Toxic Stress: The Facts. Harvard Center on the Developing Child.

National Forum on Early Childhood Policy and Programs. Harvard Center on the Developing Child.

Physicians for a National Health Program. PNHP website.

E. Richard Jones, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America. University of California Press, 1979.

David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, The Struggle over Employee Benefits: The Role of Labor in Influencing Modern Health Policy. Milbank Quarterly, Mar 2003.  Means that striking workers can and do lose their health benefits and even pensions – like the GM worker strike –  means that unions can be pressured to accept less comprehensive health plans (see this); means that union leaders and benefits coordinators make commission money from selling insurance to union members (see this); and why union-funded Senate Democrat Sherrod Brown. D-OH.  opposes Medicaid for All (see this), even though he is otherwise progressive.

Dave Lindorff, GM’s Healthcare Double Standard. In These Times, Apr 27, 2005. See also Physicians for a National Health Program, Canadian Auto Workers Union, Big Three Sign Letters With Canadian Auto Workers Union on Publicly Funded Health Care. PNHP, Nov 9, 2010.

Vinod Shah, What Motivated the Early Christian Health Missions? Anatomy of Transformation in India. presentation, May 29, 2005.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, A Goal of Service to Humankind. NPR, Jul 25, 2005.  Dr. Fauci’s recognition that public health is a global health issue, rooted in principles from his Jesuit education, is impressive and corresponds with biological reality over political dynamics.

Marcia Angell, The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. Random House | Amazon page, Aug 9, 2005.

Kip Sullivan, Two-Thirds of Americans Support Medicare for All. Physicians for a National Health Plan, Sep 2009.  Important because the polling includes both education and opinion-taking. “The more they know about single payer, the more they like it”

Josh Eboch, Health Care and the Fallacy of Positive Rights. Tenth Amendment Center, Nov 16, 2009.  A libertarian position.

Aaron Carroll, What Makes the U.S. Health Care System So Expensive - Introduction. Incidental Economist blog, Sep 20, 2010.

Wendell Potter, Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans.  Bloomsbury Press | Amazon page, Nov 16, 2010.  

David A. Squires, Explaining High Health Care Spending in the U.S.: An International Comparison of Supply, Utilization, Prices, and Quality. Commonwealth Fund, May 2012.

David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, A Simpler, Better Solution. New York Times, May 29, 2013.  From the PNHP website, arguing for federal, single-payer health insurance

Trudy Lieberman, 'Bitter Pill' - the Aftereffects - An Interview with Steven Brill. Columbia Journalism Review, Jun 11, 2013.

John Medaille, Distributism and the Health Care System. Distributist Review magazine, Jul 11, 2013.

Bruce Bartlett, The Question of Taxing Employer-Provided Health Insurance. NY Times, Jul 30, 2013.  notes that the health insurance exclusion will cost $248 billion in federal tax revenue foregone in 2013. Aaron E. Carroll, The Real Reason the U.S. Has Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance. NY Times, Sep 5, 2017.  notes that it is $260 billion in 2017.  Tax Policy Center Briefing Book, How Does the Tax Exclusion for Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance Work? Tax Policy Center, Urban Institute & Brookings Institute.  also explains why the deductibles make it a regressive tax.

Alex MacGillis, Obamacare Gets a Bright Spot in a Very Bad Week. New Republic, Oct 22, 2013.

Jonathan Cohn, The Huge Obamacare Story You Aren't Reading. New Republic, Nov 10, 2013.

ManMohan S. Sodhi and Navdeep S. Sodhi, Fix the Handful of U.S. Hospitals Responsible for Out-of-Control Costs. Business Insider, Nov 13, 2013.

Ralph Nader, 21 Ways the Canadian Health Care System is Better Than Obamacare. Common Dreams, Nov 22, 2013.

Josh Barro, Here's Why Both Parties Lie All the Time About Health Care. Business Insider, Nov 26, 2013.

Paul Krugman, Obamacare's Secret Success. NY Times, Nov 28, 2013.

Jonathan Cohn, Healthcare.gov is not Amazon.com. Should We Care? New Republic, Dec 4, 2013.

Ezra Klein, 93 Percent of Hospital Executives Think Obamacare Will Make Health Care Better. Washington Post, Dec 19, 2013.

Lauren F. Friedman, This $55,000 Bill Is The Perfect Example Of Our Broken Hospital System. Business Insider, Dec 30, 2013.

Sarah Kliff, Think America Has the World’s Best Health Care System? You Won’t After Seeing This Chart. Washington Post wonkblog, Jan 7, 2014.

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Insurance Companies as We Know Them Are About to Die and Here's What's Going to Replace Them. New Republic, Mar 2, 2014.

Sarah Kliff, Forget Obamacare: Vermont Wants to Bring Single Payer to America. Vox, Apr 9, 2014.

Elisabeth Rosenthal, Medicine's Top Earners Are Not the M.D.'s. NY Times, May 17, 2014.

Dr. Eric Snoey, My State of Emergency: Reflections on Life, Death, and Obamacare inside Oakland's Main Trauma Ward. San Francisco Magazine, Jun 4, 2014.

Melissa Hellman, U.S. Health Care Ranked Worst in the Developed World. Time, Jun 17, 2014.

Rishi Manchanda, What Makes Us Sick? Look Upstream. TED Talk, Aug 2014.  re: poor diet, stress, lack of fresh air

Spiritual Catalyst, The Future of Medicine. Aug 13, 2014. , an interview with my friends Dr. Daniel Cagua-Koo and Dr. Lenore Saulsberry about functional medicine!

Is the Affordable Care Act Working? NY Times, Oct 26, 2014.

Meghan O'Rourke, Doctors Tell All - And It's Bad. The Atlantic, Nov 2014.  doctor-patient relations

Dean Ornish, Hotter Sex, Cooler Planet. Huffington Post, Nov 14, 2014.

Lauren F. Friedman, The Same Surgery in the Same City Can Vary in Price by 313% - And That's a Sign of a Much Larger Problem. Business Insider, Jan 23, 2015.

Molly Worthen, Onward Christian Healthcare? NY Times, Jan 31, 2015.

Congressional Budget Office, Updated Estimates of the Insurance Coverage Provisions of the Affordable Care Act. CBO, Jan 2015.  to be 20% less than expected because of a decline in healthcare inflation

John Oliver, Marketing to Doctors. Last Week Tonight video, Feb 8, 2015.

Reihan Salam, Hospitals Are Robbing Us Blind. Slate, Mar 23, 2015.

Matthew Loftus, MD, Why Christians of All People Should Get Their Vaccine. Christianity Today, May 5, 2015.

Austin Frakt, Obamacare's Big Gamble on Hospital Productivity. NY Times, May 25, 2015.

Jen Hayden, GOP Congresswoman Gets Surprise on Facebook After Asking Constituents for Obamacare Horror Stories. Daily Kos, Mar 26, 2015.

The Lancet, Faith-Based Health Care. The Lancet, Jul 7, 2015.

Zara Zhang, For Cost Effectiveness, Treat Half of U.S. Adults with Statins. Harvard Magazine, Jul 14, 2015.

Philadelphia, Exceptionally Deadly: Death from Childbirth is Unusually Common in the U.S. Economist, Jul 18, 2015.

Mark Dudzic, Why Unions Supported a Single-Payer Bill That Passed New York’s State Assembly. In These Times, Aug 3, 2015.

Kat Ely, The World Is Designed for Men. Medium, Sep 8, 2015. On gender bias. Product designs that are less safe for women: seatbelts; medicine; power tools.

Robert Kennedy Jr., Says CDC Knew Mercury Based Vaccines Give Black Boys Autism and Destroyed Data. Oct 19, 2015.

John Oliver, Medicaid Gap. Last Week Tonight, Nov 1, 2015.

