By Liz Szabo/Kaiser Health News

In cities across the country, police departments have attempted to quell unrest spurred by the death of George Floyd by firing rubber bullets into crowds, even though five decades of evidence shows such weapons can disable, disfigure and even kill.
In addition to rubber bullets – which often have a metal core – police have used tear gas, flash-bang grenades, pepper spray gas and projectiles to control crowds of demonstrators demanding justice for 46-year-old George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck, while other officers restrained his body. Some peaceful demonstrations have turned violent, with people smashing windows, setting buildings afire and looting stores.
The use by police of rubber bullets has provoked outrage, as graphic images have flashed on social media showing people who have lost an eye or suffered other injuries after being hit.

Read More

Posted on June 3, 2020

By The Chicago Council of Lawyers & Chicago Appleseed

The Chicago Council of Lawyers was founded in 1969 by local lawyers, still reeling from the prior year’s Democratic National Convention, who were concerned about the fundamentally unfair policies and practices prevailing in Chicago and across the country.
This weekend, nearly 700 people were arrested during protests against police brutality in Chicago.
In the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in Minneapolis and Louisville, respectively, several sources have shared horrifying accounts of CPD officers pepper-spraying apparently peaceful protestors and known journalists, pushing people to the ground and beating them with batons, ramming crowds with police vehicles, assaulting reporters, and much more.

Read More

Posted on June 2, 2020

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.

Read More

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.”

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

Posted on May 13, 2020