Category: Health Care

Imagine vice presidents, Board of Directors, and stock holders all cashing in on denying you benefits while collecting your premiums.  If you are uninsured, try calling any one of the 23 CEOs listed below and see if they will give you free insurance.  

Image:  Seppo Leinonen

One of my relatives on the other side of the political spectrum forwarded an email to me from a group called the American Family Association (why oh why do these folks have to usurp such a nice concept like “family” and twist it into indecipherable political contortions?). Seems that they’re trying to do a writing campaign to the White House to force President Obama to backtrack on his rescinding the Bush administration’s rule that would allow doctors or hospitals to deny people health care if their religion trumped the need of the person standing in front of them asking for help.

A reminder that change may have come to Washington, but it hasn’t made it to Iraq yet.

Iraq Moratorium #19 is only 10 days away, on Friday, Feb. 20.

Here’s one idea for action from United for Peace and Justice:  Schedule a meeting with your members of Congress, who will be home on a recess that week, and ask them to end the war and occupation of Iraq.

Of course you can always protest outside of their offices.  But why not ask for a face-to-face conversation and see what happens?  UFPJ says:

To make sure you can get appointments with your elected officials you need to call now. Go here to find out who your Representative or Senators are and their contact information.  We want members of Congress to know they are getting calls from UFPJ. We want legislators to know that we are connecting the issues of the war and the economy.

There are three messages we want to deliver to the members of Congress.

1) The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan must end! We believe that security will be forged internationally and diplomatically, not by the United States unilaterally occupying nations. Furthermore, the economic crisis has created and exposed tremendous human needs in our own country. Millions are without health care, stable housing, and living wage jobs. The priority of the national treasury must go from a war economy to a peace economy where the winners are all of us, rather than military contractors. A first step in this process must be to stop the funding for these wars! It is critically important that Congress knows the antiwar movement is as strong as ever.

2) It is time to fix our country’s health care system! We encourage you to support HR 676, the Single Payer Health Care bill. Passage of HR 676 would mean that health care is provided by a single source, rather than dozens of private insurance companies making profits. This would be a cheaper way to cover health care costs, as it is all over the world where governments guarantee health care. Health insurance being separated from employment would also help U.S. corporations who cannot compete with international corporations, who do not have to provide employee health care. For more information on this bill go here.

3) We support passage of the Employee Free Choice Act!  This bill allows workers to unionize when a majority of people demonstrates their support for a union representing them by signing union cards. Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would result in more workplaces being unionized. With unionization, workers get the benefit of collective bargaining, which results in higher wages. Higher wages means more spending power that boosts the economy; higher wages means families can be supported without every adult working multiple jobs, which leaves little time for families, children, and being an informed citizen. For more information on this bill go to

AFL-CIO site.

Support for both HR 676 and EFCA is a good place to start. UFPJ member groups such as Progressive Democrats of America and US Labor Against the War are already working on them.

Everyone doesn’t live in a town where there is a Congressional office, of course. But you can bring cell phones and contact numbers to your Moratorium event and place calls from there. Keep the heat on.

This idea also ties in with the Raise Hell for Molly Ivins Campaign, which has been urging contact with members of Congress, in their home offices, on the Third Friday of the month and has produced a video with Vietnam vet Ron Kovic to promote it.

But we’re not telling you what to do to mark the Iraq Moratorium.  That’s not our role.  It’s simply to encourage people to do something, individually or collectively, on the Third Friday of the month to end the war and occupation.

Whatever you’re planning, please list it and share your plans with others. Here’s the link.

To see what others are doing, read reports from last month, get some new ideas, read about the peace movement, donate to Iraq Moratorium, buy a T-shirt, or just surf, visit the website/

Debbie and I were informed about a week ago that our doctor was changing locations, leaving the Family Health Center in Montclair for another practice a half hour away.  We are left with the decision of whether to follow her or keep going to the Family Health Center.

For me, that’s not as straightforward a decision as it would be for most people.

Treatment by medical personnel, doctors, nurses and office staff can be a critical issue or transfolk.

Of course, I can only speak for myself and my experience should not be deemed universal.  That could be the point…or at least one of them.

Crossposted from DailyKos.

This is Really Hard to Believe is the name of a new article by Barry Nolan that is now up on the ePluribus Media journal. The title of this diary reflects three things this non-diary diary represents: a shameless plug about a shamefully neglected topic, and the unbelievable stories that Barry encounters at the Battered Mother’s Custody Conference (YouTube link) that was recently held in Albany.

You need to read Barry’s piece. Make the jump for a little more info, a minor rant, and the opportunity to flame me in comments if this diary offends you.

The fact that this topic often fails to receive the attention that it deserves offends me.

