Category: Health Care

This is not the Top Ten you might think. These are the Top Ten Humanitarian Crises from around the world that are selected by Doctors Without Borders at the end of each year.

  Aid Blocked and Diseases Neglected

New York, December 21, 2009 – Civilians attacked, bombed, and cut off from aid in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), along with stagnant funding for treating HIV/AIDS and ongoing neglect of other diseases, were among the worst emergencies in 2009, the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reported today in its annual list of the “Top Ten” humanitarian crises.

Continuing crises in north and south Sudan, along with the failure of the international community to finally combat childhood malnutrition were also included on this year’s list.  The list is drawn from MSF’s operational activities in close to 70 countries, where the organization’s medical teams witnessed some of the worst humanitarian conditions.

David Swanson, Washington Director of Democrats.com, talks with Paul Jay of The Real News, dissecting the politics of health care reform and the roadblocks in the way of getting to a real reform that serves peoples needs rather than politicians needs and the fact that politicians, even democrats and so-called “progressive” politicians and not just republicans, are the major roadblocks.

David Swanson is the creator of ImpeachCheney.org, co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org and Washington Director of Democrats.com A writer and organizer, Swanson has worked for ACORN, the International Labor Communications Association, Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign and many others. Swanson is the author of the new book “Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union” by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when his tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book.

There’s a coalition of “progressive” unity-schtickers lamenting the sudden loss of support for the President and his policies.  United we stand, divided we fall, they say, and all that crap we have been hearing since well before Democrats took Congress.  These Democratic appeasers are united behind a person and party, not the issues, and therefore take issue with those who prefer the “principle” to the “man” or “tribe.”  To them, people like myself are purity trolls, like Republican Tea-baggers, regardless of what the tribe stands for.  Thus, they will tolerate any and every thing, as long as it’s served up on a plate.

This rapid loss in support for Obama has occurred for several reasons.  First, this was a very important election after eight years of neoliberalism on acid.  Second, due to a certain psychological pre-eminence of various crises at this particular time in history, we have been keenly aware of the importance of all this promise for hope and change, including the specific issues and policies that would indicate change.  Third Barack Obama has signaled in all major areas of crisis, from warfare (Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and now, Yemen), the political crisis off giving welfare to deranged profit-takers ($12 trillion dollars and counting to casino gamblers), social welfare (this fucked health care bill), the Unitary Executive and civil rights (blocking judicial activity surrounding Bush era war crimes, torture, human rights, etc.), to environmental degradation (Copenhagen), and boy howdy that’s a lot of signals, that his promises of hope and change are full-on bullshit.  If you want to call questions of war & peace, basic human rights, clear-cut questions of law, rampant and encroaching crony capitalism and fascism,  and environmental crises “purity tests,” be my  guest, you retarded fucking gink, but it shows zero intellectual honesty.

6 Months Gains in Stock prices — 3 Health Insurance Giants

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6 Months Gains in Stock prices — 3 more Health Insurance Giants

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Notice the recent spike in price, in the last few weeks, when they knew “Santa got their wish list, and was making a special trip, just for them!”

Welcome to this weeks Health and Fitness.

First cancer genome sequences reveal how mutations lead to disease

The pattern of mutations in cancer could eventually be used to tailor treatments to particular patients

Scientists have reconstructed the biological history of two types of cancer in a genetic tour de force that promises to transform medical treatment of the disease.

The feat, a world first, lays bare every genetic mutation the patients have acquired over their lifetimes that eventually caused healthy cells in their bodies to turn into tumours.

The procedure gives doctors a profound insight into the biological causes of a patient’s cancer and marks a major milestone in progress towards personalised anticancer therapies and strategies to prevent the disease.

“This is a really fundamental moment in the history of cancer research. We have never seen cancer revealed in this way before,” said Mike Stratton, a co-leader of the Cancer Genome Project at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge.

This is a stunning breakthrough in understanding how cancer mutates, treating it and, perhaps one day, cure it.