Alex Tilson, Cuban Health Care. Bike Tour Cuba, 2015, 2017.

Benedict Carey, Those With Multiple Tours of Duty Overseas Struggle at Home. New York Times, May 29, 2016.

Vann R. Newkirk, Can Free Markets Keep People Healthy? The Atlantic, Aug 10, 2016.

David Lazarus, How a Bite from a Stray Dog Shows the Sick State of U.S. Health Care Los Angeles Times, Sep 6, 2016.

Michael Hiltzik, The Truth About Health Care Premiums: They'd Be a Lot Higher Without Obamacare Los Angeles Times, Sep 21, 2016.

Michael McIntee, EpiPen Maker CEO Grilled in Congress. Michael McIntee, Sep 21, 2016.  Price increase of 500% since Mylan took over in 2007; no shame because of money?

Gina Kolata, Why Do Obese Patients Get Worse Care? Many Doctors Don’t See Past the Fat. New York Times, Sep 25, 2016.

Michael Alison Chandler, This Doctor Pioneered a Way to Treat Stress in Children, a Startling Source of Future Disease. Washington Post, Oct 6, 2016.

Jonathan Chait, Obamacare Isn’t ‘Crazy,’ and It’s Not Dying. New York Magazine, Oct 7, 2016.

Gareth Cook, Big Pharma’s Manufactured Epidemic: The Misdiagnosis of ADHD. Scientific American, Oct 11, 2016.

David Dayen, The Next Phase in Bernie’s Revolution Has Already Begun. New Republic, Oct 19, 2016.  about California's Prop 61 and big pharma

Margot Sanger-Katz, Quoctrung Bui, The Impact of Obamacare, in Four Maps. NY Times, Oct 31, 2016.

Kirk G. Morrison, The Aches and Pains of Obamacare. Christian Democracy Magazine, Nov 2016.  As interpreted by Catholic social teaching

Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, China's Growing Contribution to Health at Home and on the Global Stage. Lecture at the Chinese Academy of Governance, Nov 18, 2016.  Remarks about government-led economic development, disease prevention, and public health; market liberalization happened in China only after adequate protectionism

Grist, The Poverty Solution: Put People First. Grist, Dec 2016.  A series on lifting people from poverty while respecting the environment

Michael Hiltzik, Republicans Call Obamacare a Failure - These 7 Charts Show They Couldn't Be More Wrong. Los Angeles Times, Jan 4, 2017.

Marie Solis, Judge Rules Doctors Can Refuse Trans Patients and Women Who Have Had Abortions. Policy Mic, Jan 4, 2017.

Michael Hiltzik, Here Are the Lies Paul Ryan Told About Obamacare During His Town Hall Meeting. Los Angeles Times, Jan 13, 2017.

Andrew Flynn, Obamacare Hasn't Just Made People Healthier, but More Financially Secure. The Atlantic, Jan 17, 2017.

David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, Repealing the Affordable Care Act Will Kill More Than 43,000 People Annually. Washington Post, Jan 23, 2017.

Michael Hiltzik, US Judge Finds That Aetna Deceived the Public About Its Reasons for Quitting Obamacare. Los Angeles Times, Jan 24, 2017.

Josh Bivens, Repealing the Affordable Care Act Would Cost Jobs in Every State. Economic Policy Institute, Jan 31, 2017.

Michael Hiltzik, With Billions at Stake, a Federal Judge Just Nullified the GOP's Most Cynical Attack on Obamacare. Los Angeles Times, Feb 10, 2017.

David Epstein, When Evidence Says No, But Doctors Say Yes. ProPublica, Feb 22, 2017.

Michael Corcoran, Media Find Room for ‘Trumpcare Too Progressive,’ but Not for Single-Payer. FAIR, Mar 15, 2017.

Jonathan Chait, Why Obamacare Defeated Trumpcare. New York Magazine, Mar 24, 2017.

Eric Fox, How Pharma Companies Game the System to Keep Drugs Expensive. Harvard Business Review, Apr 6, 2017.

Catherine Rampell, Sorry, Republicans, But Most People Support Single-Payer Health Care. Washington Post, Apr 17, 2017.

Matthew Winkler, California Leads U.S. Economy, Away From Trump. Bloomberg, May 10, 2017.

Robert H. Frank, Why Single-Payer Health Care Saves Money. NY Times, Jul 7, 2017.

Andrew Sullivan, The Triumph of Obama’s Long Game. NY Magazine, Jul 21 2017.  refers to Reagan's 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act requiring Medicare recipient – i.e. almost all – hospital emergency rooms to receive patients without ability to pay.

Chase Madar, The Conservative Case for Universal Health Care. The American Conservative, Jul 25, 2017.  Believes that the right will embrace it in 5 years.

Joshua Holland, Medicare-for-All Isn’t the Solution for Universal Health Care. The Nation, Aug 2, 2017.  Careful distinction, important for progressives.

German Lopez, How to Stop the Deadliest Drug Overdose Crisis in American History. Vox, Oct 26, 2017.

Vox and Propublica, The U.S. Medical System is Still Haunted by Slavery. Vox, Dec 7, 2017.  an 8 minute video

Dylan Walsh, The Workplace Is Killing People and Nobody Cares. Stanford Business, Mar 15, 2018.

Sarah Kliff, Iowa's Found a New, Likely Legal Way to Ignore Obamacare. Vox, Apr 4, 2018.  also mentions Tennessee and the low levels of health, correlated to their health care system

Dylan Scott, After One Year of Trump, Obamacare is Actually Doing Fine. Vox, Apr 5, 2018.  features State-level countermeasures to Trump's federal changes in policy

Alan Rappeport, Trump Says He Got Rid of Obamacare. The I.R.S. Doesn’t Agree. NY Times, May 6, 2018.

Alice Ollstein, Trump Admin Poised To Give Rural Whites A Carve-Out On Medicaid Work Rules. Talking Points Memo, May 14, 2018.

Austin Frakt, Medical Mystery: Something Happened to U.S. Health Spending After 1980. NY Times, May 14, 2018.  spending began soaring above that of other nations, but without the same benefits in life expectancy

Marilyn R. Gardner, Repenting for Healthcare Inequality: A Christian Response. Plough, Jun 2018.

The Atlantic, Healing the Divide: An Atlantic Forum on Health Equity. The Atlantic, Jun 13, 2018.   

Olga Khazan, The 3 Reasons the U.S. Health-Care System Is the Worst. The Atlantic, Jun 22, 2018.  1. lack of insurance; 2. administrative inefficiency; 3. underperforming primary care

Dylan Scott, How Republican Medicaid Proposals Restrict Access, in One Chart. Vox, Jun 22, 2018.  comparison between Kansas, Indiana, Ohio

PBS News Hour, The Story of American Poverty, As Told By One Alabama County. PBS News Hour, Jul 7, 2018.  More than 18 million Americans live in “extreme poverty,” according to a report from the United Nations, which ranked poverty in the U.S. alongside some of the poorest areas in the world. The UN Special Rapporteur for Extreme Poverty paid a visit to the U.S. last year, drawing worldwide attention to his findings. This Alabama African American community lacks clean sewage water treatment because the State of Alabama has opposed extending public infrastructure there. This is a case study of how most Americans have benefited from massive public investment yet insist that American society is an “meritocracy of individual achievement,” and why “small government conservatism” is often a smokescreen for “prejudice and systemic racial injustice.”

Ed Yong, The Next Plague Is Coming. Is America Ready? The Atlantic, Jul-Aug 2018.  The epidemics of the early 21st century revealed a world unprepared, even as the risks continue to multiply. Much worse is coming.

Nick Surgey, Zaid Jilani, The Koch Brothers Commissioned a Survey of Americans and Found Most Like a $15 Minimum Wage, Free College, and Universal Health Care. The Intercept, Aug 9, 2018.

