Pres Trump
cmonforton | September 29, 2017West Virginia’s senior U.S. senator will not be supporting President Trump’s nominee to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) issued a statement on Wednesday which said:
“While I appreciate Mr. Zatezalo’s willingness to serve, I cannot support his confirmation to lead MSHA. After reviewing his qualifications and record of safety during his time in the coal industry, I am not convinced that Mr. Zatezalo is suited to oversee the federal agency that implements and enforces mine safety laws and standards.”
Ken Ward at the Charleston (WV) Gazette was…
kkrisberg | September 27, 2017At the Toronto Star, reporter Sara Mojtehedzadeh went undercover as a temp worker at Fiera Foods, an industrial bakery, to investigate why temp workers are more likely to get hurt on the job. Earlier this year, Canadian occupational health and safety officials brought charges against the company, whose clients include Dunkin’ Donuts, Costco and Walmart, for the death of 23-year-old Amina Diaby, who was strangled to death after her hijab got caught in a machine.
Mojtehedzadeh, along with Brendan Kennedy, write:
I get about five minutes of training in a factory packed with industrial equipment…
kkrisberg | September 25, 2017In yet another attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, much of the GOP justification boils down to one argument: that the ACA isn’t working. Never mind that we don’t really know what constitutes a “working” health care system for Republicans.
For a while, Republicans said the ACA wasn’t working because some U.S. counties didn’t have an insurer. Today, no county is without an insurer. Then there’s the argument that ACA premiums are too high. However, the research shows that while premiums have gone up, the rise in premiums has been slower under the ACA than it was before the ACA…
kkrisberg | September 20, 2017Senate Republicans are again trying to ram through an Affordable Care Act replacement that threatens the health and well-being of millions of Americans. It’s shameful. But don’t take my word for it. Let’s look at what people who actually work in health care are saying about the Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson bill.
In this interview, Sen. Bill Cassidy insists that his bill would protect people with pre-existing conditions. Blue Cross Blue Shield Association disagrees. (Cassidy also says in that same interview that his bill would work through the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which…
kkrisberg | September 12, 2017At the Huffington Post, Dave Jamieson reports that labor unions are stepping up to help protect increasingly vulnerable immigrant workers from deportation. In fact, Jamieson writes that in many instances, labor unions have become “de facto immigrants rights groups,” educating workers on their rights and teaching immigrants how to best handle encounters with immigration officials.
Jamieson’s story begins:
Yahaira Burgos was fearing the worst when her husband, Juan Vivares, reported to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in lower Manhattan in March. Vivares, who fled Colombia and…
kkrisberg | September 8, 2017Typically, we like to end the annual “The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety” on an uplifting note. But this time around — to be honest — that was a hard sell.
Take a quick look through the 2017 yearbook and you’ll quickly glean that worker health and safety is very much at risk under the new administration and from lawmakers in the states. From the attempted rollback of a new federal beryllium exposure standard to state efforts to weaken workers’ compensation systems, the view from 2017 does not seem terribly promising. On the other hand, the fight for workers’ rights has never…
kkrisberg | September 4, 2017For the sixth year in a row, we present “The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety,” our attempt to document the year’s highs and lows as well as the challenges ahead.
Like previous editions, the 2017 yearbook highlights policies, appointments and activities at the federal, state and local levels; outstanding news reporting on workers’ rights, safety and health; and the latest research from public health agencies and worker groups on the ground. Of course, you can’t ignore the giant elephant (no pun intended) in the room in 2017 — a new president and a Republican-controlled Congress…
kkrisberg | August 22, 2017In July, public health departments across the country got a letter from the Trump administration abruptly cutting off funding for teen pregnancy prevention efforts in the middle of the program’s grant cycle. The move means that many teens will miss out on receiving an education that could — quite literally — change the trajectory of their lives.
The abrupt funding cut — which came down without reason or explanation, according to grantees — also cuts off research efforts right at the evaluation stage. That’s the stage when public health practitioners rigorously assess a program’s outcomes,…
kkrisberg | August 2, 2017U.S. investments in global health research have saved millions of lives and prevented immeasurable suffering. And by working to detect, treat and eventually eliminate infectious diseases worldwide, we’re protecting our own country too. That cliché about diseases knowing no borders is unfortunately very true. All that alone should be enough to remain committed to the cause.
But a couple weeks ago, a new report from the Global Health Technologies Coalition (GHTC) offered another persuasive reason: U.S. funding for global health research and development (R&D) is good for the American economy…
kkrisberg | July 22, 2017With the future of the Affordable Care Act still up in the air, most of the news coverage has gone to insurance coverage, premiums and Medicaid. And rightly so. But also included in the massive health reform law were a number of innovative measures to improve the quality and value of the medical care we actually get in the doctor’s office. With repeal still on the table, those measures are at risk too.
One of those ACA efforts is the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, which reduces Medicare payments to hospitals with relatively high rates of often-preventable hospital readmissions. The…
kkrisberg | June 30, 2017In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, nearly 200 people have died from opioid-related overdoses in the first five months of this year. That means that this one U.S. county is on pace to lose more than 700 people to fatal overdoses by the end of 2017.
Terry Allan, health commissioner at the Cuyahoga County Board of Health, and colleagues across the county have spent years building and scaling up a multifaceted response to the opioid addiction and overdose epidemic that includes getting people into treatment, changing clinical prescribing habits, preventing deadly overdoses, and dealing with the often-…
kkrisberg | June 23, 2017The House and Senate health care bills are overflowing with proposals that will strip Americans of access to quality, affordable health care. But perhaps the cruelest part is what they do to children — the most vulnerable and powerless among us. Children can’t show up at the ballot box to protect their health and so it truly is up to the rest of us.
Right now, after decades of hard work, the U.S. has achieved near-universal insurance coverage of its littlest residents. About 95 percent of U.S. kids have health insurance. Unfortunately, the House and Senate proposals to replace the Affordable…
cmonforton | June 16, 2017The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) filed an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit against one of President Trump’s deregulatory efforts. Executive Order 13771 (EO) requires an agency to rescind two regulations for each one it wants to adopt, and have the action's combined incremental costs total no more than $0, regardless of the benefits. When the President announced it in January 2017, I called it the "one step forward, two steps back" edict.
A lawsuit filed in February by Public Citizen, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Communications Workers of America argues that the EO…