Link with 2 notes
great article, definitely worth reading the whole thing!!
Some 60 percent of women who receive care in a Title X family-planning health center say it’s their main source of health care — not a supplement but a lifeline. That’s because 85 percent of them live at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty level, and two thirds lack health insurance. What do the House Republicans have in mind for these women and families? Gail Collins distilled their attitude beautifully in a recent New York Times column: “Let Them Use Leeches.”
Link with 7 notes
Fill out this form on Credo to send your rep a form to repeal his/her own health insurance.
Who would have the audacity to vote for repealing affordable health care for 32 million Americans while gladly accepting generous, federally subsidized insurance for themselves? 237 congressional health care hypocrites!
Call out this hypocrisy by sending your Representative who voted for repeal the actual form to cancel his/her own federal insurance - we’ll send a fax for you right now!
(If your Rep. voted against repeal, or has opted out of federal benefits, we’ll send your message to Republican leadership.)
Link with 1 note
this is a moving account of what it is really like to live with and love someone with severe mental illness. the stigma is still far too great in this country. mental illness can range from mild to severe, and no matter what it is - depression, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, social anxiety - it is not something that a person should be vilified or blamed for. it is also not something that they can wish (or pray) away, just “get over”, or erase with positive thinking.
if you are not able to understand what it is like to live with mental illness, either that of a loved one or something that you experience yourself, you are lucky. that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t educate yourself about it, and that people who do deal with it don’t deserve understanding, respect, and empathy.
He returned to work and everyone pretended nothing had happened. But it had. Anyway, he didn’t get better. He’d get far worse before he’d get better.
Stew lost his job because he couldn’t work. He had six months of disability, and during that time we had insurance through Cobra. He had a psychiatrist, a therapist and many meds. Some made him sleepy, some made him angry, mostly they made him dull and foggy, and he became a ghost of himself. He saw things that weren’t there. He heard voices that weren’t there. He struggled with knowing what was real and what was not.
The diagnoses changed, he didn’t fit into a category. And then the disability and the health insurance ran out.
follow the link to read the full story at salon.
Regardless of who pays for what coverage, access to abortion is already shrinking. States keep enacting more and more barriers. Waiting periods. Mandated counseling. Parental involvement. Additional requirements for physicians and hospitals.
“Their real plan is to ban abortion,” says Elizabeth Nash, who oversees state actions for the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights.
Until they can win an outright ban, the anti-abortion rights people keep hammering away at access. They know that a right isn’t much good if people can’t actually use it.