Friday, December 24, 2021

It’s not Biden, Trump, the GOP, QAnon or Fox News. United States is number one in COVID deaths because for profit capitalist medical care is a gargantuan failure. In 2024 Trump & the GOP could blame Biden for that failure.

"In early September, amid the delta variant surge, Biden reiterated the promise that “every American, no matter their income, can access free and convenient tests.”

Now, nearly a full year into Biden’s term, as the virus has mutated its way through the Greek alphabet to the omicron variant, testing is in short supply in many places, leaving frustrated Americans waiting in long lines for tests — if they can get them at all.

That is feeding into a wave of concern, despondency and in some places near-frenzy at the likely approach of yet another spike in a pandemic the country has battled for nearly two years. This late-December disarray — crowded testing sites, empty drugstore shelves — is raising fresh questions about how Biden and his team have executed on his pledge to defeat the pandemic.

“We’re going from emergency to emergency. We need a strategic plan, and executing on the strategic plan and just making it happen,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, a physician and bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who was on Biden’s covid advisory team during the transition. “You need a general getting all this done…" 
"A larger question for many health experts is whether the White House will see this moment as a time to return to the idea of a “wartime footing” — given that the country is seeing about 9,000 covid deaths a week.

'One can make a strong argument that we are at war, but for the White House to recommit to a wartime position, that’s really hard to do,'Kocher said. 'It’s going to end in people saying, ‘Why didn’t you win the war the first time?’ It’s hard to go back. But biology is hard.”

FROM: 

The Washington Post

Inside the administration’s failure to avert a covid testing shortfall

By Annie Linskey

December 23, 2021

***


I came up with a vaccine,” Trump boasted in an interview released Wednesday to right-wing media personality Candace Owens. Despite Owens’s disagreement, Trump insisted that “if you take the vaccine, you’re protected” and “people aren’t dying when they take the vaccine.”

Trump has also been publicly encouraging people to get booster shots. He’s practically sounded like Anthony S. Fauci.

“Retcon” is short for “retroactive continuity,” in which existing stories are retroactively rewritten to accord with a new and contradictory story someone wants to tell. In an early famous case, Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes, then after fans demanded more stories, decided that Holmes had only faked his death. Retcons are particularly common in soap operas (Last season was all a dream!) and comics (That other stuff happened in a parallel universe!)."


MORE AT:

The Washington Post

Opinion: How Republicans will retcon the past to try to reelect Trump

Paul Waldman


"Trump’s “Warp Speed” vaccine push is one of the most underrated achievements of his presidency, and it understandably galls Trump to be blamed for covid-19 deaths when, in fact, he could more justifiably be credited for saving millions of lives…

To his credit, Trump seems undeterred. He considers the vaccines his babies, he believes in their efficacy, and he wants more Americans to embrace them. As Biden pointed out, for once he and Trump are on the same page."

MORE AT:
The Washington Post

***

"Biology is hard" on ordinary people when the health care they can get is managed not for their outcomes but for the profits of a health care system designed to benefit a few wealthy investors:

"Abstract

The current economic crisis in Europe has challenged the basis of the economic model that currently prevails in much of the industrialised world. It has revealed a system that is managed not for the benefit of the people but rather for the corporations and the small elite who lead them, and which is clearly unsustainable in its present form. Yet, there is a hidden consequence of this system: an unfolding crisis in health care, driven by the greed of corporations whose profit-seeking model is also failing. Proponents of commodifying healthcare simultaneously argue that the cost of providing care for ageing populations is unaffordable while working to create demand for their health care products among those who are essentially healthy. Will healthcare be the next profit-fuelled investor bubble? In this paper, we call on health professionals to heed the warnings from the economic crisis and, rather than stand by while a crisis unfolds, act now to redirect increasingly market-oriented health systems to serve the common good."

Conclusions

European citizens today are like those who looked around them in Eastern Europe in 1989 and realised that the systems they inhabited were being run not for them but for a small elite. These systems were becoming increasingly dysfunctional and were failing to deliver on what they had promised. They had to change and they did. Today, it is equally clear that our systems have to change, but so far they have not.

