Wednesday, America’s most well-known breast cancer organization Susan G. Komen succumbed to right-wing pressure and ended its partnership with Planned Parenthood, pulling around $600,000 in grants that allow the women’s health organization to provide breast cancer exams for low-income women. Today on the House floor, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) — a “big booster” for the foundation and a participant in its iconic Race for the Cure event — announced that she would no longer support the organization over it’s decision.

Noting that the foundation based their decision to sever ties on anti-choice advocate Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) “spurious congressional investigation” into Planned Parenthood, Speier blasted Komen for falling into the trap of a “political sandbox.” “A hearing has never been held,” she noted. “I guess it means that Susan G. Komen has become a 501(d)(4), because no longer do they want to be providing nonprofits, they want to become a political advocacy group,” she said.

Speier also pointed out the particular irony of another nearly simultaneous statement from the Komen foundation noting that the rate of breast cancer screening for women without insurance is around 38 percent.

Komen issued an updated statement on their decision, “Grant making decisions are not about politics—our priority is and always will be the women we serve. Making this issue political or leveraging it for fundraising purposes would be a disservice to women.” Maybe the organization should take its own advice.Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood provided 700,000 screenings for low-income and uninsured women last year alone. By bowing to right-wing fear-mongering, Komen is helping to cripple one of its own key efforts.

Tanya Somanader
Think Progress 

SB 810 author Senator Mark Leno

Senate Rejects SB 810 – Bill Solving Healthcare & Budget Crisis:

Coalition gears up to build statewide grassroots movement and win universal healthcare

The Campaign for a Healthy California (CHC) today denounced the failure of the California Senate to pass SB 810, the California Universal Care Act. The bill died when it remained two votes short of passage.

Democrats fell short of previous levels of support, which successfully passed similar bills through the legislature twice before, only to be vetoed by then Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. This year 19 voted in favor of the bill, two against, and four abstaining in spite of intensive efforts at persuasion by grassroots proponents. The bill received no support from Republicans.

Democrats voting against the bill were

• Ron Calderon (SD-30, Southeast Los Angeles) and
• Lou Correa (SD-31, Santa Ana).

The six abstentions, which is equivalent to a “no” vote, came from Democrats

• Alex Padilla (SD-20, San Fernando Valley),
• Juan Vargas (SD-40, San Diego),
• Roderick Wright (SD-25, Compton), and
• Michael Rubio (SD-16, East Bakersfield).

No Republican vote for the bill.

The California Universal Care Act would have created a single public health insurance program for all Californians, much like an improved Medicare-for-All plan that has been proposed at the federal level.

CHC member organizations spoke out against the disappointing vote, “Nurses will not give up on winning guaranteed universal healthcare, like SB 810” stated DeAnn McEwen, RN, Co-President of the California Nurses Association, “because we will not abandon our patients who need this vital reform.”

Nan Brasmer, President of the California Alliance for Retired Americans, stated: “This is a very sad day for seniors and all Californians. With millions of us uninsured or underinsured, SB 810 offered the only solution to our skyrocketing health care costs while covering everyone. And the added bonus is that it would save the State billions of dollars once implemented, at a time when essential programs for seniors are being slashed and out of pocket costs for health care have gone through the roof. We will continue to fight for single payer in the legislature and at the ballot box.”

SB 810 would create a new California Healthcare System to provide health insurance for all Californians, replacing the private insurance providers. Critics claim that such as system, often referred to as “single payer,” would be too costly.

“Not true,” said Dr. Henry L. Abrons, President of PNHP California. “Currently the U.S. spends twice as much as any other country on health care. We have plenty of money in the system, enough to insure 100% of us; we just need to spend it more wisely.”

Abrans continued, “The best way to save money is to take the private insurers out of the system. They are responsible for 30% of each healthcare dollar being lost to pay for exorbitant CEO salaries, lobbyists, sales and marketing, administration and shareholder profit. Medicare’s overhead by contrast is only 3%. Californians would still be free to seek services from any medical provider in the private sector — only the financing would change. The difference is that that everyone in California would be fully covered.”

Joseph Foy, spokesman for the California Health Professional Student Alliance said, “Grassroots activists are not deterred by this setback in the Senate. The movement for single-payer health insurance is growing stronger every day among students who are the doctors, nurses, and other caregivers of the future.”

“Healthcare is a human right,” Progressive Democrats of America’s California State Coordinator and Emergency Physician Dr Bill Honigman stated, “It is immoral for businesses to profit from the illness of others, just as we would not expect them to profit from other public services such as police, fire, or education.”

“We’re disappointed today, but this is just the beginning of our efforts to win quality, comprehensive health care for all,” said Pilar Schiavo, the CHC Campaign Coordinator, “We will continue to build on the momentum we have created through our recent actions and statewide activism, and build an even broader and more powerful grass roots movement to ensure we win universal healthcare in California.”

The Campaign for a Healthy California represents over 1.4 million Californians and includes: California Alliance for Retired Americans, Physicians for a National Health Program – California, California Health Professional Student Alliance, Communication Workers of America – District 9 (California & Nevada), Health Care For All, Single Payer Now, California Nurses Association, California OneCare, California School Employee Association, Democracy For America, The Progressive Caucus of California, and Progressive Democrats of America.

Pilar Schiavo
510.385.4213
Coordinator, Campaign for a Healthy California
info@HealthyCaliforniaCampaign.org

“Yeah, I could use a decent vacation,” I replied, figuring he’d pay for both of us since he had just set the world record for the most nose jobs in a 24-hour period.

“What vacation?” he said. “I’m setting up practice.”

“And give up catering to rich people with inflated bank accounts and deflated ethics?”

“Don’t have a choice. I’m getting laid off.”

Comstock had been a rainmaker for the Megabucks Happy Health Care Medical Center for the past decade. There was only one reason I could think of why he’d be laid off.

