“Sixty years ago, people who did abortions were in the shadows, people who were considered really bad doctors. Now, abortion is something that is just accepted…This is the erosion. And it happens in the medical profession, and it can happen very fast. And I think Obamacare will lead us down that road.” -Rick Santorum at the American Heartland Forum in Columbia, Missouri, February 2012. (Video at 0:38 seconds.)
Up until now, reproductive science has been steered by a male-dominant perspective, which explains why the narrative of reproduction has historically adopted patriarchal terms. But now this new science “undercuts the dominant, founding myths of Western culture — that men are active and women are passive, that men seek and find and women wait and choose. There is an interaction between the two.”
The Lancet has published a special supplement on Transgender Health, which includes advice for health care professionals as well as calls for greater public health action towards stronger anti-discrimination policies policies, more gender-inclusive schools, bans on “conversion” therapies, increased access to affirming health care and surgery, as well as direction for further academic study, including prioritizing research in Asia,the Middle East, and Africa, and assessing the interplay between gender affirming therapies and interventions for chronic disease (e.g. in the case of diabetes).
if you need an ambulance and you use a wheelchair that doesn’t fold, they will force you to leave it behind. wherever it is, wherever you are. just abandon your autonomy and ability to move around and potentially tens of thousands of dollars of equipment
imagine if you needed an ambulance and they said fine but you can’t bring your legs
people have taken issue with my use of the word ‘force’, so, after rolling my eyes so hard i can now see my brain, i will clarify that, no, they can’t 'force’ you to do anything. they will simply not take you to the hospital if you refuse to leave your wheelchair behind.
Researcher, policy wonk, and New Yorker writer Atul Gawande had heard them all: Medicaid doesn’t work, driving down coverage rates will result in more deaths, insurance coverage doesn’t actually improve health or mortality, and on and on.
So he wanted to comb through the research himself to see what studies on the health effects of health insurance show. Together with resarchers Benjamin SommersandKatherine Baicker — who are two of the leading experts on this subject — Gawande just put out a review of that literature. Their analysis was published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, on the eve of the long-awaited release of the Senate health reform bill, the Better Care Reconciliation Act.
The trio’s conclusions are pretty unequivocal.
“The bottom line,” Gawande told Vox, “is that if you’re passing a bill that cuts $1.2 trillion in taxes that have paid for health care coverage, there’s almost no way that does not end up terminating insurance for large numbers of people.”
He continued: “If you are doing that, then there’s clear evidence that you will be harming people. You will be hurting their access to care. You will be harming their health — their physical health and mental health. There will be deaths.
“As a doctor, I find this unconscionable.”
For every 300 to 800 people who get insurance, about one life is saved per year, they found. The cost to society is somewhere between $300,000 and $800,000 per life saved. “Other policies that save lives — for example, health worker safety protections and environmental regulations — cost closer to $7.6 million per life saved,” he said. That means health insurance is a pretty good deal.
It also means the debate about the repeal and replacement of Obamacare, and whatever health law, if any, comes next, is really a debate about what we value as a society and whether we consider these costs worthwhile.
In theory, cable news should be the perfect venue for explaining a complicated issue like health care policy. 24-hour news networks have a ton of airtime to fill, access to a wide range of policy experts, and a roster of journalists who can find real-life examples that illustrate how abstract policy changes could impact people’s day-to-day lives.
But in the coverage of the Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, cable news networks have largely fixated on the drama of trying to get the Republican’s bill through Congress: the vote whipping, the partisan infighting, and Trump’s efforts to make a “deal” with the more conservative members of his party.
That focus on the spectacle of a vote badly distorts audiences’ understanding of what’s at stake in the health care debate. It means entire interviews are spent asking politicians about vote counts and deal-making instead of talking to actual health care experts. It means countless segments debating Trump’s deal-making abilities and the “optics” of health care reform. And it means viewers at home end up getting less and less meaningful information about what the Republican health care bill actually does, much less whether or not it’s a good idea.
Treating the debate over health care like an episode of House of Cards might make for good television, but it fails to accomplish the basic goal of good political journalism: to explain why this stuff matters to people outside of DC. And if the angry town halls across the country reveal anything, it’s that you don’t need the drama of congressional politics to make people care about what’s happening to their health care.
