Healthcare Archives - Public Seminar

Corporations

How Minnesota Took on Hospital Monopolies and Won

HF 402 creates a “public interest standard” for mergers

May 31, 2023 • by Pat Garofalo

Across the country, health care workers have seen both their pay and their working conditions head down a slope thanks to the increasing power of the large health systems that employ them....

How Minnesota Took on Hospital Monopolies and Won

Sex & Gender

A Day at a Monkeypox Vaccine Clinic in a Berkeley Bathhouse

When under threat, queer communities across the country survive, thrive, and build networks of care

August 31, 2022 • by Will Clark

What I saw in the monkeypox line outside of a bathhouse in Berkeley was a testimony to the way queer communities across the country survive, thrive, and build networks of care when under threat....

A Day at a Monkeypox Vaccine Clinic in a Berkeley Bathhouse

Sex & Gender

What Unenumerated Rights Are Guaranteed in Samuel Alito’s World?

The Supreme Court’s majority may abort the right to privacy—but we’ll always have the right to secrecy and shame

June 13, 2022 • by Peter Nohrnberg

Like abortion, contraception has always existed in some form. And like abortion, contraception was also left unmentioned by the authors of the Constitution, who relied upon high infant mortality rates to take care of family planning....

What Unenumerated Rights Are Guaranteed in Samuel Alito’s World?

The Right

Creeping Fascism

The Texas law attacking reproductive justice is the antithesis of both law and democracy

September 8, 2021 • by Laura Briggs

_____ Is there any other phrase for the events that have activated the Texas abortion law other than “creeping fascism”? First, the ban itself is essentially an anti-law, designed to promote vigilantism. In itself, that’s not surprising. S.B. 8 is the culmination not just of numerous state-level laws that have narrowed abortion ...

Feminism

How We Are Doing in Texas

S.B. 8 and the hypocrisy of a “pro-life” state

September 8, 2021 • by Lauren Gutterman

_____ On September 2, 2021, I received a text from an old friend, an advocate for global reproductive health. “Sending love to Texas,” she wrote. “How are you all doing?” In short, not well. The day before, Senate Bill 8 took effect; that night, the United States Supreme Court announced it ...

Public Health

Understanding the Fear of Vaccines

How to talk about public health in the age of COVID

July 21, 2020 • by Tarun Jose Kattumana

The pandemic has already changed some minds. Many who were previously opposed to vaccinations have softened their stance. However, misinformation from anti-vax groups continues to be far-reaching and influential. Why are anti-vax claims influential despite the immediate threat of the pandemic? What, if anything, can be done to lower the ...

Democracy

Should Governments Have Access to Our Data?

Privacy and democracy in the age of pandemics

July 20, 2020 • by Jo Guldi and Macabe Keliher

Americans are scared about encroachments on their data privacy, and rightly so. Prior to 9/11, most advocated limiting the government’s ability to gather and access data in the name of civil liberties. Faced with the threat of terror, however, citizens resigned themselves to encroachments on privacy made in the name ...

Should Governments Have Access to Our Data?

Public Health

It’s Time to Rethink Healthcare as a Human Right

COVID-19 has put an urgent campaign agenda at the top of the policy list

March 24, 2020 • by Katie Scofield

Former Vice President Joe Biden focused on what a president could do here and now to control the outbreak. Sen Bernie Sanders called to systematically rethink American healthcare. Sanders rightly pointed out that the outcomes and effects of COVID-19 will be exacerbated by existing problems in the healthcare industry. If people ...

It’s Time to Rethink Healthcare as a Human Right

History

Yes, COVID-19 Is an Emergency: It’s Also a Paradigm Shift

This new challenge must include a demand for justice

March 24, 2020 • by Ian Zuckerman

I believe the answer is yes, in the immediate sense of what must be done. But it’s too early to tell, in the longer sense of whether our aim must be to return to the status quo ante, or undergo more permanent transformations. Either way, the legitimate, temporary suspension of ...

Yes, COVID-19 Is an Emergency: It’s Also a Paradigm Shift

Politics

Health Care & the Dangers of Demanding the Impossible

What Bernie Sanders Might Learn from Elizabeth Warren

February 28, 2020 • by Leo Casey

I have been struck today by how much of the argument I saw in the last few days before the Nevada caucuses, much of which was swirling around disagreements between the Bernie campaign and the Culinary Workers Union in Nevada, was based on a common misunderstanding of the dynamics of ...

Health Care & the Dangers of Demanding the Impossible

New York City

Bad Medicine

Arbitrary Caps and Cost Shifts Won’t Heal Medicaid

February 15, 2020 • by James Parrott

Instead, gimmicks such as moving some spending forward by a few days into the next fiscal year, as was done the past two years with Medicaid, served to mainly obscure the steady rise in Medicaid spending and pushed a reckoning down the road. That reckoning is no longer avoidable. Six million ...

Feature

Financing Medicare for All

A Modest Proposal Toward Democratic unity on Health Care

August 20, 2019 • by Duncan Foley

The proposals of progressives seeking the Democratic nomination for president, such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, to establish a universal federally-funded and administered health care system in the United States address real and unresolved policy and political problems. The most fundamental challenge for any health care system is what economists ...