Archive for the ‘health’ tag
Kevin Gosztola on Bradley Manning hearing, Mike Elk reports 9/11 mistakes repeated in Sandy clean-up
Listen to the new episode of Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.
Journalist Kevin Gosztola (@kgosztola) joins the show to discuss the Bradley Manning hearing and journalist Mike Elk (@mikeelk) reports 9/11 mistakes are being repeated in the Hurricane Sandy clean-up effort.
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An actual way to honor the troops, Wall Street keeps on being shady, update on the zombie apocalypse
Listen to the new episode of Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.
An actual way to honor the troops, Wall Street keeps on being shady, an update on the zombie apocalypse, a couple of great Occupied Chicago Tribune stories, a conversation about anonymous online comments, voter suppression, the NATO 3, their neighbors, and entrapment, and why healthy food really is cheaper.
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Introducing Citizen Radio Productions
Citizen Radio is proud to introduce Citizen Radio Productions, a collection of the very best progressive podcasts. Through member support, CR has been able to start two podcasts: Red Radio and Opinionated.
Red Radio
Red Radio is a show about veganism, animal rights, health, and fitness. Your host, Erin, is a muay Thai Fighter and Instructor, a Bikram Yogini, a runner, a Canadian, and also covered in tattoos.
Listen to the first episode of Red Radio here.
Opinionated: The Feminists You Were Warned About
Hosts Amanda Marcotte (Pandagon) and Samhita Mukhopadhyay (Feministing) comb over the news and spend one hour a week dissecting gender issues that aren’t getting the mainstream media coverage they deserve.
Amanda is a blogger and freelance writer. She’s the executive editor of Pandagon.net, and writes regularly for Slate’s XX Factor and RH Reality Check (where she also podcasts weekly about reproductive rights in the NPR format.) Amanda has written two books on feminism and liberal politics, “It’s A Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments” and “Get Opinionated: A Progressive’s Guide to Finding Your Voice (and Taking a Little Action)”. She’s written for Slate, Salon, the Nation, the Daily Beast, and Alternet, amongst other publications.
Samhita came up from the world of activism to become a full-time writer and blogger. She is the Executive Editor of Feministing.com and is the author of “Outdated: Why Dating is Ruining Your Love Life”, which received heavy coverage by a media hungry for a new narrative for single women living feminist values. She has written for multiple news outlets including The Nation, The American Prospect, Alternet and the Guardian UK. Samhita is a sought after speaker, regularly lecturing at college and universities and at conferences about race, politics, technology, sexuality and feminism.
Listen to the first episode of Opinionated here.
Citizen Radio is extremely proud to welcome these shows to CR Productions, and hopes to expand this format to eventually include shows about racial justice, LGBT issues, Occupy Wall Street coverage, labor, and more. But in order to do that, Citizen Radio needs more members. To become a member, visit our website, and for as little as $10, support independent media that won’t lead you to war.
Healthcare was not the 'best-covered news story, ever'
Image by Fibonacci Blue via Flickr
Harold Pollack went out on a limb, and unfortunately fell off the edge, when he suggested that healthcare reform was the “best-covered news story, ever.” Not even Pollack himself seems to really believe that premise as he peppers caveats throughout the article, and ultimately cites a few genuine examples of good journalism that occurred during healthcare reform. Ultimately, however, Pollack only manages to convince that citizens may have been able to hunt down some good nuggets of genuine journalism…if they knew where to look…which most citizens didn’t.
Right out the gate, Pollack attempts to amend his thesis.
It’s certainly easy to find examples of shoddy journalism and public ignorance to bolster this charge. Every night, one could watch cable TV screamers trafficking in untruths about death panels, or commentators offering with certitude political predictions that (a) were generally wrong and (b) generally detracted from discussing the actual substance of a hugely important piece of legislation.
Pollack cites the Wall Street Journal (circulation 2 million), Fox News (the highest rated basic cable channel in primetime), and Investor’s Business Daily (circulation 210,000) as a few examples of the “bad journalism” which peddled the worst kinds of healthcare miseducation nonsense. He’s absolutely correct that these forums engaged in shoddy journalism, but their low-quality gutter-dredging techniques successfully brainwashed millions of readers and viewers. That’s a big “FAIL” for the state of journalism right there. The worst journalmalism reached the most people.
