November, 07 2016, 12:45pm EDT
Registered Nurse Response Network Sends Nurse Volunteers on Second Deployment to Standing Rock
RNs to Assist With First Aid, Stand With Water Protectors Against DAPL
National Nurses United (NNU)'s Registered Nurse Response Network (RNRN), a national network of volunteer nurses, will deploy a second team of RN volunteers to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation--to help with existing medical and first aid support for land and water protectors--NNU announced today.
"As a nurse, I understand the necessity of preserving and protecting our water. Water equals life, and the Dakota Access pipeline threatens the health and well being of millions of Americans," said RNRN volunteer Amy Bowen, RN, who traveled to Standing Rock in October and will return again this month. "Nurses honor the sacrifices being made by the water protectors while they stand up for what is right, against corporate greed."
RNRN volunteers will assist medic tents at the North/Oceti Sakowin and Sacred Stone camps. RNRN is also working with local partners to establish the Mni Wiconi (Water is Life) clinic to meet the ongoing healthcare needs of the Standing Rock Sioux community and the water protectors. Donations for the Mni Wiconi clinic can be made here: https://crowdfund.ucsf.edu/project/2913/updates/1
NNU has released several statements of solidarity with the standing Rock Sioux tribe and fellow water protectors, who, for months, have sought to halt construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), which nurses say poses great risk to public health. The nurses' latest statement sharply condemns the violent attacks on protectors.
"This has become a seminal battle over the First Amendment protection of public protest. It is also a challenge for everyone who is concerned about the rights of First Nation people and their sacred sites and water sources, as well as the threat the pipeline poses to environmental degradation, public health, and to accelerating the climate crisis," said NNU Co-President Jean Ross, RN.
"It is long past time to call into question all these dangerous pipeline projects that have become increasingly common, generally with far less public notice than the Dakota Access pipeline, or the similar successful campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline, has garnered. These projects pose a continual threat to public health from the extraction process through the transport to the refinery."
Pipelines have proven to leak, including the recent Colonial Pipeline leak in Alabama and subsequent explosion at a second site. Nurses say spills from ruptured pipelines that contaminate water supplies can lead to numerous problems of respiratory ailments and other health symptoms associated with the spills.
RNRN Director Bonnie Castillo, RN, says nurses will continue to stand in solidarity with Standing Rock and condemn the violence committed against water protectors--with reports that clearly identified medics have also been attacked and arrested.
"Nurses will stand with the protectors at Standing Rock, and with our fellow caregivers, the medics -- to say that DAPL is bad for public health, and those enforcing its construction cannot speak to its safety while simultaneously targeting for attack the very people with the power to heal," said Castillo.
"As a registered nurse, it was a profoundly moving and humbling experience to live with and serve the water and land protectors at the Sacred Stone encampment on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation," said DeAnn McEwan, who volunteered at Standing Rock in October. "Nurses feel a moral commitment to lend our skills and do whatever we can do to help protect and promote their health and right to the fresh, pure water that sustains all our lives."
RNRN is powered by NNU, the largest organization of registered nurses in the U.S.
National Nurses United, with close to 185,000 members in every state, is the largest union and professional association of registered nurses in US history.
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Medicare Advantage Industry 'Scare Tactics' and Lobbying Intensify Over Efforts to Curb Fraud
"These companies have built entire businesses around making beneficiaries look as sick as possible," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren. "And unsurprisingly, government watchdogs have discovered widespread abuse."
Mar 23, 2023
In the wake of numerous studies and investigations detailing the staggering level of fraud in the privately run Medicare Advantage program, the Biden administration proposed a new rule aimed at cracking down on upcoding—a common industry practice whereby plans describe patients as sicker than they actually are to reap larger payments from the federal government.
The rule, finalized by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) earlier this year, sparked a furious lobbying blitz that has only intensified in recent weeks, with the for-profit insurance industry's most powerful players leading the fight against the proposal and other policy changes that they have falsely characterized as Medicare Advantage "cuts."
The New York Timesreported Wednesday that insurance industry executives and lobbyists have been "flooding Capitol Hill" in an effort to protect their lucrative business model, which often leaves patients without necessary care.
"The largest insurers, including UnitedHealth Group and Humana, are among the most vocal, according to congressional staff, with UnitedHealth's chief executive pressing his company's case in person," the Times reported. "Doctors' groups, including the American Medical Association, have also voiced their opposition."
The insurance industry has also taken to the media, using sponsored content to launch misleading attacks on the Biden administration's reforms.
