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Single-Payer Healthcare: A Right, Not a Privilege
AfterDowningStreet has long been a supporter of a single-payer healthcare system, also called Medicare for All. There will actually be a vote on this in the U.S. House of Representatives after the August recess and we need to lobby our representatives to commit to voting Yes.
But, even should we fail, there is another way we can win that we should also be demanding commitments on in August. Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced an amendment that was passed by the Education and Labor Committee that would let individual states create single-payer healthcare systems without the risk of having them blocked or tied up in the courts for years by insurance companies.
That's exactly how Canada evolved towards single-payer: one province at a time. Given the corporate-funded resistance to single-payer in Congress, the U.S. may have to follow the Canadian path.
Tell your congressperson to support national single-payer, and if we don't get that, the right of states to create single-payer and the creation nationally of as strong an immediate public option as possible.
If they ask you where to find the money, tell them to cut the military budget and end illegal wars. They should pay for the nation’s first line of defense—our health.
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PA DOC Will Finally Treat Mumia's Hep-C infection, But Only Because Prison's Neglect has Caused Cirrhosis
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Ryancare wreckage: Don the Con's Health Care Pushes Serious Problems Aside
fdsBy Linn Washington, Jr.
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Big win for Hep-C infected inmates: Federal Judge Orders Pennsylvania to Provide Anti-Viral Hep-C Treatment to Mumia Abu-Jamal
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In a stunning conclusion to a year-and-a-half legal drama, a federal judge in Scranton, has ordered the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to quit stalling and to begin treating prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal with the latest available and highly effective anti-viral drugs for curing him of a raging and life-threatening case of Hepatitis C.
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A win and a loss, at least for now: Federal Judge finds 8th Amendment Violation in Pennslvania’s Refusal to Treat Mumia's Hep-C
By Dave Lindorff
Depending on how you look at it, lawyers for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Philadelphia journalist and political prisoner serving a life sentence in a Pennsylvania prison after a controversial 1982 conviction for killing a white Philadelphia police officer, won a huge victory, lost big or maybe won and will win again soon.
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Virus blinds public to health issues that really matter: Zika Hysteria Spreads Faster than Zika Itself
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Zika has been described as extraordinary in so many ways. But the only thing that’s really extraordinary about the whole thing is how incredibly dispassionate I am about it.
Why I won’t be voting for Hillary in November: A Neolib Posing as a Progressive vs. a Reality TV Star Posing as a Fascist
By Dave Lindorff
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Striking out at the NY Times: Hit Piece on Sanders Proposals Relies on Pro-Clinton Economists Mislabeled as ‘Leftists’
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Sanders campaign offers a historic opportunity: We Need a Mass Movement Demanding Real Social Security and Medicare for All
By Dave Lindorff
The rising fortunes of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist US senator from Vermont, in the Democratic presidential primaries, provides a unique opportunity for organizing a new radical movement around key political goals including a national health care program for all Americans, not just the elderly and disabled, and a national retirement program that people can actually live on.
Ruling soon on Mumia non-treatment policy challenge: PA Admits Secret ‘Protocol’ Denies Hep-C Treatment to All But Dying Inmates
By Dave Lindorff
Following three days of contentious testimony in a courtroom in Scranton, PA late last month, a federal district judge is considering a legal petition by Pennsylvania's most well-known prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal for a finding that the state's long-running refusal to treat his active case of Hepatitis-C, a potentially fatal disease, violates his Eighth Amendment right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment.
Court could rule not treating inmates with Hep C violates 8th Amendment: Dr. Jess Guh on Hep-C Epidemic in Nation’s Prisons
Dr. Jess Guh on Hep-C Epidimec in Nation’s Prison and PA’s Refusal to Treat Mumia Abu-Jamal
A Progressive Radio Network podcast
Dave Lindorff and his guest on PRN.fm's “This Can't Be Happening!" program, Dr. Jess Guh, talk about Mumia Abu-Jamal’s court battle in federal court in Scranton to force the state’s prison system to provide him with treatment for his active and potentially fatal case of Hepatitis-C.
Dr. Guh, a primary car physician from Seattle who has been investigating the shoddy standard of health care in the nation’s prisons, and who has reviewed some 100 pages of Mumia’s medical record, says that what Pennsylvania and many other states are doing to prisoners in their control by denying Hep-C treatment is nothing short of malpractice and neglegence on a massive scale.
To hear this podcast, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/2972
Abu-Jamal case shows widespread neglect of inmate health: Mumia Faces Possible Second Death Sentence
By Jess Guh
This is the third in a three-part series on Mumia Abu-Jamal's fight to force the Pennsylvania prison system to treat his active Hep-C infection, and that of thousands of other infected state inmates, and on the raging Hepatitis-C epidemic in the nation's prisons. (Click here for Part I or here for Part II)
Seattle, WA – Physicians are held to professional expectations dictating that the failure to provide standard healthcare is malpractice. There is no difference between failing to provide a service and performing a liable medical mistake.
Mumia Abu-Jamal Battles for His Life...Again
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Blacks to be treated differently with blood pressure meds: Racism Alive and Well in New Medical Guidelines
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With this article, ThisCantBeHappening! welcomes Dr. Jess Guh to our collective. You can read about her background by clicking on the "Who, and What, Are We?" button just below our masthead.
‘We’re sorry’: America’s Latest War Crime is the Murderous Destruction of a Hospital in Afghanistan
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Killing prisoners through medical neglect: Mumia Attorneys Sue in Federal Court for Prisoners’ Right to Medical Care
By Dave Lindorff
Attorneys from the Abolitionis Law Center in Pennsylvania, an organization defending prisoner rights and challenging the state's penal system, have filed suit in federal court demanding that Pennsylvania's Department of Corrections stop preventing them from even seeing their client, journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, on occasions when he has to be hospitalized for a critical diabetes condition.
Execution by medical neglect?: Pennsylvania’s Prison System is Torturing Mumia Abu-Jamal and his Family Too
By Dave Lindorff
Mumia Abu-Jamal, the radical Philadelphia journalist convicted of killing a white Philadelphia police officer in a trial fraught with prosecutorial misconduct, witness coaching and judicial prejudice back in 1981, spent nearly three decades in solitary confinement in the deliberately designed hell of Pennsylvania’s supermax SCI Green prison before a panel of federal Appeals Court judges eventually ruled that he’d been unconstitutionally sentenced to death.
Victory in an eight-year battle: Philadelphia Passes Paid Sick-Leave Law
By Dave Lindorff
Finally some good news for a change!
At a packed session of the Philadelphia City Council Thursday morning, council members voted 14-2 to approve a bill mandating that all companies with 10 or more employees in this city of 1.5 million allow their workers to earn up to five days’ paid sick leave for themselves or to care for a sick or injured person at home.
