The Alleged News®

by Jake Johnson A pair of new stories examining the increasingly common but shadowy U.S. insurance industry practice of refusing to pay for certain treatments drew outrage Wednesday from patient advocates and Medicare for All proponents, who said the reporting further reveals the harms of for-profit healthcare. The investigative outlet ProPublica focused its attention on the “galling” secrecy around insurance companies’ claim denials, which frequently leave patients with massive medical bills and little clarity as to why their claims were rejected. “How often insurance companies say no is a closely held secret,” ProPublica’s Robin Fields reported. “There’s nowhere that a consumer or an employer can …

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Albert Bigelow was commanding the destroyer escort U.S.S. Dale W. Peterson as it sailed into Pearl Harbor when he learned that Hiroshima had just been destroyed by an atomic bomb. He soon concluded that “morally, war is impossible,” and resigned from the Naval Reserve a month before becoming eligible for a pension. As time went on, Bigelow’s convictions only deepened. In 1955, he and his wife Sylvia, by now members of the Religious Society of Friends, hosted two “Hiroshima Maidens”—young Japanese women disfigured by atomic bombs who had come to the U.S. for plastic surgery. Using facts, logic, and argument, Bigelow and numerous colleagues tried …

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CPUSA Statement on the Removal of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s Historical Marker in New Hampshire: In early May, the historical marker for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at her birthplace in Concord, New Hampshire was taken down by Republican members of the city’s executive council. So much for GOP objections to “cancel culture!” Why is a woman whose life was dedicated to justice, human rights and free speech so threatening? The state’s governor, Chris Sununu, has no problem with that. But we should all have a problem with it since Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, known as “the Rebel Girl,” can help us answer basic questions about our world today. …

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On May 5th we published something quite surprising. A news release from the New Hampshire Historical Marker Program said, “Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a well-known labor, women’s rights and civil liberties activist,” had finally been honored by an historic marker “in downtown Concord, near the site of her birthplace.” Less surprisingly, now it’s gone. It was removed on Monday, in a dubious and irregular procedure, after a panic attack among Republicans in high places. Why? Because: “One gets a sense of the energy and fire of some of those turn-of-the-century radicals,” Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States, “by looking at the …

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Paraphrasing a recent lede in the New York Times, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said on Monday that come the first of June, the last loose quarter underneath the cushions of the federal couch will likely have been found and spent. That metaphor is idiotic, but it’s only a slight twist on the absurd “kitchen table/household budget” trope with which the public is constantly bludgeoned. Shorthand such as this can be quite useful if your goal not to inform, but to switch off your target audience’s gray matter. Being contrarians, we thought we’d try something completely different: describing the present moment as clearly as we …

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by Brett Wilkins As the deadline for Americans to file federal income tax returns approached, on April 14th Oxfam America renewed calls for taxing the ultrarich while publishing an analysis showing America’s growing number of billionaires saw their wealth increase by nearly one-third since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and by nearly 90 percent over the past decade. “Wealth inequality in the U.S. is more extreme and dangerous than income inequality; and we need to change our approach, so we effectively tax wealth as well as income,” the charity said in an introduction to the report, Tax Wealth, Tackle Inequality. Based on Forbes data, …

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