“Megabucks tired of paying your malpractice insurance?” I asked.

“Not just me,” he said. “Hospital’s laying off most of the staff, making the rest work overtime, and hiring outside contractors. They said it was hard to survive when the profit was down to only 20 or so million a year.”

“I didn’t realize it was that serious,” I said. “You planning to set up private practice to help the poor in Mexico?” I asked admiringly.

“Not a chance! Gonna get rich working for Megabucks!”

“You just said you were laid off.”

“Been laid off in the U.S.,” said Comstock while putting a frozen burrito into the microwave.

“Megabucks/Mexico just hired me. There’s cheaper labor down there.”

“You crazy?” I asked. “You’re the cheaper labor.”

“Obviously you don’t know American business,” said Comstock haughtily.

“Megabucks/U.S. closes its auxiliary operations, and then contracts with Mexican companies for a fifth of the cost in the U.S. They do the work, ship it back to the U.S., and Megabucks bills Blue Cross the full rate as if it was done locally.”

“So where do you fit in?” I asked.

“Just as before. Nose jobs. Breast augmentations. Tummy tucks. All the important medical procedures. But this time, I do it in Cancun.”

“To rich Mexicans,” I said disgusted.

“To rich Americans!” said Comstock. “If they want the best care, they’ll take their private jets to Mexico and then deduct the trip as a necessary business expense.”

“And what about the impoverished and middle-class Americans?”

“If they can sneak across the border, they can also get medical care.”

“What about prescriptions?”

“Megabucks contracted with some of the best drug dealers—I mean pharmacists and chemists—in Mexico. Quality is just as good and it’ll only be four or five times production costs. Unlike the U.S. there’s no TV advertising and six-figure MBAs and lawyers that require drugs to be 30 or 40 times production costs.”

“With prices that low, how do you know there won’t be mass rushes by Americans to grab everything they can?”

“Because there’s security! Every hospital and pharmacy has armed guards with the best automatic weapons smuggled through the God-fearing 2nd Amendment patriotic Southern states.”

“Is Megabucks outsourcing all its operations?”

“Keeping the ER. After tummy tucks and butt lifts, that’s the hospital’s ‘cash cow.’”

“So, then, it’ll have to keep some services like X-Ray and the lab,” I said. “Maybe even a doctor or two.”

“Too expensive,” said Comstock. “Megabucks will hire more residents and foreign-educated doctors, and work them 18 hours a day. More work, less time to complain. Residents will do anything to get experience to pass their boards. May even hire a couple of hospitalists. You know, the ones who graduated at the bottom of their class and can’t even get work in a Free Clinic.”

“I suppose they’ll also do the lab work?” I asked.

“Do you know some of those lab techs are making as much as $30,000 a year! Made sense to lay them off, too.”

“So how will the ER know a victim’s blood chemistry, or if there’s internal injuries?”

“Technology,” said Comstock. “They scan the blood here, and send digital X-Rays to Mexico. Mexican lab technicians—you know, the ones that don’t know about unions and will work for only a few bucks a day—will analyze everything, then text the results back to the U.S.”

“This sounds like it’s not only a way to maximize profits, but also a way to avoid dealing with the President’s health care reform program.”

“Obamacare!” spit out Comstock. “Nothing but socialized medicine.”

“Most countries have forms of socialized medicine,” I countered, “and they not only have good health care but affordable prices to their citizens.”

Comstock put his hands to his ears and began chanting, “We’re Number 1, We’re Number 1.”

“Number 37,” I corrected him. “The World Health Organization ranked the U.S. just below Costa Rico.”

“They’re all Commies,” replied Comstock. “Besides, that study is a decade old.”

“Last year, the independent Commonwealth Fund compared the nations of the United Kingdom against the U.S., and the U.S. ranked seventh of the seven.”

“Yeah, like Americans will go to Canada? It’s covered by snow and run by a queen who can’t even speak English.”

“You and Megabucks are crazy!”

“Possibly,” said Comstock, “but outsourcing is the American way. By the way, do you put ketchup or mustard on a burrito?”

Walter Brasch

Walter Brasch isn’t licensed to practice medicine, but he goes to some excellent physicians who are—and they’re just as frustrated with the costs, insurance companies and myriad forms as anyone else. His current book is the critically-acclaimed mystery novel, Before the First Snow

“New York streets where killers’ll walk like Pistol Pete
And Pappy Mason, gave the young boys admiration
Prince from Queens and Fritz from Harlem
Street legends, the drugs kept the hood from starving”

Nas, “Get Down”

That big ol’ building was the textile mill
It fed our kids and it paid our bills
But they turned us out and they closed the doors
We can’t make it here anymore
See all those pallets piled up on the loading dock
They’re just gonna set there till they rot
‘Cause there’s nothing to ship, nothing to pack
Just busted concrete and rusted tracks
Empty storefronts around the square
There’s a needle in the gutter and glass everywhere
You don’t come down here ‘less you’re looking to score
We can’t make it here anymore

James Mc Murty “ We Can’t Make It Here Anymore”

The strength of the Ron Paul candidacy continues to astound many liberals and leftists. How can a 76-year-old man who opposes, and continues to oppose, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and was the featured speaker at the John Birch Society 50th Anniversary Dinner attract thousands of young supporters, not all of whom think of themselves as conservatives, some of whom are gay or people of color.

It is tempting to see Paul’s mass appeal to young people as a form of false consciousness, attributable to his anti-war position, which blinds them to the conservative implications of his libertarian philosophy. But such a posture overlooks ways in which one portion of the Paul platform, his opposition to the drug war, and the incarceration of non-violent drug offenders, speaks directly to their material interests in the way no other candidate, Republican or Democratic does. For young people of all racial backgrounds, the drug economy has become an essential income supplement in a society where work has become scarce, and wages have been driven down to the point that few people can support themselves in the legal economy without some off the books activity, a good portion of it drug related.