Dylan Scott, Medicaid Expansion's Private Option Is Nearly Gone. Vox, Sep 2, 2018.  Being replaced by work requirements.

Mark Flatten, To Help Fix American Mental-Health Care, Reform Certificate-of-Need Laws. National Review, Oct 8, 2018.

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, U.S. Health Care Spending Highest Among Developed Countries. Johns Hopkins University, Jan 7, 2019.  We pay more for worse outcomes

Hasan Minhaj, Drug Pricing. Patriot Act, Feb 17, 2019.  Features epi-pens and insulin, patent law and PBM's

Kyle Kulinsky, Doctor Pummels Fox Hosts Into Submission On Medicare For All. Secular Talk, Mar 9, 2019.  Dr. Adam Gaffney from Harvard Medical School corrects Fox News hosts. Discusses why the American health care industry can save on costs through single-payer insurance. cutting out administrative and marketing; lowering drug costs through bargaining with pharma companies. , cross-country comparisons showing the same, why the free market does not work with health care. This is a valuable 13 minute video clip.

Jonathan Chait, Republican Blurts Out That Sick People Don’t Deserve Affordable Care. New York Magazine, May 1, 2017.  “In a CNN interview, Representative Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican, makes the case for Trumpcare in much starker terms: It will free healthy people from having to pay the cost of the sick.”

T. Colin Campbell, Why is the Science of Nutrition Ignored in Medicine? TEDxCornellUniversity, Dec 3, 2018. An excellent 17 minute video on how proteins contribute to cancer, and how healthy nutrition could create more health than all other drugs combined.

Andrew Buncombe, AOC Asks Pharma CEO Why $2,000 HIV Drug Costs Just $8 in Australia: 'People Are Dying For No Reason'. Independent, May 17, 2019.  

CNBC, How French Health Care Compares to the U.S. System. CNBC, May 18, 2019.

CNBC, How Medicare-for-All Works in Australia. CNBC, Sep 2, 2019.

Christopher Willoughby, How Black Activists Sought Healthcare Reform: A New Documentary. Black Perspectives | African American Intellectual History Society, Sep 5, 2019.

Austin Frakt, The Huge Waste in the U.S. Health System. New York Times, Oct 7, 2019.  “A study finds evidence for how to reduce some of it, but also a large blind spot on how to remove the rest.”

Michael Brooks, Ben Burgis Debunks The "Strongest" Argument Against Medicare For All, featuring Harvey Kaye. The Michael Brooks Show, Nov 4, 2019.  single-payer universal health care was not actually tried in Vermont

Sean Masaki Flynn, The U.S. Can Slash Health-Care Costs 75% with 2 Fundamental Changes - and Without Medicare for All. MarketWatch, Nov 9, 2019.

CNBC, How Germany's Universal Health-Care System Works. CNBC, Nov 24, 2019.  

Michal Rozworski, The NHS Shows What Life Outside the Market Could Look Like. Jacobin Magazine, Dec 7, 2019.

Kyle Kulinksy, Trump Betrays Voters, Opposes Bill To Cut Pharma Prices! Secular Talk, Dec 9, 2019.

John Iadarola, Healthcare Costs Ravage America Now More Than Ever The Damage Report, Dec 24, 2019.

Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, Former Healthcare Exec Wendell Potter Rips and Answers CNN’s Industry Talking Points. Rising | The Hill, Jan 16, 2020.  and continued interview Former Health Care Exec Backs Up Bernie: It’s Our Current System That’s Bankrupting Us. Rising | The Hill, Jan 20, 2020.

ASteffie Woolhander, Adam Gaffney, Clare Fauke, Doctors “Prescribe” Medicare For All: Single Payer Reform Endorsed by America’s Largest Medical Specialty Society and Recommended in Open Letter from Thousands of Physicians. Physicians for a National Health Program, Jan 21, 2020.  

Christopher Ingraham, Here’s That Medicare-For-All Study Bernie Sanders Keeps Bringing Up. Washington Post, Feb 20, 2020.  “A single-payer health-care system would save more than 68,000 lives and $450 billion a year, new research shows” see also Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Yale Study Says Medicare for All Would Save U.S. $450 Billion, Prevent Nearly 70,000 Deaths a Year. Democracy Now, Feb 19, 2020.  Interviews Alison Galvani, the Yale epidemiology researcher who directed the study, who covers more details about cost savings, such as the fact that Medicare spends 2% of its budget on administration. no marketing. , and private health insurers spend 12%.

Jake Miller, Paying the Price. Harvard Medical School, Mar 3, 2020.  “Health care spending for homeless population 2.5 times more than nonhomeless population”

Naomi Schalit, Why So Many Epidemics Originate in Asia and Africa - and Why We Can Expect More. The Conversation, Mar 4, 2020.

Josh Bivens, Fundamental Health Reform Like ‘Medicare for All’ Would Help the Labor Market. Economic Policy Institute, Mar 5, 2020.  “Job loss claims are misleading, and substantial boosts to job quality are often overlooked”

Ben Burgis, Cuba’s Coronavirus Response Is Putting Other Countries to Shame. Jacobin Magazine, Mar 23, 2020.  and Helen Yaffe, Cuba and Coronavirus: How Cuban Biotech Came to Combat COVID-19. LSE, Mar 18, 2020.

Gracy Olstead, Our Monoculture Food Supply Is A Potential Coronavirus Calamity. The American Conservative, Mar 25, 2020.  “The highly consolidated system is fragile, and this is where local farming can step in.”

Anna Sauerbrey, Germany Has Relatively Few Deaths From Coronavirus. Why?. New York Times, Mar 28, 2020.  an effective health care system and coordinated response

John Iadarola, Insulin Price Drop Exposes Pharmaceutical Scam. The Damage Report, Apr 11, 2020.  insulin prices went up 100% from 2012 - 2016

Sarah Mervosh, ‘It’s Not in My Head’: They Survived the Coronavirus, but They Never Got Well. NY Times, Sep 28, 2020.  “With seven million known cases of the coronavirus across the country, more people are suffering from symptoms that go on and on.” “By some estimates, as many as one in three Covid-19 patients will develop symptoms that linger. The symptoms can span a wide range — piercing chest pain, deep exhaustion, a racing heart.”

David Doel, Whistleblower Shares How Private Insurance Will Screw COVID Survivors. The Rational National, Oct 4, 2020.  compares remdesivir across countries; implications of SCOTUS overturning the ACA

Krystal Ball, Healthcare CRIMINALS Are Gouging Covid Patients. Rising | The Hill, Nov 24, 2020.  References National Nurses United, Fleecing Patients Hospitals Charge Patients More Than Four Times the Cost of Care. National Nurses United, Nov 2020.  and David Dayen, How Biden Could Give Everyone Medicare on His Own. The American Prospect, Nov 17, 2020.  on the legal path to doing it

David Doel, Secret Recordings Reveal Alberta's Conservatives Overruled Top Doctors. The Rational National, Nov 28, 2020.  shows how conservative elevation of “personal freedom” failed in Alberta, Canada especially when compared with other provinces, showing that the ideology of personal freedom has the same results in Canada as in the U.S.

Ian Milhiser, There’s a New Lawsuit Attacking Obamacare — And It’s a Serious Threat. Vox, Apr 2, 2021. “The legal arguments in Kelley v. Becerra aren’t exactly good arguments, but five justices have signaled that they agree with them.” Ian Milhiser, Obamacare Is Under Attack by Republican Judges Again. Here’s What’s at Stake. Vox, Sep 7, 2022. “Judge Reed O’Connor’s latest decision is more nuanced than his previous work, but it is still a disaster for public health.” See the actual decision Braidwood Management Inc. et al., Plaintiffs, v. Xavier Becerra et al., Defendants. Sep 7, 2022. See Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave, Religious Employers Not Required To Cover HIV Prevention Drugs: Judge. Bri & Robby Debate. Rising | The Hill, Sep 8, 2022. An excellent debate; Briahna Gray has far more robust arguments than the libertarian Soave “A U.S. district judge in Texas ruled this week that workplace healthcare plans do not need to cover HIV prevention drugs if it violates an employer's religious beliefs.”

