As reported in the Texas Tribune, the Texas Senate is considering a bill that would prevent cities and counties from enacting paid sick leave ordinances. Republican politicians that run on small government and local control, as usual, have no qualms about violating that “principle” of theirs when it interferes with big business. Like when Denton county decided to ban fracking, the state quickly put a stop to that type of local control. Now that Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio require paid sick leave, big government is coming to put a stop to it.

You see, they really know what’s best for us, y’all. The Tribune article quotes a “CEO” of a company that runs Auntie Anne Pretzels and Cinnabon franchises in Texas. According to her, offering her food-service workers paid sick leave would be terrible for them, because if she had to pay sick leave, she couldn’t offer them 401K’s. Which is funny, because the stores owned by her company don’t offer 401k’s at all. Or maternity leave. Or any benefits. As usual, they’re just anti-worker and full of shit. They would rather the employees serve covid pretzels than pay a part-time employee $7.25 an hour for a four-hour shift while they rest and recover.

This is all public information based on employee reviews from Glassdoor and Indeed, by the way.

Employees of these mall stands make minimum wage. They work with food. They do not have health insurance and I imagine they’d have to work 15-20 hours to afford one cash pay doctor’s visit, not including prescriptions. These people have absolutely nothing, and their boss is fighting against offering them sick pay. I hate humanity.

In a pandemic, when we are all told to stay home if we are sick, Texas Republicans want to make sure that we are not guaranteed sick leave. It’s for our own good, really.

Nothing says, “I’ve got this,” like Bruce Aylward of the World Health Organization discussing the Coronavirus outbreak in a goddam medical exposure mask:

Today, the WHO gave a briefing saying that the Coronavirus outbreak COVID-19 has not reached pandemic level -yet.  But there is a large outbreak now in South Korea and Italy. China has tried to tamp down concern for the growing crisis, and that has certainly not been helpful.  COVID-19 sounds like a ComicCon convention name, but no, it’s not that fun.  This whole thing gives me the willies.

Remember when Rand Paul’s neighbor beat the crap out of him over landscaping?  Well, Sen. Paul, Mr. Libertarian Socialized Medicine is Slavery is going to…wait for it…Canada for surgery to repair a hernia suffered in the melee.  His spokesman stated that the hospital he’s going to is a private one, but the fact is that said hospital, Shouldice Hernia Hospital, receives the bulk of it’s funding from the Province of Ontario, and accepts funding from Canada’s Provincial Ministry of Health.  In other words, the hospital exists primarily from single payer funding, but will accept actual dollars from those who don’t have insurance, just like in the states.

It must be nice to be rich enough to fly to Canada to pay cash for surgery instead of staying in the States where you would be nickeled and dimed to death by private insurance.

Remember in 2009 during the writing of the ACA when Sarah Palin spun the big lie about “death panels” where faceless bureaucrats would arbitrarily deny coverage to innocent patients?  I certainly do.  During late 2009, this gigantic lie took on a life of its own, scaring the crap out of people using a completely baseless charge about healthcare under the new act.  Even today some media circles still use that lie to oppose people getting medical insurance.

The tragedy of the death panel lies is that death panels do actually exist and have for decades since Nixon converted the national healthcare system from a care system to a for-profit system when he signed the 1973 act forming HMOs.  Since then, actual panels of nurses and doctors are flooded on a daily basis with life and death decisions for their customers, insurance policy holders.  These actual death panels often make the wrong decision, wrecking millions of families’ financial wellbeing and accelerating the deaths of those with deadly diseases.

In a small victory against the insurance industry monopoly, Aetna has just been ordered to pay the family of Orrana Cunningham $25.5 million for “recklessly” disregarding its duty to deal fairly and in good faith when the Aetna death panel denied coverage for her treatment.  She had cancer and the proton beam treatment which could have saved her (and was approved by Medicare) was denied for financial reasons.  The court also ruled that the doctors making these decisions were unqualified and overworked, noting that one doctor had stated that he was expected to review over 80 cases per day, which is impossible for a doctor to properly review cases like these.

Aetna hasn’t decided whether it will appeal the judgement, but a spokesman said the company has “learned some things” during the course of this case.  I’ll bet.

NO solution to healthcare works unless it is a nationalized healthcare for all system.  Every developed country on the planet, with the notable exception of the United States, has figured out this problem.  It’s time we do, too.

While were watching Trump’s disgraceful performance in Helsinki on Monday, Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee to the the DC Circuit Court, handed religious fanatics a huge victory by ruling in Trump’s favor for his shift in Health and Human Services spending.  The new policy is shifting up to $260 million per year in federal grants from reproductive health programs such as birth control to faith based organizations that teach abstinence only.  In the ruling, McFadden said, “courts cannot review substantive objections to a non-final agency action, nor can they require formal rulemaking for a change in agency procedure.”  Essentially McFadden, a long time member of the ultra-conservative Federalist society, said that the courts, who are supposed to be a check over legislative and executive authority, don’t have the jurisdiction to do just that.

The effect of this ruling is that, once again, like under Bush II, federal dollars for healthcare are being drained and sent to churches and other religious organizations.

Here’s Kansas governor Jeff Colyer getting confronted time after time about his refusal to expand Medicaid for 150,000 Kansans.  He gets increasingly more agitated as person after person asks about Medicaid.  Finally he just says it – “I’m not going to debate this with you.”

The video is pretty telling and the real reason most super conservative Republicans refuse to have open meetings with normal people.