There has been a great deal of research done on the drug economy in inner city neighborhoods, where de-industrialism, and neo-liberalism hit first and hardest. From Charles and Bettylou Valentine’s pioneering anthropological study, Hustling and Other Hard Work, to Phillipe Bourgeois brilliant book on crack dealers in East Harlem, In Search of Respect, scholars have demonstrated that a significant portion of the income stream in inner city neighborhoods from the early 70’s through the present has come from the drug economy, shoring up local businesses and producing for a level of consumption among local residents, that official census data on incomes could not predict. Hip Hop artists and hop hop scholars alike have spoken about this with considerable frankness. In his book Hip Hop America, Nelson George estimated that 150,000 young people worked in the drug business during the height of the crack epidemic, a figure I have never heard anyone dispute

But what is less well known is the size of the drug economy in small town, rural and suburban America, and its role in supplementing wages in a nation where Wal Mart has replaced the automobile and steel industry as the largest employer. Even before partial legalization in states like California and Colorado, marijuana was the second largest cash crop in the nation, and it has now been supplemented by a thriving market in chrystal meth and prescription pills.

Although I am not familiar with anthropological studies of the drug economy in rural, white America, I have gotten enough papers on small town drug dealing from students in my Worker in American Life class to get a sense that it’s proportions now equal, if not exceed, what is going on in inner city neighborhoods. If what my students tell me is true, a significant portion of young people working in Wal-Mart, K-Mart or other box stores sell drugs on the side ( prescription pills as well as pot) and almost no-one can survive on what those stores pay without some additional source of income. In poorer, more rural areas, chrystal meth, locally manufactured, is the drug of choice, and the violence associated with its trade can rival what you have in tough inner city neighborhoods.

In his powerful indictment of the new, low wage economy, “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore,” James Mc Murtry sings

Minimum wage won’t pay for a roof, won’t pay for a drink
If you gotta have proof just try it yourself Mr. CEO
See how far 5.15 an hour will go
Take a part time job at one of your stores
Bet you can’t make it here anymore”

Nobody knows this better than the young people who work in these stores and their response has been to find alternative sources of income, many of them illegal, some involving the risk of violence, arrest and imprisonment

Enter Ron Paul with a call for legalization of drugs and release of non-violent prisoners. To millions of young people living in an economy where the route to the middle class can no longer go through the legal economy, that portion of his campaign speaks directly to their lived reality. It provides them with the hope of doing in the light of day, and in safety, that which they now do surreptitiously in order to have even a minimum access to what they perceive as an American standard of living

Given that no other candidate is willing to raise this issue as clearly and forthrightly as Ron Paul does, don’t be surprised if his support continues to grow among young people of all backgrounds. And it won’t be because of racism. It is because Ron Paul implicitly recognizes- alone among Presidential candidates- that without the drug economy “we can’t make it here anymore.”

Mark Naison
With a Brooklyn Accent 

Mike and Ruthie Leming

Through a story of personal tragedy and the virtues of small-town life, voluntarism, and compassion, the New York Times’ David Brooks has written a column that unwittingly exposes our nation’s outrageous cruelty and callousness.

In his December 30 column, ”Going Home Again,”Brooks tells the story of Ruthie Leming, a school teacher and mother of three daughters in St. Francisville, Louisiana (population 1,765), who last year, at age 40, was diagnosed with a virulent form of cancer. Brooks understandably laments the tragedy and applauds Ruthie’s community, which rallied around her and her family as her health deteriorated.

“There were cookouts to raise money for her medical care,” Brooks reports. On April 10 last year — officially “Ruthie Leming Day” — “more than half the town went to a fund-raising concert” to help pay her medical expenses.

Brooks describes other ways that Leming’s friends and neighbors came to her aid. At the fundraising concert, for example, someone brought a camper trailer “so Ruthie would have a place to rest and take oxygen.” And when Leming died on September 15 of this year, “more than 1,000 people signed the guest book at the funeral.” Brooks quotes Ruthie’s husband Mike, an Iraq war veteran and a fireman, whose friends helped him get through the tragedy. “We’re leaning, but we’re leaning on each other,” he said. Each year on Christmas eve, Ruthie and her mother would put candles on the graves in the local cemetery. But her mother couldn’t bring herself to do it this year. When she drove by the cemetery, however, the candle flames were aglow; one of Ruthie and Mike’s neighbors had taken it upon herself to maintain the tradition. “They will never know what this meant to me,” the mother said.

Brooks learned about Ruthie Leming’s story from his friend Rod Dreher, her brother, who writes and blogs for The American Conservative magazine “The outpouring — an eruption, really — of goodness and charity from the people of our town has been quite simply stunning,” Dreher wrote. “The acts of aid and comfort have been ceaseless, often reducing our parents to tears of shock and awe.”

After experiencing the warmth of the tight-knit community, Dreher decided to move from the Philadelphia area back to St. Francisville, where he grew up but hadn’t lived since he left for college. “I thought, ‘Even with all the sadness, there’s no place else in the world I’d rather be.”

Brooks uses this story as a parable about the virtues of what he calls “communitarian conservativism,” which he contrasts with “free market” conservativism. Brooks favors both, but laments that the former version — which he identifies as rooted in “small towns, traditions, and community” — has gotten less attention.

The support that Ruthie Leming got from her friends and neighbors is indeed heartwarming. Of course, neighborliness and compassion are not unique to small towns. Nor are acts of cruelty and mean-spiritedness confined to big cities. There is plenty of crime, domestic violence, bigotry, and racial and economic tension in rural America.

