Category: Health Policy

Schumer and Manchin Love Bipartisanship, Hate Diabetics

The Daily Escape:

Full moon, 4:00 am, Burlington, VT harbor -July 2022 photo by Adam Silverman Photography

Senate Democrats have been working on a prescription drug pricing reform proposal aimed at lowering the cost of prescription drugs by allowing Medicare to negotiate prices for up to 20 drugs.

The House passed similar legislation which was considered by the Senate last year. That bill included language that would have made all insulin products subject to Medicare price negotiation and would have capped Medicare beneficiaries’ insulin copays at $35 per month.

Earlier this month, Senate Democrats (including Manchin), reached a deal on a plan that would allow Medicare Part D to negotiate the prices of up to 20 prescription medications directly with pharmaceutical corporations, a proposal that is overwhelmingly popular with voters across party lines.

But the Senate Finance Committee has just left insulin out of the package they plan to send to the floor of the Senate. From Yahoo News: (parenthesis by Wrongo)

“Staff for the Democrats on the Senate Finance committee said the provisions were removed because a separate bipartisan Senate bill (the Insulin Act) includes the monthly $35 insulin cost cap for people with Medicare or private insurance.”

But that separate bill is facing an uphill battle because it would need 60 votes in the Senate to cross the filibuster hurdle, while the drug pricing reform bill is expected to be part of the Senate’s reconciliation process, requiring only 51 votes to become law.

Bloomberg Law reports that Schumer: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“…has said he plans to hold a vote soon on a measure from a bipartisan duo to cap the out-of-pocket cost of insulin at $35 a month. But passing the legislation from Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) requires the support of Republicans, and key GOP senators say they’re not ready for a vote right now.”

Naturally, diabetics and their interest groups are up in arms. That people have to pay huge sums for insulin is a very visible problem among all of the problems with America’s health care system. That Democrats may cave on fixing this in favor of making the path harder reveals much about the Dem’s ability to govern.

From Common Dreams: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Insulin prices in the US [are] seven times higher than those found in peer countries [and] are so steep that experts have accused the federal government and pharmaceutical industry of violating human rights. More than 37 million people in the US have been diagnosed with diabetes….Because just three pharmaceutical corporations control the nation’s lucrative insulin market, the century-old drug can cost a person without adequate health insurance more than $300 per vial.”

So, an oligopoly controls insulin.

The massive coverage gaps inherent in our for-profit healthcare system have left millions of people across the US who rely on insulin, unable to afford it. Corporate profiteering is forcing many people to ration the drug or forgo it, often with deadly consequences.

Considering the fact that insulin is more than 100 years old, it should be as close to free as possible. Why not set up a not-for-profit co-op to manufacture insulin, which would then be available for the cost of production? One such organization that’s trying to do just that is the Open Insulin Foundation. However it isn’t clear that they have launched production of insulin at this point.

The drug pricing reform bill would start negotiating with drug manufacturers sometime in the next three years and wouldn’t be fully implemented until 2030, so it’s weak tea to begin with. And it’s only for 20 drugs, and the most used one is no longer included.

Schumer and Manchin are responsible for taking insulin out of the bill that will certainly pass, in favor of it being in a stand-alone bill that probably won’t pass, because they still don’t have the Republican votes they need to pass a separate insulin bill.

Unless Democrats abandon their efforts to convert Republicans to bipartisanship, Wrongo’s days of funding their election campaigns are over.

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Saturday Soother – June 18, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Rainy morning, with Vista House at Crown Point in right foreground, Columbia River Gorge, WA – June 2022 photo by David Leahy Photography

Wrongo has written before about the crushing burden of consumer debt in the US. Medical debt is an American disgrace, and Noam Levey, Kaiser Health News (KHN) Senior Correspondent has written an excellent piece about it. He says that 100 million people in America, some 41% of adults, owe some level of debt to healthcare providers.

But most studies don’t reveal the actual extent of the debt because much of it appears as credit card balances, loans from family, or payment plans arranged with hospitals and other medical providers. To calculate the true extent and burden of this debt, KHN partnered with NPR, and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) to conduct a nationwide poll designed to capture not just bills patients couldn’t afford, but other forms of borrowing used to pay for health care.