Turkana, in his essay at the Left Coaster, provides more information and further discussion in understanding the importance of this monumental break through.

Huge Medical Breakthrough: Cancer Genome Sequenced

As is now custom, I’ll try to include the more interesting and pertinent articles that will help the community awareness of their health and bodies. This essay will not be posted anywhere else due to constraints on my time and in January it will be coming to you from Paris, Fr. for awhile. Please feel free to make suggestions for improvement and ask questions, I’ll answer as best I can.

Cross-posted at Daily Kos

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Jacob Heilbrunn has a new essay up at the Huffington Post titled “Please, Cut Obama Some Slack.”  It is Exhibit A in hero mythology of the President, as well as a prime example of chastising anyone — even progressives — who would dare criticize any of Obama’s policies.

A year ago, Barack Obama was a hero for Democrats. Now he’s becoming a villain. Have the Democrats lost their minds?

The tenebrous story is recounted by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post, who notes that some liberals are even starting to join forces with the tea party to decry Obama over the confirmation of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. The decriers are also upset about Obama’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, the administration’s readiness to make concessions on health care, its failure to shutter Guantanamo, along with a host of other grievances.

Apparently, because some liberals have chosen not to regard President Obama as a “hero” and have begun to seriously question some of the policies of the Obama Administration, that qualifies Heilbrunn to assert that those same liberals have “lost their minds.”  Heilbrunn doesn’t identify in his article who those allegedly insane Democrats are — though for the record, Dana Milbank does, naming liberal voices such as Howard Dean, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, MoveOn.org, John Conyers, and Alan Grayson as the progressives who are supposedly “joining forces with the tea party,” to use Heilbrunn’s language.

Economic Royalists:

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for a second term, delivered at Philadelphia on 27 June 1936, said, “The economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power.”

(emphasis added)

http://www.answers.com/topic/e…

How about a “Case Study” using a recent history of their HandiWork … and their apparent Victory — AGAIN!

Olbermann’s Special Comment, Wednesday December 16:

“They must now not make the defeat worse by passing a hollow shell of a bill just for the sake of a big-stage signing ceremony. This bill, slowly bled to death by the political equivalent of the leeches that were once thought state-of-the-art-medicine, is now little more than a series of microscopically minor tweaks of a system which is the real-life, here-and-now version, of the malarkey of the Town Hallers. The American Insurance Cartel is the Death Panel, and this Senate bill does nothing to destroy it. Nor even to satiate it.”

“It merely decrees that our underprivileged, our sick, our elderly, our middle class, can be fed into it, as human sacrifices to the great maw of corporate voraciousness, at a profit per victim of 10 cents on the dollar instead of the current 20. Even before the support columns of reform were knocked down, one by one, with the kind of passive defense that would embarrass a touch-football player – single-payer, the public option, the Medicare Buy-In – before they vanished, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the part of this bill that would require you to buy insurance unless you could prove you could not afford it, would cost a family of four with a household income of 54-thousand dollars a year, 17 percent of that income. Nine thousand dollars a year. Just for the insurance,”

“That was with a public option.That was with some kind of check on the insurance companies. That was before – as Howard Dean pointed out – the revelation that the cartel will still be able to charge older people more than others; will – at the least – now be able to charge much more, maybe 50 percent more, for people with pre-existing conditions – pre-existing conditions; you know, like being alive.”

h/t gqmartinez @ correntewire.com

The capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible, as did our capacity to exempt from mercy those who…[couldn’t afford it.]

I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds…

I- like any head of state- reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend [the profits of the ruling classes].

Third, a just peace includes not only civil and political rights – it must encompass economic security and opportunity. For true peace is not just freedom from fear, but freedom from want.

It is undoubtedly true that development rarely takes root without security; it is also true that security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine they need to survive. It does not exist where children cannot aspire to a decent education or a job that supports a family. The absence of hope can rot a society from within.

And that is why helping farmers feed their own people – or nations educate their children and care for the sick – is not mere charity.