But as Brooks extols his vision of compassionate conservatism, he casually and conveniently passes over the major outrage of Ruthie Leming’s last year on earth — the fact that her community had to hold fundraisers so her family could pay her medical bills. Brooks wasn’t writing a column about health care policy, but implicit in his story is the notion that charity is an adequate substitute for government regulation or funding to meet basic needs.

In no other civilized nation would the Leming family face this double tragedy of debilitating illness and deep debt. Indeed, people in other well-off countries view America’s lack of universal health care as cruel and barbaric, as indeed it is.

Charity is a good thing. People will always face tragic circumstances where compassion — by individuals and by entire communities — can relieve suffering. As Oliver Zunz points out in his new book, Philanthropy in America, voluntary giving — by the very rich and by ordinary people — can benefit society, especially when it is used to support the extra things that government cannot fully support, such as museums, symphonies, theater, and Little League. But conservatives romanticize charity (which former President George H. W. Bush called “a thousand points of light”) when they view it as a substitute for government support, and argue that voluntary donations and good will gestures can adequately raise funds for K-12 education, feed the hungry, house the homeless, or pay for medicine, hospitals, and doctors’ bills.

The real “community”-wide solution to our health care crisis is universal insurance, which can only be achieved with government setting the rules and providing subsidies.

Exorbitant medical bills are the biggest cause of personal bankruptcies and home foreclosure. In recent years, health care profits — for drug and insurance companies, in particular — have soared, while more and more Americans found themselves without any health insurance at all or (like Ruthie and Mike Leming) with inadequate insurance that didn’t cover their medical bills. As part of their standard business model, insurance companies calculated which Americans were expensive to cover and refused to provide coverage to those people who had what they euphemistically called “pre-existing conditions.”

Last year the nation took a step forward in addressing these problems with a health reform law that requires every American to have insurance, provides subsidies for those who can’t afford it, and restricts insurance companies from discriminating against sick people. While America was debating health care reform, the insurance companies, big business, and the Republican Party spent tens of millions of dollars — in TV ads, campaign contributions, and lobbying — to oppose and weaken the bill. Now every Republican candidate for president has pledged to dismantle what they call “Obamacare” before it even has been fully implemented.

It is a great reflection on the generosity of the people of St. Francisville, and an awful reflection on American society, that at their time of greatest need, Ruthie and Mike Leming had to rely on donations to stave off financial ruin. In what kind of society do we allow teachers and firefighters to rely on charity to help pay their medical bills?

Peter Dreier

On a state-by-state basis, Medicaid – a program that provides health care to the poor –  is being cut in virtually every state, where they are using their manufactured budget crises as an excuse. This under-funding of Medicaid has created a lack of doctors for patients, according to USA today:

“With a shortage of doctors…[Medicaid] patients have little choice but to use hospital emergency rooms for more routine care.” (July 5th, 2011).

But it gets worse. Now, “long term solutions” are being sought. After critically wounding the system with disfiguring cuts, Medicare’s plug is about to be pulled. Different privatization plans have been put forth that would instantly kill Medicare. One such plan was recently announced by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden and Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, which, if enacted, would deliver a deathblow to Medicare as we know it. Some commentators have wrongly dismissed Wyden as a “crackpot” risking political suicide; in fact, Wyden is a cautious, “pragmatic” politician, i.e. he blindly follows party leaders and their corporate bosses.

The Wyden-Ryan plan has deep roots not only amongst Republicans, but also Blue Dog Democrats and the New Democrat Coalition – the powerful congressional caucuses that actually run the Democratic Party. These are the people that create the right-wing economic policies that President Obama has been pursuing since his election victory – thus Obama’s ability to work in a bi-partisan manner with the Republican Party. The Wall Street Journal commented on Obama’s right-wing health care plan:

“To listen to President Obama and his closest Democratic allies, you’d think John McCain had won the election and their bill had been drafted by Paul Ryan, Tom Coburn and the scholars at the American Enterprise Institute [a right wing think tank].” (February 26, 2010).

By attaching his name to Paul Ryan (the anti-Medicare crusader), Wyden is now revealing the ultra-right, pro-corporate trajectory of the Democratic Party leadership. And although the White House has spoken against the bill, Obama’s own health care reform bill created the framework now copied by the Wyden-Paul plan.

Why does the Wyden-Ryan plan amount to privatization? A brief glance at the recent history of Medicare is necessary to explain.

Medicare was once dominated by the federal government, where, as a result, administrative costs were low and quality was high. In the 1990s Medicare patients were given an option to have their Medicare services performed by private providers, who were now able to profit off Medicare by charging extra fees for extra services, which they added to the basic amount of funds received via Medicare.

The reason that people often chose private providers was that Medicare  funding was being cut and consequently, less services were being offered under traditional Medicare. For those who could afford it, private providers became preferred, since people could then purchase the services they needed but were not offered under traditional Medicare. This “option” created the beginning of a two-tier system of Medicare, opening the door for the systems fracturing.

The Wyden-Ryan plan would crack the nut wide open. But instead of saying privatization, a dirty word, “premium support” is used instead, a sterile sounding term with nasty consequences. It essentially means that each Medicare patient will receive a set amount of money for their Medicare that they can use to “shop” for their insurance. This would be the first time that Medicare spending would be capped, and the rate of growth of this capped fund would not match the rate of growth of health care prices. Once you’ve accepted the cap, the cap can be continually lowered by Congress or not raised to keep pace with inflation.

Instead of reducing Medicare costs by going after profit-hungry pharmaceutical corporations, patients will have their services curtailed via the cap.

The “choices” offered under the Wyden-Ryan will fully insert the profit motive into the national health care program: Medicare patients with poor health or chronic conditions would find that most private plans are closed to them, since it’s unprofitable to actually offer the necessary, varied treatments for these patients. Thus, Medicare participants in poor health would remain in traditional Medicare, where costs would rise as more chronic patients joined and healthier patients fled to cheaper plans that allowed only healthy people. Richer patients would also flee to private plans for another reason: Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals are being continually lowered, doctors would naturally refuse to take Medicare patients as they now refuse to take Medicaid patients.