In addition to the proposed crackdown on Medicare Advantage upcoding and overbilling—an effort that federal health officials estimate will recover $4.7 billion in improper payments over the next decade—the Biden administration is pushing for technical changes to the formula used to calculate Medicare Advantage payments.
Under the proposed changes, the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) has noted, "CMS estimates that Medicare Advantage plan payments per enrollee will be 1% higher in 2024 than they are this year."
"The proposed payment changes for 2024, taken together, are unlikely to have a meaningful impact on the trajectory of Medicare Advantage spending, which CBO estimates will exceed $7 trillion (cumulative) through the decade that ends in 2032," KFF explained.
Nevertheless, industry groups and insurance giants have reacted with outrage to the Biden administration's proposals, focusing their ire specifically on plans to tweak the risk adjustment model that dictates how much the federal government pays Medicare Advantage plans to cover beneficiaries.
"Since the proposal was tucked deep in a routine document and published with little fanfare in early February, Medicare officials have been inundated with more than 15,000 comment letters for and against the policies, and roughly two-thirds included identical phrases from form letters," the Times reported Wednesday. "Insurers used television commercials and other strategies to urge Medicare Advantage customers to contact their lawmakers. The effort generated about 142,000 calls or letters to protest the changes."
The Medicare Advantage industry and its Republican allies in Congress insist the Biden administration's proposed changes would result in higher premiums for the program's tens of millions of beneficiaries and potentially impact the quality of care—but experts, advocates, and progressive lawmakers are pushing back.
During a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) defended the administration's proposals against Medicare Advantage industry "scare tactics" and argued that "these companies have built entire businesses around making beneficiaries look as sick as possible."
"The more diagnosis codes that a beneficiary has, the higher the payment, and whatever insurers don't spend on care they actually get to keep," Warren said. "Unsurprisingly, government watchdogs have discovered widespread abuse."
Kaiser Health Newsreported late last year that government audits have uncovered "widespread overcharges and other errors in payments to Medicare Advantage health plans, with some plans overbilling the government more than $1,000 per patient a year on average."
One Cigna executive, according to a lawsuit against the insurance giant, privately described certain diagnoses as "golden nuggets," an apparent reference to larger government payments for patients who are presented as sicker.
A KFF analysis published last month found that "Medicare Advantage plans have far higher per person gross margins—more than double those seen in other markets in 2021."
Advocacy organizations—including groups representing physicians, nurses, and seniors—have attempted to counter the torrent of industry-backed criticism of the Biden administration's proposals via the public comment process.
"The proposed reforms resulting in a limit of 1% increase is still an increase, which we understand is being opposed by the [Medicare Advantage] industry and their associations, and being mischaracterized as a cut. It is a cut only as far as it doesn't replicate the huge 8% increase granted last year," said California State Retirees.
Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), an advocacy group that supports single-payer healthcare, said earlier this month that "accountability to both Medicare beneficiaries and taxpayers instead of to investors and corporate greed is long overdue."
"We encourage CMS not to give in to industry lobbying pressure, and to implement the proposed changes without compromising, and we believe even stronger measures are needed. After all, it is the mission of CMS to protect the integrity of the Medicare program," PNHP added. "The profitability of MA plans has rested heavily on gaming strategies and fraud."
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The Fed Accused of 'Playing With Fire' After Latest Rate Hike
"It shouldn't take a lot of courage to resist another interest rate hike when the economy is this fragile," said one critic.
Mar 22, 2023
Progressive economists and other experts blasted Federal Reserve leadership on Wednesday for raising interest rates yet again despite concerns about recent bank failures and how the quarter-point increase will impact the U.S. and global economies.
"Once again, interest rate hikes are going to fall hardest on low-wage workers and the poor—the same people who have already been hurt the most by rising prices," tweeted University of California, Berkeley professor and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. "Higher rates could also imperil more banks, and risk even more financial chaos. The Fed is playing with fire."
Fed Chair Jerome Powell told reporters Wednesday that although the Federal Open Market Committee "did consider" a pause on rate increases following the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank failures, officials ultimately decided to raise the federal funds rate to a range of 4.75-5%, the highest level since 2007.
"The Fed under Chair Powell made a mistake not pausing its extreme interest rate hikes," declared Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) a fierce critic of nine consecutive rate hikes since last March as well as the Fed's regulatory rollbacks that proceeded the bank collapses.
"I've warned for months that the Fed's current path risks throwing millions of Americans out of work. We have many tools to fight inflation without pushing the economy off a cliff," added Warren, who has repeatedly called for ousting Powell.
Patriotic Millionaires chair Morris Pearl—a bank bailout expert and former managing director at BlackRock—similarly contended that "the Fed's decision to keep pushing forward with rate hikes no matter the circumstances is a dangerous mistake."