The results are contained in the KFF Health Care Debt Survey. The KFF poll found that half of US adults don’t have the cash to cover an unexpected $500 health care bill. As a result, many simply don’t pay their medical bills. The flood of unpaid bills has made medical debt the most common form of consumer debt in America.

Over the past five years, more than half of US adults report they’ve gone into debt because of medical or dental bills. Moreover, a quarter of adults with health care debt owe more than $5,000, and about 20% with any amount of debt said they don’t expect to ever pay it off.

Debt incurred for health care is forcing many families to cut spending on food and other essentials. The poll also found that millions are being driven from their homes or into bankruptcy:

So, if 100 million people were in debt and 17% declared bankruptcy or lost their home, that’s 17 million people! The KFF poll found that the debt is also preventing Americans from saving for retirement, investing in their children’s educations, or buying a home. And debt from health care is nearly twice as common for adults under 30 as for those 65 and older. And that age cohort is supposed to be much healthier than the elderly.

Perversely, about 1 in 7 people with medical debt said they’ve been denied access to a hospital, doctor, or other provider because of unpaid bills. An even greater share (two-thirds) have put off care that they, or a family member need because of the cost.

Hospitals are among the culprits. They are capitalizing on their patients’ inability to pay. Hospitals and other medical providers are pushing millions of patients who can’t afford to pay into credit cards and other loans. These are high interest rate loans, carrying rates that top 29%, according to research firm IBISWorld.

This collections business is fed by hospitals, including public university systems and nonprofits granted tax breaks to serve their communities, who sell the outstanding debt to collections companies.

Welcome to the best country on earth, (maybe) one that doesn’t have the best health care system (and certainly one without  health insurance for all). We have a system which shackles 100 million people to medical debt while at the click of a computer mouse, we send $billions in armaments overseas before those same dollars are recycled into the coffers of our Military-Industrial complex.

That’s all for this week. It’s time for our Saturday Soother, when we take a break from the J6 public hearings and whether Ginni Thomas was another Trumpist plotter. Let’s focus on calming ourselves for whatever insults are coming next week.

Here at the Mansion of Wrong, we’re engaged in an air conditioning project, adding more central air to our home. Hey, we’re aware of the crummy stock market, and the rampant inflation, but consume we must.

To help you clear your head on this warm weekend, grab a seat outdoors and brew up a cup of Supernatural coffee ($18.45/12 oz.) by Lee, MA’s own Barrington Coffee Roasting Company. This espresso is said to have flavors of Concord grape, dark chocolate, plum and tangle berry pie!

Wrongo has no idea what tangle berries look like, much less what they taste like.

Now, put on your wireless headphones and listen to the “Adagio for Oboe, Cello, Organ and Strings”, also known as “Elevazione” or “All’Elevazione” by Domenico Zipoli.

Zipoli was an Italian Jesuit priest who lived much of his life in what is now Argentina. He studied with Scarlatti, became a Jesuit, worked as a missionary, and died in 1726 in Argentina at age 38. If fate had granted Zipoli another 20 to 25 years, he might be regarded today as a major composer. Here it’s performed in 2015 by the Collegia Musica Chiemgau conducted by Elke Burkert :

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Which States Are The Best for Working Moms?

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Columbia Hills, WA – May 2022 photo by Mitch Schreiber Photography

Each year, WalletHub ranks the best and worst states for working mothers. Below is an overview of their methodology and findings: Women make up nearly half of the US workforce, and nearly 68% of moms with children under age 18 were working in 2021.  That share of the workforce declined during Covid, dropping around 1.3% between Q3 2019 and Q3 2021 (compared to 1.1% for men).

We know that women face an uphill battle in the workplace, with their average hourly wage being just 84% of what men make. They face other non-financial problems as well. Parental leave policies and other childcare support systems vary by state, but the quality of infrastructure — from cost-effective day care to public schools, is far from uniform.

WalletHub compares state performance across 17 metrics to rank the best & worst states. They compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across three key dimensions: 1) Childcare, 2) Professional Opportunities and 3) Work-Life Balance:

“We evaluated those dimensions using 17 relevant metrics…with their corresponding weights. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the most favorable conditions for working moms. We then determined each state and the District’s weighted average across all metrics to calculate its overall score and used the resulting scores to rank-order our sample.”

