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Health Care

Congress’s Cuts To Medicaid Could Devastate Rural Hospitals

When Dr. Ed Paul visits Nogales, Arizona, he sees well-trained, hardworking doctors and nurses. Yet as in many smaller towns and rural communities, its health care staffing, infrastructure, and funding doesn’t meet the needs of residents. People who need health care have a tough time accessing it — and the people delivering it feel overburdened. With limited providers, Dr. Paul notes, it’s hard to get an appointment, so patients either wait, travel long distances, or simply go without. As the Policy Director for the Rural Democracy Initiative, I support groups across the country who are working to ensure rural Americans have access to quality, affordable health care.

Historic 12-Day March For Mumia Ends At SCI Mahanoy

Around 150 participants filled both sides of the entrance road to State Correctional Institution (SCI) Mahanoy for a rally on Dec. 9 – the final day of the historic March for Mumia. The march demanded “Justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal, End Medical Neglect [in Pennsylvania prisons] and End Elder Abuse.” The 12-day, 103-mile march started in Philadelphia on Nov. 28 and ended in Frackville, Pennsylvania, with over 65 people walking the last three miles. A long-time supporter of Mumia, Pam Africa, with International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal, reminded people that Mumia was a journalist, a teacher, and a family man, who was railroaded and never had a fair trial. She urged people to keep on fighting for justice for Mumia.

Wave Of Tax Cuts Left States Vulnerable To SNAP And Medicaid Crisis

This fall, Americans got to see what it’s like to go without a safety net for the hungry. With the U.S. government shut down for multiple weeks and President Donald Trump refusing to fund SNAP, the federal food stamp program, a panic set in among the more than 40 million people who rely on it. Families skipped meals, and babies went unfed. Food banks ran out of food, and some people turned to dumpster diving. It was just a glimpse of what’s to come. Starting next October, Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act will shift billions in SNAP costs from the federal government onto states.

CHOP Defends Rights Of Transgender Patients

A federal court in Philadelphia ruled in favor of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia blocking the Trump administration’s demand for the renowned hospital’s Gender and Sexuality Development Program to turn over confidential information about clinic patients. CHOP runs one of the largest clinics in the U.S. which provides medical care and mental health support for transgender and gender-nonbinary children and teens and their families. Each year since 2014, hundreds of new families seek care through the program.

Billionaires Are Buying Your Hospitals

South African billionaire Johann Rupert has enjoyed a sudden surge in wealth. His expanding fortune, like those of billionaires around the world, is not a sign of brilliance or achievement. It is a symptom of a system built to funnel wealth upward into the hands of the 1%. Rupert’s net worth jumps from $13.7 billion to $19.1 billion in under a year, powered by sales of high-end jewelry through Richemont, the luxury goods holding company he founded. With his exploding profits he invests in hospital networks, viewing them simply as financial assets, not the essential services the rest of us — the 99% — need and have the right to. The headlines call it “performance,” but anyone living outside the 1% knows it is extraction.

Study: Gender-Affirming Care Lowers Suicide Risk For Trans Kids

A newly published study reveals that a certain kind of gender-affirming care for transgender kids and young adults likely lowers rates of suicidality among those populations. The study, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, examined 432 patients between the ages of 12 and 20 years old who received treatment at an unnamed Midwestern academic medical center. Patients who were set to receive gender-affirming care filled out Ask Suicide-Screening Questions (ASQ) surveys prior to receiving hormone therapy (HT) treatment, then repeated the questionnaire at future visits.

Health Care Workers Spoke Out For Their Peers In Gaza; Then Backlash

Chandra Hassan, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) College of Medicine, spent three weeks in Gaza in January 2024, treating patients who had survived tank shelling, drone strikes, and sniper fire amid Israel’s ongoing genocide. When Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis came under siege, Hassan and the MedGlobal doctors he was serving with were forced to flee. “We were evacuated when they bombed just across the street from the hospital [and] tanks were rolling in,” Hassan told Truthout. When Hassan returned home to Chicago, he was eager to share his experiences and advocate for an end to Israel’s assault on Gaza, which has killed an estimated 68,000 Palestinians since October 2023.

40,000 University Of California Hospital Workers In Two-Day Strike

San Diego — As 40,000 AFSCME Local 3299 workers throughout the ten-campus University of California system launched a two-day strike on Nov. 17, two Communist Party members—Alvin, an AFSCME-represented employee at University of California at San Diego (UCSD), and another worker, an AFSCME retiree from UC San Francisco—shared their thoughts before they prepared to picket. Pay, or lack of it, is the big issue. But so is disparate treatment on a class basis.  While the university system fails to settle contracts addressing the cost of living and affordability crises facing its most economically vulnerable patient care workers, it’s also handed out six-figure salaries and housing subsidies to multiple high administrators.