Describing such hikes as "a blunt instrument," he stressed that high interest rates "are not well suited to the economic realities the country now faces—and will inevitably end up doing more harm than good."
Pearl continued:
In our modern economy, high interest rates are simply not an effective way to fight inflation. Rate hikes have disproportionately hurt just a few sectors, like housing, automobiles, and some banks and investors, while leaving many of the nation's largest employers relatively unscathed.
Rising interest rates do nothing to address a major cause of inflation, corporate price gouging, and actually make another long-term cause, lack of investment in new housing, worse. Instead, the Fed is betting that lowering employment and cooling wage growth is the best solution to inflation.
Higher interest rates may be a cure for inflation, but if they end up causing another banking crisis, or pushing the economy into a recession, the cure may be worse than the disease.
An analysis released Wednesday by Accountable.US explained that "SVB's failure was partly due partly to a 'plunge' in bond value and $1.8 billion in 'paper losses' amid the Fed's rate hikes. By the end of 2022, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) had warned that U.S. banks were 'sitting on $620 billion in unrealized losses' that may make their balance sheets appear healthier than they really are."
The watchdog group found that "at the end of 2022, the five biggest U.S. banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank Of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and U.S. Bank—reported a total of $233 billion in unrealized losses on held-to-maturity securities, including $54 billion in unrealized losses on Treasury securities. These same banks reported a combined $39.4 billion in unrealized losses on available-for-sale securities, including $12.7 billion in losses on available-for-sale U.S. Treasuries."
Liz Zelnick, director of economic security and corporate power at Accountable.US, warned Wednesday that "hiking interest rates, even if more slowly, will devastate Main Street and Wall Street alike by wiping out millions of jobs while sending Treasury securities into a downward spiral," acknowledging that the recent bank turmoil prevented an even bigger increase than 25 basis points.
"A recession and broken financial system are not worth the price of higher interest rates that have failed miserably to curb the corporate greed epidemic helping to drive up costs," Zelnick added. "To date, the Federal Reserve and Chairman Jerome Powell have been more than willing to let average American families bear the brunt of their job-killing strategy—but are they also willing to let their banker friends on Wall Street go down with the ship?"
The Hill highlighted that ahead of Wednesday's announcement, influential figures such as economist Paul Krugman and analysts for Goldman Sachs—in a Monday letter to investors—had advocated for pausing rate hikes.
"Bank stress calls for a pause," wrote Goldman Sachs analysts. "Banking is not just another sector of the economy because financial intermediation is vital to every sector. As a result, addressing stress in the banking system is the most immediate concern and must take priority over other less urgent goals for the moment. We expect that policymakers and staff economists at the Fed will have the same view."
During his Wednesday press conference, Powell insisted that "our banking system is sound and resilient with strong capital and liquidity. We will continue to closely monitor conditions in the banking system and are prepared to use all of our tools as needed to keep it safe and sound."
While Powell also emphasized the Fed's commitment to learning from the recent SVB and Signature failures to prevent repeat events, both the bank collapses and a year of rate hikes have fueled calls for his ouster.
Asked by CNN's Jake Tapper on Wednesday whether she had ever directly told President Joe Biden that he should fire Powell, Warren said she wouldn't talk about private conversations "but what I will say is I've made it very clear as publicly as humanly possible that I didn't think that he should be reconfirmed as chair of the Fed. And I think he's doing a really terrible job."
"And he's doing a terrible job on both fronts," she said, referring to the Fed's dual mandate. In terms of oversight, Powell "has spent five years weakening regulations over these multibillion-dollar banks," and on monetary policy, he is "risking pushing our economy into a recession."
"What he's trying to do is get two million people laid off, and one of the things that we need to understand: He wants to raise the unemployment rate by more than a point within a single 12-month period. We have done that before in this country. In fact, we have done it 12 times before. And out of all 12 times, how many times has it resulted in a recession?" she said. "The answer is 12."
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Restarting Michigan Nuclear Power Plant Risks 'Chernobyl-Scale Catastrophe,' Coalition Warns
"This more than $10 billion in ratepayer and taxpayer robbery would merely fund an insanely high-risk game of radioactive Russian roulette on the Lake Michigan shoreline," said one critic.
Mar 22, 2023
A coalition of 191 individuals and 185 groups representing thousands of people on Wednesday implored the federal government for the third time not to fund the revival of a roughly 51-year-old nuclear power plant that was shut down last May in Covert, Michigan.
