#universalhealthcoverage — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #universalhealthcoverage, aggregated by home.social.
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Cognitive Dissidence
=================Obama sold us #Obamacare and #healthcare went from complicated & expensive, to complicated, expensive, & mandatory.
Government subsidies ended.
Net result: healthcare is worse than before.There were some benefits to Obamacare, or it would not have passed at all. Some people benefited, though for most others it made #healthcare worse.
People: "We want #UniversalHealthCoverage ! healthcare is too expensive."
Obama: "I will ensure that everyone has healthcare."
People: "Hooray! Obama cares."
Obama: "Now everyone is REQUIRED to have health insurance."
People: "And the government will pay for it, right?"
Obama: "..."
People: "... right?"
Obama: "No, but your preexisting conditions will be covered."
People: "Yay!!!"
Obamacare subsidies were set to expire, in his plan. Obama handed his opponents a ticking time bomb before leaving office.
Trump just didn't renew this crock of a plan, because he is too busy doing other evil shit.
Trump is a daylight robber.
Obama was a midnight thief.
Poor people got clobbered,
electing either, as chief.Mandatory health insurance means more money for the "healthcare industry".
Remember the 2008 market crash that wiped out millions of Americans out of their retirement savings and 401-K? There was corruption behind the scenes, and big insiders made money. It was Obama who stopped that investigation, and it was sneakily moved out of the news cycle.
He fooled the masses with charm and attraction.
Propaganda is a weapon of mass distraction.Watch what he do.
Ignore what he say.
Connect the dots
and follow de monay!I used to laugh at the people who said, "Both sides are the same."
In 2023, I was a programmer with federal clearance, working for the US Department of Veterans Affairs, through #AccentureFederalServices , through a contractor ( #GrayDigital ), when I called out corruption & became a government #whistleblower
I have been #homeless since 2023, hounded by the law, a dozen rides in the back of cop cars, usually handcuffed. Kicked out of hospitals, banks, libraries, stores, & buses. 5 arrests ( 4 under #Biden, 1 under #Trump ), faced #police brutality, spent 6 nights in jail. The last arrest was extrajudicial, and I was not even brought before a judge after spending a night in jail, just told to go away.
I slept outdoors in winters without warm clothes, in muddy orchards, in rain, on cold concrete city pavements, in sweltering heat. I was denied public defense in #courts, though I told judges I was homeless and food insecure. I fought in court, representing myself, while homeless. All charges were dropped. It was whistleblower intimidation. I had committed no crimes. I was assaulted in the streets by the security guard of a #Catholic charity. I have eaten out of garbage cans, & several times, gone hungry for 2-3 days at a time.
In December 2025, I moved to #Tokyo to avoid persecution, though it followed me here. I'm homeless and hungry here as well, probably because the #Japanese government is reluctant to grant me #political #asylum.
Every #Refugee Assistance Organization I contacted in Tokyo has turned me away.
Read:
https://whistleblower.lovestoblog.com/The linked PDF has an appendix with the "receipts", documents that corroborate my account.
#Earth #MAGA #Trump #UsPol
#Truth #propaganda #Heresy #corruption #DNC #RNC #USA
#America #Democrat #Republican
#Japan #government #corruption
#EqualRights #Justice #HumanRights #Law #InternationalLaw #UNHCR
#Amnesty @amnesty_digital_de @amnesty
@amnestynl
#AntiFa #fascism #ChristoFascism -
There were some benefits to Obamacare, otherwise it would not have passed at all. Some people benefited, though for most others it made healthcare worse.
People: "We want #UniversalHealthCoverage ! #healthcare is too expensive."
Obama: "I will ensure that everyone has healthcare."
People: "Hooray! Obama cares."
Obama: "Now everyone is REQUIRED to buy health insurance."
People: "And the government will pay for it, right?"
Obama: "..."
People: "... right?"
Obama: "No, but your preexisting conditions will be covered."
People: "Yay!!!"
Obamacare subsidies were set to expire, even in the original plan. Obama handed his opponents a ticking time bomb before leaving office.
Trump just didn't renew this crock of a plan, because he is too busy doing other evil shit, and doesn't give a damn.
Trump is a daylight robber.
Obama was a midnight thief.
Poor people get clobbered,
electing either, as chief. -
“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhuman”*…
Why are health care costs so high in the U.S.? Harvard public health scholar John McDonough chalks it up to a “wrong turn” in 1980, and the consequences that have ensued…
“What happened in 1980?” John McDonough wondered every time he looked at the numbers.
After 1980, U.S. healthcare became far more expensive than care in peer nations such as France and Germany. In 1980, the U.S. was at the top of a tight pack of industrialized democracies. After that, the cost of American healthcare soared. By 2024, U.S. spending as a percentage of GDP was about 50 percent higher than that of peer nations.
