Ideology kills

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Republican-led states have for years refused to expand Medicaid eligibility to many of their poorest residents, and now, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and an unprecedented economic crisis, thousands upon thousands of Americans will fall through that hole in the safety net and end up uninsured.

This was completely avoidable.
The Affordable Care Act was designed to extend Medicaid coverage to everybody living in or near poverty. But Republican resistance to the health care law, enabled by a 2012 ruling from the US Supreme Court, prevented that vision from becoming a reality. Today, 14 states have not expanded Medicaid access. Poor people — particularly black Americans living in the South — have already been paying the price for that obstruction for years.
But today, in the middle of the coronavirus outbreak, many thousands more are going to discover the harsh reality that the United States has failed to adequately protect its poorest citizens from financial ruin in a medical emergency.

New estimates from the Urban Institute provide a fuller understanding of the cost of those decisions during the Covid-19 crisis. With record unemployment upon us, the institute’s researchers anticipate that between 25 million and 43 million Americans will lose their employer-sponsored health coverage along with their job. In the 36 states (plus Washington, DC) that have expanded Medicaid through the ACA, less than a quarter of those people are expected to become uninsured. Most of them are expected to end up on Medicaid, as intended.

But in the 14 states that still refuse to expand Medicaid, a full decade after Obamacare became law, about 40 percent of the people who lose their jobs and their health insurance will end up with no coverage at all.
Urban Institute/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Those newly uninsured people will be less likely to seek necessary medical care, the available research tells us, and more likely to face financial catastrophe if they do have a medical emergency — coronavirus-related or otherwise. The price tag for treating Covid-19 if a patient ends up hospitalized is anywhere from about $10,000 to north of $20,000. And these will be people who just lost their job and therefore their income. Enhanced benefits for unemployment aren’t going to cover a $15,000 hospital bill.

It gets worse. Rural hospitals in states that refused to expand Medicaid were already more vulnerable to closure than hospitals in states that did expand. Now they have been forced to cancel elective surgeries, a fiscal lifeblood for any hospital, pushing them even closer to closing.
Tens of thousands uninsured, hospitals on the brink of bankruptcy, all amid a devastating pandemic. It didn’t have to be this way..

Coronavirus: Rejecting Medicaid expansion hurt newly unemployed workers - Vox

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The United States could have averted about 15,600 deaths if all 50 states expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, new research suggests. The Affordable Care Act initially expanded Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for low-income people, to everyone making less than 138 percent of the federal poverty line. But a 2012 Supreme Court ruling weakened the policy, allowing states to reject the expanded program. As of 2019, 36 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Medicaid expansion, and 14 have not..

This is in line with a growing body of research that shows Medicaid expansion has not only vastly increased access to health insurance, but also improved health outcomes. About 13.6 million adults gained Medicaid coverage under Obamacare.

One 2018 study found Medicaid expansion improved access to surgery and increased the probability that patients seek care before their conditions become complicated. Another 2018 study found Medicaid expansion saved patients with kidney disease starting dialysis. As Sarah Kliff reported for Vox, Medicaid recipients have also report having an easier time paying medical bills and carry less debt.

Obamacare study: 15,600 fewer deaths if every state expanded Medicaid - Vox

• As a reminder to the previous post
  
• Numbers likely to be much larger now that many lose their jobs and associated healthcare coverage..
  

[Admin]

From Talking Points Memo:

String together coverage of COVID-19 “stay-at-home” orders in The Federalist, the conservative website, and it begins to resemble an ode to death itself.

“Imagine for a moment that the nation were ruled by dictatorship of doctors…”

“Is it right for the nation to require our children’s futures be destroyed to keep alive less than 1 percent of our population until the next flu season?”

“It seems harsh to ask whether the nation might be better off letting a few hundred thousand people die.”

“So the barbaric, panicky elevation of mere life as the only good worth conserving is becoming increasingly shameful.” 

“Is death the worst thing that could happen to you?”

So sings the chorus of conservative PhDs, right-wing think tankers, business owners and scientific contrarians narrating the impact of COVID-19. The Federalist is their echo chamber, publishing dozens of articles in recent weeks largely focused on the need to “reopen” society.

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In recent weeks, three studies have focused on conservative media’s role in fostering confusion about the seriousness of the coronavirus. Taken together, they paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others.

The end result, according to one of the studies, is that infection and mortality rates are higher in places where one pundit who initially downplayed the severity of the pandemic — Fox News’s Sean Hannity — reaches the largest audiences.

“We are receiving an incredible number of studies and solid data showing that consuming far-right media and social media content was strongly associated with low concern about the virus at the onset of the pandemic,” said Irene Pasquetto, chief editor of the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, which published one of the studies.

New research explores how conservative media misinformation may have intensified coronavirus - The Washington Post

• Ideology kills again..
  

[Admin]

I have long argued that conservatives’ innate empathy deficit requires them to suffer directly from societal problems and controversies before they will support basic concepts, like the value of the social safety net or the importance of medical research or the morality of same-sex marriage. We’ve seen this play out with the COVID-19 crisis, as the virus first hit urban centers and coastal regions rather than Republican strongholds. Republican governors, with only a few exceptions, did not take the pandemic seriously enough and put too much emphasis on reopening their economies. They are now suffering the consequences, and their constituents are turning on them, and on the president. Gallup shows Trump’s approval rating sinking to 38 percent, and the explanation is based almost entirely on new people being impacted by COVID-19... 

Amazingly, as Yasmeen Abutaleb and Josh Dawsey report in the Washington Post, the administration seems to believe that their base of supporters will simply “get over it” and “move on” as they become inured to a steady and massive infection rate.

