Author: Common Dreams

The Cure: Why Universal healthcare would enable a healthier population to withstand the next pandemic

More than 330,000 people in the United States died during the pandemic because they were uninsured or underinsured. That grim statistic was reported recently by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health. In addition to that staggering, preventable death toll, in 2020 alone, our “fragmented and inefficient healthcare system,” cost the U.S. $459 billion more than if we had genuine, universal healthcare. The Yale team prescription to prepare for the next pandemic: Medicare for All. “Our current healthcare system is dysfunctional. It is extraordinarily wasteful and expensive, and it is cruel,” Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders said as...

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America’s crumbling healthcare: Study finds “Medicare for All” could have prevented 338,000 COVID deaths

COVID-19 has killed more than one million people in the United States over the past two years, but more than 338,000 of those lives could have been saved if the country had a universal single-payer healthcare system such as Medicare for All. That is according to new peer-reviewed research published on June 14 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Although U.S. residents pay more for healthcare than their peers around the world, the nation’s fragmented for-profit model leaves tens of millions of people uninsured and delivers worse outcomes. Unnecessary costs and preventable deaths were already rampant in the...

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Congressional committee report accuses Gun Industry of “profiting off the blood of innocent Americans”

Firearm companies have raked in over $1 billion from selling AR-15-style rifles over the past decade, a U.S. congressional committee revealed in a report ahead of a July 27 hearing, prompting calls from Democratic lawmakers and gun control advocates for a renewed assault weapons ban. The House Committee on Oversight and Reform held the hearing on gunmakers’ responsibility for a national crisis that costs tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars annually. In the wake of recent massacres in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York, the House panel queried five leading gun manufacturers — Bushmaster,...

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With Alex Lasry out of senate race, Mandela Barnes emerges as top Democrat to take on Ron Johnson

The Democratic primary field in the race to unseat Republican U.S. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin shrank for a second time in less than a week on July 27 as Milwaukee Bucks executive Alex Lasry announced he would end his campaign, leaving progressive Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes as the frontrunner. Barnes received key endorsements from Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in recent days, and on July 25 fellow progressive candidate Tom Nelson said he was throwing his support behind the lieutenant governor after his campaign ran out of money. Lasry said he was also endorsing Barnes...

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A Civil War in the making: The payoff for 50 years of attacks by rightwing interests on democracy

The June 24th Supreme Court ruling nullifying Roe v. Wade should not be viewed as an isolated event in America’s cultural wars but instead as the result of a fifty-year conservative strategy to supplant US democracy with plutocracy. Although culture wars are an important aspect of this strategy, conservative SCOTUS cultural rulings are not the final objective but merely a stepping-stone to the ultimate goal: weakening the Federal system to the point where the U.S. becomes, in effect, a confederacy. Conservatives are refighting the 1861 Civil War. And they are winning. Although the American Civil War was a war fought over...

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Degradation of Democracy: New analysis details how the Supreme Court’s record has hit rock bottom

A new analysis released on July 13 argue that the right-wing majority now controlling the U.S. Supreme Court has dragged the institution to its lowest point in history by overtly, and repeatedly attacking the bedrock foundation upon which the nation was built: representative democracy itself. In the report — titled The Supreme Court’s Role in the Degradation of Democracy — researchers with the Campaign Legal Center detail how the Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has issued rulings in a “consistently anti-democratic” pattern and by doing so reversed “decades of work by prior Courts that sought to perfect...

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