Let's see how socialized medicine is doing -- Oh, you have to self-fund your surgery

[piezoe]

Ha ha,
DeJoy, another wonderful example, of how the Republicans will try and take a wrecking ball to any government body they want to privatize. And who better to swing the Wrecking Ball then someone who has a controlling interest in a private, for profit, competitor. Talk about a conflict in interest!!! https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/09/politics/usps-louis-dejoy-biden/index.html

 

[Cuddles]

Ha ha,
DeJoy, another wonderful example, of how the Republicans will try and take a wrecking ball to any government body they want to privatize. And who better to swing the Wrecking Ball then someone who has a controlling interest in a private, for profit, competitor. Talk about a conflict in interest!!! https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/09/politics/usps-louis-dejoy-biden/index.html

using race as a wedge to sabotage & privatize public education:

Despicable:
https://dianeravitch.net/category/dark-money/
https://www.masspoliticsprofs.org/2...ards-superintendents-principals-and-teachers/
https://www.masspoliticsprofs.org/2...am-grassroots-of-parents-defending-education/

Follow the Money

Over the past five years I’ve been following “education reform” groups created by billionaire investors with names like Families for Excellent Schools, Massachusetts Parents United, and National Parents Union which have presented diversity as their public face while attacking teachers. So when I saw the launch of Parents Defending Education on March 30 I took note because it follows a different path: white backlash aimed more at school boards, superintendents, and principals. The first thing to do when evaluating these groups is always, follow the money.

But as the financial backers of groups like PDE well know, public disclosure of funders will only come about nearly two years down the road, if then, in publicly available Form 990 tax returns for organizations with Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3)status as charitable organizations. PDE president Nicole Neily has refused to disclose the organization’s donors when asked by media outlets. It’s not just that she won’t. She can’t. Disclosure would likely reveal ties to radical right funders tied into the Koch network and similar underwriters. We know this thanks to work done by PRWatch and from Sourcewatch at the Center for Media and Democracy. They show that Neily is a political operative at Koch network funded operations like the Independent Women’s Forum, Franklin Center, and Speech First.

The Speech First association is instructive. Neily is founding president of that non-profit as well. Sourcewatch has identified some of its funders as the Bader Family Foundation for $30,000, Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund: $500,250, Judicial Education Project for $1,000,000, and National Philanthropic Trust: $500,000. The real check writers will probably never become known. Form 990s show that Neily is the sole employee, earning $161,000 in 2018 and $150,000 in 2019. Speech First brings lawsuits against universities for policies touching on race. For this, it paid the law firm Consovoy McMullen $950,000 in 2018, and to get the word out paid the Republican communications firm Creative Response Concepts $106,000. Boiled down, Speech First is a pass through that allows wealthy conservative donors to remain hidden while paying Consovoy McMullen to attack universities.

And who represents Parents Defending Education? Why, Consovoy McMullen. William Consovoy also represents Donald Trump and clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. The firm is conservative legal royalty. PDE did not hire it after an especially successful bake sale.

 

[gwb-trading]

Increasing push that the unvaccinated should pay their own medical bills. Plague rats should not be sponging off of those who responsibly got vaccinated to pay their bills.

Should the unvaccinated have to pay their own medical bills?
https://theweek.com/delta-variant/1003596/treating-the-unvaccinated

Not for the first time, the pandemic has raised new questions about how to balance individual liberty with public health. The latest is whether people who choose to go unvaccinated against COVID-19 should be made to pay their full hospital expenses if they get sick.

Jonathan Meer, an economics professor, makes the argument at MarketWatch: "Under our system of risk-sharing, it's all of us, whether through government programs like Medicare and Medicaid or through private insurers," he writes. "When someone who refuses to get the vaccine gets seriously ill, their bills currently are paid by taxpayers or others in their insurance group."

Meer bases his argument on economic incentives, as befits his profession, but many of the people advocating for this appear at least partially motivated by animus against Donald Trump's supporters. But anything targeting the unvaccinated would also have a disparate effect on racial minorities with low-vaccination rates, especially black Americans, as much as any GOP voting law. That is not a defense of white conservative vaccine hesitancy, it is just an acknowledgement of reality.

Higher insurance premiums for the unvaccinated might make sense, but making them assume the full cost of hospitalization is probably unworkable. But the question does raise interesting thought experiments about what kind of behaviors the government would be able to regulate or forbid under Medicare-for-all. Some Republicans are interested in passing laws or regulations to prevent local governments and even private companies from experimenting with their own ways to encourage safe COVID practices. President Biden has said he thinks this is inconsistent with the standard GOP critique of government overreach, and he may be right, even in an era where conservatives are rightly reappraising whether supporting free markets entails an uncritical defense of whatever private businesses want to do.

What both of these excesses have in common is that they confuse stigmatizing the other side of the red-blue divide and piling mandates upon mandates with protecting the populace from the virus.