Search Results for “right to try”

Right to Try or Right to Die?

January 31, 2018February 2, 2018 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

“We also believe that patients with terminal conditions should have access to experimental treatments that could potentially save their lives.

People who are terminally ill should not have to go from country to country to seek a cure — I want to give them a chance right here at home. It is time for the Congress to give these wonderful Americans the “right to try.”
– President Donald Trump State of the Union Address 1/30/2018

Not so fast Mr. President. In fact, almost unanimously critics of “Right to Try (RTT) legislation dismiss it as a feel good proposition with disastrous consequences. As one medical ethicist noted “The public has no idea that this is not a good thing. They know nothing about the bill except that the right-to-try sounds like a good thing.” A good thing maybe for the 1% but for desperate, terminally patients the devil is in the details.

Right to Try or Right to Die? Hijacking the FDA For Fun and Profit

September 22, 2017February 2, 2018 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

“… false hope legislation [Right to Try Laws] … put countless patients at risk by dramatically undermining the FDA’s role in ensuring that medical products are safe and effective before they become widely used.” (Public Citizen) Sadly, It’s time for our umpty-umpth article on that serial offender —the health care industry – a […]

What Happens if You’re Poor, Female and Black in the Richest Country in the World?

June 10, 2022June 10, 2022 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

Time To Go

In the richest, most powerful country in the world, inequality touches every aspect of poor peoples’ lives. We all know that. But how many of us have stopped to think that 20 million American women, mainly Black and Latina, face an inequality that affects their right to control their bodies. That right, for one-quarter of women in the U.S. of child-bearing age, a little known but poisonous part of the US budgetary process has kept poor women from being able to afford an abortion. American women celebrated the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973 making abortion obtainable. For three years it was also affordable. All that changed in 1976 when a bigot, Henry Hyde, slammed the abortion door shut on poor women. Forty-six years and four democratic presidents later, many of them blessed with democratic majority Congresses, the Hyde amendment continues to threaten the lives and prospects of poor women. Where is the voice of powerful women rights organizations like NARAL and Planned Parenthood? Enraged by a recent Supreme Court leaked draft opinion overturning Roe, these organizations and others mounted furious campaigns to express their displeasure and rake in oodles of money from women afraid their right to obtain an abortion will go away and leave them with the same choice (none) that poor women have had for forty-six years. On the Hyde Amendment, a chilling silence. Check out “What Happens If You’re Poor, Female and Black in the Richest Country in the World?” for all the dirty details.

Billionaires Do the Two-Step into Space While Most Americans Try to Stay Afloat

July 26, 2021July 26, 2021 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

Making Money

Eleven people in the world die every minute — most from preventable causes like hunger. That doesn’t seem to faze three billionaires who could afford to right the world’s ship solely on the rise in their net worth during the pandemic. Instead, these unspeakably greedy billionaires, chief among them Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, are off to the wild blue yonder to turn space into a capitalist profit center via a sub-orbital tourist business. But the vast bulk of Americans need not apply. For the first trip, the Bezos entourage held a lottery. The winning bid? $28 million. “We need to build a road to space so that our children can build the future.” [Jeff Bezos] Considering that in order to snag a seat on Bezos’ next flight, a ticket will cost $300,000 or more, the universe of space travelers and their “kids” is miniscule. Only about two million people in a U.S. population of 333 million could afford a seat on the next joyride. [Vertical Research Partners] Remember this is the guy who could give all Amazon’s U.S. workers (one million+) a one-time $105,000 bonus and still be as filthy rich as he was before the pandemic. What he did instead as the pandemic was raging: eliminated the $2-an-hour pay boost intended to reward frontline workers for continuing to come into work. While he was cheating his workers, he was hard at work building a half billion-dollar yacht. Think that’s as obscene as it gets? Check out “Billionaires Doing the Two-Step in Space While Most Americans Try to Stay Afloat” and you may wind up wishing he stays in space permanently.

Three Bogeymen of the Apocalypse: Why the $4 trillion U.S. Healthcare Industry Blew the Pandemic

June 2, 2021June 2, 2021 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

Covid Death

How to explain the pickle the U.S. is in? The world’s most powerful and richest nation with only 4% of the world’s population has managed to infect 33 million Americans. Almost 600,00 have died. The country that annually spends $4 trillion on healthcare, most of it going into the pockets of healthcare executives, was helpless to stop the widespread carnage. Victims died in nursing homes from shoddy care, in hospitals from a “just in time” supply chain that did not stockpile vital equipment and supplies and at home because their privatized insurance put the cost of an ambulance ride out of reach. There’s lots of blame to go around, but three bogeymen, Bourla, Biden and Fauci, are especially culpable. From uneven vaccine distribution by profit-hungry vaccine makers (Bourla), to the failure of U.S. political leaders to bring the drug companies to heel (Biden) and last but far from least, to the medical advice of the U.S. infectious disease expert (Fauci) whose constantly shifting opinions on mask-wearing, waiving patent protection for vaccines, sourcing the COVID virus, and reaching herd immunity have led many Americans to wonder whose side he’s on. It’s a mess and if you wonder how big, check out “Three bogeymen of the Apocalypse: Why the $4 Trillion U.S. Healthcare Industry Blew the Pandemic.”

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

February 25, 2020February 25, 2020 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

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?

