Tag Archives | Health Care

CounterSpin interview with David Himmelstein on privatized Medicare.

A new report out from the National Center for Health Statistics finds that U.S. maternal deaths have increased by an alarming 40% since 2020.

The German Democratic Republic (DDR) was a socialist state founded in East Germany in 1949 as a democratic, antifascist reaction to the Second World War and the subsequent restoration of monopoly capitalism in West Germany.

In the last days of the Trump administration, the U.S. government returned Cuba to its state sponsors of terrorism list. This was a vindictive act. Trump said it was because Cuba played host to guerrilla groups from Colombia, which was actually part of Cuba’s role as host of the peace talks.

Reflecting on the recent Kenyan elections, radical activist and poet Lena Anyuolo explains why she did not vote. How could anyone vote in elections that offered no alternative? Anyuolo explains, ‘Politicians crawl out like cockroaches from dark holes every five years; fat and destructive, ready to unleash more destruction.’

In just five minutes we’ll tell you what you need to know about the shadowy power of pharmacy benefit managers.

To calculate the true extent and burden of this debt, the KHN-NPR investigation draws on a nationwide poll conducted by KFF for this project. The poll was designed to capture not just bills patients couldn’t afford, but other borrowing used to pay for health care as well.

As we enter the new year almost two years after the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020, the official death toll from COVID-19 sits just below 5.5 million people.

“We are seeing massive ripple effects across the country for other states taking on displaced patients.”

Instead of a health system striving to provide universal healthcare, a fragmented, profit-driven market ‘non-system’ has emerged. The 1980s’ neo-liberal counter-revolution against the historic 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration is responsible.

Decades of public health cuts have quietly taken a huge human toll, now even more pronounced with the pandemic. Austerity programmes, by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, have forced countries to cut public spending, including health provisioning.

COVID-19 patients dying on the streets gasping for oxygen. Hundreds of wailing, desperate folks searching for hospital beds to access treatment. Even the dead denied dignified funerals, their bodies dumped unceremoniously in the rivers of India.

COVID-19 has exacerbated the gendered impact of care work globally, but lessons can be learned from countries like China that have relied on community organizations for solutions.

Senior care puts care workers into racialized, gendered, and age hierarchies, making it difficult for them to achieve social and economic mobility. 

Stencilled in red on the walls of Santiago, Chile is a statement of fact: ‘your privileges are not universal’ (tus privilegios no son universales).

January 7th is the deadliest day of the pandemic so far, 89 people died in the last 24-hour period. By every measure the situation is critical, and there can be no question remaining that stronger measures are needed to control the devastation the virus is wreaking.

Jhuliana Rodrigues works as a nurse technician at the Hospital São Vicente in Jundiaí, Brazil. “It is very difficult,” she says of her job these days. Brazil has just passed 100,000 deaths from COVID-19, with 3 million Brazilians infected with the virus.

Covid-19 has laid bare a fundamental truth: that capitalist healthcare is a contradiction in terms, since capital–like the killer virus–cares for nothing but reproducing itself.

The media likes to frame the limits of political struggle as between the Democratic and Republican parties, as if each side upholds a radically different political vision.