Ideology kills

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Senate Republicans on Sunday successfully stripped a proposed $35 per month cap on out-of-pocket spending on insulin for patients enrolled in private insurance from the tax and climate bill making its way through the Senate. The Senate parliamentarian had earlier ruled that the provision, sponsored by Georgia Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, is not primarily related to the federal budget and thus not eligible for a reconciliation bill. The ruling gave Republicans a chance to kill the proposal. Waiving the rules required 60 votes to succeed. Only seven Republicans sided with Democrats to keep the insulin cap in the bill with a 57-43 vote.

'What the hell is wrong with them?' GOP senators kill $35 cap on insulin - Alternet.org

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37 percent of Republicans are still unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated, compared with 9 percent of Democrats. Fourteen of the 15 states with the lowest vaccination rates voted for Donald Trump in 2020. (The other is Georgia.) We know that unvaccinated Americans are more likely to be Republican, that Republicans in positions of power led the movement against COVID vaccination, and that hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated Americans have died preventable deaths from the disease. The Republican Party is unquestionably complicit in the premature deaths of many of its own supporters, a phenomenon that may be without precedent in the history of both American democracy and virology...


Partisanship affected outcomes in the pandemic even before we had vaccines. A recent study found that from October 2020 to February 2021, the death rate in Republican-leaning counties was up to three times higher than that of Democratic-leaning counties, likely because of differences in masking and social distancing. Even when vaccines came around, these differences continued, Mauricio Santillana, an epidemiology expert at Northeastern University and a co-author of the study, told me. Follow-up research published in Lancet Regional Health Americas in October looked at deaths from April 2021 to March 2022 and found a 26 percent higher death rate in areas where voters leaned Republican. “There are subsequent and very serious [partisan] patterns with the Delta and Omicron waves, some of which can be explained by vaccination,” Bill Hanage, a co-author of the paper and an epidemiologist at Harvard, told me in an email...

What’s most concerning about all of this is that partisan disparities in death rates were also apparent before COVID. People living in Republican jurisdictions have been at a health disadvantage for more than 20 years. From 2001 to 2019, the death rate in Democratic counties decreased by 22 percent, according to a recent study; in Republican counties, it declined by only 11 percent. In the same time period, the political gap in death rates increased sixfold.

Health outcomes have been diverging at the state level since the ’90s, Steven Woolf, an epidemiologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, told me. Woolf’s work suggests that over the decades, state policy decisions on health issues such as Medicaid, gun legislation, tobacco taxes, and, indeed, vaccines have likely had a stronger impact on state health trajectories than other factors. COVID’s high Republican death rates are not an isolated phenomenon but a continuation of this trend. As Republican-led states pushed back on lockdowns, the impact on population death rates was observed within weeks, Woolf said.

How Many Republicans Died Because GOP Leaders Turned Against Vaccines?

• This from the "pro-life" party...
  

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“Under McCarthy, smoking is allowed not just in members’ offices, but in public areas too,” Walsh explains. “Now comes more carcinogenic propaganda from right-wing losers. Last week, Fox’s Tucker Carlson began preaching a return to smoking as a return to American values. Tobacco is so much more American than increasingly legal and available weed, he told his stoned-on-lies audience.” On Fox News, Carlson made cigarette smoking a culture war issue, telling viewers that liberals “hate nicotine” but “love THC.”

Walsh comments, “I shouldn’t be surprised at Carlson’s tribute to tobacco…. Republicans have long opposed anti-smoking measures, at least partly out of fealty to Big Tobacco. Former GOP Speaker John Boehner became infamous for handing out checks from tobacco lobbyists on the House floor in 1995. As Indiana governor, Mike Pence railed against tobacco restrictions and insisted ‘smoking doesn’t kill.’ But the recent pro-smoking crusade seems to be inspired more by culture war imperatives than by defending the tobacco industry.” The journalist points out that Limbaugh spent decades vigorously defending cigarette smoking on his radio show — before dying of lung cancer in 2021.

'Carcinogenic propaganda from right-wing losers': How the GOP is 'killing its own voters' by hyping Big Tobacco - Alternet.org

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Right-wing Daily Wire commentator Charlie Kirk said at his Turning Points USA Political Action Committee Faith conference on Wednesday that the tens of thousands of annual firearm-related deaths in the United States are an acceptable price to pay in order for Americans to keep their Second Amendment constitutional right to bear arms. The statistics underlying this uniquely American problem as outlined in this Gun Violence Archive chart are sobering.

