Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Luigi:
““I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy?””
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/luigis-manifesto
“Luigi Mangione, the man charged with murder in the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, seemed to support Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appeared to harbor frustrations with the medical field, and expressed skepticism toward both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, deleted X posts show.
Mangione, a 26-year-old software developer who reportedly fell out of touch with friends and family after back surgery last year, reposted Edward Snowden’s suggestion that Democrats should nominate Kennedy for president following Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/luigi-mangiones-deleted-social-media-154248097.html
“For millions of families, a spike in health care costs might be around the corner because crucial subsidies are set to expire at the end of next year. Some families will see their premiums rise by thousands of dollars; others might lose their insurance altogether.
In 2021, President Joe Biden signed into law the American Rescue Plan Act, which included a provision that enhanced the premium tax credit — a piece of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that subsidized the cost of premiums for some lower- and middle-income families. The Biden-era enhancements, which essentially expanded the number of people who qualify for the tax credit, were originally set to expire at the end of 2022, but Congress extended them through 2025 when it passed the Inflation Reduction Act. (For families at or slightly above the poverty line, the enhanced tax credit subsidizes the full premium. For people making more than 400 percent of the poverty line — people who were previously ineligible for this subsidy — it caps their premiums to 8.5 percent of their income.)
The enhanced premium tax credits contributed to a record number of insured people in the United States. In February 2021, before Congress expanded the premium tax credits, 11.2 million people were enrolled in health coverage through ACA marketplaces. By 2024, that number shot up to 20.8 million people.
There are many reasons for the dramatic increase in marketplace coverage — including the fact that millions of people were disenrolled from Medicaid coverage after Covid emergency measures lapsed and had to turn to other forms of insurance, including the marketplace — but the enhanced premium tax credit played a critical role. Its expansion was the main reason so many more people were able to enroll in health care coverage from the ACA marketplace, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
If Congress allows the enhanced premium tax credits to expire, millions of people will see a noticeable rise in out-of-pocket expenses. Many will likely lose their coverage, and that’s without considering how much more will be at stake if Medicaid gets slashed as well. For low-income families, particularly those who live just above the poverty line, that could be a nightmare.”
https://www.vox.com/policy/387424/enhanced-premium-tax-credit-health-care-marketplace-aca
“police identified the person of interest as 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, who was spotted at a McDonald’s in Altoona and taken into custody by local police on gun charges. Mangione was found in possession of a ghost gun and suppressor consistent with the weapon seen in video footage of the crime, a fake New Jersey ID matching the one the suspect is believed to have used at a Manhattan hostel and clothing, including a mask, that match those worn by the suspect.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/live/unitedhealthcare-ceo-shooting-updates-police-identify-luigi-mangione-as-person-of-interest-detained-in-altoona-pa-142515789.html
“Despite the decline in attention, Zika is still spreading in many countries. In the first half of 2023, health officials recorded about 27,000 Zika infections in the Americas, with Brazil the most affected country with more than 2,700 cases. Thousands of babies are still being born with preventable disabilities.
“With a safe and effective Zika vaccine, we could eliminate the possibility of congenital Zika syndrome, and I think that would have a huge impact,” said Anna Durbin, a professor of international health and global disease epidemiology and control at Johns Hopkins University. “Even if there are few cases of congenital Zika syndrome, just the emotional, financial effect of that is huge.”
Scientists and global health experts warn that Zika, alongside other mosquito-borne infectious diseases, could make a broader resurgence. The first step to defeating pandemics is, of course, prevention, and a Zika vaccine is vital to that goal.
But major hurdles stand in the way. Private pharmaceutical companies aren’t willing to invest in vaccine development because so few people are getting infected now — and those who are getting infected largely live in relatively poor countries. Researchers say governments aren’t investing sufficient public funds in vaccine development. And it is almost impossible to run a traditional clinical trial for the few vaccines hastily developed during the 2015 outbreak.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/379740/zika-virus-vaccine-mosquitoes-climate-change
” In most rich countries, people don’t have to worry about sifting through a dozen different health plans — and they don’t live in fear of losing their health care after losing a job, and they receive more affordable, higher-quality care than Americans do. The paradox of the world’s wealthiest nation having one of the weakest health systems among developed nations has long been a vexing policy problem — without an easy solution.”