“In the early 1980s, we can see a significant upsurge,” McDonough, professor of the practice of public health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in an interview. “All of a sudden, we jumped from the rest of the crowd and were now in a category by ourselves. Over the following 40, 45 years, the distance kept growing.”
McDonough knew what he could rule out: Any suggestion that Americans get more for their money. On the contrary, millions of U.S. citizens are uninsured; out-of-pocket costs and medical debt are high; and even people with insurance have trouble getting appointments. Meanwhile, physician satisfaction is low, leading to early retirements and migration to nontraditional models like concierge care.
When the pandemic hit, McDonough had time for a deep dive into the issue. This month, after a five-year “labor of love,” he’s presenting his answer in a new book, America’s Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era [here]. In it, McDonough links increases in healthcare costs to a new political and economic era dominated by a belief in an unfettered free market, tax cuts, deregulation, privatization, smaller government, increased immigration, and free trade.
This trend in U.S. policy — “Reaganomics” before it became “neoliberalism” — included tax, spending, and regulatory overhauls instituted during President Ronald Reagan’s eight years in the White House. But McDonough, a Democrat who served 13 years in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, isn’t just interested in Reagan. Over the next 40 years, some presidents adhered to neoliberalism’s tenets but even those who didn’t were influenced by its deep penetration into the nation’s political and economic ecosystem, he says.
McDonough found a guide in the writings of Yale University political scientist Stephen Skowronek, who suggests that presidents should be measured by the durability and influence of their ideas and values well beyond their terms in office. Skowronek identified only five singular and decades-long eras in U.S. history, those of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan.
While Reagan was the first president to espouse neoliberal political and economic philosophy, the core ideas date back decades, fostered by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, who became a key economic adviser to Reagan.
“There was a New Deal-FDR era between 1933 and 1980,” McDonough said. “The neoliberal era that Reagan kicked off saw itself as the corrective to the pro-government prior era. Important dynamic consistencies persisted among Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and even Barack Obama. There were sets of beliefs with a Republican conservative flavor and with a Democratic flavor that were surprisingly consistent.”
When describing the U.S. healthcare system under neoliberalism, McDonough, who worked with U.S. senators on the Affordable Care Act, cites several major effects, chief among them a permissiveness toward corporate mergers and consolidations that reduces competition, and an unleashing of private equity.
Since the 1980s, U.S. healthcare has become increasingly consolidated, dominated by fewer and larger organizations. The two largest dialysis centers have 92 percent of the U.S. market, for example, while the two largest providers of intravenous solutions control 75 percent of the market. The two largest syringe manufacturers have a 69 percent market share.
Consolidation extends to physician and hospital markets, with 90 percent of hospital markets, 65 percent of physician specialist markets, and 74 percent of health insurance markets considered highly concentrated, McDonough writes.
One argument for larger organizations is the potential for cost saving through both efficiencies and a greater ability to negotiate savings, but the cost-saving record of larger organizations in healthcare is poor, McDonough says. He cites a 2022 RAND study that indicates that price increases of between 3 percent and 65 percent accompany hospital mergers.
Private equity’s focus on generating profits to maximize shareholder value conflicts with improving patient care, McDonough argues. When private equity firms target businesses, enhance their operations, and quickly resell them at a profit, critics say the value extraction from the deals creates harmful operating cuts and dismantling rather than business improvement.
McDonough reviews other key forces in the evolution of U.S. healthcare in recent decades, including fragmentation leading to high administrative costs, low spending on public health and preventive care, unequal access and uneven quality of care, and cost shifts onto consumers via copays, coinsurance and other cost-sharing mechanisms, which result in high levels of medical debt.
McDonough offers prescriptions, but recognizes that change will require political buy-in for things such as strengthened antitrust action to break up megacompanies and stronger regulation of prescription drug pricing, both difficult in an era of sharply divided politics. Government, along with industry, needs to reaffirm a commitment to patient care as the center of its efforts, he says, while also foregrounding equity, access, affordability, and population health.
“The damage to U.S. health and medical care from the 40-year neoliberal era has left considerable harm for patients and consumers, for medical workers at all levels, and for public/population health,” McDonough said. “It will take radical action to reinvigorate the values and principles of our health system that have been lost and eroded. An essential way to do this is to understand how we got to this position in the first place.”…
How we got here and how to respond: “How to fix U.S. healthcare? ‘Radical action’,” from @harvardmagazine.bsky.social.
For a case in point, see David Oks‘ “Why American ambulance rides are so expensive” (source of the image at the top).
And for a more straightforward, but somewhat more “radical” prescription than McDonough’s, see: “Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1 Trillion and 114,000 Lives Every Year, Yale Study Projects,” from the Yale School of Public Health: “A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace…”
Finally: this is the third (R)D in a row that focuses on (some of) the consequences of the unholy infection of government by business, largely in the U.S. (though, of course, we can see the phenomenon all over the world). The focus shifts with tomorrow’s post. But before we go, Dylan Riley‘s pithy diagnosis of “the chaotic obscenity of our current moment”: “The Thesis of Political Capitalism.”
* Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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As we actually make America healthy again, we might recall that it was on this date in 1793 that prominent Philadelphia physician (and Declaration of Independence signatory) Benjamin Rush alerted the city’s mayor that an epidemic of mosquito-borne yellow fever was fast emerging.
In the summer of that year, refugees from a yellow fever epidemic in the Caribbean fled to Philadelphia. Within weeks, people throughout the city were experiencing symptoms. By the middle of October, around 100 people were dying from the virus daily. Caring for the victims so strained public services that the local city government collapsed. Philadelphia was also the seat of the United States government at the time, but federal authorities simply evacuated the city in the face of the raging epidemic. Eventually, a cold front eliminated Philadelphia’s mosquito population, and the death toll fell to 20 per day by late October. By the time the epidemic ended, roughly 5,000 people had died.
Today, a vaccine prevents yellow fever in much of the world, though thousands of unvaccinated people still die every year from the disease.
The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 (source) #ambulance #BenjaminRush #culture #health #healthCare #history #JohnMcDonough #medicine #neoliberalism #Philadelphia #privateEquity #publicHealth #Science #singlePayer #singlePayerHealthCoverage #universalHealthCare #universalHealthCoverage #YellowFever -
🚨 Breaking News: #Yale discovers that saving lives and money is a good thing! 💡🙄 Who would have thought that universal health coverage could be beneficial? Next up: water is wet, and the sky is blue. 🌧️🌐
https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/universal-health-coverage-could-save-one-trillion-dollars-and-114000-lives-every-year/ #Discovery #UniversalHealthCoverage #SavingLives #MoneyMatters #BreakingNews #HackerNews #ngated -
Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1T and 114,000 Lives a Year, Yale Study
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49332981
#HackerNews #UniversalHealthCoverage #HealthCareSavings #YaleStudy #PublicHealth #LivesSaved
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The first lesson is to look at defenders of the US health system with horrified amazement when they say this can't be done. The second is to act on the knowledge that it can. >>
Lessons from #Indonesia ’s 10-year journey towards #universalhealthcoverage
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GLOBAL HEALTH GOVERNANCE QUESTIONS LOOM AS WHO REVISES OPERATIONAL APPROACH
The WHO is changing its plan to help all countries give healthcare to everyone. This is after COVID-19. See what this means for you.
#WHO, #UniversalHealthCoverage, #GlobalHealth, #HealthForAll, #PublicHealth
https://newsletter.tf/who-changes-health-plan-to-help-countries-reach-everyone/
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The WHO is changing its goals to help more people get healthcare. This is a big change after the COVID-19 pandemic.
#WHO, #UniversalHealthCoverage, #GlobalHealth, #HealthForAll, #PublicHealth
https://newsletter.tf/who-changes-health-plan-to-help-countries-reach-everyone/ -
#UniversalHealthCoverage by 2030 is possible. Over the next 5 years, improved policies must: 1. ensure free essential health care for the poor 2. address high spending on medicines
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Healthcare costs shouldn’t trap people in poverty, and we must take decisive action toward making #HealthForAll a reality for all. Read the global monitoring report on #UniversalHealthCoverage: bit.ly/48R2ytX bsky.app/profile/who....
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:univ47kzorwxjih3lqzrnwmv/post/3m7bwivt5zc2x -
Today, 1.6 billion people are pushed deeper into poverty due to health expenses. Read more in the newly released global monitoring report on #UniversalHealthCoverage: bit.ly/48R2ytX
Most countries make progress t... -
@rbreich Audacity / hope / change / yes-we-can Obama sold US out in 2009-10,😡 didn't fight hard enough for public option, never mind single-payer.😡ACA further enabled insurance mafia extortion, infrastructure.😡 Former Sen. Tom Harkin: Dems "…had a huge majority in the House… 60 votes in the Senate… we blew it…"
#TomHarkin #Obamacare #Romneycare #publicOption #singlePayer #M4A #MedicareForAll #universalhealthcoverage #UHC #AmeriCare -
@estelle
"healthcare executive" = "health insurance mafia boss" #HealthInsurance get multi-millionaire rich, punish the 99%P.S. Thurs. Dec. 12 is annual UN WHO Universal Health Coverage Day
#UniversalHealthCoverageDay #UHCDay #UniversalHealthCoverage #HealthForAll #UNWHO #UHC2030 #SinglePayer #MedicareForAll #AmeriCare #EverybodyInNobodyOut
https://universalhealthcoverageday.org/ -
@MJmusicinears
PSA: Thurs. Dec. 12 is annual UN WHO Universal Health Coverage Day
#UniversalHealthCoverageDay #UHCDay #UniversalHealthCoverage #HealthForAll #UNWHO #UHC2030 #SinglePayer #MedicareForAll #AmeriCare #EverybodyInNobodyOut
https://universalhealthcoverageday.org/