The subsequent higher costs of traditional Medicare would then push up premium prices, co-payments, and deductibles, where very soon the “public option” of Medicare would be unrecognizable to its ancestor. The poor and those with chronic conditions would be legally discriminated against, since private companies are allowed to do so; a once proud public program will have been mutilated and rendered unusable, i.e. it will have been privatized.

Medicare was first hijacked by the health care corporations in the 90s with the introduction of Medicare Part C, the original “option” to have privately run Medicare; and because Part C was privately controlled, it received 14 percent more money in inflated payments than did traditional Medicare patients (so that patients would be pushed into the program while corporations could turn a profit).

Later, Medicare Part D was designed and implemented by these same health care corporations to boost profits (a gift from President Bush Jr.). It thus became common for private companies to have their hand in the Medicare honey jar.

How is profit made in the health care business from Medicare? These companies get a set amount of money from the federal government, and if they provide less health care service than what they are paid, they turn a profit. They also profit by providing additional, unneeded services at inflated costs. The Government Accountability Office reported that in 2006, the private plans earned profits of 6.6 percent while having much higher administrative costs than traditional Medicare.

By 2030 Medicare is expected to enroll 78 million people. Medicaid already provides health care to over 50 million Americans. The number of uninsured Americans stands at 50 million and is rising fast. Tens of millions of more Americans cannot afford the health care plans they are currently in, and millions more would prefer quality health care plans, not the ones they actually have.

Hundreds of millions of Americans thus have a common interest in health care, yet the above attacks on health care continue while costs continue to rise.

It makes sense that Americans should unite in a single health care constituency. Medicare cannot be defended by only current Medicare recipients; nor can Medicaid be saved by current benefactors. In order to unite all working Americans into a powerful coalition, Medicare for All should be demanded, so that all Americans will see their interests reflected in the fight. Few issues so directly affect so many people, but to expand the fight still further, a coalition could be formed that demands jobs, peace, and education, the other “big” issues that– when put together–directly affect nearly every single working person.

The raw material for such a coalition already exists. If the labor and Occupy Movements unite to organize massive, ongoing demonstrations for these basic demands, the potential for a mass movement will have been realized. The majority of Americans would find common cause with such a movement, and after seeing masses of people in the streets, will believe that the fight can be won.

Like Social Security, Medicare is a self-funding program that can be easily preserved by raising taxes on the richest Americans and corporations.  Taxing the rich can also help create a national jobs program, save public education and other vital social services, while also helping to galvanize such a movement.

Politicians are using the national and state budget crises to implement drastic austerity measures — destroying public jobs and services from libraries and health care to roads and education. In Europe the fight against austerity has aroused the entire working populations of several countries, including Greece, England, Italy and Spain. The working people of the U.S. are facing the same austerity crisis and need to unite in the European fashion.

Shamus Cooke

Photo: Michael Dussault.

In her book, Nelson writes that “the Party’s focus on health care was both practical and ideological.” On a practical level, the BPP provided free community health care services, including preventative education. Simultaneously, the BPP railed against the medical-industrial complex, declaring that health care was “a right and not a privilege.” Ronald “Doc” Satchel, the minister of health for the Chicago BPP, wrote in the BPP newspaper that “the medical profession within this capitalist society…is composed generally of people working for their own benefit and advancement rather than the humane aspects of medical care.” A newsletter published by the Southern California chapter argued that “poor people in general and black people in particular are not given the best care available. Our people are treated like animals, experimented on and made to wait long hours in waiting rooms.”

By 1970, People’s Free Medical Clinics had become a requirement for every BPP chapter. In 1972, the BPP revised point six of the founding ten-point-platform, adding a demand for “completely free healthcare for all black and oppressed people…We believe that the government must provide, free of charge, for the people, health facilities which will not only treat our illnesses, most of which have come about as a result of our oppression, but which will also develop preventative medical programs to guarantee our future survival. We believe that mass health education and research programs must be developed to give Black and oppressed people access to advanced scientific and medical information, so we may provide ourselves with proper medical attention and care.”

While citing Martin Luther King’s 1966 declaration that “of all forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane,” one chapter provides an important historical context for the BPP’s health activism by detailing what Nelson calls “the long medical civil rights movement,” that began long before the BPP. “Mobilized in response to the distinctly hazardous risks posed by segregated medical facilities, professions, societies, and schools; deficient or nonexistent healthcare services; medical maltreatment; and scientific racism, activism challenges to medical discrimination have been an important focal point for African American protest efforts and organizations. The Panthers were heirs to health activism that directly reflected tactics drawn from this tradition,” writes Nelson.

Nelson says the central focus of her scholarly work is on “the intersections of science, technology, medicine and inequality.” She has co-edited Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (2001) and Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (scheduled to be released in March, 2012). To learn more, please visit www.alondranelson.com.

Angola 3 News: In our recent interview with Billy X Jennings from It’s About Time BPP, one theme explored was how, with rare exception, the mainstream media has misrepresented the BPP. However, it seems that the even the radical and anti-capitalist media has generally underreported the health activism that is the focus if your book. How did the BPP’s health activism relate to their better-known stances against white supremacy, capitalism, and police violence?

Alondra Nelson: Yes, it’s true. The Black Panthers’ health activism has been under-reported across the ideological spectrum. Their critics obviously did not want to cast them in a positive light. And, as your question suggests, even the Party’s supporters said little about this important aspect of the BPP’s work. I think its plausible to say that many on the Right and some of us on the Left–in very different ways and for completely opposite reasons–were captivated by a vision of the Party that did not include its health politics. Depictions of African Americans working in their neighborhoods, wearing white medical coats, was unspectacular compared to images of Black radicals wearing leather jackets and carrying guns.

