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Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter Dead At 100; President Biden Will Deliver Eulogy

The 39th president of the United States, James Earl Carter Jr., died yesterday after receiving care at his home in Plains, Georgia, where he resided with his wife, Rosalynn Carter, until she passed on Sunday, November 19, 2023. On that day, the former President refused hospital care, saying he wanted to go out holding Rosalynn's hand, according to historian Michael Beschloss

"Number one, this was one of the great marriages in American history, even if they weren't president and first lady," said Beschloss. "Not only the length of this marriage, (77 years) but the closeness of it — that partnership. And you know, everyone who has said this in the last two minutes is absolutely right. They love most of all being with each other. I am told by someone who is very close to both Carters, that last winter, when Jimmy Carter was told that he was very sick and there was not very much that could be done for him, he was told, probably the best thing is for you to go into the hospital where you can get the best care. And I am told that President Carter said, no, I want to get home, and be in bed with Rosalynn, and just sit holding hands, and that's the way I'd like to close my life. And that's really the way it happened."

Last May, one of Jimmy Carter’s grandsons said that the former president's life is “coming to the end.

He's "doing OK. He has been in hospice, as you know, for almost a year and a half now, and he really is, I think, coming to the end that, as I’ve said before, there’s a part of this faith journey that is so important to him, and there’s a part of that faith journey that you only can live at the very end and I think he has been there in that space," Jason Carter said.

According to earlier reports, President Joe Biden will deliver Carter's eulogy.

In recent years, Carter had received various hospital treatments, including when he revealed in August 2015 that he had brain cancer and was undergoing radiation treatment — an illness he recovered from, seemingly against the odds.

In addition to being president, the 100-year-old was a U.S. Navy submarine officer, a farmer, a diplomat, a Nobel laureate, a Sunday school teacher and one of the world’s most well-known humanitarians.

Carter won the presidency in 1976, following the Nixon and Ford administrations, at a time of grave political and social tumult not unlike our own. During his tenure, the Democrat prioritized human rights and social justice, enjoying a solid first two years, which included brokering a peace deal between Israel and Egypt dubbed the Camp David Accords.

But his administration hit numerous snags — the most serious being the taking of U.S. hostages in Iran and the disastrous failed attempt to rescue the 52 captive Americans in 1980.

The blowback from the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics, held in the former Soviet Union in response to that country’s invasion of Afghanistan, may have also hurt Carter.

Richard Moe, who served from 1977 to 1981 as chief of staff to Vice President Walter Mondale, offered an alternative view of Carter’s presidency in 2015, citing numerous achievements.

As worthy as Jimmy Carter’s post-presidency has been, it shouldn’t overshadow his time in office, which has been too often overlooked, and which stands in sharp contrast to what we see in the [Trump administration],” Moe said.

In November 1980, Republican challenger Ronald Reagan beat Carter, relegating him to a single term of office on a wave of staunch conservatism.

“We told the truth, we obeyed the law, and we kept the peace,” said Vice President Walter Mondale at the end of Carter’s term.

In the introduction of his 2015 book, A Full Life, Carter repeated the Mondale quote, adding, “We championed human rights.”

As the years passed, a more nuanced image of Carter emerged, taking into account his post-presidential activities and reassessing his achievements.

He founded the Carter Center in 1982 to pursue his vision of world diplomacy and received the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to promote social and economic justice.

Carter said basic Christian tenets such as justice and love served as the bedrock of his presidency, and the ex-president taught Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist, his church in Plains, well into his 90s.

Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who is also a senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church where Martin Luther King, Jr. preached, wished the Carter family comfort as the former president entered hospice.

"Across life's seasons, President Jimmy Carter, a man of great faith, has walked with God," Warnock tweeted. "In this tender time of transitioning, God is surely walking with him."

Both Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter made plans to be buried at their family home in Plains, near “a willow tree at the pond’s edge, on a gentle sloping lawn, where they will be buried in graves marked by simple stones.”

The Carters’ property has already been deeded to the National Park Service.

