6 May 2017. Ajamu Baraka: Healthcare is a Human Right, But You Have to Fight For It!

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Millions of Poor Americans to Be Out of Medicaid

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A significant effort to extend health coverage to Americans will leave out millions of uninsured… just the very kind of people the programme was designed to help. Not only are these people uninsured and impoverished, but they’re also unlucky to live in Republican-controlled states that’ve declined to expand Medicaid, an insurance scheme for the poor. About half of the country’s population, with about 68 percent of poor uninsured blacks and single mothers, live in the 26 states that rejected Medicaid expansion.

Dr H Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health centre concept, explained, “The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion… many of them Southern… are the very places where the concentration of poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute. It’s their populations that have the highest burden of illness and costs to the entire healthcare system”. This disparity introduces the unpleasant racial issueheated healthcare law discourse into the . Surprisingly, race was rarely (if ever at all) mentioned in high circles’ disputes in terms of Medicaid.

Every southern state except for Arkansas rejected Medicaid expansion. Opponents of the expansion claim that they’re against it strictly on economic grounds, and that the demographic situation of the South… with poor blacks being the vast majority of the uninsured… makes it easier to make race “the topic of the day”. The law intended all Americans to have health coverage. For lower and middle-income earners, there are subsidies on the new health exchanges to help them afford insurance. An expanded Medicaid programme was supposed to cover the poorest American citizens. Overall, about 30 million uninsured Americans were to be eligible for financial aid. However, last year, a US Supreme Court ruling on the health care law allowed states to choose whether to expand Medicaid or not. Those states that preferred not to expand Medicare left about eight million impoverished and uninsured people without any medical assistance at all, excluding illegal immigrants and foreign-born residents.

3 October 2013

Voice of Russia World Service

http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2013_10_03/Millions-of-poor-Americans-to-be-out-of-Medicaid-3448/

Comment from the Original VOR Post:

What an ANTI-SOCIAL nation! Everything revolves around $$$. Sink or swim… you’re on your own. Exceptional country?

Vera Gottlieb

Editor’s Note:

I agree with Ms Gottlieb. Pre-repentance Scrooge was actually more generous… he did accept the union workhouse and the Poor Law. The Republican Party has a lotta goddamn gall. They shut down the government… in order to smash what they consider “socialism”. The GOP is chock fulla beans… single-payer healthcare was the brainchild of Prince Otto von Bismarck… AS A WEAPON AGAINST SOCIALISM. It shows you how dirt ignorant and downright stupid the Republicans are. The German healthcare system is one of the best in the world, and it’s utilised single-payer insurance since the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It served the Empire, it served the Weimar Republic, it served the Third Reich, it served the Bundesrepublik and DDR… it still serves today.

The Republicans aren’t only liars; they’re malicious and cruel, as well. There’s money for Medicaid expansion… stop the useless foreign wars and end the free ride for the rich. Slobberin’ Ronnie started it… after 30 years of Voodoo Economics, the top Five Percent are at 275 percent of their 1981 income in real terms (adjusted for inflation)… the rest of us are at 85 percent of the 1981 level in real terms. I think that some class warfare has gone on… the rich against the rest of us, and the Republicans are the willing whores of the moneyed class.

For Orthodox people here in the American diaspora, it means that Rod Dreher, Victor Potapov, Terrence Mattingly, James Paffhausen, Patrick Henry Reardon, Joseph Honeycutt, Alexander Webster, John Whiteford, and Josiah Trenham (and all those like them) are enablers of evil. They all support the Republican Moloch. HH doesn’t approve of the Republican War on the Poor… neither does Bart, for that matter (Pope Francisco gives a hearty “Amen”). The Church is FOR government single-payer healthcare. After all, HH IS friends with Gennady Zyuganov and Fidel Castro… he’s NOT friends with grasping filth like Mitch McConnell, Darrell Issa, John Boehner, and Rand Paul. Reflect on that…

BMD    

6 October 2012. A Point to Ponder. Just What IS “Pro-Life?”

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Let’s not take forever on this. “Pro-Life” is so much more than anti-abortion… it’s being against the death penalty for non-state crimes (hey, that was Tsar Aleksandr‘s stance, and he was no weak sister)… it’s being critical of promiscuous warmongering… it’s being for economic justice in the marketplace for workers and consumers. The late John Cardinal O’Connor called it the “seamless garment“. He was right… if you advocate war in foreign parts on flimsy pretexts… if you advocate the death penalty for crimes that aren’t against the state or the society as a whole (that is, Timothy McVeigh and the Minsk Metro bombers were examples of legit capital punishment)… if you advocate anarchic libertarian nihilism (“economic freedom” and “shrinking the state”)… if you defend a tax system that cheats the working class to enrich the Wet Willies… you’re NOT Pro-Life… not at all.