I like this guy.  A lot.  And I like that Biden picked him.  I know Biden voted bad on the bankruptcy bill, but I think that was for his Deleware banks.  That he picked Jerod Bernstein today to be his economic advisor is good news for progressives.

Vice President-elect Joe Biden on Friday named Jared Bernstein as his chief economic policy adviser, a new post created as the nation faces a recession.

Bernstein, a senior economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, has been an informal economic adviser to President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign. He also served as deputy chief economist under Labor Secretary Robert Reich during the Clinton administration.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

Today, he published an article about job losses.  This is Bernstein:

Our job market is now shedding jobs at a truly alarming rate, a rate measurably worse than past recessions. We face an emergency that certainly equals those in the financial markets in recent months. The American workforce is too big to fail.

No shit.  But it’s good to hear it from those who will be in power.

More on Bernstein and other good signals from Obama today, after the fold.  

This from Richard Spencer in Beijing, this morning:

A statement posted on online government media overnight said that 294,000 babies and young children had suffered “urinary system abnormalities” after drinking formula milk from Sanlu, the company most seriously affected, and other brand names.

It now says as many as six infants died and up to 294,000 suffered from urinary tract ailments including kidney stones. That figure is a lot higher than had previously been reported. More than 850 children are still being treated in hospital; at least 150 of them are said to be seriously ill. Why? Last year, China’s dairy industry was worth $18 billion. That’s a whole lot of dairy products.

Having written some scary diaries on water scarcity, tainted foods and global food shortages among others, it’s high time to write about something positive for this festive holiday. Like the types of foods that would boost your moods in these recessionary (and uncertain) times. Recent research has confirmed the existence of a link between eating certain types of foods and the act of feeling better, relaxed and even happy. Further research from the University of Cambridge in England found regularly skipping, or skimping on meals can mean you’re not getting enough serotonin, a brain chemical that helps keep anger in check. Serotonin needs the amino acid tryptophan (also known as the turkey drug, more on that below) to work, and it only comes from food.

Eating for a better mood boils down to this simple exercise: control your blood sugars by eating every 4 to 5 hours throughout the day, eat a diet rich in soluble fiber, and incorporate foods rich in omega 3 fats, folic acid, B12 and Vitamin D – four nutrients that all researchers have found to be mood lifting.

Which foods, you ask. And will it be expensive?

Being born into a family of hoteliers had some advantages, to be sure. As a kid I used to spend most of my winter time reading in the hotel larder because it was quiet, the overhead lighting was good and the smells were reassuring. And it was also a place where I could sneak in a few slices of bread and hack a bit of hard cheese, sit on my chair and dream about the origins of all the products we managed to store between bouts of reading. René Descartes liked to do his thinking in bed, I did mine in the larder. It was my domain throughout the winters and certainly not the place to be in the summertime as the hotel was taken over from April to October by a brigade of noisy, fellow loons.

So it was in that larder that I became seriously interested in food and I made a point of scrutinizing and itemizing every tin, bottle, bag, boxed spices, jars, blocks of cheese, preserves and all the hanging charcuterie; the country hams from various regions, the army of salamis, the rings of smoked sausages…I became an expert in label reading and developed a nose for sniffing out rancidity and spoiled goods.  

A couple of days ago I wrote this diary and copped quite a few unkind comments, mostly from misinformed posters and a handful of hardcore denialists. Yet the problems persist, and shooting the messenger rarely helps. But I’m a tough cookie, comfortable in the knowledge of what I know and write about and in this diary I’m basically tackling the same issues albeit from a different angle: “Big Pharma” and the multinational junk & processed foods companies (“Big Food”) which, worldwide, make gigantic profits on the back of unsuspecting consumers, specifically marketing non-nutritious food appealing to children and adults alike via disingenuous advertising.

Obesity, though some would prefer to call it eating disorders, is a big growth area, not just for the unwitting sufferers, but also for some food companies which contributes so greatly to the problem. “Big Pharma” which works in tandem with “Big Food” would love to “terminate” its main source of competition: the natural products industry and the organic movement.

You think this is harsh and OTT? Dr Donal O’Shea, a famed Irish endocrinologist and Director of the Weight Management Clinic at St Columcille’s Hospital in Loughlinstown, said in a conference in Dublin last week that

“pouring funding into cardiology, cancer and dementia without tackling the obesity epidemic that is fueling these conditions would be a disaster.”

His take on obesity (about 24 minutes long, scroll down to the tenth video) is a sober approach to combating it. “Worldwide, obesity is the driver of a range life-threatening “lifestyles” diseases”, he notes. The British Medical Journal puts it bluntly: “The driving force for the increasing prevalence of obesity in populations is the increasingly obesogenic environment rather than any pathology in individuals”.