COVID-19 & Healthcare

For a full month now, the corporate media has been engaged in a campaign of fear mongering to gin up hysteria over Ebola. It has been the most shameless example of reckless and irresponsible journalism that I have seen regarding a disease since the early days of the AIDS scare. Steven Petrow, who reported on the AIDS epidemic for two decades, had a great piece about this at the Washington Post. Why ‘Fearbola’ reminds me of the early AIDS panic.

Exactly one person has died of Ebola in America. Thomas Eric Duncan would not have died if he was not: (1) African, (2) without health insurance, (3) without financial means to pay for medical care, and (4) in the worst place for a poor black man without health insurance to get sick in America, an emergency room in the state of Texas. Ebola didn’t have to kill my uncle, Thomas Eric Duncan.

The death of Thomas Eric Duncan was fortuitous timing for the GOP, because it dovetailed nicely into their biennial campaign of fear mongering to scare the crap out of low information voters to get them to vote Republican, the only thing that the GOP knows how to do well.

I swear GOP voters are a bunch of hysterical bedwetters pissing themselves out of irrational fear over imaginary monsters hiding under their beds. This constant state of irrational fear makes them susceptible to believing every wild-ass conspiracy theory generated by the conservative media entertainment complex on a daily basis . . . like Arizona’s angry old man, John McCain.

Read more

The New York Times today has an investigative report that looks at the Affordable Care Act aka “ObamaCare” one year later. the Times piece asks: Is the Affordable Care Act Working?

After a year fully in place, the Affordable Care Act has largely succeeded in delivering on President Obama’s main promises, an analysis by a team of reporters and data researchers shows. But it has also fallen short in some ways and given rise to a powerful conservative backlash.

• Has the percentage of uninsured people been reduced?  Yes, the number of uninsured has fallen significantly.
• Has insurance under the law been affordable?  For many, yes, but not for all.
• Did the Affordable Care Act improve health outcomes?  Data remains sparse except for one group, the young.
• Will the online exchanges work better this year than last?  Most experts expect they will, but they will be tested by new challenges.
• Has the health care industry been helped or hurt by the law?  The law mostly helped, by providing new paying patients and insurance customers.
• How has the expansion of Medicaid fared?  Twenty-three states have opposed expansion, though several of them are reconsidering.
• Has the law contributed to a slowdown in health care spending?  Perhaps, but mainly around the edges.

Each topic section goes into greater detail with facts, figures and lots of charts.

Read more