States are making big progress on health care and voting rights
Good news this week!
Welcome to a Friday edition of Progress Report.
Thank you to everyone who signed up after reading Tuesday night’s edition, our report on Ron DeSantis’s latest despotic assault on Florida’s students, teachers, public institutions, and minority communities. We’ll continue to cover DeSantis’s ongoing fascist takeover of Florida as much as we can, and we’ll never describe the harm he’s causing people as a brand-building exercise.
That being said, I want to be careful not to build DeSantis into some fearsome heavyweight. Instead, his mendacious sociopathy represents a national threat in large part because so many politicians and news outlets provide him with inexplicable deference and respect. Deliberately injuring millions of people is granted legitimacy by virtue of being portrayed as a political strategy, because in the political arena, objectivity requires amorality. It’s ironic, because DeSantis could hardly be described as a talented politician. Underneath the ill-fitting suits, he’s just a bully who punches down and keeps tight control of his surroundings because he’s actually really easy and fun to mock.
Take his team’s dopey, outrageously-timed screw-up today in Tallahassee:
Feels good to laugh in his face, right? Here, have another laugh at him, this time courtesy of the one guy who the media likes to cover more reverentially than Ron.
Today, we’ll keep the good feelings going with an issue filled with good news from across the country, because not everywhere in this country is run by a homophobic Top Gun cosplayer.
Thank you to our latest crowd-funding donors: Linda, Sunny, Jim, Douglas, Linda, John, and Karen!
HEALTHY WINS
Medical expenses are piling up for Americans, and it’s about to get much worse. With the debt piling up, a once-obscure novel solution — or at least form of substantive relief — is beginning to catch on.
On Thursday, Connecticut governor Ned Lamont announced a plan to buy up a whole lot of medical debt.
Between the American Rescue Plan, infrastructure law, and the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats sent billions of dollars to every state in order to prop up their economies and jumpstart important public works projects. Over the past few months, cities and states have begun applying some of that money to buying up and clearing residents’ medical debt, which can be purchased for pennies on the dollar.
It’s happened in municipalities big and small, including Cook County (Chicago), Pittsburgh, and New Orleans. Connecticut’s purchase would be the largest yet.
Gov. Ned Lamont unveiled plans Thursday to use $20 million in federal pandemic aid to potentially cancel billions of dollars in medical debt for thousands of Connecticut residents.
Lamont’s plan involves working with one of the nonprofit organizations that have been negotiating with hospitals to purchase medical debt at extreme discounts. Those charities then cancel the debt.
Lamont said he hopes Connecticut’s $20 million investment could ultimately lead to $2 billion in debt being retired.
It’s somewhat notable to see this happening in a state that’s synonymous with the health insurance industry. Though symbolically a criticism of the for-profit insurance system, those companies would probably benefit from a process that essentially picks up the costs that they don’t want to cover. That’s not a criticism of the RIP Debt movement, because it can only work with the system as it exists. More on that below…
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you’ve got to watch this interview with a high-ranking Republican in the North Carolina state Senate, and maybe even take some notes.
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