WalletHub’s weighted average for the three categories was as follows: Childcare = 40 possible points, Professional Opportunities = 30 possible points, and Work-Life Balance = 30 possible points, totaling 100 points available per state. That translates into the overall total score below. Here are the top 10 US states for working mothers with individual state rankings by category:

It’s very telling that America’s best score was 62.99 out of 100, meaning that all states have a long way to go to make us a nation that supports women and mothers. Wrongo is happy to note that Connecticut is #1 in job opportunities for women. Here are the bottom 10 states:

Note that only California of the bottom 10 states is an urban (and blue) state. It gets killed in the rankings because of its terrible performance on childcare. If you are interested in how your state ranked, you can see an interactive map of all the states here. WalletHub also compared the top and bottom five states across a few of their metrics. Here’s what those rankings show:

According to a recent report, more than 2.3 million American women have dropped out of the labor force since the start of the pandemic. Solving the problems that keep these women out of the workforce should be a focus for all of the states.

This is particularly true for service and front-line workers whose work scheduling can be unpredictable and for many jobs, there is limited flexibility. Companies should do more. They can create more flexible work environments, allowing parents to take short-term time off. They can strive to eliminate schedule unpredictability for hourly workers. Companies can also work to change their culture to better recognize work-life balance.

The biggest hypocrisy of the anti-abortion movement and the Supreme Court’s apparent decision on abortion is that the Justices and the Republicans are willing to go to the mat to protect the unborn, but that commitment mysteriously vanishes once a child exits the womb.

In many cases, these same zealots are actively hostile to programs that would benefit children.

Parenthood is humankind’s most important job; but there’s no internship, no training program, no handbook. You dive into it and are expected to figure things out on your own. It’s true that parents should bear the responsibility and costs of raising a child, but, government intervention should be available, depending on local conditions and income levels. Some parents simply need help.

At a time when Republicans and the Supreme Court seem to be willing to discount the value of women in our society, it’s important that we battle their views on the economic front as well as on the political front.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – May 8, 2022

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell thinks the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe is a “toxic spectacle”. Chief Justice John Roberts calls it a “betrayal.” And Justice Thomas of Ginni said:

“We can’t be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want…We are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like…”

So suck it up American women! They’re sure that the leak is worse for America than their outrageous decision, and nothing you say will change any Republican minds. It is likely to be a long time before this (anticipated) decision is reversed. We will be a nation divided between states where reproductive freedom is guaranteed and states without it.

Major judicial errors in American history have been reversed before. The Constitutional amendment prohibiting alcohol was repealed in 14 years. The Supreme Court opinion upholding laws that criminalized gay sex was overturned after 17 years.

Women have many reasons for choosing abortion that have nothing to do with not wanting to be a parent. They may have medical needs; a fetus may carry genetic defects; the woman may be an underage child or a survivor of rape or incest. Adoption does not erase either the medical effects or the psychic scars that forcing a mother to term might inflict, and that may persist long after pregnancy is over.

And on this Mother’s Day, it is particularly ironic that they call themselves pro-life. Except, of course, for mothers. On to cartoons.

Who should be feeling violated?

Alito changes the rules:

Barrett shows she’s one of the boys:

More of the hypocrisy:

Oh, the places you will go:

Anybody else think Republicans are too controlling?

Mother’s Day 2022:

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – April 24, 2022

A follow-up to the DeSantis vs. Disney column. Nick Papantonis of Orlando’s WFTV describes the economic consequences of Florida’s decision to take away Disney’s protected tax status.  In a Twitter thread, he says that DeSantis’ actions have given Disney a $163 million/year tax break while passing on to the two counties that hold Disney’s Reedy Creek tax jurisdiction more than $1 billion of municipal debt.

Also, once Reedy Creek goes away as a jurisdiction, Orange and Osceola counties will be responsible for providing all of the services (fire, police, roadwork) that Disney currently provides. And those counties won’t be able to pay for the additional services by raising sales taxes or impact fees.

So, they will have to raise property taxes. By law, they must tax all properties equally (not just Disney) and it’s expected that the county mil rate for property tax computation in Orange County will rise as much as 25% next June.

Florida has just 12 counties where Biden won in 2020. DeSantis has cleverly managed to screw the residents in two of them. Orange was 61-38 for Biden, Osceola was 56-43. The residents, by the way, had no say in DeSantis’ Murder Mickey vote. They will likely have no say in their property taxes going through the roof. But they are likely to see their communities come close to financial ruin.

