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Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Neil DeGrasse Tyson: ‘No Reason’ For Marijuana To Be Illegal

August 11, 2017 4:04 am

Generic Drug Prices Are Declining, But Many Consumers Aren’t Benefiting

August 10, 2017 3:45 am

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

Not all drug prices are going up.

Amid the public fury over the escalating costs of brand-name medications, the prices of generic drugs have been falling, raising fears about the profitability of major generic manufacturers. Last week, Teva Pharmaceuticals reported that it had missed analysts’ earnings estimates in the second quarter and planned to lay off 7,000 workers. Its share price plummeted 24 percent in one day as investors worried there was no end in sight.

Share prices of other generic drugmakers also declined, as did those of wholesalers, which profit from the sales of generic drugs and have said they expect prices to continue declining.…

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In New York City, World’s Marijuana Arrest Capital, Minorities Bear The Brunt

August 8, 2017 1:26 am

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

Last month, the Drug Policy Alliance released a report noting that marijuana arrests under New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio continue to be marked by shocking racial disparities, much as they were under his predecessors, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. Stung by the criticism, de Blasio is fighting back, but his response so far has consisted of attacking DPA as “legalizers” and comparing apples to oranges.

The DPA report, Unjust and Unconstitutional: 60,000 Jim Crow Marijuana Arrests in Mayor de Blasio’s New York,noted that while pot possession arrests are down under de Blasio from the numbers achieved under Giuliani (more than 40,000 arrests in 2001) or Bloomberg (more than 50,000 arrests in 2011), NYPD still arrested more than 18,000 people for pot possession last year, and a whopping 86% of them were black or brown, maintaining the racial disparities so apparent in earlier administrations.…

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National Memo Health: Top Posts
Trumpcare's Medicaid Cutbacks Will Bring The Real Death Panels
State officials will have to inflict illness and death on people whose only crime is having no money -- or as Sarah Palin put it, those who fail the Republican test of “their level of productivity in society.” Those politicians and their appointees who implement the new Medicaid rules will become the real death panels.
Trump's Broken Promise Will Doom Thousands Of His Voters
Back when the president’s health reform plan first passed, Republicans and their media echoes warned loudly about mythical “death panels” embedded in his legislation. Now, the voters who believed that nonsense are about to meet the real death panel -- led by Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate leader Mitch McConnell, and Rep. Tom Price, the Georgia Republican slated to head the Department of Health and Human Services.
Trump Administration Moves To Block Access To Health Insurance
The Trump administration is moving to make it harder for you to get health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. The net effect of the proposals would be significantly greater regulatory and paperwork burdens for both consumers and health insurance exchanges, the opposite of Trump’s promise during the campaign and since taking office.
The Obamacare Repeal Game Is A Complete Disgrace
Every other modern nation guarantees health care as a right of citizenship. Even their conservative leaders don't touch benefits that beat ours by a mile. This Obamacare repeal game is, at bottom, an insult to the dignity of the American people. Actually, it's a disgrace
House Members Sit To Move America
Something's happening here in the People's House. What's going down seems exactly clear: a stage of our democracy, men and women players speaking unscripted lines that could wait no more.
Dump The Myth That Obamacare Froze Out Republicans
It's true. The Affordable Care Act was passed without a single Republican vote. Republicans repeatedly cite this fact as Obamacare's original sin, a fatal flaw that justifies their efforts to dismantle the ACA. But let's set that record straight. Obamacare was a bipartisan plan. It just didn't get a bipartisan vote.
How Corporate Media Enabled The GOP's Audacious Plan To Steal Health Care Coverage From 23 Million Americans
Republicans in the Senate are about to radically overhaul former President Obama’s landmark Affordable Healthcare Act but you’d hardly know it watching American media. The sheer size of this shift involved in the American Health Care Act (AHCA), both in moral and economic terms, cannot be overstated. 23 million Americans stand to lose their health insurance, and according to one study, 18,000 to 28,000 people will die as a result of the GOP bill by 2026.
GOP Health Care Bill Recycles Tired Moralizing Of The Poor
The AHCA is rightly being derided as a cruddy facsimile of Obamacare that massively shifts wealth from the lowest income brackets to the highest. The rationales for foisting this botch on the not-so-well-to-do are grounded in that old conservative disposition to blame the poor for their poverty.
National Memo Health: Archive
Take The Generic Drug, Patients Are Told — Unless Insurers Say No
Faced with competition, some pharmaceutical companies are cutting deals with insurance companies to favor their brand-name products over cheaper generics. Insurers pay less, but sometimes consumers pay more. Adderall XR, a drug to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, is a case in point.
August 7th, 2017
Blowing Up The Big Marijuana IQ Myth
But while such inflammatory claims by culture warriors like Coulter are to be expected – and may readily be dismissed – the notion that smoking pot will have lasting negative impacts on intelligence is a longstanding one, and a claim that is all too often made by those on both sides of the political spectrum. Yet the latest science finds little to no factual basis for this contention.
August 7th, 2017
Accreditors Can Keep Their Hospital Inspection Reports Secret, Feds Decide
Reversing course, federal health officials withdrew a proposal that would have required private accrediting organizations to publicly release reports of problems they found in health care facilities. Accreditors and hospitals had panned the idea; consumer advocates and business groups supported it.
August 4th, 2017
A Million Children Are At Risk Of Death By Cholera In Yemen
Last Thursday, the head of the UN Children’s Agency (UNICEF), Anthony Lake, arrived in Amman, Jordan after a heart-wrenching tour of war-ravaged Yemen. ‘Stop the war,’ said Lake. It was a clear message. No subtlety was needed.
August 4th, 2017
Dangerous Pollutants In Military’s Open Burns Greater Than Thought, Tests Indicate
The federal government appears to have significantly underestimated the amount of lead, arsenic and other dangerous pollutants that are sent into the air from uncontrolled burning of hazardous waste at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant in Virginia, according to a draft of a long-awaited report compiled by researchers at the Environmental Protection Agency.
August 3rd, 2017
Energy Department Scientists Barred From Attending Nuclear Power Conference
Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, was one of 30 U.S.-based scientists scheduled to speak at the quadrennial International Atomic Energy Agency conference on fast breeder nuclear reactors in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in late June.
August 3rd, 2017
Is This The 'New Normal' We Want?
"New normal" is the phrase society slaps on the horrific conditions we have created and now lack the courage and love to change. So we get used to things that shouldn’t have happened in the first place, and most of us are okay with it, as long as it doesn’t happen to us. But eventually, it will. Truthfully, it’s happening to all of us right now, even if we’re too distracted by a shiny new news story to see it.
July 31st, 2017
Why Are Americans So Afraid?
The reality is "facts" don't mean much in the way of beliefs. Telling a person, who has the sincerest gut belief, the statistic that more Americans are killed each year by furniture than terrorism becomes somehow unconvincing, or rather disagreeable. Political psychologists call this tendency of people to conform assessments of information to some goal or end extrinsic to accuracy "motivated reasoning." In other words, people believe what they want to believe.
July 30th, 2017
People With Disabilities Deal With Extra Costs
However, a new body of research reveals another major barrier, previously missing from most studies: People living with disabilities also face extra costs of living.
July 30th, 2017
Republicans Who Tried To Repeal Obamacare Will Be Haunted By Their Votes For Years To Come
The healthcare votes Friday morning in the Senate and weeks before in the House were the most consequential votes affecting most American households in years. A string of Republican bills and amendments threatened to take away coverage from tens of millions.
July 30th, 2017
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