Amy Goodman, Meet the Texas Doctor Developing a "People's Vaccine" to Help Inoculate Billions Around the World. Democracy Now!, Apr 22, 2021.  re: Dr. Peter Hotez, infectious disease expert; capitalism’s shortcoming: not enough money goes to poor people’s diseases.

Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, Panel: Is Bill Gates Turning Into Biggest Villain of Vaccine Distribution? Rising | The Hill, Apr 27, 2021.  highlights the role of patents and intellectual property; how the profit motive of big pharma inclines pharma corporations to ignore major those who are sick and poor, showing the inhumanity of capitalism

David Doel, Non-Americans Stunned By American Health Care Costs. The Rational National, Apr 28, 2021.  features clips from the NY Times, What Does U.S. Health Care Look Like Abroad? New York Times, Apr 28, 2021.

Jon Walker, Biden Would Rather Build an Entirely New Welfare State Than Touch the Hospitals. Prospect, Apr 29, 2021.  “Health care improvements are minor and largely neglected in Biden’s new plan because he doesn’t want to arouse the ire of health care lobbyists.”

David Doel, Katie Porter Exposes Big Pharma CEO's Greedy Lies To His Face. The Rational National, May 18, 2021.  Abbott Labs/AbbVie raised the price of Humira by 13x because there are no price controls in the U.S. The federal government does not negotiate drug prices with big pharma. See The Hill, Katie Porter Presses Pharma CEO on Increased US Prices of Two Drugs. The Hill, May 18, 2021.  for full video of Katie Porter. D-CA.  grilling CEO Gonzales.

Washington Post, What Experts Say About Who Has the Best Health Care System.  Washington Post, Jun 17, 2021.  Seven leading health economists and public policy experts reflect on one of the hardest questions facing them — and us — today.  Informative, and despite the multiple criteria that people can legitimately use based on variation of values, the US ranks dead last.

Thom Hartmann, The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich. Berrett-Koehler Publishers | Amazon page, Sep 7, 2021.  See interview by Ryan Grim, Kim Iversen, and Robbie Suave, Thom Hartmann: Why Sickness Bankrupts You And Makes Others Insanely Rich. Rising | The Hill, Sep 12, 2021.  On how racism largely drove white American opposition to national health care since the 1880s. See interview by Joy Reid, Mad at UnitedHealthcare? Voted for Trump? You Voted for U.S. to Be Run Like UnitedHealthcare.  MSNBC, Dec 10, 2024. If you want the government to be run like a business, then you want it to be run like United Healthcare.  And one story from guest Thom Hartmann is quite pertinent:  In 1887, Germany developed the first single payer health care system.  In 1888, Frederick Hoffman came from Germany and became VP of the Prudential Insurance Company.  In 1896, he published a book, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro.  He argued that Black people were genetically inferior and therefore, if the U.S. simply denied them health care, Black people would simply die out in a few generations.  His book was one of the bestselling books from 1896 to 1930.  He testified before Congress and committees.  He was the reason why FDR’s efforts and Harry Truman’s efforts at single payer care were shot down.  In 1965, when Medicare was developed, there was a 20% hole in Medicare so that poor people -- aka poor Black people in the South -- wouldn’t integrate the doctors’ offices.

The New York TImes, Takeover: How We Occupied a Hospital and Changed Public Health Care | Op-Docs.  New York Times, Oct 12, 2021.  “On July 14, 1970, members of the Young Lords occupied Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx — known locally as “the Butcher Shop.” A group of activists, many of them in their late teens and early 20s, barricaded themselves inside the facility, demanding safer and more accessible health care for the community.  Originally a Chicago-based street gang, the Young Lords turned to community activism, inspired by the Black Panthers and by student movements in Puerto Rico. A Young Lords chapter in New York soon formed, agitating for community control of institutions and land, as well as self-determination for Puerto Rico. Their tactics included direct action and occupations that highlighted institutional failures.  Through archival footage, re-enactments and contemporary interviews, Emma Francis-Snyder's "Takeover" shines a light on the Young Lords’ resistance movement and their fight for human rights. The dramatic takeover of Lincoln Hospital led to one of the first Patient’s Bill of Rights, changing patients’ relationship with hospitals and doctors nationwide.”

Ryan Grim, Medicare Is Being Privatized On Biden’s Watch, Insurance Industry Salivates. Rising | The Hill, Dec 9, 2021.  highlights a disturbing apparent oversight in private health insurers being enlisted by Medicare. This is like charter schools: privately managed, but publicly funded, with the financial incentive to remove underperformers.

Vice News, How Nursing Homes Hide Profits While Residents Suffer.  Vice News, Dec 16, 2021.  Life Care, founded by Bernard Bergman and Forrest Preston, hides horror stories and massive Medicare fraud.  One example is a shell company that owns the facility, and the nursing home pays the shell company, which is self-dealing.  “The nursing home industry is 70% for-profit, which means that residents are competing with owners and shareholders for the same dollars.”  How big of a factor is corporate greed?  “We don’t really know how much of the money that goes into these places actually goes to direct care.”  One of every three COVID deaths was a nursing home resident or worker.  

Molly Redden, Private Equity Is Gobbling Up Hospice Chains And Getting Involved In The Business Of Dying. Huffington Post, Dec 21, 2021. “One private-equity-led hospice chain has thousands of seniors in its care and millions of dollars in government revenue. The owner's identity is a mystery.” “Today, private equity firms are acquiring American hospices at an astonishing rate. From 2012 to 2019, the number of hospices owned by private equity companies tripled. The pace of acquisitions seems to have only gotten faster during the COVID-19 pandemic. Industry brokers who have never before put together a deal involving private equity say they now field calls from private equity buyers multiple times a week. Tempted by a wave of retiring baby boomers, the-sky’s-the-limit Medicare payments, the mom-and-pop nature of the industry and a lack of regulation that is pretty startling even by U.S. standards, private equity now accounts for three out of every five new hospice acquisitions.”  Examined Traditions Health, which is owned by Dorilton Capital, whose owners are unknown.  “From 2000 to 2012, the share of for-profit hospices doubled, to 60%. Then, about a decade ago, private equity began to get more and more interested in the health care sector. It has recently come to dominate fields including dermatology and dentistry and impose steep profit demands, practitioners say, at the expense of patient care.  From 2011 to 2019, private equity ownership of hospices tripled. By 2019, there were more than 300 private-equity-owned hospices providing care to more than 112,000 Medicare recipients, according to Tyler Braun, a health policy researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College. That is a modest share of the total number of Medicare hospice patients — 1.46 million in 2019 — but it still works out to a soaring increase in the number of people spending their final days in the care of private equity: a 328% jump since 2012.”

Amy Goodman, Despite U.S. Embargo, Cuba Aims to Share Homegrown Vaccine with Global South.  Democracy Now, Jan 27, 2022.  Cuba developed 3 vaccines despite the limitations that the US led embargo placed on it.  

CNBC, Is Obamacare Fueling The Great Resignation?  CNBC, Jan 31, 2022.  Since workers don’t need their employer to provide health care, more workers feel free to not return to work.

David Sirota, The Congressional Budget Office’s Single-Payer Pitch.  The Daily Poster, Mar 14, 2022.  This video reveals “a surprising admission from the Republican-run Congressional Budget Office: Corporate health care is immiserating millions of Americans, and a Medicare for All-style system could fix the catastrophe.”