With additional reporting from AFP.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Trump Tells Governors To ‘Do It Yourself’ On Medical Equipment

Trump Tells Governors To ‘Do It Yourself’ On Medical Equipment

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

In Italy, where the number of deaths from the coronavirus pandemic has passed 1800 (according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore), hospitals have been absolutely overwhelmed — and American health officials fear that U.S. hospitals could be facing a similar situation in the weeks to come.

During a conference call with President Donald Trump on Monday morning, the New York Times reports, a group of governors voiced their concerns that U.S. hospitals might not have enough respirators or ventilators for all the coronavirus patients they could be inundated with. And the president’s response was that they should “try getting it yourselves” rather than relying on the federal government.

The Times has obtained a recording of that conversation. In the recording, Trump told the governors, “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — trying getting it yourselves. We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves. Point of sales, much better — much more direct if you can try getting it yourselves.”

During the conversation, Trump also told the governors, “We’re going to get it remedied, and hopefully, very quickly.”

On Twitter, Ronald Klain (former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden in President Barack Obama’s administration), tweeted, “We had entire teams of people at HHS / DHS / WH working on supply chain coordination during Ebola: to make sure that the needed supplies were going to the right places (where they were needed the most). This is a horrible, horrible approach.”

Baton Rouge Emergency Room Closing Shows Cost Of Obamacare Fight

Baton Rouge Emergency Room Closing Shows Cost Of Obamacare Fight

By Margaret Newkirk, Bloomberg News (TNS)

ATLANTA — A Baton Rouge, Louisiana, hospital is closing the only emergency room on the city’s impoverished north side, a real-world ripple effect of the ideological clash over President Barack Obama’s health care law.

The shutdown on April first serves as an early warning for hospitals in states like Louisiana, where Republican Governor Bobby Jindal turned down federal money to expand the Medicaid program for the poor. Charity hospitals will lose billions of federal aid beginning late next year, a cut that was supposed to be offset as more residents were covered by Medicaid.

The combination is a looming “double whammy,” said Shawn Gremminger, a lobbyist for America’s Essential Hospitals in Washington, which represents those that care for the poor.

“It’s not survivable,” he said. “Hospitals are going to close.”

In Louisiana, Baton Rouge General’s Mid City hospital was already caught in that vise. It was flooded with the uninsured after a nearby charity hospital was closed. Louisiana provided a one-time injection of funds last year from the federal aid program that’s about to be cut. With that money gone, the hospital is closing the emergency room.

“It was unsustainable,” said Mark Slyter, the hospital’s chief executive officer.

While Republican governors in states including Indiana, Ohio, and New Jersey have expanded their Medicaid programs under Obamacare, Jindal, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, has remained steadfast in his opposition.

A health-policy expert who began his political ascent as chief of Louisiana’s state hospital system in 1996, Jindal, 43, has said adding to the federal program would put nearly half of Louisiana on government assistance. Jindal instead decided to turn management of the state’s charity hospitals over to private operators to improve the efficiency of health care provided to the indigent.

In Baton Rouge, a city of 229,000, about one-fourth of whom live below the poverty line, the emergency room’s closing has been met with protests by residents and lawmakers who say Jindal’s policies are hurting the poor.

“The governor is putting ideology ahead of the welfare of the state,” said state Representative Alfred Williams, a Democrat from Baton Rouge. “He has an agenda and it’s to run for president of the United States. And if that causes the people of Louisiana to suffer, then I believe he’s OK with that.”

Alexis Nicaud, a spokeswoman for Jindal, referred questions to Kathy Kliebert, the secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals.

Kliebert said Jindal’s decision to relinquish management of the state hospitals has helped the poor by giving them access to better-equipped facilities with shorter waits. She said Mid City was undermined by market forces as rival specialty hospitals lured away patients with insurance.

“Mid City has had financial problems for ten years,” she said.

Nationally, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 has eased the strain of caring for the uninsured. The law allowed for making Medicaid available to those earning as much as 138 percent of the poverty level or about $16,200 for an individual. The expense is fully paid by the federal government through 2016 before being phased down to 90 percent.