In a way, the outcome is a perfect encapsulation of the 2022 Republican Party: Take more from Joe Sixpack while the corporations that are ostensibly the target of their moral outrage, walk away with the money. Oh, and screw a few Blue counties. On to cartoons.

Who won? You be the judge:

GOP’s rules seem wrong:

Happy passengers are missing the big picture:

MAGAs should choose their poison carefully:

Our learning disability:

 

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Monday Wake Up Call – January 31, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Mount Saint Nicholas, Glacier NP, MT – January 2022 photo by Jack Bell Photography

Anyone else thinking that our national party bus is about to stall out in the slow lane on America’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams?

Here’s an under-the-radar story: In 2020, the Trump administration hatched a plan to gradually transition traditional Medicare over to private firms. It’s called Direct Contracting (DC) and is operated by Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs). Currently, there are 53 of them in Phase One of an experimental program operated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

Under the program, the DCEs receive a fixed amount of money annually to cover care for each traditional Medicare enrollee whose primary care doctor (or group) has signed up with that DCE. The DCEs must pay for all of the care of those people assigned to them. To date, the CMS has auto-assigned hundreds of thousands of people to DCEs.

Since no one on Medicare has voluntarily signed up to work with a DCE, it’s unlikely they know of, nor understand what’s happening. And the CMS doesn’t require DCEs to tell people that they have the right to opt-out.

The idea behind DCEs is to shift a portion of the financial risk of the elderly’s medical care away from traditional Medicare by capping the payments to a third party that’s responsible to pay for it. This is the latest in many efforts by CMS and Congress to control the rising costs of healthcare.

Wrongo and Ms. Right have recently noticed a blizzard of direct mail offers to convert our traditional Medicare to an all-in insurance program. It’s probable that some of these are from DCEs.

The anticipated advantage of the DCE experiment is that Medicare’s out-of-pocket costs will be capped. The DCEs contract with CMS is for an agreed-upon annual payment. They have to pay for care and also make a profit based on that fixed revenue amount from the government. In addition to the normal profits from providing services, DCEs can keep as much as 40% of the money they don’t spend on care.

But there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and it seems to Wrongo that this creates yet another financial incentive to deny otherwise necessary treatments. It’s possible that the DCEs could pay doctors to steer patients away from specialty care. This means that someone enrolled in a DCE has reason to worry that their primary care doctor might limit their access to more costly care.

Direct contracting is supposed to be a pilot program, yet Medicare has no plans to limit the number of people it enrolls in these new plans. Instead, Medicare has announced plans to enroll 100% of traditional Medicare members into DCE-like programs by 2030.

Congress did not authorize the wholesale overhaul of traditional Medicare, so why is this happening? And so far, the Biden administration appears to be willing to continue playing Trump’s cards.

Many of the DCEs are owned by Private Equity (PE) firms. It doesn’t take a chess master to see that the PE firms will ultimately sell out to the insurance industry. And it wouldn’t be a big leap from that to fully privatize Medicare.

Time to wake up America! Did we elect Biden to privatize Medicare? The word “privatize” should scare the hell out of Americans. But unfortunately they’ve been fooled into believing that by some magic miracle of economics, it’s to their benefit.

To help you wake up, today we spend a few minutes with Neil Young. Wrongo appreciates Neil Young saying he wanted his music removed from Spotify if Joe Rogan is allowed to continue spewing his anti-Vaxx trash there.

This was an easy business decision for Spotify. They picked the popular podcaster Rogan with the $100 million-plus exclusive deal, over the cranky 76-year-old rocker whose last gold album was nearly two decades ago. Someone who hasn’t been on the Billboard charts since 1982.

Joni Mitchell and Dave Grohl have now said they will follow Young in leaving Spotify.

Let’s watch and listen to Neil Young playing “Hey Hey, My My” at Farm Aid in Champaign, Illinois on September, 1985. Young is a co-founder and board member of Farm Aid, along with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp:

Neil won’t burn out or fade away.

Sample Lyric:
Out of the blue
and into the black
You pay for this,
but they give you that
And once you’re gone,
you can’t come back
When you’re out of the blue
and into the black.