Lydia Densworth, People in Republican Counties Have Higher Death Rates Than Those in Democratic Counties. Scientific American, Jul 18, 2022. A growing mortality gap between Republican and Democratic areas may largely stem from policy choices. “In a study published in June in The BMJ, Warraich and his colleagues showed that over the two decades prior to the pandemic, there was a growing gap in mortality rates for residents of Republican and Democratic counties across the U.S. In 2001, the study’s starting point, the risk of death among red and blue counties (as defined by the results of presidential elections) was similar. Overall, the U.S. mortality rate has decreased in the nearly two decades since then (albeit not as much as in most other high-income countries). But the improvement for those living in Republican counties by 2019 was half that of those in Democratic counties—11 percent lower versus 22 percent lower.”

PBS News Hour, Compelling New Evidence Tracks COVID’s Origin to Wuhan Market.  PBS News Hour, Jul 27, 2022.  Not about animal extinction per se, but the impact of climate change and government policy on human-animal interaction. Interview with Angela Rasmussen, Canadian virologist, who published an article in the Journal of Science.  There is physical evidence of the virus at the live animal market from November and December of 2019.  Also, incidents of human infection clustered around the market, not the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  Argues for two separate introductions at the market of SARS-COV-2 lineage A and B.  Although see Briahna Joy Grey, Robby Soave, Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky, Lab Leak Theory Not Debunked By New Studies Claiming Natural Origin. Rising | The Hill, Jul 28, 2022. The market was very close to the lab. The natural emergence theory actually looks worse for the Chinese government than the lab outbreak theory, because the Chinese government had promised to regulate live animal markets.  This raises the equally troubling concern that climate change is driving shifts in animal habitats and behavior, and therefore in human-animal interaction, and the need for global cooperation in health monitoring systems.

Amy Goodman, Health Insurance Whistleblower: Medicare Advantage Is "Heist" by Private Firms to Defraud the Public.  Democracy Now, Oct 12, 2022.  Goodman interviews Wendell Potter, author and health insurance whistleblower. “Many of the nation's largest health insurance companies have made billions of dollars in profits by overbilling the U.S. government's Medicare Advantage program. A New York Times investigation has revealed that under the Advantage program, health insurance companies are incentivized to make patients appear more ill than they actually are. Some estimates find it has cost the government between $12 billion and $25 billion in 2020 alone. We speak with former healthcare insurance executive Wendell Potter, now president ​​of the Center for Health and Democracy, who says Medicare Advantage will be recognized in years to come as the "biggest transfer of wealth" from taxpayers to corporate shareholders, and blames the lack of regulation over the program on the "revolving door between private industry and government."” 

Kiara Chang et.al., Ultra-Processed Food Consumption, Cancer Risk and Cancer Mortality: A Large Scale Prospective Analysis Within the UK Biobank. The Lancet, Feb 2023.

Global dietary patterns are increasingly dominated by relatively cheap, highly palatable, and ready-to-eat ultra-processed foods (UPFs). However, prospective evidence is limited on cancer development and mortality in relation to UPF consumption. This study examines associations between UPF consumption and risk of cancer and associated mortality for 34 site-specific cancers in a large cohort of British adults.

The mean UPF consumption was 22.9% (SD 13.3%) in the total diet. During a median follow-up time of 9.8 years, 15,921 individuals developed cancer and 4009 cancer-related deaths occurred. Every 10 percentage points increment in UPF consumption was associated with an increased incidence of overall (hazard ratio, 1.02; 95% CI, 1.01–1.04) and specifically ovarian (1.19; 1.08–1.30) cancer. Furthermore, every 10 percentage points increment in UPF consumption was associated with an increased risk of overall (1.06; 1.03–1.09), ovarian (1.30; 1.13–1.50), and breast (1.16; 1.02–1.32) cancer-related mortality.

Our UK-based cohort study suggests that higher UPF consumption may be linked to an increased burden and mortality for overall and certain site-specific cancers especially ovarian cancer in women.

Morning Joe, Red States See Highest Affordable Care Act Enrollment Rates.  Morning Joe | MSNBC, Feb 2, 2023.  A good update on the ACA.

Krystal Ball, Revealed: Why Southerners' Credit Scores Are Terrible. Breaking Points, Feb 23, 2023.  Medical debt due to Southern political leaders refusing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act 2010.  Refers to Andrew Van Dam, Why the South Has Such Low Credit Scores.  Washington Post, Feb 17, 2023. 

Krystal Ball, Biden Kills Healthcare for 15 Million. Breaking Points, Apr 3, 2023. 

More Perfect Union, How One Drug Could Break America’s Health Care System.  More Perfect Union, Jun 28, 2023.  

Matthew Cunningham-Cook, Private Equity Wreckers Come For Your Health Insurance. The Lever, Jul 28, 2023. “As hundreds of thousands lose coverage and face major additional out-of-pocket expenses, private equity enters the spotlight.”

Colin Woodward, America’s Surprising Partisan Divide on Life Expectancy.  Politico, Sep 1, 2023. “Centuries-old settlement patterns — and the attitudes they spawned about government — are to blame for differences in longevity between red southern states and bluer parts of the country.”

Catherine Powell, War on COVID: Warfare and its Discontents. UCLA Law Review, Sep 21, 2023.

This Essay critically analyzes the wartime framing that both Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden relied upon in fighting a “War on COVID-19.” According to this militarized framing, they sought to, in Trump’s words, “fight that invisible enemy,” the coronavirus. The conundrum this Essay explores is: Even as Biden has announced plans to let the coronavirus health emergency declaration expire in May 2023 (as this Essay goes to press), for the future, how should lawmakers address crises, such as COVID-19, with the urgency of a social emergency without reinforcing our overly-militarized, securitized, and policed state implicated by national security emergencies? The problem with a militarized, securitized approach to a health crisis, such as COVID-19, is that security “is a deeply indeterminate concept, whose power derives not only from its association with particular issues or threats, but from the way that it combines fundamental ambiguity with a sense of heightened urgency.” As a normative and practical matter, a militarized, securitized approach to the interrelated health and economic crises catalyzed by coronavirus is flawed due to the indeterminacy of war discourse and its relationship to legality in exceptional moments.

Importantly, this project fits within the body of scholarship critiquing and redefining national security law studies—by questioning what is meant by “security,” by “racing national security,” and by applying feminist and other critical lenses which interrogate the levers of decision making and power that the concept of security highlights and erases.  Building on “critical insights concerning the structure of international law and politics,” this broader body of scholarship raises significant questions, such as: to what extent is security defined primarily by state actors in contrast to nonstate actors? Relatedly, whose knowledge matters in identifying and responding to security threats? What is the relationship of security to legality? In moments of emergency, does security require exceptionalism? How do we prevent security measures adopted in times of emergency from bleeding over into ordinary law in normal times?

Noah Smith, Here Are Some Better Versions of Bernie’s Ideas.  Noahpinion | Substack, Sep 26, 2023.  

Lisa Jarvis, Long Covid Is Real. Now the Evidence Is Piling Up.  Bloomberg, Sep 27, 2023.  Two newreports this week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that in 2022, some 18 million adults said they had ever had long Covid, with about 8.8 million currently suffering from the condition. In that time, roughly 1 million children had been affected — with about 360,000 children reporting an ongoing case.

National Institutes of Health, SARS-CoV-2 Infects Coronary Arteries, Increases Plaque Inflammation.  NIH, Sep 28, 2023.  

Washington Post Staff, The Post Spent the Past Year Examining U.S. Life Expectancy. Here’s What We Found. Washington Post, Oct 3, 2023. Factors highlighted: chronic diseases; poverty’s impact on health; childhood. Lauren Weber, Dan Diamond, and Dan Keating, How Red State Policies Are Shaving Years Off American Lives. Washington Post, Oct 3, 2023.