Let me make one final point about the use of force…

–Obama’s Nobel speech on vaporizing the poorest innocents at home and abroad

I don’t get it. I expected a lot more from Senator Bernie Sanders.

But tonight Bernie Sanders just caved in to pressure from Obama, Rahm Emanual and Reid to withdraw a formal consideration of his own single-payer healthcare amendment, after Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) had initiated a procedural manuever to force the measure to be read out loud on the Senate floor.

The amendment would have extended Medicare coverage to all who wanted it.

Senate aides estimated that the “bill reading” would have taken eight to 10 hours, which would have sidelined the healthcare debate on the bad “Obama-Emanual-Baucus-Lieberman” bill as Democratic leaders are attempting to pass it (a junk bill) by Christmas.

But why didn’t Sanders call their bluff and go ahead with the vote anyway? By pulling his own amendment off the table all by himself, this just further creates the unnecessary illusion that Medicare expansion is an unworthy subject to even discuss or consider.

Even though the Sanders amendment would never get close to 60 votes, the act of allowing the bill to go to formal debate and consideration would have provided a badly needed educational tool for the public, and it would have put each and every U.S. Senator formally on notice, and on the record as to the key question of whether they want to really solve the Health Care crisis, or whether they just want to keep the public held hostage to a corrupt Insurance Monopoly that steals their money.

I wanted to see that vote!

So did you!

Here are American values in a nutshell.

• Today, the House approved by an overwhelming 395-34 vote a ‘budget’ of $636 billion for 10 months for the Pentagon.

• In November, the House passed by a narrow 220-214 vote legislation that would “cost $1.1 trillion over 10 years and extend insurance coverage to 36 million uninsured Americans.”

The Senate will approve the 2010 Pentagon funding later this month and its price tag will likely increase.

In 10 months, we Americans will allow the Pentagon to spend more than half of what the House is willing to spend on watered down health reform legislation during 10 years. The Senate cannot even be convinced to pass the bill the House barely approved.

This is an example of what we value as a people. I think it is morally and fiscally wrong.

This is what is wrong with Congress. This is what is wrong with America. This is what I think we must change if we are to survive as a nation.

 

^{Cross-posted from Daily Kos.}

 

Obama’s effort on the signature issue of healthcare has been truly pathetic.  More generally, he seems to have no problem with US citizens paying tithes and bailouts directly to US corporations as government policy, despite what he says publicly.  

Populist Rhetoric and Symbolic Actions

Barack Obama is so mad at Wall Street! Here, just look at what he told 60 Minutes last night:

BARACK OBAMA: I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street…Nothing has been more frustrating to me this year than having to salvage a financial system at great expense to taxpayers that was precipitated, that was caused, in part by completely irresponsible actions on Wall Street…the people on Wall Street still don’t get it. They don’t get it…you guys are drawing down $10, $20 million bonuses after America went through the worst economic year that’s it’s gone through in decades, and you guys caused the problem.

But he’s not just all talk. He’s also taking action! He’s so furious he’s going to have an hour-long meeting with Wall Street executives. Dear god in heaven!

Meanwhile, the banksters continue pissing on Barack Obama’s shoes, even after he put on a public show to berate them for their financial malpractice.

… Said one CEO who attended: “I expected to be taken to the woodshed, but the tone was quite the opposite.”

Said another senior exec with knowledge of the meeting: “The whole thing was so telegraphed that not much was accomplished, other than giving Obama a PR stunt … He might have sounded mean on ’60 Minutes,’ but during the meeting he was a hell of a lot nicer.”

So far, the dude’s been painfully, strikingly ineffectual, with resulting outcomes always favoring corporations and screwing the public, even though health care and job prospects suggest a fucking blowout for Democrats in 2010.  Worst, his actions, as distinct from his “word-itude,” suggest he is a total corporate sell-out willing to alter the Constitutional fabric of our nation.  Never mind the ineptitude and ineffectualness of Mr. Constitutional Law. And never mind 2010. What a total fuck-face.