Corporate Democrats Using Insurance Industry Talking Points and Republican Fear Mongering to Defeat Medicare For All

October 31, 2019October 31, 2019 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

No More Private Insurance

How often have democratic politicos from Obama to the current crop of “hold the line” democrats vying for the presidential nomination tried to convince democratic voters who should know better but sadly don’t that a national health insurance plan (aka single payer) would be a disaster especially for workers depriving them of the “joys” of employer-sponsored health insurance. That idiocy won’t work much longer. Scare tactics don’t hold a candle to evidence-based conclusions. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation report, all is not coming up roses in private insurance land. Workers are in desperate straits, the cost of health insurance rising faster than wages. Last year, half of covered workers (75 million) facing exorbitant out-of-pocket costs skipped doctors’ visits or failed to fill prescriptions. And those aren’t the only costs baked into their paychecks. Workers are responsible for almost one-third ($6,300) of the cost of premiums for family coverage plus $1,500–$5,000 to meet their deductibles on top of copays from $10-$40 for each doctor visit. A worker unlucky enough to land in the hospital faces additional outlays of hundreds of dollars. To complete the perfect storm, employer health care is not a shield against “surprise billing” which can tack on thousands to an employee health tab. Does that sound like irreplaceable health insurance to you? Just a little less crappy than other crappier options in the privatized U.S. health insurance system. Don’t believe the do-nothing democrats when they assure you that freedom and choice are the hallmarks of a private insurance industry. It’s no secret that the industry MO is ripping off customers in the name of profits. All the info is here in Corporate Democrats Using Insurance Industry Talking Points and Republican Fear Mongering to Defeat Medicare For All.”

A Country with More Guns Than People is a Recipe for Disaster

September 5, 2019September 5, 2019 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

More Guns

In the U.S., it’s raining guns. 393 million of them. More guns than people in a country that has become a Hobbesian jungle of mass shootings with countless lives lost prematurely. In all three branches of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, our leaders sit on their hands preferring to be consolers rather than doers. Pleas to stop the slaughter from those grieving fallen loved ones don’t move the needle. We are a country eating itself up. 53 people lost their lives in mass shootings in August alone. The exceptional nation has an exceptional record for wars at home and abroad. Curbing gun violence at home is a long-term effort and to be successful needs an equal effort to end U.S violence abroad. SA takes a stab at uncovering the reasons the U.S. is now the most lawless nation in the world in “A Country with More Guns than People is a Recipe for Disaster.”

Joe Biden: Time to Exit Stage Right

April 18, 2019April 18, 2019 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

Joe Failed Campaigns

“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? (Macbeth Act 2, Scene 2) Sorry, Joe, it won’t. In his whole 47-year career, Joe was on the wrong side of almost every issue. In his first term as Senator in 1972, he was a fervent opponent of busing, a ploy to keep on the good side of Delaware bigots, part of his base. If it’s true that people can be judged by the company they keep, Joe has a lot of ‘splaining’ to do. For two of his closest buddies—the arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond and the hawkish John McCain Joe was faithful to the end eulogizing their bad deeds at their funerals (“I’m a Democrat and I love John McCain”). Throughout his career, Joe’s labors on behalf of the global moneyed elite never wavered. He went into the tank for banks eliminating bankruptcy protection for student debtors, gave whole hearted approval to junking Glass-Steagall, the law standing between the plunder and pillage of financial institutions and their victims, the people. He wrote the infamous crime bill that kicked off an era of mass incarceration, made an unfair distinction between crimes committed by whites and blacks, and supported “three strikes and you’re out” legislation which transformed petty criminals into lifers. He voted for the biggest blunder in American foreign policy, the destruction of Iraq and carried the water for Obama’s wrong-headed policies – the Libyan invasion, the drone war, the incarceration of whistle blowers and the methodical selection of assassination targets on Terror Tuesdays. If you have the stomach for it, we’ve laid it out in living color in “Joe Biden: Time to Exit Stage Right”

A Country Afraid of its 3-Year-Olds is Approaching Insanity

October 9, 2018October 9, 2018 Suspicious Angels Leave a comment

PRESCHOOL TO PRISON

Holy cow, is it criminal insanity or just business as usual in the exceptional nation? Judge for yourself. What benighted theory of child development directs the U.S. education bureaucracy to wage war on 3 and 4-year-old preschoolers? For what heinous crimes? A gun hidden in their onesies? Not quite. Just a bunch of little kids suspended or even expelled for doing what little kids do best: annoying the hell out of their caregivers. Rambunctious behavior, temper tantrums, defiance —used to be a case of kids being kids. Not any more if you live in the empire. The screws are tightening, the vise-like grip of repression holds our smallest, most vulnerable, predominantly children of color, to the zero tolerance policies of a fearful nation. Easy as one, two, three. Discipline them for infractions they are too young to comprehend, label them as “troublemakers,” punish them with suspensions or expulsions when they fail to “reform.” Frontier justice—tried, convicted and sentenced. Due process need not apply. Problem solved. It’s not really about education, is it? Running out of countries to devastate, the U.S. turns inward to find easier targets. At last, a war the greatest military on earth can win. To read the shocking details, don’t miss “A Country Afraid of its 3-Year-Olds is Approaching Insanity.”

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