Watch the video above to see how cable news’ focus on politics over policy warps the way we think about health care.
the “I believe in abortion only in extreme situations” people (especially women) truly baffle me because I genuinely consider “a human has another human growing inside of them and does not want to” to be a very extreme situation. to me that feels so deeply like an extreme emergency situation. I know this has been said before but it’s incredible to me that this does not feel innately horrifying and “extreme” to everyone.
If you are not sure where to start, here are some civic engagement tasks you can do some or all of today:
1) GIVE TO ADAPT
–http:www.adapt.org/donate This will help them continue to organize disabled activists and disability advocates on the ground protesting in DC and to recruit more people to help them with this action– they have been responsible for organizing and supporting many of the folks you have seen photos of protesting, getting arrested, and dragged out of buildings in DC these past weeks and they need our support to keep working to protect disabled rights (and the rest of our rights, too).
2) CALL YOUR SENATORS IF YOU ARE CALLING A DEMOCRATIC SENATOR:
–Call your senator and thank them for fighting against all efforts to repeal the ACA without a bill that actually improves healthcare. –Let them know you support a single payer system (if you do).
–Let them know that you will NOT support any bill that increases premiums or the number of uninsured people, or any bill that excludes care for any minority group (you may want to mention transgender health by name) or excludes support for reproductive health.
–Express your distress over the DOJ’s decision to interpret Title VII as not protecting people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and that you believe it should also protect people based on gender identity as well.
IF YOU ARE CALLING COLLINS (ME), MURKOWSKI (AK), OR MCCAIN (AZ)
–Call them and thank them for fighting against all efforts to repeal the ACA without a bill that actually improves healthcare.
–Let them know you support a single payer system (if you do).
–Let them know that you will NOT support any bill that increases premiums or the number of uninsured people, or any bill that excludes care for any minority group (you may want to mention transgender health by name) or excludes support for reproductive health.
–Let them know that you appreciate that they crossed party lines to do the right thing and ask them to continue to demand bipartisan cooperation on any new healthcare bill.
–Express your distress over the DOJ’s decision to interpret Title VII as not protecting people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and that you believe it should also protect people based on gender identity as well.
IF YOU ARE CALLING COLLINS (ME) OR MURKOWSKI (AK)
–Let them know that you appreciate their steadfastness in the face of threats and insults from their own party and encourage them to keep working for better healthcare. Tell them that they have your support.
IF YOU ARE CALLING MCCAIN (AZ
)–Let him know that you appreciate his efforts against the skinny repeal and to draw attention to procedural breakdown in the Senate but that his methods were not compassionate toward the people whose healthcare was dependent upon this vote and that he owes it to his constituents to be up front about his voting choices and that there are kinder ways to achieve the same ends.
IF YOU ARE CALLING A REPUBLICAN SENATOR WHO IS NOT ONE OF THE ABOVE:
–Tell them that unless they do a real 180 on healthcare, you will be voting against them.
–Let them know you support a single payer system (if you do).
–Let them know that you will NOT support any bill that increases premiums or the number of uninsured people, or any bill that excludes care for any minority group (you may want to mention transgender health by name) or excludes support for reproductive health.
–Let them know that you expect them to do a better job of inviting bipartisan work on this bill.
–Let them know that you expect them to do a better job of defending their own party members from insults within their party and that the way fellow Republicans have treated Murkowski and Collins is unacceptable.
–Express your distress over the DOJ’s decision to interpret Title VII as not protecting people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and that you believe it should also protect people based on gender identity as well.
3) CALL YOUR YOUR HOUSE REP:
–Express your feelings about their record on healthcare to this point.
–Ask them to vote NO on any healthcare bill that increases premiums or the number of uninsured Americans.
–Ask them to vote NO any bill that excludes care for any minority group (you may want to mention transgender health by name) or excludes support for reproductive health.
–Let them know you support a single payer system (if you do).
–Express your distress over the DOJ’s decision to interpret Title VII as not protecting people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and that you believe it should also protect people based on gender identity as well.
4) CALL YOUR GOVERNOR AND STATE REP(S):
–Tell them that you would like to see state healthcare legislation in the event that the ACA is removed.
–Let them know you support a single payer system for your individual state (if you do).
–Ask them to ensure that reproductive health, LGBT health, and healthcare for the disabled are protected.
–Ask them to ensure that pre-existing condition exclusions are not welcome in your state.
–Ask them to ensure that caps on annual or lifetime coverage are not welcome in your state.
–Ask them to ensure that large employers MUST pay toward insurance for employees in your state.
–Ask them to work on making sure that civil rights laws in your state protect people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
