10/9/14

Texas hospital rejected Ebola decedent for lack of insurance

Thomas Eric Duncan’s condition had taken a turn for the worse in recent days. He had been placed on dialysis and was receiving an experimental drug. Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings announced his death. Duncan, who had no health insurance, was initially sent home from a Dallas hospital, despite telling a nurse he had been to Liberia. New questions are also being raised about his treatment after he was diagnosed. [Democracy Now!]
The State of South Dakota has spent $170,000 in taxpayer money since 2011 defending a single anti-choice law, according to new figures from the state attorney general obtained by RH Reality Check. The amount is based on the number of hours that staff attorneys in South Dakota’s Office of the Attorney General have spent working on HB 1217, a bill linked to controversial lawyer Harold Cassidy. The tab for defending South Dakota’s HB 1217 could balloon. Already this year, spending has occurred at a far higher rate than in the previous three years. And when the attorney general was asked in 2011 to estimate how much it could cost to defend HB 1217, the figures ranged from $1.75 million to $4.15 million, according to a document obtained by RH Reality Check. The higher figure contains a $1.75 million contingency to cover Planned Parenthood’s costs, in the event that Planned Parenthood wins the litigation. [ Sharona Coutts, RH Reality Check]
Comes this from Irin Carmon writing in Salon:
We are in a moment of partial Republican self-examination, in which certain party reformers are facing the fact that there just aren’t enough white voters to keep them in power — a demographic problem! And every conversation about how allegedly unsustainable Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are, for one reason or another, mainstreams the pressure to radically cut its benefits or reshape it to the whims of the market. What better way to reclaim the narrative, to change the subject from the inconvenient autonomy of women, than to claim that all of this contracepting is bringing on the decline of America for all?


Kristi Noem and the United States House GOP voted again, for the 51st time, to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Those votes are totally worthless. Has anyone figured out how much time and tax dollars have been spent on these repeal votes? [Arlen Hanson, Letter: Don't stop health care, Aberdeen American News]

There is a misconception that by expanding Medicare, South Dakota state spending will increase. This is simply not true. Federal contributions to those newly covered under the expansion are much higher than current spending, therefore shifting much of the financial burden from the state level. Hospitals provided approximately $40 billion in uncompensated care in 2011. If we can cut that spending by almost half while providing more citizens with insurance coverage, it is shameful that South Dakota would opt out of this opportunity. The South Dakota government is sending the message that the health of its citizens is not a priority and neither is finding a solution to the national healthcare crisis. [Abby Peters, letter, Pierre Capital Journal]

The Indian health system is underfunded and third-party billing — money from private insurance, Medicaid, Medicare, and other programs — is the only way funding will improve. Like it or not, Treaty or not, the Congress is not going to pay for Indian health through appropriations. The $6 billion budget for the Indian Health Service shows the agency collecting more than a billion dollars from Medicaid and only $90,307,000 from private insurance. [Mark Trahant, Indian Country Today]
Posted by at No comments:
piled in ,

10/8/14

Oglala chef brings taste of the Black Hills to Minneapolis menu

Sous chef, Sean Sherman calls himself a 'Sioux Chef.'
After years of researching and experimenting with "pre-colonization" foods, he's preparing to open a restaurant in the Twin Cities this winter that showcases those foods, reborn for contemporary palates. "We were close to the Badlands and its sand hills, which is not the best growing area by far," says Sherman, who's now 40. "But we would also spend weeks in the Black Hills, crawling around and learning stuff." If his restaurant is successful, Sherman hopes he can expand the concept and create similar ones across the country, training young Native American chefs in keeping their tribes' best culinary traditions alive. [Serri Graslie, NPR's The Salt]
Americans waste food and pollute watersheds at biblical proportions.
The average deer collision causes $3,305 in damages, according to a report from State Farm Insurance. West Virginia was listed as the state with the highest risk for collisions, followed by South Dakota. Pennsylvania was number four, and Montana was number six. It’s a nationwide problem. [Jack McNeel, Antelope Learn to Look Both Ways Before Crossing Street, Indian Country Today].
Rob Chaney writes in the Missoulian:
In 2012, Montana motorists hit 4,754 whitetail deer, 1,977 mule deer, 220 elk, 72 antelope and 28 moose, according to state Department of Transportation records. They also hit 39 black bears, five grizzly bears, six mountain lions, 15 bighorn sheep, an uncertain number of wolves, and uncounted birds of prey and furbearing mammals. [Chaney, FWP serves up roadkill salvage permits online]
From a post by Alex Reshanov at EarthSky:
All this shifting meat consumption is a concern because, despite our middling trophic level, we’re quite good at sucking up resources. According to the study, humans use 25% of the net primary production (that finite amount of planty [sic, planetary, i think, ip] energy we discussed earlier), and food production accounts for 35-40% of that allocation. Given that agriculture isn’t even our only drain on global resources, the fact that we’re not at the top of the food chain is probably a good thing. [Reshanov, Humans aren't top predators, says report]
Humanity has wiped out half the world's wildlife population since 1970.

Is it 4:20 yet?


