Recently Mad River Community Hospital faced the prospect of selling out to a corporate group from Texas. Is Mad River Hospital now an endangered species like so many of our rural hospitals? Recently, Blue Shield and Providence (the conglomerate owner of St. Joseph’s Hospital) struggled with a contract dispute that could have banished many people […]
Patty Harvey
Posted inLetters + Opinion
California Says No to Privatizing Medicare
On Sept. 7 an unheralded piece of legislation passed 30-6 to put California unequivocally on the side of protecting traditional Medicare. Assembly Joint Resolution 4 requests President Biden to eliminate Wall Street profiteering from Medicare via a new program, ACO REACH. REACH is an invention by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) that […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Corporations Aren’t People but They Can Be Psychopaths
Manipulative, deceitful, aggressive, remorseless, lacking empathy and affect — all are classic definitions of psychopathic social behavior, according to psychiatric evaluations. These are traits also emblematic of today’s legal fictions called corporations — entities that have taken control of our democracy and our lives, entities that exist only for the purpose of increased revenue and […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Is Medicare a Public Good or a Market Commodity?
Seniors, beware: Traditional Medicare is under attack. It was established 56 years ago for the health benefit of all seniors and those with chronic disabilities. It is already almost half gone — and without public outcry it will never return. Medicare disintegration started with a program with the misleading name of Medicare Advantage, run by […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
The (Single-Payer) Elephant in the Room
There’s the ancient Buddhist story about blind men describing an elephant. One grasps the tail: “An elephant is like a rope.” One has an ear: “An elephant is flat and floppy.” Another, a leg: “An elephant is like a tree trunk.” These isolated conclusions do not describe an elephant. This has relevance to what people […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
A Real Answer to the Single-Payer Debate
We pay taxes and local fees for water, sewage, garbage and protection, for essential services and infrastructure — an expected, rational cost for the common good. But there is one area of overlooked expense, one fraught with irrationality and inequity; namely, the literally millions of our local dollars going to buy health plans, including some […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Healthcare for All
On Nov. 19, the Humboldt Progressive Democrats voted to admonish state Assemblyman Jim Wood for failing to “take steps to move forward” Senate Bill 562, the single-payer, universal healthcare bill for California that is currently stalled in the Assembly Rules Committee by order of Speaker Anthony Rendon. Wood has supported this suspension even while insisting […]