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“American health insurance, as we think of it today, started to take shape in the 1920s, as the medical profession was being standardized and modern hospitals were being built. Some employers started offering payments for hospital-based services as a perk for their workers. Companies had large groups of employees, some in good health and some in bad, to spread the risk and make the finances work much like modern-day insurance does.
This system soon became entrenched enough that President Franklin D. Roosevelt bypassed plans to include national health insurance as part of the New Deal. Then came World War II, along with government-mandated wage controls for employees in the private sector to keep the war machine moving. Barred from offering raises to motivate their workers, companies started pumping up their health benefits — and the government agreed to exempt those benefits both from wage controls and taxes.
By the 1950s, employer-sponsored insurance had become popular among those who received it and progressive labor unions urged the government to make the tax exemption permanent. Congress agreed, enshrining in 1954 the subsidy for company health plans in federal law. Doctors and hospitals, whose industry was growing into the leviathan that it is today, became accustomed to working with private insurers rather than with the government directly.
Today, these work-based health plans still cover roughly half of all Americans.”
…
“The problem with the employer-based system was it left out too many people because they didn’t work or didn’t have a job that offered health insurance. To start filling in the gaps, in 1965, Congress created Medicare and Medicaid to cover two of the biggest groups of people who lacked coverage: seniors and people in poverty.
After that expansion, we had a system that covered most Americans — which made it hard to change, because people feared losing what they had.
Those fears, supported by the medical industry’s campaign against “socialized medicine,” doomed the health care overhauls proposed by presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton that would have consolidated most Americans into a national insurance scheme. Certain tendencies in American culture — consumerism and trust in private markets — made it easier to persuade the public that they’d lose under a government-run health plan.
Meanwhile, the US health care system still had obvious holes. Rather than threaten the status quo, policymakers added new patches.
CHIP was approved in the 1990s, covering children of working-class families whose incomes were not low enough to get Medicaid. (Their parents, however, were often left without any coverage at all.) The 2010 Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, was designed to fill that gap by covering people who didn’t receive health insurance through their jobs but didn’t qualify for Medicaid.
Yet even after a half-dozen rounds of incremental health reform over five decades, about one in 12 people in the US lack health coverage and Americans are much more likely than people in other developed nations to say they skip medical care because of the cost.”
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“Other countries built their health care systems more deliberately.
After World War II, the United Kingdom sought to extend medical security to all its citizens, creating the National Health Service; many other European governments followed suit.
A half-century later, another wealthy island nation made the same choice. Taiwan, building a modern democracy after decades of authoritarian rule, scrapped a fractured, inequitable health system to set up a national insurance program that would cover everyone. It was a proclamation of solidarity after a tumultuous military dictatorship had come to an end.
Not all countries have opted for a single government program, but their systems are still simpler than America’s and cover the entire population. In 2006, the Netherlands opted to trade a dysfunctional two-tiered insurance system for a universal program that relied on private coverage but was nevertheless designed to insure everybody. The uninsured rate there today is less than 1 percent (some people opt out).
But the US? We’ve never paused to build a fairer, simpler, uniform health system.”
https://www.vox.com/explain-it-to-me/375082/us-health-insurance-plans-medicare-medicaid
“RFK Jr. is not a scientifically literate, fact-based, competent, experienced, or measured person. He is wrong about HIV/AIDS; linking vaccines to autism; and the purported danger of thimerosal. On some things, he is correct: The COVID regime and the “noble lies”—which are still lies!—spread to the American public by our purported health authorities are despicable. We still need accountability. Considering which endocrine disruptors might exist in our environment and what unintended consequences might stem from SSRIs are valid research questions to which RFK Jr. has brought attention. Also, raw milk is great.