“You pay for this, and they give you that”. Listen up Medicare!

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – January 16, 2022

A new Quinnipiac University Poll, conducted between January 7 – 10 of a nationwide sample of 1,313 adults shows that Americans are confused about which Party is protecting voting rights:

(hat tip: Jobsanger)

This is another example of poor messaging by Democrats. Republicans have been trying to suppress voting in many states, and the Republicans in Congress have prevented Democrats from passing legislation to protect the right to vote for all citizens. But only 45% say Democrats are protecting the right to vote and 43% say it’s the Republicans. That’s within the poll’s margin of error of 2.7%, meaning it’s a virtual tie.

There are only three cohorts with more than 50% saying that one Party is better. Women (52%) and Blacks (86%) say it’s the Democrats, while Whites (51%) say it’s the Republicans. It’s also interesting that 12% apparently have no opinion about which Party is better for voting rights. Whatever the reason why this poll is so close, it isn’t good for the country. On to cartoons.

Let’s vote our way out:

More GOP inflation:

Sen. Sinema is just not that into him

Are Sen. Manchin’s priorities misplaced?

Supremes reject federal government’s right to set rules for public safety:

(The mandate would have covered about 84.2 million Americans. OSHA estimated (before Omicron) that the rule would save 6,500 lives and prevent 250,000 hospitalizations over a six-month period.)

Supremes can’t rule on Djokovic:

 

 

 

 

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Covid’s Junior Year Better Not Suck as Much as Its Sophomore Year

The Daily Escape:

Mt. Baker, viewed from Bellingham, WA after 66” of new snow – December 2021 photo by Randy Small photography

Wrongo tested positive for Covid on Christmas Day, despite being vaxxed and boosted. When he asked if it was Omicron or Delta, the hospital didn’t know, saying that the test might be selected randomly for further genetic testing. That means it’s highly doubtful any facility in Connecticut can separate Delta and Omicron patients. In fact, most places wouldn’t have the resources to do that, even if they wanted to.

So, while recovering here at the Mansion of Wrong, we’ve tried to take the required precautions, including cancelling family events, informing those who we had spent time with earlier that week, and masking indoors. One family friend who was with us last week, just texted to say that his 3.5 year old grandson whom he babysat for after seeing us, just tested positive. It’s rampant.

We are entering year three of Covid, and the pandemic isn’t over, even though most of us believed it would be over by now. Instead, for its junior year, Covid is looking like it may shift from a pandemic to an endemic disease, one we will have to live with, possibly forever.

We have effective vaccines, but a political effort is stoking anti-Vaxx feelings in order to keep the pandemic going. Republican leaders are opposing vaccinations, wearing masks, and social distancing (even though they know these things are very effective). And their followers are well — following, by refusing vaccinations, masks, and social distancing.

Despite Covid having a roughly 2% mortality rate, they seem to be more threatened by a vaccine that has a 0.0022% mortality rate. We can ask why GOP politicians are doing this. Most of them are vaccinated. They know that refusing these measures will make people sick and will likely kill quite a few of the unvaccinated, but they don’t seem to care.

They understand that a continuing pandemic could make Biden a one-term president. A continuing pandemic may help Republicans retake the House and Senate in 2022. Nobody likes a loser, and they think the majority of voters will blame Biden for the continuing pandemic.

The numbers are against Biden. America’s now at 821,000 dead. Unless we get very lucky, in another 100 days, we’ll be somewhere between 920,000 and 1,000,000, because since August, we have averaged more than 1,500 deaths/day. Unless the daily deaths change, we’re headed to a million dead by spring.

Republicans are going to use this fact to attack Biden, saying that he’s handled Covid worse than Trump did, because there are more deaths on his watch.

Republicans have done everything possible to prolong Covid and to slow or prevent the implementation of measures that would have lowered the death toll. It’s like an arsonist complaining about the fire department not putting out fires fast enough. The idea that Covid vaccinations should be treated as a matter of individual consumer preference is absolutely brain-dead Republican nihilism.

The NYT reports that where people are dying of Covid also has changed since vaccines became widely available: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Death rates fell in most counties across the country, and in about one in five counties, the death rate fell by more than half. But in about one in 10 counties, death rates have more than doubled.”

