Instead of looking to improve and expand Medicare as the majority in the U.S. favor, the Biden administration is using a back door created by the Trump administration to invite Wall St. to privatize it. Since this would be an unpopular move, a bureaucratic structure known as Direct Contracting Entities (DCE) has crept in behind the scenes.
In case you think the U.S. health care system already has too many middlemen raking in profits from people’s illnesses, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Doctors are enticed to sign up for a DCE on the promise that their revenues will go up.
Then patients are opted into the DCE without their consent or even knowledge. They can opt out again and change doctors, but only if they know about it.
Physicians for a National Health Program has put together this explainer about the threat posed by DCEs — which already exist in 43 states, including Maine. (It’s a pdf so I can’t embed it but I’ll include a screenshot.)
Why would both Democratic and Republican administrations create a way for private investors to prey on the elderly or people with disabilities who currently receive Medicare?
Because when Wall St. says Jump, both Democrats and Republicans ask, How high?
The big bucks that flow into campaign coffers on “both sides of the aisle” are what buys representation in this alleged democracy, while the people get fleeced with the government’s cooperation.
We already spend the most on health — enough and then some to fund universal health care — and rather than good health we have lousy outcomes. The fact that we alone of rich countries have no public health system is a direct result of ultra wealthy health “insurance” corporations sponsoring our government.
Gender reveal party in Arizona that sparked widespread fires in 2017.
Another of those lame-brained gender reveal parties has caused considerable distress and damage, this time in New Hampshire, where an explosion big enough to crack nearby house foundations was set off by the expectant father.
Men have long suffered from womb envy, a disempowered feeling of jealousy at females’ superior power to bring life into being. Knowing the science of reproduction, i.e. the role of the male in fertilization, has done little to address this.
Males raised in our current violent, power-tripping society thrash about killing wantonly and setting off explosions that make other males very wealthy.
The modern proclivity to determine an unborn child’s genitalia and then announce it to the world may also be a sort of backlash against the non-binary movement so threatening to traditional order-keepers. (I can remember my Christian fundamentalist grandmother and her peers being horrified when males began growing their hair long in the 60’s “because you can’t tell the boys from the girls.” This always mystified me because I still could.)
This news on damaging property and frightening your neighbors “for fun”, while distressing, was much less so than the overnight report from Israeli-occupied Jerusalem.
Jewish Supremacists carried out a pogram last night in Jerusalem, hundreds marching the streets chanting “death to Arabs” & assaulting Palestinians >100 wounded.The event was not an aberration, but the logical extension of a racist apartheid state
— Ariel Gold אריאל ✡️☮️🕊 (@ArielElyseGold) April 23, 2021
History is doomed to repeat itself, apparently, with fresh victims in every generation.
Should we be worried that the increasingly violent nation of Israel, a best buddy of the increasingly violent nation of the U.S., has nuclear weapons?
Yes.
And we should also be worried that the U.S. military tweeted about its renewed commitment to nuclear war under a Democratic administration.
#USSTRATCOM Posture Statement Preview: The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option. pic.twitter.com/4Oe7xkl05L
Notice how it is “an adversary” that is supposedly threatening the nuclear ceasefire of sorts that has existed since Nagasaki. (I say “of sorts” because of the depleted uranium weapons used to this day by the Pentagon in its never-ending air strikes.)
Our least bad option would be to defund the Pentagon immediately.
This would lead to a halt to encircling and menacing Russia on its European borders, and a halt to menacing China in the South China Sea. Both would significantly reduce the risk of nuclear war as both those nations have nuclear weapons but have not used them.
Defunding the Pentagon would lead to a jobs crisis as every state in the U.S. has deeply embedded building weapons systems into its economy. This could lead to the very welcome development of a Green New Deal conversion to building things we actually need, thus creating even more jobs with federal funding.
Defunding the Pentagon could also lead quickly to the conditions making universal healthcare possible.
The primary reason people in the U.S. are suffering in poverty without adequate or even any healthcare is that the resources to fund Medicare for All are always given to the Pentagon and its contractors.
Defunding the Pentagon would also be the model for defunding the violent police departments who appear determined to spark civil war in the U.S. by slaughtering people of color.
Including children and people on the spectrum and people with mental health issues and people with developmental disabilities. Yup, that’s who the violent white supremacist regime of Germany slaughtered, too, while focusing their cruelty on Jewish Europeans.
Mark Twain said history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
You know what else rhymes? Live by the bomb, die by the bomb. And that’s where the road we’re on right now is headed.