James Li, The Toxic Ingredient Hiding in Everything That Nobody is Talking About.  51 - 49 with James Li, Jan 3, 2024.  Trans-fats that are triglycerides have to be labeled at certain quantities.  But not Monoglycerides and Diglycerides.  This can lead to leaky gut, inflammation, irritable bowel syndrome, and other health issues.  James Li also talks about the politics and corporations behind this.

Negar Fani, Racism Produces Subtle Brain Changes that Lead to Increased Disease Risk in Black Populations.  Insight News, Jan 2, 2024. Fani is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Emory University and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. 

Linda F. Hersey, Severe Shortages of Doctors and Nurses Have Persisted for a Decade at VA Facilities, Report Finds. Stars and Stripes, Aug 7, 2024.

Michael Burns, Getting Old In America is a Nightmare. Wisecrack, Nov 8, 2024. Primarily about elder health care and services.

Random Critical Analysis, Why Conventional Wisdom on Health Care is Wrong (A Primer). Random Critical Analysis, 2024.

“The development of health care technology matters in the long-run, but not so much amongst developed countries since they’re all spending on high efficacy treatments and most of the marginal expenditures are going (increasingly) to cutting edge treatments that tend to have small effects on mortality.  Some incremental spending in more cutting edge treatments for cancer, cardiovascular, metabolic, and other major categories of diseases may help the afflicted to some extent. Still, the fraction of people treated multiplied by plausible effect sizes implies this activity is not likely to visibly move the needle when we look at nation-wide measures like life expectancy at birth, especially not in comparison to some of the previously enumerated causes of mortality that (mostly) vary idiosyncratically between countries.  Amongst developed countries, lifestyle is the 800-pound gorilla in the room.”

Elizabeth McCauley, You're Being Lied To About Ozempic. Truth Complex | Business Insider, Nov 13, 2024. A pro-ozempic argument based on data, while acknowledging non-responders and the challenge of maintaining weight loss. Curiously, Ozempic was developed because of government-funded research into gila monsters and their hunger-regulating venom; see Hilary Brueck, We Wouldn't Have Ozempic Without Gila Monsters — Their Hunger-Regulating Venom Inspired Weight-Loss Drugs. Business Insider, Mar 22, 2023. Ozempic mimics a compound people produce naturally in our intestines, called GLP-1, a hunger-regulating hormone; see Hilary Brueck, A Scientist Who Created Ozempic Explains What the Drug Actually Does to Your Brain — And Why It Makes People Satisfied While Eating Less. Business Insider, Mar 30, 2023. But within a year of stopping, people regain 70% of the weight they lose, and there are other health risks; see Diary of a CEO, Johann Hari: They’re Lying To You About The Side Effects Of Ozempic! Diary of a CEO, Apr 29, 2024.

Joy Reid, Mad at UnitedHealthcare? Voted for Trump? You Voted for U.S. to Be Run Like UnitedHealthcare.  MSNBC, Dec 10, 2024. If you want the government to be run like a business, then you want it to be run like United Healthcare.  And one story from guest Thom Hartmann is quite pertinent:  In 1887, Germany developed the first single payer health care system.  In 1888, Frederick Hoffman came from Germany and became VP of the Prudential Insurance Company.  In 1896, he published a book, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro.  He argued that Black people were genetically inferior and therefore, if the U.S. simply denied them health care, Black people would simply die out in a few generations.  His book was one of the bestselling books from 1896 to 1930.  He testified before Congress and committees.  He was the reason why FDR’s efforts and Harry Truman’s efforts at single payer care were shot down.  In 1965, when Medicare was developed, there was a 20% hole in Medicare so that poor people -- aka poor Black people in the South -- wouldn’t integrate the doctors’ offices. 

Michael Moore, A Manifesto Against For-Profit Health Insurance Companies. Michael Moore | Substack, Dec 13, 2024. “It’s been three days since Luigi Mangione’s manifesto was discovered in his backpack explaining why he assassinated the CEO of United HealthCare. In Mangione’s manifesto, he said that he was not the “most qualified person to lay out the full argument” against our for-profit healthcare industry. Apparently, to Mangione, one of those qualified people — is me. In his manifesto, he references how I’ve “illuminated the corruption and greed,” implying folks should go to my work to understand the complexity — and the power-hungry abuse — within our current system.”

Noah Smith, Insurance Companies Aren’t the Main Villain of the U.S. Health System. Noahpinion | Substack, Dec 13, 2024. It's mostly the providers overcharging you, not the middlemen.

David Epstein, What's Really Driving Healthcare Costs? Range Widely | Substack, Dec 19, 2024. Hospitals and providers. “There is a bit of irony in this whole situation, which is that, on average, private insurers reimburse anesthesiologists at rates far higher than Medicare. For certain procedures, across different states, it's anywhere between 2.4 to 7.9 times, but on average private insurers reimburse at rates 3.5 times that which Medicare pays… Getting an ultrasound can end up costing more than double at a hospital compared to what you're going to be charged in a free-standing physician’s office, and that's because hospitals will tack on what they're calling facility fees. Which is true, it does take a lot of upkeep to run a hospital, but there are a lot of medical procedures that are performed in hospitals or hospital-owned facilities that can also be performed in stand-alone physician offices, and for those procedures, facility fees aren’t justified.”

Kyle Kulinski, Oops: Local News Tells the Truth About Luigi Mangione. The Kyle Kulinski Show | Secular Talk, Dec 31, 2024.

Gabrielle Emanuel, Tuberculosis Rates Plunge When Families Living in Poverty Get a Monthly Cash Payout. NPR, Jan 3, 2025. Social experiment done in Brazil.

James Li, The Chemical Cocktail Inside Your Tampon. 51-49 with James Li | Breaking Points, Jan 8, 2025.

Berkeley Lovelace Jr., Trump Reverses Biden Policies on Drug Pricing and Obamacare. NBC News, Jan 21, 2025. The moves are likely to be inconsequential to many people in terms of what they pay in out-of-pocket health care costs. Trump left the $35 cap on insulin in place. But Trump’s executive orders will make Medicare and Medicaid more expensive.

Helen Santoro, Wall Street Is Jacking Up The Cost Of Your Doctor Visits. The Lever, Jan 22, 2025. A groundbreaking study finds doctors affiliated with hospitals and private equity firms are charging billions more annually than independent general practitioners.

Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov, Elon Musk’s Federal Government Takeover. Raging Moderates, Feb 12, 2025. At the 1:05:00 mark, Galloway makes insightful criticisms of our public school system feeding the industrial food-diabetes complex that is making our children sick and our health care system unbearably expensive. Children are being addicted to processed food.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Christina Jewett, F.D.A. Cancels Meeting of Vaccine Experts Scheduled to Advise on Flu Shots. New York Times, Feb 26, 2025. The cancellation plays into fears among scientists who worry that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will use his position as health secretary to sow doubts about vaccines.

Chinea Rodriguez, What’s Going on With Synthetic Braiding Hair? The Cut | New York Magazine, Mar 3, 2025.

“Since going viral on social media, the study has garnered a lot of attention. Cosmetics chemist Javon Ford weighed in with additional expert context to help his followers “make more informed decisions,” he said in a video on TikTok. After reading the study further, he found the levels of lead and volatile organic compounds like acetone did not exceed the maximum levels allowed. “The limit for lead allowed in lipstick is 5ppm, while none of the lead in the braid samples exceeded 2ppm and you’re much more likely to ingest lead via lipstick than you are via hair,” he said. Ford also found that the study was based on oral exposure, not dermal exposure. “You’re not eating your braids,” the cosmetic chemist said. After reaching out to the study group, they said they went with an oral-exposure model because of the likelihood of braiders coming in contact with the chemicals after eating food while braiding hair. Read the full study here.”