It is ironic that our collective memory of the Panthers remains so incomplete because their health activism—from their political writing about medical issues in The Black Panther newspaper, to their practice of DIY healthcare—exemplified the anti-racist, anti-capitalist stance for which they are known. In fact, the reality of health inequality brought the BPP’s political perspective into sharper relief because it offered stark and specific examples of how economic and racial oppression literally damaged bodies, families and communities.

As you know, the BPP was originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, a name that reflected that protecting communities from police brutality was a primary motivation for the group’s founding. The BPP exposed the misuse of power whether it was at the hands of police officers or physicians. So, it’s also useful to think of the Panthers as being engaged in medical self-defense.

In Los Angeles, Party members Ericka Huggins and Elaine Brown, nursing professor Marie Branch, Dr. Terry Kupers, and others established that chapter’s People’s Free Medical Clinic. But, like all of the BPP’s health activism, this work extended beyond the clinic, including in this case, confronting police brutality. (Branch shared meeting notes with me from the 1970s from her personal archive where the formation of BPP health programs and prisoners’ protection from medical discrimination were seamlessly discussed). The LA Panthers advocated for and provided health care for incarcerated persons; some of these men and women needed medical attention because they had been abused while in police custody.

A3N: How does the story of the BPP’s health activism, as presented in your book, contribute to and challenge the traditional presentations of the BPP by both the mainstream and alternative media?

AN: Body and Soul offers an account of the BPP that moves away from the narrow confines of the so-called “culture wars,” in which the Party can only ever be a positive force or a negative element. Paying attention to the Party’s health activism calls into question the inaccurate stereotype of the activists as aimless thugs.

We also gain a different perspective on things we thought we already knew about the BPP, like the fact that the Panthers were avid followers of Fanon, Che and Mao, whose writings were required reading for all members. Through the prism of health, one can see very clearly the influence of Fanon’s dissection of colonial medicine in Algeria on the Panthers’ understanding of medical discrimination in the U.S. We can take seriously the fact that Fanon and Che were physicians as well as political thinkers. We can appreciate that Mao, who established the “barefoot doctors” lay health worker program, made available to the Party not only broad revolutionary principles, but also specific ideas about health care as political practice.

A3N: What do you think were the most successful tactics employed by the BPP as part of its health activism? Strategically speaking, what lessons from the BPP’s health activism do you think are most applicable for today’s activists to learn from?

AN: In addition to setting up their own clinics, they used legal approaches not dissimilar from the NAACP to voice their opposition to problematic biomedical research. The Party leadership realized early on that “policing the police” would not be the only method they used in their effort to topple racism and capitalism. The Panthers were pretty flexible tacticians.

One of the lessons that the BPP offers today’s activists is that they should be more loyal to the desired outcome than to the tactic. The sit-in came to be associated with the southern civil rights movement just as the mic check is now emblematic of the Occupy movement. But these groups also used other tactics: marching, occupying, sermons, etc. Social movements are dynamic phenomena; circumstances are constantly changing. So too should tactics.

One of the BPP’s more fascinating tactics was what I call, after sociologist Lily Hoffman, the “politics of knowledge.” Working in this vein, the Panthers engaged and reinterpreted scientific ideas about race and disease. They reinterpreted scientific theories about the causes of sickle cell anemia, for example, by placing the prevalence of the disease in the context of the history of the transatlantic slave trade, the medical-industrial complex and contemporary racism.

The Panthers use of this tactic—the politics of knowledge—should remind today’s activists that “framing” matters. It is important to be able to translate political arguments—health-related ones and other ones—into language, into stories really, that resonate with the broader public. The Party could be expert at this.

The Nixon administration and mainstream philanthropies would ultimately coopt the issue of sickle cell anemia. But the BPP played a key role in raising awareness about the disease and in situating it in a powerful political language that could mobilize communities.

Alondra Nelson

A3N: Along with chapters focusing on the BPP’s free medical clinics and the campaign to educate the Black community about and test for Sickle Cell Anemia, another chapter focuses on the BPP’s involvement with a diverse coalition that successfully organized against the formation of the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence at UCLA in 1973. You write that BPP felt that the Center’s “biologization of violence” line of research would ultimately “craft a narrative of Black and Latino violent pathology” that would serve to “make already marginalized populations more vulnerable to medicine as a tool of social control,” and “effect the further criminalization of social groups—black males, the incarcerated—and in turn justify calls for increased surveillance and social control.”

While writing that the defeat of the Center was a “notable triumph,” you note further that it “was somewhat of a Pyrrhic victory for Newton and his allies, as blocking resources to the center as an entity would not prevent individual researchers from pursuing other sources of support for their investigations.” With this in mind, how has biologization of violence research progressed since the 1970s? How much influence has it had on public policy?

AN: Attempts to attribute the causes of violence to biology (and closely related to this, criminality) are a very old story. In the late 19th century, the influential Italian criminologist Lombroso, claimed that new methods (e.g., phrenology) and theories (e.g., social Darwinism) showed that the tendency toward criminal behavior was inherited.

More than one hundred years later, similar ideas persist. In the 1990s, during the first Bush presidency, Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of Health and Human Services set-up a “violence initiative” to explore the biological models of social unrest in urban settings. Your readers may recall that around the same time another Bush official, referencing studies on violence among non-human primates, said that disproportionately black and brown “inner cities” were like “jungles.” (The initiative and controversial commentary around it would recall to the heated debate the Panthers were engaged in over plans to form a “violence center” at UCLA in the 1970s that may have had an especially harmful impact on black and Latino youth and men).

Recently behavioral researchers have aimed to link the presence of what has been called the “warrior gene” to violent, criminal behavior. At a time when we are learning even more about the complexities of genetic inheritance, about the epigenome and the systems biology, it simply does not make sense that one single genetic marker could have such a dramatic, determinative effect.

