Tag: Healthcare

Speak Up Before VA Health Care Is Gutted #Project2025

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

While controversy swirls around last week’s mass firing of 1,000 Department of Veterans Affairs’ employees, a far greater threat to veterans’ health care is going completely unnoticed. Powerful leaders in Congress have quietly unveiled their plan to gut VA-delivered care, wrapped in the misleadingly titled “Veterans’ ACCESS Act.” If veterans don’t act fast, they will lose the VA health care system they know and depend on.

The bill appears innocuous enough, with aspirations of accountability. But don’t be fooled. Hidden in its depths like a ticking time bomb is a provision intended to dismantle the integrated VA health care system faster than you can say “privatization.”

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Follow the money, which will hemorrhage from the VA to the private sector. The likely outcome is that the VA will close its inpatient services and instead become a sprawling assortment of outpatient clinics. If that sounds familiar, it is the plan laid out in the Project 2025 playbook. Veterans are being hoodwinked that the VA facilities they rely on won’t be impacted. Don’t buy it for a second.

Speak Up Before VA Health Care Is Gutted

Previously:

What’s in Store for VA Disability Benefits with New Office of Management and Budget Chief?

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Donald Trump’s Next Diversity Target: People With Disabilities

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

President Trump’s suggestion last month that the tragic Potomac air crash was somehow the fault of disabled federal air traffic controllers was appalling—but it should have come as no surprise. Trump’s contempt for people with disabilities has been well documented, and it’s that animus, combined with the accelerating MAGA assault on diversity throughout the United States, that has disability rights advocates preparing to defend decades worth of hard-won protections.

One month into his presidency, Trump has unleashed a government-wide attack on people with disabilities, from anti-diversity executive orders to proposed special-education rollbacks to threats to slash programs like Medicaid that are lifelines for disabled people across the country. If successful, these actions could have catastrophic consequences for millions of Americans, according to disability rights experts.

Donald Trump’s Next Diversity Target: People With Disabilities

Related:

In the video below, Rep. Jahana Hayes mentions how Trump’s DEIA order is already affecting special education.

If Trump Dismantles the Dept. of Education, Who Will Pay the Biggest Price?

DEI (A?) – The Effect of Donald Trump’s DEI Executive Order on Accessibility

On President Trump’s first day in office, he immediately issued a new Executive Order declaring Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (“DEI”) efforts “illegal.” With this new order in effect, previous mandates that implemented DEI efforts both in the federal government and among federal contractors were revoked.

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While the primary focus is on race- and sex-based affirmative action, the Order lumps together “DEI” and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (“DEIA”) efforts. So, disability inclusion efforts may now be under scrutiny as well.

Bangladesh’s Constitution reform: Sweeping changes in the constitution

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)
Source

Constitution reform: Sweeping changes in constitution

Expanding the fundamental rights to include food, clothing, shelter, education, internet, and vote, the Constitution Reform Commission proposes replacing nationalism, socialism, and secularism with equality, human dignity, social justice and pluralism as fundamental principles of state policy.

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Modifying, the much discussed article 70, the commission recommends that parliamentarians be allowed to vote against party line except finance bills.

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The constitution commission recommends deletion of the constitutional provision that stipulates inclusion of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s speech of March 7, 1971, his declaration of independence and the proclamation of independence, which are included in the 5th, 6th and 7th schedules respectively.

FYI, it was written by International IDEA, which is funded by USAID, Open Society Foundations, and several Western governments.

Related:

Leaked files expose covert US government plot to ‘destabilize Bangladesh’s politics’

Atlantic Council’s Ali Riaz to lead commission on constitutional reforms for Bangladesh

Bangladesh and Kenya document

Socialists should back support for living not assisted suicide

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

The vote in favour of the second reading of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill on 29th November, proposed by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, was welcomed with unalloyed enthusiasm by the bourgeois media. Photos featuring jubilant campaigners for voluntary euthanasia were plastered across web front pages. The real promise of this Bill is far from joyful for many. The Bill, which will now go to parliamentary committee with the opportunity for amendment, if finally passed into law, would represent a major political attack at a time of huge inequality and significant shortages in access to health care, social care, support for independent living, and end of life care, including adequate, high quality palliative care. Despite all this – and the loud opposition of disabled people’s organisations in particular – this measure is still mistakenly understood by some on the left as merely a matter of personal choice: an enabler rather than a threat.

Socialists should back support for living not assisted suicide

Listening to Soldiers Of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)
Opening quote.

Soldiers Of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire

Related:

The Rand Corporation: The Think Tank That Controls America (archived)

By the 1960s, America’s rivals were paying attention. The Soviet newspaper Pravda nicknamed RAND “the academy of science and death and destruction.” American outfits preferred to call them the “wizards of Armageddon.”

How can people support Luigi Mangione but vote in droves to deny health care to others?

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

How can people support Luigi Mangione but vote in droves to deny health care to others?

Last week was a bizarre time to be queer on social media: Many cishet people voiced enthusiastic support for Luigi Mangione, the man accused of shooting and killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, arguing that the health insurer’s denial of claims led to so many deaths that the murder was justified as retaliation. Meanwhile, Congress was passing a bill that would require an insurer (Tricare) to deny claims, and it was hard to get anyone to even pay attention to that.

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