Helen Santoro, You’ve Already Paid $6 Billion For Weight-Loss Drugs You Can’t Afford. The Lever, Mar 6, 2025. U.S. taxpayers spent billions developing Ozempic-type diabetes and weight-loss drugs — now those drugs’ markups could bankrupt the U.S. health care system.

“U.S. taxpayers spent an estimated $6 billion researching, developing, and implementing new blockbuster weight-loss drugs, according to new data shared with The Lever. Yet Americans are now paying pharmaceutical giants — including one in Denmark — up to 11 times more for these medicines than patients in other countries, markups that are inflating consumers’ insurance premiums and risk bankrupting the country’s health care system.  It’s unclear whether President Donald Trump will crack down on weight-loss drug price gouging. While Biden regulators selected two top-selling weight-loss medications for Medicare price negotiations this year, potentially lowering their price for millions of Americans, Trump has sent mixedmessages about the future of price-negotiation programs and nominated people who’ve sold or promoted weight-loss drugs to oversee related matters.  According to data shared with The Lever by researchers at Bentley University, the federal government spent $6.2 billion from 1980 to 2024 on the discovery and development of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) molecules, as well as research on how to use GLP-1 drugs to treat diabetes, obesity, and other diseases. GLP-1, a hormone that regulates blood sugar, was the foundation of the diabetes drug Ozempic, whose 2017 approval by the Food and Drug Administration launched a wave of other GLP-1-based diabetes and weight-loss medications coming to market.”

Peter Zeihan, Of Birds and Bugs. Zeihan on Geopolitics, Mar 8, 2025. Zeihan discusses Brooke Rollins, Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services. Rollins can learn on the job to tackle the bird flu epidemic, and she seems capable. RFK seems like exactly the wrong person to handle the unknown and deadly fever disease emerging in Congo. It has infected 400 people and killed 50. Normally, the Epidemic Intelligence Service in HHS would rush in to study the disease, but RFK has killed that department. Also, Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from the World Health Organization. In the case of Rollins, we have inexperience but a willingness to learn on the job. In the case of RFK, we have a man with lots of preconceived notions trying to push his views down everyone’s throats.

Amy Goodman, Trump's Trade War: Why Lack of Universal Healthcare Makes U.S. Less Competitive. Democracy Now, Mar 12, 2025. US automakers moved plants to Canada because the Canadian government provides health insurance, offloading the companies from having to pay for their employees’ health insurance.

Holden Thorp, I Was Diagnosed With Autism at 53. I Know Why Rates Are Rising. New York Times, Mar 20, 2025.

“Could there be other factors behind the surge in autism diagnoses beyond increased awareness? Yes. Conservative estimates from studies of twins and siblings indicate that genetic factors may account for about 80 percent of autism risk. That leaves room for environmental factors. For instance, there are studies suggesting a link between autism and exposure of expecting mothers to nitric oxide found in air pollution.

But any environmental contributors to autism will need to be subjected to rigorous study of all of the evidence. Too often, when vaccine skeptics blame vaccines for autism, they point to studies that have weak methodology, as Mr. Kennedy did during his confirmation hearing for health secretary. Proponents of these studies ignore the existence of numerous large and carefully designed studies that show the opposite.”

Alexander Zaitchik, Dr. Oz and the Plot Against Medicare. Drop Site News, Mar 24, 2025. Medicare Advantage plans are killing seniors and bankrupting hospitals. Now the Trump administration is preparing to make them mandatory, ending Medicare as we know it.

Heather Cox Richardson, March 23, 2025. Letters from an American | Substack, Mar 24, 2025. HCR gives a short narration of Obama’s passage of the Affordable Care Act and Republican opposition to it.

Matt Stoller, How the American Medical Association Screws Doctors. BIG | Substack, Mar 27, 2025. The American Medical Association has a government-granted monopoly over medical billing codes. Is that why the AMA was silent when Robert Kennedy Jr. was sent to run American health care?

Helen Santoro and Luke Goldstein, Paging Dr. Land Baron. The Lever, Apr 2, 2025. Nonprofit hospitals are building tax-exempt real estate empires — and working to crush politicians who stand in their way. Nonprofit hospital chains are buying up billions of dollars worth of real estate around the country, milking them for income while using their charity status to avoid paying property taxes that fund schools, emergency departments, and other community services. Using their taxpayer-subsidized fortunes, somehospitalsare trying to influence local elections in which their profits could be at stake — including a new effort to unseat a progressive mayor who’s cracking down on a hospital giant’s tax-exempt real estate empire.

John Iadarola, CEO Video Gets Leaked... Looks Awful For Them! The Damage Report, Apr 3, 2025. Starts with a sweaty-faced Peter Thiel unable to answer Piers Morgan’s question about sympathy for Luigi Mangione’s shooting of United Health CEO Brian Johnson. Mostly a long clip of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) questioning United Health Group CEO Andrew Witty.

More Perfect Union, The $140 Billion A Year of Waste That DOGE Won't Touch. More Perfect Union, Apr 15, 2025. “Dr. Mehmet Oz, the recently-confirmed administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. says that he wants to expand Medicare Advantage — a program that former health insurance executive Wendell Potter calls “one of the biggest scams [...] we’ve seen in this country.” It lets private health insurers siphon tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to pad their bottom line, but is sold as a way for seniors to save money. In reality, it costs taxpayers 22% more than traditional Medicare. We investigated why Trump and Oz want this program to be even bigger, and who the biggest winners (and losers) will be if they do.”

John Oliver, RFK Jr. & HHS. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO), Apr 28, 2025. “John Oliver discusses the budget and staffing cuts being made to public health agencies in the U.S. under RFK Jr.’s new leadership, the many ways those cuts will impact all of us, and how WWII really ended. Trust us, it’s not how you think.”

Angela Wyse and Bruce D. Meyer, Saved by Medicaid: New Evidence on Health Insurance and Mortality from the Universe of Low-Income Adults. National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2025.

“We examine the causal effect of health insurance on mortality using the universe of low-income adults, a dataset of 37 million individuals identified by linking the 2010 Census to administrative tax data. Our methodology leverages state-level variation in the timing and adoption of Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and earlier waivers and adheres to a preregistered analysis plan, a rarely used approach in observational studies in economics. We find that expansions increased Medicaid enrollment by 12 percentage points and reduced the mortality of the low-income adult population by 2.5 percent, suggesting a 21 percent reduction in the mortality hazard of new enrollees. Mortality reductions accrued not only to older age cohorts, but also to younger adults, who accounted for nearly half of life-years saved due to their longer remaining lifespans and large share of the low-income adult population. These expansions appear to be cost-effective, with direct budgetary costs of $5.4 million per life saved and $179,000 per life-year saved falling well below valuations commonly found in the literature. Our findings suggest that lack of health insurance explains about five to twenty percent of the mortality disparity between high- and low-income Americans. We contribute to a growing body of evidence that health insurance improves health and demonstrate that Medicaid’s life-saving effects extend across a broader swath of the low-income population than previously understood.”

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, The Healthcare Industry Is A Total Scam. The Long-Term Investor, May 3, 2025.

Katya Schwenk, Wall Street To Insurers: Keep Denying Care. The Lever, Jun 6, 2025. “UnitedHealth Group’s investors were profiting from its high denial rates. Now, they’re suing to ensure that doesn’t change.”

Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland, Republicans Are Lying To You And They Don't Care. The Majority Report with Sam Seder, Jun 8, 2025. Republicans like James Lankford (R-OK) are lying to the public about the cuts to Medicaid in the “Big Beautiful Bill”.