One of the first things that new public health trainees are taught is the importance of looking upstream, to the fundamental determinants of health. To make a difference to population health it is necessary to tackle the causes of the causes.30 The policies of austerity being pursued in Europe today are already impacting adversely on health, with rising suicides and denial of necessary care.6 Yet, as is now increasingly clear, they are not even doing what they were designed to achieve in the economy, instead they are choking recovery. As this paper has shown, many of those who promoted the deregulation of financial markets are now turning to the social sector as the next big opportunity to turn a profit. Yet their actions will not help those who need care and will medicalise the problems, real and imagined, of those who do not need it. Inevitably, scarce resources that could be used to alleviate genuine suffering will be wasted."

More at the Journal of Public Health Research

The Crisis of Capitalism and the Marketisation of Health Care: the Implications for Public Health Professionals

2012 Dec 28; 1(3): 236–239. 


***

There's hope.

ALSO SEE:

"Introduced during the Trump administration, “direct contracting” is a Medicare payment model that allows private medical practices and insurance companies to arrange set payments from Medicare for the year, rather than bill the administration for services. But critics warn that the system, which has continued under the Biden administration, is being exploited by venture capitalists. Merrill Goozner is a reporter who has spent decades covering the slow-moving crisis of American health care, and he joins Ryan Grim to discuss the present and possible future of Medicare.

[Musical introduction.]

Ryan Grim: You may not have heard much about it, but in the Medicare system, there’s now something called direct contracting. It was started under Trump, and it has continued under Biden, and it allows private physician practices, hospitals, or insurance companies to contract directly with Medicare and get a set amount of money over the year. That contrasts with traditional Medicare, in which healthcare providers bill Medicare directly for services. 

The stated point of direct contracting is to experiment with new models that would save money and improve care, but its critics warn that it’s a runaway scam that is being exploited by venture capital and private equity firms, and that it’ll lead to worse care in the long run, based on private equity’s poor record of delivering care in other settings. 

The project in question was designed by Adam Boehler, who was previously a dorm mate of Jared Kushner’s, and also the founder of Landmark Health, a VC-backed healthcare company. He was brought in to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) under Trump, and as he was designing this new model, career staff became concerned about conflicts of interest. 

When a calender alert went out to staff in May 2019 reading “discussion with Landmark on the direct contracting model,” career staff were appalled. I obtained a group text in which they commiserated with one another and expressed their disgust over the corporate influence. This is a family podcast, so I’ll edit the messages, but a sampling: “This stuff is so effing gross,” wrote one. “Ugh. What the eff,” replied another. A third sent a link to the Office of the Inspector General, suggesting somebody report it.

These were not off-the-wall concerns. The Office of the General Counsel for the Health and Human Services Department warned, in comments on a draft of the proposal that I obtained, that it appeared as if the new project was being set up to benefit specific companies: “We are concerned based on the regular references to organizations like Chen Med, Oak Street Health, and Verily in the comments and otherwise, that this model has been designed with specific private sector entities in mind. If accurate, this could create ethics concerns, as the creation of this model would give those entities a leg up in the market.”

And the model has indeed been extremely attractive to VC- and private equity-backed firms. It’s now being overseen by Liz Fowler, who serves as director of CMMI. She was previously the top healthcare aide to Max Baucus during the Obamacare fight, and if you remember, Baucus was the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, which wrote the meat of the bill. CMMI itself came out of the Affordable Care Act. Previously, Fowler had worked in the insurance industry, and between her time with Baucus and now, she was an executive at Johnson and Johnson.

This week, I published a story about the roots of the direct contracting program. Not long afterward, Fowler appeared at a conference by video in Washington and responded to the story. She appeared to be reading from a prepared statement. 

Liz Fowler: I have [perceived or received] the concerns that have been raised, some legitimate and some overblown. But as a responsible steward of Medicare, we appreciate the input and we are continuously looking for improvement opportunities, including how the model can help achieve our goals for advancing health equity. So, I know that wasn’t part of the question, but since I had the opportunity and since this issue has been in the press, I wanted to take the chance to weigh in and give you my perspective. 

RG: Now, claiming that your for-profit model is actually in the business of generating equity — and they don’t mean equity as in the stock market — is a rather old corporate trick. But what makes this story so interesting is that the principle behind this new Medicare effort is actually quite a good one."

MORE AT: 

The Intercept

Deconstructed: A New Way to Think About Medicare

Ryan Grim


Monday, December 6, 2021

Boris Johnson's Law to Remedy the Distress of England "Enabling Act" "Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich 1933" "Boris Johnson wants to weaken the power of courts to overrule decisions by ministers through the process of judicial review"

 Boris Johnson wants to weaken the power of courts to overrule decisions by ministers through the process of judicial review, according to reports.