Posted by at No comments:
piled in , ,

10/5/14

Black Hills threatened by another strip mine, 1872 mining law

I almost peed my pants when the Rapid City Journal editorial board said:
The 1872 Mining Act was signed by President Ulysses S. Grant at a time when the government was trying to encourage people to settle and develop the West. Updating it to shift cleanup costs and extract royalties would generate millions in federal revenue. Nearly 1,000 recent mining claims have been filed in the watershed of Montana's Blackfoot River (PDF). Congress should undertake a long overdue revision of this antiquated law.
The US Forest Service is often powerless to stop the extractive industry from permanently altering sensitive watersheds because of the General Mining Act of 1872.

Thunder Basin National Grassland west of Devil's Tower is at risk to the 1872 act, not to mention the ground impacted by another Canadian invasion in the form of a proposed strip mine for rare earth minerals north of Sundance. Wyoming blasts through treaty lands and leaves mercury trails in its wake.

Another earth hater wants to mine the Black Hills not far from Pe 'Sla on Forest Service ground:
[South Dakota] Department of Environment and Natural Resources engineer Eric Holm said this week that Dakota Resource submitted applications for permits for its project from the state in early August and that the applications were reviewed, site-inspected and approved, and only await deposit of a $20,000 reclamation bond before taking effect. [Tom Griffith, Hunting for the second Homestake]
The GOP-owned SDDENR is a rubber stamp for earth scorching.

Repeal or even reform of the 1872 statute has been thwarted repeatedly: only affected tribal nations who lost treaty ground and environmental lawyers can stop mining on public lands.
Posted by at 3 comments:
piled in , ,

10/3/14

Feds freshly fixing failed infrastructure for South Dakota

Self-reliance or moral hazard?
Officials say five electric cooperatives are using state and federal disaster funds to bury hundreds of miles of power lines to protect against widespread outages from storms. The cooperatives are burying more than 530 miles of line damaged in a powerful storm that struck 14 western South Dakota counties last year. Officials say the cost of the line-burying project is estimated at more than $32 million. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is paying 75 percent of the cost. The state provided 10 percent and the cooperatives paid the remaining 15 percent. [Associated Press]
That 10% the state kicked in also came from the feds.

The above article doesn't say how many white ranchers will get buried cables and how many tribal nations will still have storm-prone overhead lines.

After public outcry one South Dakota utility thought better and chose not to assess a fee on customers who add alternative means of electricity generation to their services while those poorly served by cooperative utilities are becoming power self-reliant.

From KSFY:
Agriculture Secretary Walt Bones said the department is asking those affected by the drought what they could the department could better. Bones says many farmers have developed a safety net for drought conditions but livestock ranchers don't have the same assistance.


Remember this? South Dakota's embattled earth hater governor wants government assistance according to the Sioux City Journal:
Gov. Dennis Daugaard has asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a preliminary assessment of damages the recent ice storm caused to public and nonprofit property in southeastern South Dakota. Daugaard says damage to rural electric cooperatives and the removal of fallen tree limbs and power lines will likely be a significant part of the cost.
Candidate Dennis Daugaard drew gasps from a State Fair audience in 2010 when he said: “I am skeptical about the science that suggests global warming is man-caused or can be corrected by man-made efforts."
Remember, too, that these utilities are not Google or Facebook. They are not accustomed to a state of constant market turmoil and reinvention. This is a venerable old boys network, working very comfortably within a business model that has been around, virtually unchanged, for a century.--David Roberts at Grist
What a fucking surprise.

Scientists have excused anthropogenic climate change as a negligible influence in the 2013 blizzard.

So, this is how red states finance infrastructure improvements while bitching about Big Government.

Expect the same swindle next year.
Posted by at 1 comment:
piled in , ,

10/1/14

Menards forces closure of Pierre family store



Pierre is the Fort Pierre of Hughes County.

Bryan Rice has a right to be pissed at Mayor Laurie Gill and has chosen to leave the shit hole town without a home improvement store until earth hater-owned Menards is finished building next door sometime next year after another brutal winter.
The store has also been unfortunate to be along Garfield Avenue, which has been under heavy reconstruction for the past four months [to build the fucking Menards]. Still, the closing is a bitter pill to swallow, because in the past 102 years Knecht has only closed two locations. The store will make sure customers will have ready access to employees and supplies for any current projects and will support projects that extend past mid-November from its Rapid City location. [David Rookhuyzen, Pierre Capital Journal]
Menards, whose policies include issuing anti-democratic propaganda, pays its employees subsistence wages while massaging its margins in under-served markets like Rapid City and Scottsbluff, Nebraska.

O'Fallon, Missouri has been passed over according to a local media outlet:
The company is blaming the Obama administration for the project’s failure. A Menards spokesperson says the company no longer plans on adding a store in O’Fallon, Missouri because of the President’s economic policies.
John Menard is one of the country's richest white men contributing to earth haters like John Thune and Michele Bachmann while joining with Koch Industries in forcing primaries against those resisting its advances.
Menards and CEO John Menard have been cited for dozens of environmental code violations; in 1997 Menard and his company were fined $1.7 million when Menard himself was found to have used “his own pickup truck to haul plastic bags filled with chromium and arsenic-laden wood ash to his own home for disposal along with his household trash,” according to Milwaukee.--Adele M. Stan at AlterNet.
Gill is not only the mayor, she works for the embattled Daugaard administration, too.

Is this a great country or what?

Good call, Bryan: fuck 'em all but six then make them your pallbearers.
Posted by at 11 comments:
piled in ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)