A3N: What role has biologization of violence research played in justifying the mass incarceration explosion that began in the 1970s, increasing the prison population from 300,000 to 2.4 million today, giving the US the highest incarceration rate and the largest total prisoner population in the world?

AN: To the extent that the longstanding efforts that I have just described have kept in circulation the fallacy that there is a definitive link between human biology and violence, theses ideas have indeed served as a justification for the expansion of the carceral system.

This is where the policy implications of the biologization of violence come to the fore: If violence is “in your genes” or “in your blood,” then one can justify policies that lock people away because these people are “lost causes.”

And, in turn, the idea that there is a innate predisposition to violence contributes to the decline of support for rehabilitation and reparative justice programs.

A3N: Since the 1970s, has the US come any closer to realizing the BPP’s public health goals? If BPP co-founder Huey P Newton were alive today, what do you think he would say about President Obama’s “Affordable Care Act?”

AN: The revised ten-point platform was prescient in capturing one side of the recent debates about widening health inequality in the U.S. and what to do about it. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that Newton and the Party would have appreciated the historic nature of what President Obama accomplished—a feat that many administrations before his had variously tried to accomplish and failed to do. Perhaps Newton would have even observed that the Affordable Care Act is a very small step in the right direction.

However, some journalists and pundits have noted the similarity between President Obama’s historic Affordable Care Act and the national insurance plan that former President Nixon backed unsuccessfully. Given the animus between the Party and Nixon, and the way this administration and its agents worked to destroy the BPP, it is hard to imagine that Newton would have been in strong support of recent healthcare reform legislation. There would have certainly been opposition to the fact that President Obama’s plan is a boon for insurance companies because the Panthers demanded, “healthcare for the people, not for profit.”

–Angola 3 News is an official project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com, where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. Additionally we are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more. Our articles and videos have been published by Alternet, Truthout, Counterpunch, Monthly Review, Z Magazine, Indymedia, and many others.

The controversial practice, known as “pay for delay,” occurs as part of patent litigation settlements and typically buys a brand-name drug company more time to sell its blockbuster drug exclusively until its patent on the drug expires. Federal Trade Commission regulators have said the practice costs consumers an estimated $3.5 billion each year, and have pushed for a ban.

But now it appears the drug company Pfizer is adding yet another twist to its efforts to delay generic competitors. As The New York Times reports, the company seems to have struck a deal with certain pharmacy benefit managers — the middlemen in the pharmaceutical industry — to block generic versions of Lipitor.

Lipitor, Pfizer’s blockbuster cholesterol-lowering drug, is among the world’s best-selling pharmaceuticals, and this isn’t Pfizer’s first attempt to protect it.

In 2008, the company settled patent litigation with Ranbaxy, an Indian generic manufacturer, striking a deal that guaranteed that Pfizer would not have to face challenges from Ranbaxy’s generic version of Lipitor until the end of November 2011. Pfizer granted Ranbaxy some incentives as part of the bargain but said it made no payments. Nonetheless, a group of pharmacies filed suit against Pfizer and Ranbaxy last week over the deal, calling it “an extraordinary ripoff” and alleging price-fixing between the two companies.

Now that it’s November 2011, Ranbaxy and other drugmakers are gearing up to offer cheaper versions of Lipitor. As The Times reports, Pfizer has tried to counter this competition by offering big discounts on Lipitor to the middlemen that process prescriptions for pharmacies and other buyers, giving them discounts in exchange for having them block generic versions of Lipitor for another six months. Here’s The Times:

Many drugstores are being asked to block prescriptions for a generic version of Pfizer’s Lipitor starting Dec. 1, when the company loses its patent for the blockbuster cholesterol drug and generic competition begins.

Medco Health Solutions, among the nation’s largest pharmacy benefit managers, is one of the companies issuing instructions, seeking to have pharmacists keep filling prescriptions with the more expensive Lipitor for six months.

See some of those instructions sent to pharmacies by the pharma middlemen. The documents were released by Pharmacists United for Truth and Transparency, a group of independent pharmacists. (We first noticed them posted at the blog Pharmalot.)

According to the group, Pfizer’s plan would mean that customers at the pharmacies serviced by these middlemen would receive Lipitor even when they’ve been prescribed a generic version.

Because Lipitor co-pays would also be reduced to the level of generic co-pays, customers might not notice, but employers and Medicare Part D would pay the same amount as before, despite the availability of a cheaper alternative.

A Pfizer spokesman gave The Times a statement saying that the company was committed to ensuring that customers had access to Lipitor but declined to answer additional questions. We’ve also asked Pfizer for comment and will update when we hear back.

Marian Wang
Pro Publica 

Magic turned Los Angeles from a “bridesmaid,” always watching someone else put a ring on it, to the dominant bride of the NBA, going to the NBA finals nine times in 12 years and winning five championships. All was well with the world…and then it happened. November 7th, 1991 changed Magic’s life, our lives and changed the way we would forever perceive our own mortalities, as it related to the deadly AIDS disease.

Magic Johnson retired from basketball that day (the first time), announcing that he had contracted the dreaded HIV virus that led to contracting the full-blown AIDS disease, for which there was no cure at the time. There was one medicine available that only extended life for not more than a few years. In fact, the medicine killed you just a fast as the disease did. No one, let me repeat…NO ONE had lived with the disease beyond 10 years prior to the 1990s. The disease stuck fast and decisively. When Earvin Johnson stood before the world 20 years ago and said, “I’m going to beat it,” you perceived it more as denial than as determination. AIDS was that scary and it was a foregone conclusion that one was going to die a fast and debilitating death soon after contraction.

