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By Bryan Furlow, Carli Brosseau and Isaac Arnsdorf/ProPublica
On Dec. 15, 2016, the nation’s largest nursing home lobby wrote a letter to Donald Trump, congratulating the president-elect and urging him to roll back new regulations on the long-term care industry.
One item on the wish list was a recently issued emergency preparedness rule. It required nursing homes to draw up plans for hazards such as an outbreak of a new infectious disease.
Posted on May 30, 2020
By Jon Queally/Common Dreams
While critics have noted in recent weeks the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has “laid bare some of the dysfunctions and inequalities in the American healthcare system,” new reporting Monday reveals how some of the wealthiest hospital groups in the United States have received huge infusions of federal rescue funds even as they sat on billions of dollars in cash reserves and poorer hospitals and clinics struggle to maintain bare-minimum levels of service.
According to the New York Times, a disproportionate amount of the $72 billion approved by Congress to bolster hospitals amid the coronavirus outbreak is flowing “to hospitals that had already built up deep financial reserves to help them withstand an economic storm. Smaller, poorer hospitals are receiving tiny amounts of federal aid by comparison.”
Posted on May 26, 2020
By Julie Rovner/Kaiser Health News
Casa de Salud, a nonprofit clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, provides primary medical care, opioid addiction services and non-Western therapies, including acupuncture and reiki, to a largely low-income population.
And, like so many other health care providers that serve as a safety net, its revenue – and its future – are threatened by the COVID-19 epidemic.
“I’ve been working for the past six weeks to figure out how to keep the doors open,” said the clinic’s executive director, Dr. Anjali Taneja. “We’ve seen probably an 80% drop in patient care, which has completely impacted our bottom line.”
In March, Congress authorized $100 billion for health care providers, both to compensate them for the extra costs associated with caring for patients with COVID-19 and for the revenue that’s not coming in from regular care. They have been required to stop providing most nonemergency services, and many patients are afraid to visit health care facilities.
But more than half that money has been allocated by the Department of Health and Human Services, and the majority of it so far has gone to hospitals, doctors and other facilities that serve Medicare patients. Officials said at the time that was an efficient way to get the money beginning to move to many providers. That, however, leaves out a large swath of the health system infrastructure that serves the low-income Medicaid population and children.
Posted on May 21, 2020
By J. David McSwane/ProPublica
The Transportation Security Administration ignored guidance from the Department of Homeland Security and internal pushback from two agency officials when it stockpiled more than 1.3 million N95 respirator masks instead of donating them to hospitals, internal records and interviews show.
Internal concerns were raised in early April, when COVID-19 cases were growing by the thousands and hospitals in some parts of the country were overrun and desperate for supplies. The agency held on to the cache of life-saving masks even as the number of people coming through U.S. airports dropped by 95% and the TSA instructed many employees to stay home to avoid being infected.
Meanwhile, other federal agencies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs’ vast network of hospitals, scrounged for the personal protective equipment that doctors and nurses are dying without.
Posted on May 20, 2020
By Michelle Andrews/Kaiser Health News
Examining dead bodies and probing for a cause of death is rarely seen as a heroic or glamorous job. Rather, as the coronavirus pandemic has unfolded, all eyes have been on the medical workers and public health disease detectives fighting on the front lines – and sometimes giving their lives – to bring the novel coronavirus under control.
But as the crusade to test for the coronavirus and trace cases continues, medical examiners and coroners play a vital – if often unsung – role. These “last responders” are typically called on to investigate and determine the cause of deaths that are unexpected or unnatural, including deaths that occur at home.
In the early days of the outbreak, a scarcity of tests often hampered their efforts. Now, as that equipment gradually becomes more widely available, these professionals may be able to fill in answers about how people died and if those deaths were related to the coronavirus.
Posted on May 19, 2020
By Richard Holden and Bruce Preston/The Conversation
As Australia begins to relax its COVID-19 restrictions there is understandable debate about how quickly that should proceed, and whether lockdowns even made sense in Australia in the first place.
The skeptics arguing for more rapid relaxation of containment measures point to the economic costs of lockdowns and appeal to the cold calculus of cost-benefit analysis to conclude that the lives saved by lockdowns don’t justify the economic costs incurred to do so.
Their numbers don’t stack up.
Posted on May 18, 2020
By Negin Owliaei/OtherWords
Every morning for the last two months, I’ve checked the news in my home state of Florida with growing concern.
First came the photos of unemployed people lining up to file for benefits in person, denied access to an overburdened system. Then came the news that only a tiny percentage of unemployment claims were paid out by late April.
Now, barber shops and nail salons are reopening, even as the state saw its deadliest week yet. Altogether, the news paints a horrifying picture of a government cruelly uninterested in protecting human life.
The overwhelming majority of Americans continue to support social distancing and stay-at-home orders. But right-wing forces across the country are demanding an end to life-saving lockdowns, cheered on by a White House well aware of how devastating the loss of life could be.
Posted on May 14, 2020
By Jesse Eisinger/ProPublica
Ten weeks into the worst crisis in 90 years, the government’s effort to save the economy has been both a spectacular success and a catastrophic failure.
The clearest illustration of that came on Friday, when the government reported that 20.5 million people lost their jobs in April. It marked a period of unfathomable pain across the country not seen since the Great Depression. Also on Friday, the stock market rallied.
Posted on May 13, 2020
By Malcolm Glenn/New America
Record unemployment claims are beginning to illustrate the stark economic reality of the COVID-19 pandemic. We knew they were coming, but the numbers are still staggering – and we’re nowhere near a sustainable respite from the damage.
Indeed, for some groups, the greatest pain is yet to come. The 2008 economic downturn is a sad, recent example of this: A 2015 report from the ACLU and the Social Science Research Council projected that, by 2031, the decline in black household wealth resulting from the downturn would be almost 10 percentage points worse than the decline of white household wealth. That’s worth restating: While overall wealth will be down across all racial groups, the gap will be massively wider for black families 23 years after the start of the crisis.
Posted on May 12, 2020
By Robert Reich
Last August, the Business Roundtable – an association of CEOs of America’s biggest corporations – announced with great fanfare a “fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders” and not just their shareholders.
They said “investing in employees, delivering value to customers, and supporting outside communities” is now at the forefront of their business goals – not maximizing profits.
Baloney. Corporate social responsibility is a sham.
Posted on May 11, 2020