'It's worth it': Charlie Kirk calls school shootings 'a prudent deal' to protect the Second Amendment - Alternet.org

United States Congressman Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana) attempted to redefine reality during an Oversight Committee hearing in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, just two days after six people – three students and three staffers – were killed in a mass shooting at the Christian Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. "Regarding gun violence and gun violence being the number one cause of death of children in America today, you'll hear that a lot. Let me correct both," Higgins said. "There's no such thing as gun violence. There's only human violence. It's intellectually unsound to state otherwise, and the number one cause of death for children in America remains abortion."

'Save the fetus, slaughter the child': House Republican roasted after claiming 'gun violence doesn't exist' - Alternet.org

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Reed O’Connor should have to carry a Surgeon General’s warning: This federal judge may be hazardous to your health. O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, is a federal district judge in Texas, and he has it in for the Affordable Care Act. In 2018, on the flimsiest of rationales, he declared the entire Obama-era statute unconstitutional. That ruling was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court, on the grounds that Texas didn’t have standing to challenge the law. But O’Connor is back at it, this time going after one of the ACA’s most successful and popular provisions: the requirement that insurers cover preventive services without additional costs, such as requiring co-payments or applying deductibles... 

It is common sense — buttressed by numerous studies — that people are more likely to seek preventive care when they don’t have to pay out of pocket for it. This incentive, as Congress found in enacting the Affordable Care Act, isn’t just good for individuals — it’s good for society, helping to head off illness and lower overall health-care costs. So millions of Americans have relied on this coverage for everything from cancer screening to efforts to head off diabetes and cardiovascular disease. According to a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the American Medical Association, 233 million individuals are enrolled in health plans — employer-sponsored coverage, plans available in the ACA marketplace, Medicare or Medicaid — that are subject to the preventive care rules.

This federal judge may be hazardous to your health

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Differences in political party affiliation is the primary force dividing whether Americans are going to get the latest COVID-19 booster shot, a recent poll found. Seventy percent of Democrats say they are likely to or have already received the updated shot, while 28 percent of Republicans say they will, the Ipsos poll found.

7 in 10 Democrats say they’ll get latest COVID shot compared to 28 percent of Republicans: survey | The Hill

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Among the efforts DeSantis has made to try to arrest his slide among Republican hardliners include positioning himself as a champion for “medical freedom”, and defying federal health guidance to advise Floridians against taking new Covid-19 booster shots. The settlement ends a two-year legal battle between the DeSantis administration and a coalition of Democrats, open government advocates and media outlets that began in June 2021 when the Florida health department ended daily updates of Covid cases, deaths and vaccinations on its online dashboard.

The department will pay the plaintiffs’ $152,000 legal bill and resume regular posting of the data that DeSantis’s communications team insisted at the time was no longer necessary because cases had “significantly decreased” and that Florida was “returning to normal”. In reality, as DeSantis dismissed reporting on the pandemic as “media hysteria”, the Delta variant of the virus was just taking hold, and cases and fatalities spiked, to a record 385 a day in Florida by September 2021. Simultaneously, Florida led the nation in pediatric Covid hospitalizations.

Critics dubbed DeSantis “the Pied Piper of Covid, leading everybody off a cliff”, as he forged ahead with an executive order banning mask mandates in schools, having already signed legislation awarding himself veto power over coronavirus mandates set by municipalities. “Twenty-three thousand Floridians died during the Delta surge, and not only did the DeSantis administration restrict information on Covid during that time, they repeatedly downplayed the severity of the outbreak to fit their political narrative and help DeSantis run for president. That decision cost lives,” said Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democratic former state congressman who filed the lawsuit against the Florida health department, later joined by the Florida Center for Government Accountability.

“Our school leaders were struggling to make informed decisions about how to mitigate the spread of Covid, whether it be masking or social distancing policies, or other strategies. They needed data, they needed information, but the state made it unavailable, then said it didn’t exist. “All Floridians have a constitutional right to public records and receive them in a timely manner. And what’s interesting about the governor’s arguments about Covid is he repeatedly talks about giving people the choice over masks and vaccinations, but without critical public health data how are they able to make informed choices?”

Smith said the settlement became inevitable when an appeals court ordered the health department earlier this year to produce documents containing Covid data it claimed did not exist. “The DeSantis administration was caught red handed lying about the existence of these public records in court, repeatedly claiming that the records we were requesting didn’t exist, then saying even if they did exist, they would not share them because they were somehow exempt,” he said..

‘That decision cost lives’: Covid data case further deflates Ron DeSantis’s campaign | Ron DeSantis | The Guardian