More than 275,000 will die over next decade from lack of health insurance
Image by leoncillo sabino via Flickr
It’s easy to get swept up in the stupid meaninglessness of a public event like Obama’s healthcare summit and lose perspective of what’s really at stake in all of this reform business. The media is more preoccupied with who is “winning” or “losing” this particular PR stunt without taking time to discuss the real matters of life and death.
Back in September, I asked Trudy Lieberman, a veteran healthcare journalist, to grade the media’s performance in explaining reform to the American people.
The horse race coverage of the healthcare reform debate does not impress Lieberman. The “Who’s up; who’s down? Who’s winning today? Does Pelosi have the votes? What’s going to be the game-changer? What should Baucus do because he can’t get the votes out of his committee? That chatter doesn’t inform citizens, she says. “That kind of coverage certainly wouldn’t rate very high — probably C-, but I tend to be a very tough grader.”
Nothing has changed since then. Sticking with the horse race theme, the media has covered the summit in terms of who’s “winning” and who’s “losing.” Dylan Ratigan played with marionette puppets. It was a strange time. (The Daily Show lampoons the media’s coverage of the summit here, starting at around 9:10).
Glenn Beck targets America's real enemy: Michelle Obama
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
The Leader has finally set his gaze upon the real culprit who is rotting America’s foundation: First Lady Michelle Obama. Beck’s main beef with the First Lady is that she wants to help fat children. Actually, she’s trying to combat the issues of childhood hunger and obesity. Or destroy America with her ACORN army. I keep getting the two mixed up.
Anyway, Beck does not trust this whole obesity campaign thing:
BECK: So now going all out to have government limit the food choices available at our kids’ school, to make sure that grocery stores pop up in what they are calling — and I’m not kidding you — food deserts. There’s no salad bars; it’s a food desert. Then we are going to put the grocery stores instead of fast food businesses.
They’ll limit what we can watch on TV, what ads we can run and how long we can watch. No doubt we’ll start mandating certain kind of activities as part of this wonderful government campaign.
Rationing! Censorship! Socialism!
Read the rest of this entry »
Hilda Solis shocks everyone, acts like a Democrat
Image via Wikipedia
Soon after she became the nation’s labor secretary, Hilda Solis warned corporate America there was “a new sheriff in town.” Less than a year into her tenure, that figurative badge of authority is unmistakable.
Her aggressive moves to boost enforcement and crack down on businesses that violate workplace safety rules have sent employers scrambling to make sure they are following the rules.
I’m assuming this story got little play because the media has become accustomed to pragmatist Democrats. You know, the party that sells out liberal ideals in the name of corporate donations, 60 votes, and few accomplishments. The public option, full withdrawal from the Middle East, these things aren’t as important as knowing Joe Lieberman is happy.
So it’s weird to see Solis act like a fiery liberal, one who sends Big Business sprinting for cover, shrieking.
Healthcare is national security
Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife
President Barack Obama begins and ends each workday at the White House by going over a to-do list with his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. The two were reviewing things recently when Emanuel reminded him of the sheer size of the administration’s workload, which includes fending off the Great Recession and dealing with terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now, evidently, Yemen. “You know, Mr. President,” Emanuel said, “Franklin Roosevelt had eight years to deal with the economy before he had to lead a war. You have to do it all at once.”
Nothing unusual about a little fawning in the Oval, but it prompts questions. Given the urgency of those challenges, underscored by the Nigerian bomber, was it wise for the president to spend most of his first year and political capital on a monumentally complicated overhaul of the nation’s health-care system? And will the results of that gamble—not fundamental reform, but rather an expensive set of patches, bypasses, and trusses bolted onto the existing system—improve the lives of Americans enough to help him or his fellow Democrats politically?
via Will Obama Come to Regret Health-Care Reform? – Newsweek.com.
Yes. Fineman can stop fretting right now. The answer is yes.
Healthcare and national security are not two autonomous administrative duties, but rather overlap in the same area of President Obama’s Venn Diagram of Obligations.