Now, ten percent of counties doesn’t equal ten percent of the population. Here’s the map provided by the Times:

Note the concentration in Kentucky and West Virginia. The latest data from the CDC, based on data from 25 states and cities, shows that the death rate for unvaccinated people is 14 times higher than that for vaccinated people. The article also includes a map where Covid deaths have decreased. You can view it here. In most ways, it fills in the blank areas on the map above with green cones instead of these red cones.

We’ve been at this for two long years. Now starting year three, maddeningly, the issues remain the same: The health care system is running out of resources. People can’t get tested. Some people refuse to help themselves and their neighbors. New variants can emerge in the wild faster than we can develop remedies, particularly when people won’t avail themselves of the remedies we already have.

There will be end of year reports on the good things that happened in 2021. There will be reports on both the good and bad things to come in 2022. One thing that doesn’t seem likely to be in any of those reports is a changed reaction to Covid by Americans.

Time to put 2021 in the dumpster.

Happy New Year! Thanks for riding with Wrongo for another year. Raise a glass, knowing that we will try our damnedest to make sense of it all again in 2022. Let’s close with “Auld Lang Syne” performed by The Choral Scholars of University College Dublin: (hat tip to Monty)

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Monday Wake Up Call – November 22, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, NV – November 2021 photo by Marcia Steen

Today is the 58th anniversary of the assassination of President John Kennedy. While it wasn’t the first time Americans dove deep into conspiracy theories, who killed JFK has always been a controversial topic surrounded by conspiracy theories since that November day.

Over the weekend, we passed a sad milestone. The number of US Covid deaths in 2021 surpassed the deaths in 2020 and we still have a month to go. So far, there have been 385,457 deaths this year vs. 385,343 in 2020 according to the WSJ.

Wrongo has a few observations about what our continuing saga with Covid says about America. Almost 200 million of us are fully vaccinated. In addition, we have had 47 million confirmed cases to date. That means 74.8% of us have some level of antibodies to the several variants of Covid that have traveled through our population in the past two years.

But because: 1) Vaccines haven’t made it beyond the rich world (only 6% of the population in Africa is vaccinated) and 2) Americans seem to value the freedom to control their bodies over public health, new variants that may not be controllable by current vaccines could infiltrate the US.

There’s one very concerning new variant, B.1.640. It appears to be from Africa and has only been seen in small numbers. Apparently it’s bad. The Jerusalem Post mentioned it in” New COVID variant found in France: Reason for panic or not quite yet?” after it spread to Europe:

“A new COVID variant identified in a handful of European countries is raising concerns among some health professionals because there are changes to the coronavirus spike protein that have never been seen before.”

The B.1.640 variant has nothing to do with Delta. Researchers have had a really hard time placing it on the known Covid family tree, because it’s so far removed from anything else, that it just sits on a very long branch of its own. They think that it may elude our current vaccines.

If true, this would be another example of viral evolution completely blindsiding us. And if it isn’t this one, we’ll probably see some other variant.

The sad truth is that America is no longer willing to fight Covid. We think its too hard, and we don’t like doing difficult things. Too many of us don’t want to choose between public health and our economy.

Our unofficial policy is to expect that Covid will become a gradually declining annual infection. But that’s based on the assumption that we have a successful vaccine, that the current variant is all we’ll see, and that the virus will lose its potency over time.

Nobody dares say it out loud, but Covid has revealed the US to be a prime risk for a bioweapon attack.

If a terror group, or an adversary country decided to launch a biological attack, there is clearly nothing that we would do to stop it. How do we know that? Because Covid could have been a biological attack, and it was allowed to spread broadly instead of being properly dealt with. Because it was “too hard” to try to stop it.

We’ve spent countless $ trillions over the last 20 years for “national security”, and this is where we’ve gotten to? Wrongo is starting to think that Churchill’s comment that “the US will do the right thing, after we’ve tried everything else” was overly optimistic.

Time to wake up America! We’ve got to toughen up, or face defeat, not only on the battlefield but in ICUs across America. To help you wake up, here’s a throwback song from another era. Listen to “I’d Love to Change the World” by the late Alvin Lee & his group, Ten Years After from their 1971 Album: “A Space In Time.”