Let’s put it plainly… if you support the Republican Party, you’re not Pro-Life… their platform is antipodes removed from Christianity and justice. That’s the way it is…

BMD

Study Suggests that the Affordable Care Act Would Slash American Abortion Rate

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According to a new study, providing birth control to women free of charge, a measure contained in new healthcare legislation signed by US President Barack Obama, would “significantly” reduce unintended teen pregnancies and abortion rates in the USA. On Thursday, Dr James Breeden, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said after the study was published, “It’s just an amazing improvement. I’d think if you were against abortions, you’d be 100 percent for contraception access”.

The study, conducted by the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis and the pro-choice organisation Planned Parenthood, showed “a clinically and statistically significant reduction in abortion rates, repeat abortions, and teenage birth rates” among subjects who received free contraception. The study was conducted in the St Louis area over a course of four years and comprised 9,256 women and teens between the ages of 14 and 45. It simulated the free contraceptive mandate under Obama’s controversial Affordable Care Act, which critics referred to “Obamacare”. All of the subjects in the study, published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, were uninsured low-income women or those otherwise considered to be at risk for unintended pregnancy. The researchers said that when cost wasn’t an issue, the women chose the most effective and permanent methods of contraception including implants, that usually cost several hundred dollars. This resulted in significantly less unintended pregnancies and abortions compared to the national average.

The researchers said, “We observed a significant reduction in the percentage of abortions that were repeat abortions in the St Louis region compared with Kansas City and non-metropolitan Missouri”, adding that overall abortion rates amongst the study group were less than half the regional and national averages. The study showed 6.3 births per 1,000 teens who received free contraception, compared to a national teen average in 2010 of 34 births. It also showed there were 7.5 abortions per 1,000 women in the study versus a national rate of 20 abortions per 1,000 women. The findings came two months after the Affordable Care Act began requiring private insurance companies to provide free contraception. The law stipulates that any insurance contract starting on or after 1 August must offer free access to birth control along with seven other women’s health services, including pap smears. Obama’s opponent, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, vowed to repeal the healthcare law if he’s elected.

6 October 2012

Sasha Horne

RIA-Novosti

http://en.rian.ru/world/20121006/176435384.html

Editor’s Note:

There’s something called “zeal without knowledge”. The Church condemns it; always has, always will. Foxy ol’ Bishop Mensurius of Carthage showed us what this meant back in the day… he decreed that anyone who was a “voluntary martyr” was no saint. That is, if you died in the persecution because the pagan authorities dragged you off, you were a saint. If you goaded the authorities and forced them to kill you, you weren’t a saint, you were just a misguided putz.

We have Orthodox loudmouths such as Reardon, Josiah Trenham, Fathausen, and their konvertsy claque, who shout that contraception’s a sin. That’s bullshit, full stop. Fr Vsevolod Chaplin said that contraception’s licit via oikonomia. That ends the discussion, because when Fr Vsevolod talks, he’s usually talking for HH. We don’t agree with the papists on this.

The real Church agrees with the Affordable Care Act (HH is FOR state-provided healthcare for all); it doesn’t agree with the Republicans who want to repeal it. The real Church blesses economic justice and it denounces the Free Market as a fraud, where only the workers suffer. Don’t be fooled by the loud konvertsy ignoramuses on the internet. They don’t inform themselves of the doings of the real Church; everything that they spout is nothing but idiosyncratic ungrounded babbling. As for me, I prefer to find out what real leaders like HH say… that’s much safer. After all, whom would you trust? Some jumped-up semi-converted Episkie/Evangelical frauds or the real leaders of the Orthosphere? For me, there’s no contest…

Never forget, anti-abortion does NOT equal pro-life!

BMD