IHS moves to recover from Trump era ethnic cleansing

Hey Democrats, most Native Americans don’t want Medicare for All; they want a fully funded Indian Health Service.

Roselyn Tso takes over as IHS director after leading the agency’s operations on her own Navajo Nation. Life expectancy for Native people fell by more than six years from 2019 to 2021, the biggest drop found by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s now 65 years old. The U.S. average is 76. Without a full-time IHS leader, tribal nations and other Native health care providers struggled to raise and address the issues they were facing amid the pandemic, the National Council of Urban Indian Health said in a statement. [After 609 days, the Indian Health Service has a new leader]

Adjusted for age and population Trump killed many more American Indians and Alaska Natives (AIAN) per capita than he did whites.

For every 100,000 in the population, 737 AIAN people have died of COVID-19 versus 105 whites. [Brookings]

Starting in New York Donald Trump targeted the Mohawk and Oneida Nations for annihilation then his Tulsa trip and his campaign rally in occupied South Dakota spread disease throughout Native America. Trump even killed the White House Tribal Nations Summit because he loathes Indigenous Americans and he committed crimes against humanity throughout Indian Country not only by slow-walking resources to reservations during a pandemic but by undercounting Indigenous populations during the 2020 Census. Trump’s erasure of protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments was cruel retribution targeting Indigenous peoples.

It’s called ethnic cleansing even genocide elsewhere but in Trump’s America it’s called MAGA. 

There is a growing movement among Democrats and others to fund Medicare for all but I like the idea of rolling the funding for Obamacare, TRICARE, Medicare, the Indian Health Service and the Veterans Health Administration together then offering Medicaid for all by increasing the estate tax, raising taxes on tobacco and adopting a carbon tax.