After the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012 said it was up to states to decide whether to expand the program, the decisions initially broke down along party lines as Republicans questioned whether the federal government would keep its pledge to pay for it.

Ten of 28 states that have since decided to do so were led by Republicans. A new wave of the party’s governors in states including Tennessee, Wyoming, and Utah tried to follow this year though they have been stymied by lawmakers.

By January, 11.2 million more people were enrolled in Medicaid and its related program for children than during the three months that ended September 2013, before the provision took hold. In states that boosted the scope of Medicaid, uncompensated care costs dropped by $5 billion in 2014, twice as much as in those that didn’t, according to estimates released by the Obama administration.

In Louisiana, Obamacare would have added 242,000 people to the program, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a Menlo Park, California-based nonprofit that tracks health care policy.

Nationwide, charity hospitals are set to lose money from a Medicaid fund that partially offsets the cost of treating those who can’t pay.

Initially scheduled to kick in last year, Congress delayed the cuts until late 2016. The funding will decline by $35 billion during the following eight years, according to a 2014 analysis by researchers at Georgia State University in Atlanta and Tulane University in New Orleans.

Baton Rouge General’s Mid City hospital is a harbinger of the effect those reductions will have in states that didn’t expand Medicaid.

Mid City wasn’t the area’s safety-net hospital. It became one accidentally in 2013, when Jindal closed the nearby Earl K. Long Medical Center, which was part of a network of state teaching hospitals charged with caring for the poor.

When the Long hospital closed, Louisiana directed its patients and federal aid money to Our Lady of the Lake, a Catholic hospital in a wealthier, southern part of East Baton Rouge Parish.

Many of the poor showed up instead at the closer Mid City emergency room, which had to take them under federal law. Jerry Dean Johnson, 64, said Our Lady is at least 13 minutes farther from her home.

“It’s too far,” said Johnson, a Medicaid patient who has lung disease and has been rushed to Mid City twice in four months. “I think if I had to go way down there I would have died.”

Mid City’s uninsured patients rose by 400 a month, a 30 percent jump, said Slyter, its CEO. Psychiatric consultations rose almost 70 percent, also a spillover from the shuttered hospital, he said.

The state gave Mid City $23 million in one-time emergency funding in 2014 to keep the doors opened.

Expanded Medicaid would have relieved some of pressure on the emergency room, although it wouldn’t have saved an operation that was losing $2 million a month because of the uninsured, Slyter said.

“It would not have been a silver bullet,” he said. “But that’s one of several things that would have helped.”

Photo: Kevin O’Mara via Flickr

Former President Bush Spends Fourth Night In Texas Hospital

Former President Bush Spends Fourth Night In Texas Hospital

Washington (AFP) – Former U.S. president George H.W. Bush is spending a fourth night at a Texas hospital Friday after experiencing breathing problems, but is in “high spirits,” his spokesman said.

Bush, 90, was admitted late Tuesday to Houston Methodist Hospital. He received family visits on Christmas Day, when his spokesman Jim McGrath said he had “another terrific day.”

“President Bush remains in high spirits and continues to make progress, but he will remain at the Houston Methodist Hospital this evening,” McGrath said in his latest update, without explaining the reasons for the extended stay.

Late Wednesday, McGrath had said the former president’s prognosis “remains positive.”

The oldest of the four living former U.S. presidents, Bush, who is wheelchair-bound, seemed frail in recent public appearances.

He was treated at Houston Methodist in November 2012 for bronchitis, and ended up spending nearly two months at the hospital.

The former president’s wife was admitted to the same Houston hospital nearly a year ago.

Suffering from pneumonia, the former first lady was released from the hospital in January.

Bush, patriarch of one of America’s most prominent political dynasties, is father to former U.S. president George W. Bush.

Another son, Jeb, last week announced that he was laying the foundation for his own 2016 White House bid.

AFP Photo/Jim Watson

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