe Biden? Want to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself? Read “A Peoples’ History of the Obama Presidency” to see how it could.

For a more exhaustive examination of eight years of a failed Obama presidency, read SA’s Legacy: Obama’s & Ours

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America Misses the Boat Again and Again… Universal Healthcare Out of Sight Out of Mind

Remember the halcyon days of 2009 as the echoes of “change we can believe in” and “yes we can” hadn’t yet succumbed to dashed hopes and dying dreams. America had cut the cord of centuries of racial bias and elected a black man president. Dreams of My Father, Obama’s opus, reinvigorated our belief in the myth of a chosen people.

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U.S. Health Care Debacle: You’ll Never Guess Who Benefits?

(Update on U.S. Health Care: Getting Less for More follow link to read original report) In our last depressing foray into the alarming statistics that underpin the sorry state of health care in America, we discovered that America has the highest child and infant mortality rate of any high-income, industrialized country in the world, that […]

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Why the Latest Media Reports of Obamacare’s Blessings Are Fake News

  “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man (or woman) is king (or queen)”—the shorthand version of how the health care battle in the US is trending. Before the Trump follies rolled into the White House on January 20, public reaction to the Affordable Care Act (hereinafter referred to as Obamacare) was decidedly […]

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