Matt Stoller, Private Equity, UnitedHealth Take a Huge Loss as Oregon Bans Corporate Control of Doctors. BIG | Substack, Jun 11, 2025. Oregon passes SB 951, a bill that prohibits private equity and corporate decision-making in health care. UnitedHealth Group, Amazon, and private equity lobbied fiercely, but lost. Is it a trend?

Johanna T. Crane and Carolyn P. Neuhaus, Enacting Justice in Community Health Centers. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Spring 2025.

“Started in the 1960s with a commitment to justice, the community health center (CHC) movement emphasized that everyone deserves respectful, quality health care and that addressing social drivers of health is within the remit of health-care organizations. Sixty years on, the network of federally funded community health centers that developed from this movement remain committed to serving vulnerable populations in America as they set the standard for high-quality, wraparound primary care services. This essay draws on the authors’ qualitative study of moral uncertainty in community health to show how CHC providers enact a commitment to justice as they both improve access to care and services and recognize their patients’ humanity in a society where too many of them are “chewed up and spit out.” CHCs’ ability to enact justice, however, is limited in the US’s fractured health-care system and profoundly unequal society, and their success and financial viability are not assured. In order for CHCs to fully enact their mission, it will take appreciating the key role they play in advancing health justice in America, and strong, savvy advocacy efforts.”

Ashleigh Fields, Sanders Points to Nebraska Medical Center Closure After GOP Bill Passes: ‘Dark Day for Rural America’. The Hill, Jul 3, 2025. Matt Olberding, Southwest Nebraska Medical Center Announces Plan to Close, Blames Uncertainty Over Funding. Nebraska Public Media | PBS | NPR, Jul 3, 2025.

“The budget reconciliation bill that the House of Representatives voted to approve on Thursday contains several provisions that experts say will slash Medicaid, which rural hospitals are more dependent on than their urban counterparts. Earlier this week, during a Zoom meeting put on by the multi-state organization United Today Stronger Tomorrow, officials estimated that up to six Nebraska hospitals could be forced to close if the bill passes. "We currently have six hospitals that that we feel are in a critical financial state, three that are in an impending kind of closure or conversion over to the rural emergency hospital model,” Jed Hansen, executive director for the Nebraska Rural Health Association, said during the meeting. "We would likely see the closures within a year to two years of once [the bill is] fully enacted.” In a statement Thursday, the Nebraska Hospital Association said 44% of the state's rural hospitals are already losing money, and passage of the bill could lead to a $3.6 billion cut in funding to Nebraska hospitals over the next decade.”

Admin, Stem Cell Treatment for Diabetes in Germany. Treatment in Germany, Jul 8, 2025. German scientists developed a cure for Type 1 Diabetes. See Dinesh Kumar, Rajni Tanwar, and Vrinda Gupta, First-Ever Stem Cell Therapy Restores Insulin Independence in Type 1 Diabetes: A Medical Milestone. World J Stem Cells, Jul 26, 2025.

Rachel Pearson, Sick Children Will Be Among the Victims of Trump’s Big Bill. The New Yorker, Jul 13, 2025.

Susan J. Demas, Beyond Abortion: How Dobbs has Created a Crisis in Maternal Health | Author Irin Carmon Joins Susan J. Demas. Lincoln Square, Aug 13, 2025.

“Journalist Irin Carmon takes an intimate look at this landscape in her upcoming book, Unbearable: Five Women and the Perils of Pregnancy in America, which comes out Oct. 28. The book also includes her own experience of being eight months pregnant when the Dobbs decision came down. Carmon recalls reading Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion. "I was so angry that I started writing a piece that was partly the inspiration of this book called, ‘I, Too, Have a Human Form,’” she recalls, “... because there's nothing in here about the person whose body is taken over willingly or unwillingly and is incurring enormous medical risks.””

Editorial Board, America Was Finally Turning a Corner on Opioids. Until Now. New York Times, Aug 28, 2025.

“President Trump’s big domestic policy law threatens that progress. The law’s Medicaid cuts, which finance lower taxes for the wealthy, will deprive millions of Americans of health insurance. These changes will harm people with all sorts of medical conditions. Yet addicts are particularly vulnerable because of how many of them are on Medicaid. The program covers nearly half of non-elderly adults with an opioid addiction, according to KFF, a health research group. Without insurance, many will drop out of treatment and relapse. Researchers at Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania estimate that the law will end access to opioid treatment for more than 150,000 Americans.”

Noah Smith, Are Westerners Turning Back Into Medieval Peasants? Noahpinion | Substack, Sep 9, 2025.

“And yet that is exactly what I now see Western civilization doing. In the U.S., the Anglosphere, and Europe, there are simultaneous backlashes against a number of key technologies that have either made the modern world what it is, or promise to make it even wealthier. These include: vaccines; solar and wind power; batteries; AI; software platforms; anti-obesity drugs; lab-grown meat; self-driving cars; air conditioning.”

Brian Daitzman, Rural Hospitals in the United States Face Collapse. Lincoln Square, Oct 21, 2025. “As Medicaid cuts deepen, small-town hospitals across Republican states are closing, leaving millions without access to emergency care.”

“Between 2005 and 2023, 146 rural hospitals across the United States either closed completely or converted away from inpatient care, according to federal data. Nearly half of the rural facilities that remain now operate at a loss, the American Hospital Association reports. As new federal budget cuts take effect, analysts warn that hundreds more may follow, threatening to turn vast stretches of the country into health-care deserts.

At the center of this growing crisis lies a rollback in federal health-coverage spending. Nonpartisan analyses show large Medicaid reductions over ten years; according to KFF’s synthesis of Congressional Budget Office scoring, the total is on the order of eight to nine hundred billion dollars for Medicaid and roughly 1.1 trillion when combined with Affordable Care Act coverage changes.

The legislation passed with near-unanimous Republican support and broad Democratic opposition, according to official roll-call votes. These cuts fall hardest on hospitals that depend on Medicaid to survive. Nearly half of all rural facilities already operate in the red, and analysts at the University of North Carolina’s Sheps Center and the Chartis Center for Rural Health identify roughly 300 rural hospitals as financially vulnerable to closure or conversion.

The administration’s $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Fund — sold as a lifeline — would offset only about thirty-seven percent of the estimated $137 billion in rural-area Medicaid reductions and roughly five percent of total Medicaid cuts. What reads as fiscal prudence in Washington translates into layoffs, diverted ambulances, and wards gone dark in the heartland.”

Matt Stoller, Monopoly Round-Up: Obamacare Is Cooked. What's Next? BIG | Substack, Oct 26, 2025. “With big health insurance hikes coming, another health care crisis is here. Where's all the money going? And what comes now? Plus Argentina votes for the Trump bailout, Warner is for sale and more...”

Sonya Sloan and Haydee Brown, Trump Screws Red States as Disease Rages Out of Control. Meidas Touch, Dec 15, 2025.

“On this episode of Ella: Black and Brown Women Disruptors, Dr. Sonya Sloan and Dr. Haydee Brown break down a week of public health upheaval in the U.S. From a South Carolina measles outbreak sparking major quarantines to chaos inside the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, they explain what’s really happening, and why it matters. The doctors also examine calls to impeach HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the impact on federal health policy, and the enduring battles over the Affordable Care Act.”

Christopher D. Cook, The Quiet Way Trump Has Made Life Easier for Polluters. The New Republic, Mar 9, 2026. “It’s not just about environmental rollbacks: Trump and Lee Zeldin have presided over a striking decline in the EPA enforcing existing laws.”

Andréa Becker, The Cost of ‘Natural’ Womanhood. The Atlantic, May 3, 2026. “Hormone hype is out of control.” Re: ovulating, pre-menopausal women.

Clarizza Potoy, $5 Trillion Crisis: New Study Warns Diabetes Will Devastate Global Economy by 2050. International Business Times, May 13, 2026. “New study reveals the staggering economic impact of diabetes on global growth.”