The video doesn’t feature the band, just the song from the album. The video is a film student project that Wrongo likes. Overall, the song  looks at what were considered the biggest problems in the world in 1971: Overpopulation, economic inequality, pollution, and war. Unsurprisingly, the issues remain the same:

Sample Lyric:

Everywhere is freaks and hairies
Dykes and fairies, tell me where is sanity
Tax the rich, feed the poor
Till there are no rich no more

I’d love to change the world
But I don’t know what to do
So I’ll leave it up to you

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Do Religious Exemptions From Vaccination Protect Anyone?

The Daily Escape:

Coast Guard Beach,  Cape Cod MA – October 2021 photo by Anna Olivera Alabarg

From Military.com:

“US service members should have the right to refuse the military’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement on conscientious grounds, the Catholic Church’s Archdiocese for the Military Services said Tuesday.”

The statement by Archbishop Timothy Broglio focuses on potential objections over the use of fetal cell lines in vaccine development: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines were tested using an abortion-derived cell line. That type of a link has been for centuries considered remote material cooperation with evil and is never sinful. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was developed, tested, and is produced, with abortion-derived cell lines. That vaccine is, therefore, more problematic.”

That’s the Catholic Church’s overriding position on Covid vaccines. Since the military has the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines available, no military member needs to take the J&J shot. Where Archbishop Broglio goes off the rails is with this:

“….no one should be forced to receive a COVID-19 vaccine if it would violate the sanctity of his or her conscience.

Individuals possess the “civil right not to be hindered in leading their lives in accordance with their consciences.”

Even if an individual’s decision seems erroneous or inconsistent to others, conscience does not lose its dignity. This belief permeates Catholic moral theology as well as First Amendment jurisprudence. As stated by the United States Supreme Court, “[R]eligious beliefs need not be acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others in order to merit First Amendment protection.”

So, every Catholic in the military has a vaccination hall pass from the Archbishop from taking a vaccine that is “never sinful”? The curious thing is that Catholics are the most vaccinated group in the US, according to a recent national survey by the Pew Research Center.

Should religious exemptions from vaccine mandates really be a thing? Exceptions were designed to protect religious faith. But where vaccines are concerned, they often seem to be used in bad faith, as a way to get around complying with a public health requirement.

Some Constitutional history from Wired: The First Amendment restricts the government from prohibiting the “free exercise” of religion. For much of our history, there were no religious exemptions from secular laws that applied to everyone. As the Supreme Court observed in 1879, “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

Congress couldn’t tell you what to believe, the Court ruled, but it can tell you what to do.

By the early 1970s, the justices carved out space for religious exemptions. They ruled that if a superficially neutral law conflicted with a religious command, the government would have to meet the “strict scrutiny” test by showing that it had a “compelling interest” in enforcing the law.

In 1990, the Court narrowed its thinking. In a case involving members of a Native American Church who took peyote as part of religious ceremonies, the Court held that religion doesn’t give someone the right to challenge a “generally applicable” law. Ruling otherwise, wrote the conservative Catholic Justice Antonin Scalia, “would open the prospect of constitutionally required exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind.” An example of a civic obligation that Scalia cited for his slippery-slope argument: compulsory vaccination laws.

In fact, religious opposition to vaccines is rare. In 2013, John D. Grabenstein, a vaccinologist and practicing Catholic, surveyed a wide range of world religions and couldn’t find any that had anti-vaccine teachings, except for the Christian Scientists, who teach that the material world, including disease, is an illusion. And the way to overcome disease is through prayer, not medicine or vaccination.

In the 1960s and ’70s, as vaccine mandates for diseases like measles and polio proliferated, a wave of state laws enabled religious opt-outs. Today, 48 states and the District of Columbia allow some form of exemption.

As Aaron Blake asks in the WaPo: How long before Republicans’ coronavirus vaccine skepticism and anti-mandate fervor makes the next logical jump – to the other vaccines that have been mandated for many years?

It’s already happened. Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan tweeted:

“Ohio should ban all vaccine mandates”

Jordan supposedly is vaccinated. But apparently, he wants not only Covid, but whooping cough and measles to be spread as far and wide as possible.

It seems likely that the US will end up with fewer vaccine requirements in some places than we had before this pandemic that has killed over 700,000 people. You know, the one that we have vaccines for.

We live in a country where there’s no agreement on what constitutes the common good.

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