But in order to actually administer these programs, you need more than the ability to just ask questions and spread theories about what could be happening. You need some amount of competence. Perhaps RFK Jr. can take a pickax to the government waste that stems from certain companies being in bed with their overseers, but don’t count on it”
https://reason.com/2024/11/15/one-brainworm-to-rule-them-all/
“The NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical and public health research, with a budget of $47 billion, most of which is used to support research at universities and academic medical centers. The agency has long been criticized for being way too risk-averse when it comes to choosing which research projects to fund.”
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“Being informed by the best information is certainly the right goal. But RFK Jr.’s long history of anti-vaccination agitation suggests he is not a source of the best information for the safety and efficacy of modern vaccines. This includes false assertions that vaccines cause autism; that they are not tested using placebo-controlled trials; and, contradicting the previous claim, that COVID-19 vaccines killed more people than did a placebo.
Again, the CDC needs fixing, but RFK Jr.’s skepticism about the safety and efficacy of modern vaccines would further undermine what should be the CDC’s main focus: the prevention of the spread of dangerous infectious diseases.”
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“Four years into the post-COVID era, most research has found that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine provide no treatment benefit for the infected. In April, the Journal of Infection published a report about a randomized controlled trial that concluded, “Ivermectin for COVID-19 is unlikely to provide clinically meaningful improvement in recovery, hospital admissions, or longer-term outcomes.””
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“Giving drug development and infectious disease an eight-year break seems inadvisable. After all, the death rate for cancer has continued to drop from 2016 to today, partially as a result of lower incidence stemming from lifestyle changes, but also because of better and more widely available pharmaceutical treatments. Recent calculations show the value of medicines to patients far outweigh the profits the drug companies rake in. And, as ever, infectious diseases lurk in the background waiting for us to lower our guards or seeking just the right mutation to enable them to jump into the human population.”
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“RFK Jr.’s solution to stemming the tide of chronic illnesses is better diets and physical fitness. History suggests government interventions will have little effect on either. After all, the federal government has been periodically issuing dietary guidelines since 1979 and promoting physical fitness since 1956. The Lancet authors agree with RFK Jr.’s aspirations but suggest in the meantime that “regulations need to be put in place to eliminate barriers to accessing new-generation obesity clinical treatments, ensuring the availability and affordability of these options to the broader population.””
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“The FDA needs streamlining to speed biomedical innovation, the NIH needs greater risk-taking in research, and the CDC needs to be laser-focused on preventing infectious diseases. None of these appear to be high on the agenda of possible incoming secretary of health and human services.”
https://reason.com/2024/11/15/can-rfk-jr-fix-our-dysfunctional-public-health-agencies/
“An estimated 12 people die every day while waiting for a kidney transplant. At least some of those deaths are preventable, and monopoly government contractors shoulder most of the blame.
“Monopolies don’t work and
government-funded monopolies are even worse,” says Jennifer Erickson, a former Obama White House staffer who now works as a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists.”
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” All told, more than 17,000 kidneys (as well as thousands of other organs) are going to waste each year instead of finding their way to dialysis patients who need a replacement. That’s a tremendous opportunity cost. And because there’s no competition between OPOs, if you’re unlucky enough to need an organ and you live in an area where there’s a poor-performing OPO, you might never get one.”
https://reason.com/2024/09/30/against-government-kidney-monopolies/
“By compiling and analyzing a huge amount of government data, environmental economist Eyal Frank, the study’s sole author, discovered that in regions with outbreaks of white nose syndrome, a wildlife disease that kills bats, the rate of infant mortality increased by nearly 8 percent relative to areas without the disease.
There’s a clear reason for this, according to the paper. Most North American bats eat insects, including pests like moths that damage crops. Without bats flying about, farmers spray more insecticides on their fields, the study shows, and exposure to insecticides is known to harm the health of newborns.”
https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/370002/bats-link-babies-death-study-white-nose-syndrome