Tag: universal health care
Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World’s Richest Country
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One morning a couple of years ago, during the awkward hour between my eldest daughter’s school drop-off and her sister’s swim lesson, I stopped at a coffee shop. There, I ran into the father of a boy in my daughter’s class. He was also schlepping a younger child around, and as we got to talking, I learned that we had a lot
Destigmatizing Drug Use Has Been a Profound Mistake
The image on the billboard that appeared in downtown San Francisco in early 2020 would have been familiar to anyone who’d ever seen a beer commercial: Attractive young people laughing and smiling as they shared a carefree high. But the intoxicant being celebrated was fentanyl, not beer. “Do it with friends,” the billboard advised, so as to reduce the risks of overdose.
The advertising campaign was part of an ongoing national effort by activists and health officials to destigmatize
The Widespread Cruelty of Death Care Disparities
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The American Socialism That Might Have Been
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America Was in an Early-Death Crisis Long Before COVID
Jacob Bor has been thinking about a parallel universe. He envisions a world in which America has health on par with that of other wealthy nations, and is not an embarrassing outlier that, despite spending more on health care than any other country, has shorter life spans, higher rates of chronic disease and maternal mortality, and fewer doctors per capita than its peers. Bor, an epidemiologist at Boston University School of Public Health, imagines the people who are still alive
Why the Poor People’s Campaign 2022 Matters
EDITOR’S NOTE: On Saturday, June 18, tens of thousands of poor and low-income people gathered with allies on Pennsylvania Avenue to lift the voices of those most directly impacted by poverty, racism, militarism, ecological devastation, the denial of healthcare and the
Have We Really Learned Nothing From the Pandemic?
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How Public Health Failed America
Even though Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, backed off his statement that the United States is “out of the pandemic phase,” elected officials and much of the public seem to think that he had it right the first time. But if the end of the COVID-19 emergency is at hand, the United States is reaching it with lower vaccination and higher per-capita death rates than other wealthy nations. The conventional wisdom is that the American political
Democrats Need to Sell the Reconciliation Package
With the finish line in sight (if still stubbornly out of reach) for the Democrats’ massive social-programs and economic development bill, the party now faces the challenge of focusing the attention of its key constituencies and the public on what remains in the package, not on what was cut in the exhausting legislative maneuvering.
To meet the objections primarily of Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, party leaders underwent a grueling process of shrinking