This ought to be the talk of everyone today — with the Texas Ebola problem, we are seeing how the US Public Health system has been deliberately broken:
That chart is from a great piece in the Scientific American, showing how Public Health spending has been on the decline. The author, Judy Stone, provides some context for how Public Health considerations have been undermined over the past few years. Read the entire thing, then take a look at some of the material she provides in the links at the end of the article:
And we need to take the politics out of funding for public health and research. We need to approve a strong Surgeon General like Dr. Vivek Murthy, and not have appointments like his be derailed by the NRA and their politicians. NIH’s budget was reduced by $446 million from 2010 to 2014, and subjected to inappropriate politically motivated interference in its decision making. The CDC’s discretionary funding was cut by $585 million during this same period. Shockingly, annual funding for the CDC’s public health preparedness and response efforts were $1 billion lower for 2013 fiscal year than for 2002. These funding decreases have resulted in more than 45,700 job losses at state and local health departments since 2008. Again, it is not just the Ebola that is a looming threat. We need to worry about vaccine-preventable but neglected infections like influenza, measles, and whooping cough; the serious emerging viral infections in the US like Enterovirus-D68, chikungunya and dengue, as well as overseas MERS and bird flus, and natural disasters.
Right. No matter what your TV says, there are greater public health threats out there, including this Enterovirus which is making children sick. Get the politics out of the business of public health.
Dear Democrats, Why trying to appeal to conservative groups is a very bad hedging strategy. (Talking about the status of Democrats who voted for the Manchin-Toomey universal background amendment, here.)
That Hagan [D-NC] is the only one of the four vulnerable Democrats mentioned above who is ahead in the polls is a further indication that crossing the NRA is hardly fatal. Meanwhile, the fact that Pryor [D-AR] and Begich [D-AK] are getting nothing in return from the NRA for their votes against Manchin-Toomey is yet another suggestion that the organization’s hold on American politics is loosening, or at least narrowing. One of the reasons the NRA held such sway for so long was that it commanded support from key Democratic elected officials such as John Dingell, the veteran congressman from Michigan, who could count on being rewarded for their votes with staunch NRA support, regardless of their party label. But many of those Democrats have been leaving the scene, either via retirement (like Dingell) or electoral defeat.
And now that the NRA has become so partisan in its calculations—backing Republicans even over Democrats who have sided with it on key votes—its grip on remaining Democrats will weaken further.
Americans support background checks before buying guns by huge margins. Right? There ought to be a lesson here in getting Democrats to pay attention to their own constituencies and stop trying to innoculate themselves from some Fox News BS.
What interests you today?