The Times reported the PM wants to allow ministers to effectively throw out any legal rulings they do not agree with.

Boris Johnson ‘planning reforms which would let ministers overrule judicial decisions’

Reported move triggers backlash from lawyers, with one senior QC quoted as saying the prime minister is seeking a ‘more compliant judiciary’

Ella Glover December 6, 2021




Boris Johnson's Law to Remedy the Distress of England "Enabling Act" "Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich



Enabling Act of 1933


The Enabling Act (German: Ermächtigungsgesetz) of 1933, officially titled Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich ("Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich"),[1] was a law that gave the German Cabinet—most importantly, the Chancellor—the powers to make and enforce laws without the involvement of the Reichstag and with no need to consult with Weimar President Paul von Hindenburg. Critically, the Enabling Act allowed the Chancellor to bypass the system of checks and balances in the government and these laws could explicitly violate individual rights prescribed in the Weimar Constitution.[2


Saturday, December 4, 2021

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. You can’t do “Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” if you’re dead. And the Republican Party is intent on killing you.

"President Biden announced an array of measures Thursday to protect Americans from a potential winter surge of coronavirus infections, as five states confirmed cases linked to the omicron variant and international researchers shared data indicating that the still-mysterious variant may be able to reinfect people who had prior infections.

“We’re going to fight this variant with science and speed, not chaos and confusion,” Biden said in a speech at the National Institutes of Health, appealing to Americans to put aside partisan differences and continue to get vaccinated, wear masks and take other precautions. “This is a moment we can put the divisiveness behind us, I hope.”

The president’s plan includes campaigns to increase vaccinations and booster shots, more stringent testing for international travelers and plans to make rapid at-home coronavirus testing free for more people. While some of the measures are new — notably a plan to launch “family mobile vaccination clinics,” where all eligible members of a family could simultaneously get shots and boosters — others build on existing tactics, such as rallying businesses to impose vaccination-or-testing mandates for employees.

Public health experts praised aspects of Biden’s plan but called for further investments in testing, screening and combating misinformation about the vaccines. They also said Biden’s vow that the nation will ward off omicron after it “beat back” the delta variant doesn’t reflect a reality where the virus continues to circulate at high levels, with more than 140,000 coronavirus-linked deaths in the United States since the start of September.

It’s the “most aggressive pandemic plan yet for the United States, but still falls short of all that’s needed now,” said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute.

Omicron mutations alarm scientists, but new variant first must prove it can outcompete delta

Biden’s package of coronavirus strategies comes as officials confirmed omicron-linked infections in California, Minnesota, Colorado, New York and Hawaii, and as South African researchers reported that the new variant appeared to be linked to increased coronavirus re-infections, although the new cases were mild. Scientists caution that it will take days, if not weeks, to fully understand whether the new variant can evade current vaccines and treatments, or cause more severe symptoms in infected people."


MORE AT:

Washington Post

‘We are pulling out all the stops’: White House details strategies to combat delta, omicron variants

Biden to promise at-home test kits for no cost, more access to booster shots, stricter testing of travelers coming to U.S.


***


"For McConnell, the conservative rebellion over vaccine mandates is yet another challenge to band his 50 members together and avert catastrophe. A second one awaits around the corner as a potential U.S. credit default looms later this month. McConnell has vowed there will be no shutdown and no default; both may depend to on whether he can rein in all of his members.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), who's as conservative as they come, said that while she wants to defund vaccine mandates, she’s going to trust McConnell to shape the party's strategy.

“My gut tells me, let leadership do the best they can and trust them," Lummis said. "I just am going to trust the people who are leading and negotiating ... that's how flexible I'm willing to be."

With the pandemic still clouding everyday life nationwide, many Republicans believe a shutdown over vaccine mandates will reflect poorly on their party and argue there are way better ways to make their point. Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) wants to channel the GOP frustration with required vaccinations into a vote next week to roll back President Joe Biden’s mandate. That would avoid his party taking the hit for a shutdown, even if it’s a short one.

“Most everybody agrees with me,” Braun said. “Almost everybody.”

POLITICO

McConnell's latest challenge: Stopping a shutdown over vaccine mandates

A small group of conservatives wants to force a funding showdown over Covid inoculation mandates. But most in the GOP leader's conference aren't convinced.

By BURGESS EVERETT

12/01/2021 01:48 PM EST

Updated: 12/01/2021 04:47 PM EST