#single-payer

[barrydeutsch]

Rationing Health Care

You can find the transcript and a post discussing the issue and also the things I like and hate about my drawing here. If you're the first person to spot the cameo appearance by a Peanuts character, you'll win a billion dollars! Honest! Would I lie?

If you like my work, help me keep doing it at patreon.com/barry. (I make a living mostly from lots of people pledging just $1 or $2, which I find really cool.)

[newsbites]

News from BC, 14 June

Debris loosened by wildfires is causing concerns for transportation safety in British Columbia, as trees continue to fall unpredictably onto the roadways.

The closure of Hwy. 4 has resulted in a significant deployment of resources to maintain a 90-kilometre-long logging road detour route for essential goods and movement.

While progress is being reported to combat the Cameron Bluffs fire, transportation challenges persist due to the dangerous terrain and unpredictability of the wildfire conditions.

2. Another storm bringing rain, winds, and potential lightning is expected to hit northeastern British Columbia, which could impact the ongoing wildfires in the region.

3. The NDP has tabled legislation to establish a universal single-payer pharmacare system in Canada to pressure the Liberal government on the file.

The creation of a national universal pharmacare program by the end of the year is a condition of the House of Commons supply-and-confidence agreement between the Liberals and the NDP.

Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos did not commit to supporting the bill, saying there are consultations and other work to be done before the government brings forward a pharmacare bill — legislation he said may not pass before the end of the year.

4. The Nanaimo Association for Community Living (NACL) has launched a community garden for those with mobility challenges.

5. Chilliwack's first Vegan Festival will be held on June 17, 2023, from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM at Central Community Park.

[odinsblog]

Were it not for white supremacy, America would have single payer health care. In the wake of the assassination of United Health CEO Brian Thompson, Americans are wondering out loud why we're getting ripped off by giant insurance companies when every other developed country in the world has health care as a right and pays an average of about half of what we do, and gets better outcomes. America is the only developed country in the world that doesn't recognize health care as a human right.

The only country with more than two-thirds of its population lacking access to affordable health care and a half million families facing bankruptcy every year because somebody got sick. The only country in the developed world where over 40% of the population carries $220 billion in medical debt. And the only country in the developed world that has since its founding enslaved and then legally oppressed and disenfranchised a large majority of its population because of their race.

These things, along with the United Health's $370 billion in revenue and $32 billion in profit, are connected. Roughly 60% of Americans would have had to take out a loan or otherwise borrow or beg for money to deal with a single unexpected $1,000 expense. Yet annual family medical co-pays and out-of-pocket deductibles averaged $6,575 in 2023, when the Kaiser Family Foundation did a comprehensive survey of Americans.

This strikes minorities particularly hard, which, it turns out, is not an accident. The simple fact is that, were it not for slavery, white supremacy, and the legacy of scientific racism, America would have had a national single-payer health care system in 1915, just 31 years after Germany put into place the modern world's first such program. At the center of the effort to prevent a national health care system, or any form of government assistance that may incidentally offer benefit to African Americans, were Frederick Ludwig Hoffman and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, which promoted his science-based racial theories to successfully fight single-payer health insurance.

Racism is the main reason that America doesn't consider health care a human right and provide it to all citizens, in contrast to every other developed country in the world. Racist whites, particularly in the South, have worked for over a century to make sure that health care is hard for Black people and other minorities to get.

Were it not for so-called scientific racism, America would long ago have joined the rest of the developed world with a competent and efficient national health care system. Instead, we're stuck with for-profit health insurance giants attached like giant leeches to our backs.

—Anti-Blackness is the reason we don’t have Universal Healthcare

[livefromtheelephantsfoot]

i think the best possible outcome is they catch him and the jury acquits him. think about it, if a jury won't convict him regardless of him doing it (assuming they do get the right guy), there will be absolutely nothing insurance companies can do about it but change their policies. if the american public says, fully within the bounds of the system, that their lives don't matter until ours do, there is nowhere they could throw their money to make that message go away.

[flock-of-cassowaries]

On this day, we celebrate the second-best thing the Sutherland-Douglas family has ever given us.

It’s not quite as big a contribution as public healthcare.

But nonetheless very good.

[aucado54]

[alex51324]

Scroll down a bit...

Someone who works on CNN's front page did a thing, I bet.

(A little while ago these two headlines were close enough together to get them in the same screenshot, but the second one was moved down before I got around to actually taking the screenshot.)

[isawthismeme]

[specialagentartemis]

it has been seven months and my insurance STILL is asking me "are you SURE your surgery wasn't due to a car accident we can bill someone else for? are you sure??? we're not gonna pay the whole thing till we're sure you're SURE"

[captainjonnitkessler]

Listening to conservative union members talk is a trip. They'll give a speech about worker solidarity, the right to basic human dignity and a thriving wage, and the value of labor that would bring a tear to Marx's eye, and then they'll turn around and be like "anyway, radical leftism is ruining the country".

[sleepyleftistdemon]

The simple fact is that, were it not for slavery, white supremacy, and the legacy of “scientific racism,” America would have had a national, single-payer healthcare system in 1915, just 31 years after Germany put into place the modern world’s first such program.

Emphasis was in the article

[nix-that-rad-lass]

You’d think my mom, someone directly harmed by predatory privatized health insurance in multiple ways, would understand and agree with Luigi Mangione’s actions.

Alas, indoctrination runs deep.

[rainbowpopeworld]

That’s one way to move the Overton Window

[scottguy]

Poor babies. They use their patent power to literally EXTORT money from sick people, especially cancer patients causing people to lose their life savings simply to stay alive.

Now they wail that their obscene profits may drop a bit when they never should have been that high in the first place.

[tomwambsmilk]

I do love how the celebration of the UHC CEO being killed seems to have spanned the political divide. bipartisan support for the assassin. nothing unites people like someone who made billions preying on sick people getting gunned down in the street

[berniesrevolution]

LBC | US Senator BernieSanders warns the UK against America’s private healthcare model.