White House officials also hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day, according to three people familiar with the White House’s thinking, who requested anonymity to reveal internal deliberations. Americans will “live with the virus being a threat,” in the words of one of those people, a senior administration official. “They’re of the belief that people will get over it or if we stop highlighting it, the base will move on and the public will learn to accept 50,000 to 100,000 new cases a day,” said a former administration official in touch with the campaign..

The floor is collapsing under Trump as COVID-19 hits his base – Alternet.org

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The United States is being ravaged by a deadly pandemic that is growing exponentially, overwhelming health care systems and costing thousands of lives, to say nothing of an economic recession that threatens to plague the nation for years to come. But the American public seems to be over the pandemic, eager to get kids back in schools, ready to hit the bar scene and hungry for Major League Baseball to play its abbreviated season. The startling divergence between the brutal reality of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the fantasy land of a forthcoming return to normalcy has public health experts depressed and anxious about what is to come. The worst is not behind us, they say, by any stretch of the imagination.

Public's disconnect from COVID-19 reality worries experts | TheHill

• This is what you get when you deny reality and science..
  

[Admin]

That we would have scammers, fraudsters and opportunity-grabbing companies, including those who never before had manufactured PPE falling over each other to reach a desperate medical market was a foregone conclusion. That’s how we roll. With 1,000 hospital workers now having died as a result of treating the virus has meant that hospitals and states will pay whatever the going freight requires to get their hands on enough materiel...

More than 49,000 complaints about price-gouging have been submitted to law enforcement officials in 22 states. Whatever the enforcement numbers, they are a tiny proportion of those totals. The reason, in part, apparently is a “philosophical dispute:” within the administration that is reportedly impeding enforcement.  This time, the White House has been quick to point out that it has no daily interference in the business of an independent Justice Department – a claim that actions from seeking to crush the Mueller Report to commuting the sentence of Roger Stone make easily laughable. Of course, free marketers would argue that the market is self-regulating about such abuses.

And the White House declares daily that there are more tests, more masks, better anti-virus work under their direction than in any country on Earth. But if one arm of the Trump administration is absolving companies and individuals from legal liability, that act is stepping on the enforcement arm being announced simultaneously. Even then, the Department of Health and Human Services has had technical authority to issue allocation orders, but it has been the White House that actually decides.

Why ‘the market’ can’t regulate the trade in PPE and other vital pandemic supplies – Alternet.org

• Fake and/or defunct PPE, price gauging, welcome to predatory capitalism
  
• Free market cannot solve this, and pretending it can produces casualties, like the 1000 hospital workers that have already died.
  

[Admin]

The U.S. vaccine map looks a lot like a map of how states vote in presidential elections, with most blue states vaccinating at levels well above the national average and GOP states bringing up the rear. The politics of COVID-19 have been partisan from almost the onset of the pandemic, and polls consistently show that Republicans, particularly men, are more hesitant than Democrats to get vaccinated. The deep-blue state of Vermont has the highest share of its population with at least one vaccine dose, at 65 percent, according to data compiled by The New York Times, followed by Massachusetts, Hawaii, New Hampshire and Connecticut.

The top 21 states for vaccination rates all went for President Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Iowa — with 47 percent of its population receiving at least one shot — is the highest ranking state on the list, at No. 22, that voted for former President Trump.  The state with the lowest vaccination rate, Mississippi, at 32 percent, is deeply red, as are the other four states that round out the bottom five: Louisiana, Alabama, Wyoming and Idaho. Survey results reveal a big reason why. An NPR-PBS-Marist poll this month found that 41 percent of Republicans said they are not going to get vaccinated, compared to just 4 percent of Democrats who said the same.

State vaccine rates fall along red, blue divide | TheHill

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Representative Bill Kidd joked that he didn’t get a vaccine because he’s a Republican. Now he has COVID... 

State Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Taney County, home to the tourist destination of Branson, commented on the post by falsely claiming that the virus had been developed by top government scientist Anthony Fauci and billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates. They “knew what was coming,” Seitz wrote. “The jury is still out on the ‘vaccine’ (who knows what’s in that),” he wrote. 

As the number of coronavirus infections rises around the country, lawmakers like Kidd and Seitz have adopted responses that trouble many health officials. In Tennessee, Republicans legislators threatened to shut down the state health department, saying it was targeting minors for mass vaccinations without the consent of parents. In Ohio, lawmakers allowed a doctor to testify at a legislative hearing last month that coronavirus vaccines could leave people magnetized (they can’t). During a hearing in the Montana Senate, a senator said he had read articles about “putting a chip in the vaccine.” (There are no chips in vaccines.))

GOP Legislators in Missouri Oppose Vaccine Efforts as State Becomes COVID Hotspot — ProPublica

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U.S. Senator Roger Marshall, a Republican of Kansas and an obstetrician, dismissed the deaths of 400 children who have died from COVID-19 during a Senate hearing Tuesday with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky. Senator Marshall's remarks were based on his false claim that "probably zero" of the 400 children who died of COVID (that number has not been confirmed) had no pre-existing condition. "Children are not supposed to die," Dr. Walensky told Sen. Marshall, right before he delivered his remarks dismissing their deaths, as if having a pre-existing condition makes it acceptable for a child to die of COVID-19. In questioning the CDC chief, Senator Marshall touted his credentials as a doctor, before attempting to sow doubt on the need of children to be vaccinated against coronavirus.

GOP senator dismisses deaths of 400 children from Covid - Alternet.org

• This from the "pro-life" party..