The Legal Basis For And US Violations Of Our Right To Health Care

The United States was scheduled for its regular review of its human rights violations by the United Nations Human Rights Council on November 7, but it refused to cooperate. As part of the process, activists in the US submitted a shadow report last April called "The Rights to Life and Health: How financing affects the right to health care in the US." Clearing the FOG speaks with Martha "Marti" Schmidt, a human rights expert and activist, about the findings in the shadow report, the legal basis supporting the human right to health care, the problems with the current healthcare system in the United States and what type of system would honor our right to health care. Schmidt also discusses successful healthcare systems in other countries and the importance of showing solidarity with countries that are targeted by the United States.

Long March For Mumia!

The following is based on a lightly edited post from Zayid Muhammad in support of the Nov. 28-Dec. 9, 2025 March for Mumia: “Our struggle for freedom, justice and equality has always been a long, hard walk, to put it mildly,” says veteran voice for social justice Zayid Muhammad, chair of the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee. Muhammad will be among the marchers on Nov. 28 when supporters for [Pennsylvania] political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal will begin an incredible 108-mile walk to protest medical neglect he faces and the medical neglect characteristically facing aging prisoners! The walk is being simply called ‘March For Mumia’!

‘Pelosi’s Law’: Why Democratic Leaders Think They’re Winning By Losing

With her legacy on prominent display, Nancy Pelosi’s retirement announcement couldn’t have been better timed. When better to bid farewell to a historic party leader than during a bruising fight over a corner of the U.S. health care mess, where winning won’t improve a single person’s health care but will perpetuate trillions of dollars in subsidies for corporations? There’s not much to say about the content of the reported deal to end the government shutdown that Healing and Stealing hasn’t already said. Several million people may no longer be able to buy coverage, which a huge portion of them won’t use anyway, because the enhanced subsidies don’t cover the extreme cost sharing that plagues ACA plans. Cutting the subsidies is cruel, and Congress should extend them, but it’s a fight to preserve an awful status quo.

UK Doctors On Strike: BMA Turns Down No-Pay-Rise Offer

The British Medical Association (BMA) has rejected a new offer from health secretary Wes Streeting to avert strikes on 14 November. Streeting gave the BMA until the end of today, 6 November, to consider. Not that they would have needed it, mind you – the offer didn’t make any move to restore resident doctors’ pay. As the Canary previously reported, there are two issues at the heart of the doctor’s dispute with the government: job shortages and pay restoration. 34% of resident doctors hadn’t been able to secure regular locum or substantive employment in time for August this year, according to a BMA survey.

‘Students Rise Up’ Actions Hit 100 Cities

The new coalition “Students Rise Up” held actions in 100 cities at schools and where politicians were targeted on Nov. 7 to protest President Donald Trump’s attacks on higher education and address a range of issues impacting students. Nearly 20 unions and organizations endorsed the actions, including the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Ohio Students Association, New Hampshire Youth Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, Campus Climate Network, Gen-Z for Change, Indivisible, Jewish Voice for Peace and March for Our Lives. Sunrise Movement, whose executive director, Aru Shiney-Ajay, stressed in a Nov. 4 press release that “everyone deserves an accessible, affordable and quality education.”

Enhance The Subsidies And Let Insurance Industry Feed At Federal Trough?

It’s helpful to think of the U.S. health care system like a pie made up of different slices (Figure). The largest (blue) slice is employer health insurance, which covers 160 million workers and their dependents; individual non-group insurance (in orange) provides 24 million individuals and their families with patchy insurance (including the enhanced subsidies); Medicaid (in yellow) covers 65 million poor and low-income adults, children, and seniors; Medicare (in red) pays for medical care for 60 million seniors and people with disabilities; the Veteran’s Health Administration (in bright green) provides the best socialized medicine in the nation to 9.1 million qualifying veterans; and that leaves the rest, approximately 28 million Americans, in the (purple) slice of the uninsured.

This Veterans Day, The VA Faces Multiple Threats

When veterans and their families gather at commemorative events on Nov. 11, many who use the benefits and services of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) will be wondering whether they can still rely on that federal agency. Among those worried about the agency’s future — and their own — are the 100,000 former service members who comprise one-third of the workforce in the largest public health care system in the country. These veterans work at nearly 1,400 VA-run hospitals and clinics nationwide. Every day, they help the nine million men and women who have service-related medical conditions or qualify for VA coverage because of financial need or recent deployment in combat zones. 
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