As reported in this post, cobbled together by a dozen white males, TrumpCare is disgustingly insensitive to the needs of all but the 1%, providing a trillion dollars in tax relief for our millionaires while gutting care for the poor and raising premiums for senior citizens and the middle class. Unfathomable. Read on.  

This report focuses on TrumpCare and a soon-to-be-released executive order to provide still more profits to pharma. Each day a new outrage. Santa Fe, it is time to convert your frustration and anger to action. I wonder what it takes to trigger the kind of response that occurred in November. Then Trump was a reality yet to happen. Now it is our lives at stake. It is time to take a stand and there are plenty of opportunities to do so, including our kickoff to Retake’s Support for Chainbreaker’s Equity Summer. Click here to get engaged and active. Tomorrow we will report on the London fire and the connection between the criminal neglect of the building’s safety needs while millions were invested in the outer facade. Why? To accelerate gentrification of the surrounding Kensington community. Stay tuned.

TrumpCare: Hopefully Dead on Arrival.   Thirteen Conservative white males, sequestered from public scrutiny have finally released the Senate version of TrumpCare. The plan is even worse than the House version as it utterly guts MediCaid, the healthcare system serving the poor. As reported in New York Magazine, “The most important design feature is that the Senate bill retains all the tax cuts in the House bill. The tax cuts are what drive the bill’s inescapable cruelty. By eliminating nearly a trillion dollars in revenue, it necessarily creates a trillion dollars in cuts for coverage subsidies. The House bill reduces the insurance rolls by 23 million.” For the full NY Magazine report, click here. As reported in a Salon.com article, remarkably the Senate version of TrumpCare is not ruthlessly cruel enough for some Republicans.  Republican Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Mike Lee of Utah released a statement indicating that their immediate opposition to McConnell’s so-called Better Care Act is due to the fact that it does not go far enough to completely repeal Obamacare.

On the other side of the spectrum, “moderate” Republicans are also unsupportive, with many saying they had still not seen a word of the text.  In a statement, Sen. Dean Heller from Nevada stated, “As I have consistently stated, if the bill is good for Nevada, I’ll vote for it and if it’s not – I won’t.” As he explained, “I want to make sure the rug is not pulled out from under Nevada or the more than 200,000 Nevadans who received insurance for the first time under Medicaid expansion.” Click here for the Salon.com article. And Heller is not alone, as reported in a Morning Consult  report, support for Trumpcare among Republicans has been cut in half since May.   Click here for more on plummeting support the TrumpCare. The upshot: the combination of insane right wing extremists like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and the few GOP Senators with a semblance of a conscience (or more likely an eye on the polls) both of whom have expressed unwillingness to support the bill, should result on its failing miserably. Finally, click here for a just released piece from the Santa Fe New Mexican in which Senators Heinrich and Udall describe the terrible impact TrumpCare would have on New Mexico.

TrumpCare Isn’t the Only Health Disaster Looming–Details on Coming Executive Order on Pharma:  You may recall that one of Trump’s campaign pledges was that he would make drug prices “come way down” because the pharma industry was “getting away with murder.” Guess he’s changed his mind. Truthout reports that the Trump administration has crafted an executive order will be introduced after the TrumpCare disaster is resolved (hopefully rejected). But the gist of the order, written by former pharma lobbyist Joe Grogan, is that it will;

• Make it harder for other countries to limit increases in prescription drug prices–thereby ensuring higher profits for big pharma;
• Extend monopolies on new drugs by delaying the time-frame for creating generic drugs;
• Limit regulation of the pharma industry;
• Continues to shackle the US purchasing power of Medicare, by not allowing Medicare to use its purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices and thereby eliminating perhaps the most effective tool for limiting pharma prices;

From the Truthout article: “Public Citizen’s Peter Maybarduk says of the executive order, “The way to reduce medicine prices in the United States is to reduce them in the United States. Making medications more costly for the world’s poor won’t make them more affordable in the US, and won’t help Americans who are forced to choose between paying for their health care and paying the rent.”    \ Click here for the full Truthout report.

Why HealthCare Matters.  I spoke at a rally at the Santa Fe Plaza last week. I hesitate to include video of me, but this brief talk seems so relevant to the theme of this post, as it addresses both healthcare and a sleeping nation. So, I had to share it. It is especially relevant since I was speaking to an empty plaza. Let’s get engaged Santa Fe, our world is afire.

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