In a letter to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the coalition warned that providing financial aid to Holtec International, which purchased the Palisades Nuclear Plant (PNP) last June, could lead to a massive public health and environmental disaster that reverberates far beyond the shoreline of Lake Michigan—a source of drinking water for millions of people in multiple states.
A little over a week after taking ownership of PNP "under the false pretense of decommissioning it," Holtec secretly applied for funding from the DOE's Civil Nuclear Credit (CNC) program in early July to reopen the plant, the coalition explained in a statement. The company's application—supported by Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who had been advocating for a "dangerous 'zombie reactor' bailout and restart scheme at Palisades" since April 2022—was made public in early September.
Thanks in part to opposition from the coalition, which sent its first letter to U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in September, the DOE rejected Holtec's first funding request in mid-November. The following month, however, Holtec announced it would apply for federal funding during a second round of allocations, prompting a second letter of opposition from the coalition.
As The Holland Sentinelreported earlier this month: "Holtec is taking a different route with its second attempt at funding. Rather than applying through the CNC program, the company applied for funds from the U.S. Department of Energy loan office."
Terry Lodge, legal counsel for the coalition's lead groups, Beyond Nuclear and Don't Waste Michigan, wrote in Wednesday's letter that "DOE's recently issued amended 'guidance,' which was specifically rewritten to enable Holtec to apply for $1.2 billion of federal taxpayer funds, is not legal under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA)."
"We understand that Holtec... may be applying to DOE for a subsidized loan under a different law, with the intention of using funds from the IIJA to pay off the loan," wrote Lodge. "We question whether such a combined transaction would be lawful under the IIJA. Even if it is, IIJA credits may not be used to support Palisades. Congress intended the IIJA to support only currently operating commercial nuclear reactors that face termination of operations for economic reasons. Palisades does not meet any criteria for eligibility."
The coalition once again asked Granholm—a former Democratic governor and attorney general of Michigan—and other high-ranking officials at the DOE to deny Holtec's request that the non-operational PNP be certified to receive such federal funding.
Most importantly, PNP is unable "to operate safely due to a litany of chronic and acute problems associated with age-related degradation and neglected maintenance on safety-significant systems, structures, and components," the coalition argued in its statement. "This includes the worst neutron-embrittled reactor pressure vessel in the country and perhaps the world, at risk of pressurized thermal shock through-wall fracture, which would lead to reactor core meltdown."
"But additional pathways to catastrophic meltdown include a reactor lid, as well as steam generators, that have needed replacement for 17 years or longer," the coalition continued. "Palisades' control rod drive mechanism seal leaks have been uniquely bad in all of industry, for more than a half-century. Now added to this long list is Holtec's neglect of vital maintenance, such as of the turbo-generator, bending under its own immense weight, as well as the steam generators, to name but two examples."
Holtec has "applied to DOE for a billion dollar federal taxpayer-backed nuclear loan guarantee under the Inflation Reduction Act, which it would use to promote the reactor restart scheme, hoping to pay it back over time with the CNC program bailout," said the coalition. In addition, Holtec is "seeking a more than billion dollar subsidy from the state of Michigan, as well as yet another lucrative, above-market rate power purchase agreement with an unnamed utility company in the area. Also, Holtec has applied to DOE for $7.4 billion in federal nuclear loan guarantees, authorized under the 2005 Energy Policy Act and congressionally appropriated on December 23, 2007, for the design certification, construction, and operation of four small modular (nuclear) reactors, more than one of which would also be located at the Palisades site."
In the words of Kevin Kamps, a radioactive waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear and board member of Don't Waste Michigan, "This more than $10 billion in ratepayer and taxpayer robbery would merely fund an insanely high-risk game of radioactive Russian roulette on the Lake Michigan shoreline."
"Both extremes of the risk spectrum would be co-located at the Palisades site, if Holtec gets its way," said Kamps. "The ever-worsening breakdown phase risks at the old reactor would exist alongside the break-in phase risks of the new reactors, risking a Chernobyl-scale catastrophe, with the potential for Fukushima-style, domino-effect, multiple meltdowns."
According to The Holland Sentinel: "Holtec has acknowledged there will be 'a number of hurdles' to reopening the plant even if funding is secured. Those include financial commitment from the state, procuring a power purchasing agreement, upgrading the switchyard, partnering with a licensed operator for the restart, rehiring qualified and trained staff, and maintenance and delayed capital improvements of the facility—the plant closed earlier than planned due to failure of a control rod drive seal."
Citing comments a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission official made during a public meeting on Monday, MLivereported this week that PNP "would be the first plant to enter the decommissioning phase and then try to restart."
During the meeting, Kamps declared, "Over my dead body are you all going to get away with this."
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