For-Profit Healthcare Meets the Pandemic and Collapses

Single Payer Now

Although the U.S. has less than 5% of the world’s population, U.S. COVID cases currently (as of Jan. 18, 2021) comprise a staggering 20% of world-wide COVID cases and 15% of the world’s COVID deaths. How is that possible? It boils down to one big lack —a national single payer health care system (aka Medicare-for-all). Instead America has a for-profit healthcare industry focused on private gain not public health. The evidence is everywhere you look whether it’s the contradictory messaging coming out of government health agencies, stumbling and bumbling progress in acquiring needed equipment and supplies and the specter of all segments of the medical industrial complex from providers to institutions trying to make a quick buck off the backs of desperate Americans. How could single payer healthcare surmount these obstacles? First and foremost, end the reign of the private health insurance industry where faceless bureaucrats hold the power of life or death over their customers by denying treatment or medication. End those punishing premiums, deductibles and copays that make health insurance unaffordable for a vast number of Americans. End employees’ fear that losing their jobs will cut off their families’ access to medical care. End those narrow provider networks which rob people of the freedom to choose a provider or facility. Between for-profit medical care and rampaging COVID, it’s been a bleak winter in the U.S. To those of you who shake your heads in frustration or bow them in resignation, check out “For-Profit Healthcare Meets the Pandemic and Collapses” and prepare to be dumbfounded at how deep the rot in for-profit medicine goes.

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Single Payer on the Ropes as Bernie is Top Banana in the Health Industry Donations Sweepstakes

The Candidates

Pete Buttigieg
“Senator Sanders’ plan by definition abolishes private

plans like what… [union] workers have. Mine does not.”

Amy Klobuchar
“I’m the only one on the debate stage when asked ‘Do you have a
problem with a Socialist leading the Democratic ticket’ and I said
yes”

The knives are out dear readers. We may be on the cusp of losing our best chance to finally join the rest of the developed world with universal single payer healthcare. Buttigieg’s plan is a thinly disguised sell-out to the wealthy hedge and private equity funds and corporate healthcare companies who have a gilt-edged oar in the healthcare water and are determined to keep it. To counter the Bernie threat, they send out paid stenographers masquerading as Democratic candidates to spin the public with one of two fairy tales — private healthcare with a few tweaks (very few) will do just fine as it always has (for rich folks). Credit Pete Buttigieg with that lie. Waiting in the wings, the queen of the fear mongerers, Amy Klobuchar, clutching her pearls and forecasting catastrophic consequences if even a whiff of what she calls socialism (single payer healthcare) is allowed to displace privatized healthcare. Tell that fairytale to nearly half of American adults (84½ million) with little or no insurance. The only obstacle in the way of the Democratic stampede to protect the status quo appears to be Bernie Sanders. But questions abound. If you judge a candidate by his donors, Bernie appears to be in bed with the enemy. SA recounts the troubling tale in Single Payer on the Ropes as Bernie is Top Banana in the Health Industry Donations Sweepstakes. Have we placed our bets on the wrong horse?

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Trump’s State of the Union Speech —What It Didn’t Tell Us

What’s wrong with this picture? A bunch of folk, whom we laughingly call the voice of the people, behaving badly from nationalistic chest-thumping (USA! USA!) to a spasm of dancing in the aisles (confined to Democratic women celebrating their 2018 election success), to periodic ovations (standing and clapping multiple times). What did we interrupt? The Houston rodeo, a country fair, a rally for the latest populist hero? Surprise, surprise, this was President Trump’s second State of the Union speech before elected officials, SCOTUS justices, administration heavies and a few plain folk for window dressing. Nothing new to see here in a speech chock full of the usual lies, misstatements, exaggerations and just plain nonsense that appear daily on his Twitter feed. What to make of the blather about immigration or in Trump-speak the encroaching hordes on the border, the U.S.-inspired attempted coup in Venezuela or as Trump’s tells it the heroic attempt of the U.S. to help bring democracy to a benighted nation, and the folderol about socialism threatening the pristine U.S. democracy? Suspicious Angels documents how some of Trump’s over-the-top claims went unnoticed by the corporate media intent on restarting the Cold War via Russiagate. Is it as Trump claims the empire on another triumphal march through history or is it all smoke and mirrors? You decide after you read “Trump’s State of the Union Speech — What It Didn’t Tell Us“.

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