There can be no underestimation to the damage HIV/AIDS has caused in our community and our nation over the past two decades. This is not a love story, by any sorts. AIDS has killed tens of thousands of people. Millions have been infected with the virus, many of whom do not know they have been infected because they refuse to be tested. African American and Latino women are the fastest growing infected segment of the American population. Some consider the AIDS crisis now  a national epidemic, but there hasn’t been the type of emphasis placed on the AIDS crisis that is placed on most epidemics. The HIV/AIDS crisis has had few spokespersons to raise the profile of the issue for as long as Magic Johnson, largely because most high profile celebrities affected by the virus haven’t survived it like Magic Johnson has.

We fast forward to 2011 and we see that Earvin Magic Johnson has not only survived it, he is as healthy looking as anyone in our society today. It is not sufficient to only say that Magic Johnson beat the odds. Magic Johnson changed the AIDS game the way he changed a basketball game, with the deft brilliance that only leaves you shaking your head. Magic put a spotlight on an issue that was in the shadows of our society, eating at the fringes but well on its way to the middle core of mainstream society.

With no cure and no education, America surely would have ended up like other countries, namely South Africa, that chose to ignore the disease rather than deal with it. Magic took it from the whispers of the hallways to the White House. Magic changed the way America looked at the disease, from being “just a gay disease” to one anybody could be exposed to, as the nation looked on in bewilderment that if it could touch Magic, it could touch anybody.

But the two biggest things Magic did were, first, to show us that you didn’t have to lie down and die with the AIDS virus, that you could live a normal, active and productive life, living with HIV. Second, he put his huge spotlight on the search for a cure. There are now 30 different medicines available to treat patients with the HIV virus, and all prolong life…not terminate life as the early-day treatments did. Magic kept the HIV/AIDS discussion in the public and medical discourse. He was a “game-changer” in terms of how America would begin to discuss the issue and resolve to address the issue.

Along the way, Johnson has stayed in the public eye, developing an urban entrepreneur empire that is second to none, employing thousands of inner city youth, while convincing investors and corporate America that investing in the inner city is no more a death sentence than living with HIV. Few have followed his lead on inner city investment, but many have followed his lead in living two decades with HIV.

It is still an issue than disproportionately affects the African American community. For the last 20 years, The Magic Johnson Foundation has been a leader in the fight to take the fear out of knowing one’s HIV status and in encouraging the black community to keep up the fight to bring HIV under control. Earvin Johnson has done nothing less, and given nothing less than he did on the basketball court.

Anthony Samad
Black Commentator 

That decision will have major implications for the city, but it also represents one case out of hundreds across the country in which reduced government budgets conflict with community interests.

The JDC has played an integral role in the history of Jacksonville. In 1847 the state legislature established the Illinois State Asylum and Hospital for the Insane, which opened exactly 150 years ago this month. This new public hospital was based on an innovative idea: the state would assume the costs of treating and caring for “the insane”.

Since then, this hospital has undergone significant changes in its name and functions. In the 1970s, care for the developmentally disabled was added to the hospital’s mission. Later in-patient treatment for the mentally ill was eliminated, hence the final name change to the Jacksonville Developmental Center.

While the type of patient has changed, the original idea has not: the state, representing all the people, assumes the medical challenge and financial burden of caring for citizens who cannot care for themselves. That is an expensive undertaking. At the public hearing in Illinois College’s Bruner Fitness Center on October 24, administrators from the Illinois Department of Human Services estimated that the annual cost at JDC is about $200,000 per patient. With nearly 200 patients, the total cost is about $40,000,000, or about $3 per Illinois resident per year.

The JDC is in bad shape. It is heated by outdated coal-fired furnaces, several of which no longer function. Years of inadequate budgets have left an estimated $100 million in deferred maintenance of buildings and roads. In 2010 the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency which administers these programs, nearly decertified JDC due to life safety code violations. Perhaps because of these problems, the JDC is the most expensive among similar Illinois state facilities in per capita cost.

The public hearing revealed conflicts that go beyond budget issues. The Illinois Council for Developmental Disabilities, a state agency which advocates for the developmentally disabled, and the Department of Human Services agreed that institutional care for these patients should be replaced as far as possible with community placement in smaller facilities. They believe this will not only be considerably less expensive, but better for the patients.

The closing of JDC inevitably hurts our local economy. It is one of the largest employers in the area and its 400 staff will not be able to easily find equivalent jobs. The economic ripples of shutting JDC down will extend beyond the employees to businesses which supply food, clothing, materials, and transportation.

The consensus that JDC had outlived its usefulness has developed over many years. This issue has been thoroughly studied, debated, and restudied before the Department of Human Services, following the best medical diagnosis, decided to move its support away from large institutions to smaller facilities.

That is the way we want such momentous decisions about our fellow citizens to be made. Instead the elected leaders of state government, Democrats and Republicans, just wielded an ax to deal with the state budget mess. Jacksonville has to defend our right to survive against hasty partisan decision-making. Closing JDC without sufficient time to allow the staff to prepare the residents for a life-changing move, to allow the community to develop the proper homes to accept so many new residents, to allow staff to find jobs, is incompetent politics.

The crisis at JDC is a small part of a much larger crisis in American political morality. The decision by the young State of Illinois in 1847 is being questioned – should the state, that is, all of us, take care of those who can’t take care of themselves? Or is it too expensive?

On March 15, the New Boston Tea Party was clear about why they want to eliminate most social programs: “The locusts are eating, or should we say devouring, the productive output of the hard working taxpayer.”

At the moment, the developmentally disabled at JDC are the locusts. In other places, it’s the unemployed, the homeless, the immigrants, the poor. Conservatives don’t say that the US isn’t rich enough to care for such people; they say all the time that we are the most prosperous nation ever. They say they don’t want to pay for them. That’s why I’m not a conservative.

Steve Hochstadt
Taking Back Our Lives