Corporations: the missing factor in immigrant-health care debate
Child of a migratory farm laborer in the field during the harvest at FSA labor camp, Tex. Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr
Two Republicans, Senators Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, have requested numerous major changes in the health care reform proposal drafted by Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. The changes include things like prohibiting the use of federal money to pay for abortion, but while the tiny coterie bickers over that admitedly major provision, they agree that illegal immigrants should not benefit from the health care overhaul in any way.
Actually, Enzi and Grassley go further by requesting a five-year waiting period for legal immigrants to receive tax credits, or subsidies, to help them buy insurance. While the legal immigrant waiting period may seem excessive to invidiuals who possess souls and beating hearts, similar statements about illegal immigrants have become commonplace. Of course we shouldn’t provide health care for illegal immigrants! They’re illegal! Illegal is bad!
However, once the discussion is permitted to evolve past shallow slogans, it’s obvious that providing health care for all immigrants (illegal and legal) actually benefits everyone. Last week, I attended a town hall meeting in New Jersey during which Rep. Rush Holt (D) explained that if an immigrant, legal or otherwise, arrived at a hospital and was diagnosed with meningitis, he would want that immigrant to stay in the hospital instead of infecting his or her entire community.
White House continues tradition of confusing everyone
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If you have no idea how President Obama’s healthcare reform plans (or the euphemistic health insurance reform plans) will affect you, the White House’s latest continuation of confusing statements should feel familiar. All the opaque, backdoor deliberations, and protean definitions of what reform will mean to America’s healthcare system give “Mission Creep” a bad name.
On Saturday, President Obama appeared to be readying his Progressive constituents for some bad news when he downplayed the significance of a public option, telling a town hall meeting in Grand Junction, Colorado: “All I’m saying is, though, that the public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”
The following day, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said a public insurance option was “not the essential element” of any healthcare reform. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs immediately rushed in to perform damage control on “Face the Nation” and emphasized that the White House still supports a “public option,” and The Atlantic‘s Marc Ambinder wrote that an administration official told him that Sebelius “misspoke” in underplaying the importance of the “public option.”
Either the White House is back-peddling after testing the waters on pulling the public option, and officials now understand that Progressive constituents are gravely serious about keeping that teeny, tiny “sliver,” or the healthcare reform team is so uncommunicative that they can’t even pull together a basic message like “We Support The Public Option.”
Meanwhile, the message resonating from pro-reform supporters is strikingly uniform: pulling the public option would be disastrous. Former healthcare insurance industry executive Wendell Potter told me that President Obama appears to be “caving bigtime to the insurance industry. It’s really tragic” when I asked him to comment on Sebelius’s statement that the public option was “not the essential element” of reform.
I asked Stan Brock, founder of Remote Area Medical, a nonprofit group that provides medical care to people living in remote areas of the United States and the world, if he supported the public option. “Yes, I do,” Brock quickly replied. This week marked the first time RAM has gone to a major metropolitan area. The group set up their free expedition in Los Angeles, and saw thousands of patients who queued in the middle of the night for medical care.
HBO’s Real Time coorespondant, Dana Gould, featured RAM and Stan Brock in a fantastic segment on the healthcare debate:[youtubevid id=K21_teAW0Zg]
On Bill Moyers’ Journal, veteran health care and consumer issues reporter Trudy Lieberman voiced her skepticism regarding the likelihood that a meaningful public option would ever emerge from Congress:
We don’t know what a public plan will look like. And even if there’s going to be a public plan. The insurers don’t want it. It’s not clear that the doctors want it. And the pharmaceutical companies don’t want it. So my question is, are they working behind the scenes to make sure this doesn’t happen? My guess is– my answer is, they probably are.
Dr. Marcia Angell, editor-in-chief of the highly respected New England Journal of Medicine, and Moyers’ other guest, concurred.
A lot is said about how the public wants to cling to what it has. What I’m finding is something that confirms the polls that have been done. Showing that something like two-thirds of the public would favor a Canadian style or a Medicare for all style single payer system. The same is true of physicians, now. About 60 percent of physicians favor Medicare for all, or a single payer system. So, what is against it? The pharmaceutical and the insurance industries are the biggest lobbies in Washington. They spend millions and millions on influential members of Congress.
While the White House continues to struggle to define what reform means for average citizens, pro-reform supporters are clear about one thing: the public option is essential, but under constant assault from the private healthcare and insurance industries, which are doing everything in their power to permanently sink it.
