By Emma Curchin, Brandon Novick and Peter Hart | –

( Commondreams.org ) – The quasi-privatized system called “Medicare Advantage,” otherwise known as Part C, was created in 2003 as a means of expanding the role of private sector corporations in the publicly-funded Medicare system. Proponents claimed it would lower costs and improve health care for seniors. It has achieved neither of those goals; instead, MA has become a wildly profitable scheme for private insurance giants, who have become adept at taking advantage of Medicare’s billing model to claim exorbitant profits. At this point, MA is more profitable for many companies than their conventional insurance businesses.

And the program continues to grow. Medicare Advantage now has more enrollees than traditional Medicare, thanks in no small part to aggressive public relations campaigns that sell seniors on the idea that the plans cut costs and increase choice. Congress has simultaneously failed to plug the holes in traditional Medicare, pushing seniors towards MA to avoid high out-of-pocket costs. Policymakers can fill these gaps and guarantee true comprehensive coverage simply by redirecting the overpayments to MA insurers into Medicare.

Numerous studies and media investigations have documented the problems with Medicare Advantage. What follows is a collection of some of the most notable figures documenting the high costs of this failed experiment in privatizing Medicare.

$88-$140 billion
The amount that the federal government overpaid private insurers under Medicare Advantage in 2022, according to the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP).

$612 billion
The amount that Medicare Advantage plans overcharged the federal government due to upcoding and favorable selection between 2007 and 2023, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), an independent congressional agency established to advise Congress on issues affecting the Medicare program.

$600 billion
According to one study, this is the projected excess spending between 2023 to 2031 due to the ways that Medicare Advantage plans use ‘upcoding,’ the process of classifying beneficiaries as being sicker than they really are in order to increase payments.

$35 billion
The amount that MedPAC estimates taxpayers will overpay MA insurers this year through ‘favorable selection,’ the practice of targeting healthy seniors for their plans.

$4.2 billion
The amount that MA insurers received for questionable home visit health risk assessments (and related chart reviews) in 2023, according to an October 2024 report from the Department of Health and Human Services.

80 percent
The percentage of mental health providers in a sample of MA plans that were determined to be “ghosts” (meaning they were unreachable, not accepting new patients, or not in-network), according to a recent Senate investigation.

1.8 million
Estimated number of Medicare Advantage customers whose health plans will be canceled in 2025.

167 percent
The amount that drug deductibles will increase for roughly two-thirds of all Medicare Advantage enrollees next year.

55.7 percent
The increase in MA care denials from 2022 to 2023, according to research from the American Hospital Association.

Image by Darko Stojanovic from Pixabay

54 percent
The increase in the denial rate for long-term acute care hospitals in Humana’s Medicare Advantage plans from 2020 to 2022 (Senate Majority Staff Report, 10/17/24).

$660 million
The amount of taxpayer money that CVS/Aetna stashed away in 2018 by denying Medicare Advantage patients’ claims for treatment at inpatient facilities (Senate Majority Staff Report).

78 percent
The percentage of physicians in a 2023 American Medical Association survey who said that Medicare Advantage’s prior authorization processes caused a recommended treatment for a patient to be abandoned.

$6 billion
One estimate of the amount spent in 2022 on the marketing companies that work to attract new subscribers in Medicare Advantage plans.

556,068
The number of English-language TV commercials touting Medicare Advantage that aired during the seven-week open enrollment period in 2022.

$50 billion
The amount that the Wall Street Journal estimates private insurers received between 2018 and 2021 for “hundreds of thousands of questionable diagnoses that triggered extra taxpayer-funded payments.”

$2,329
The amount that MA insurers receive per beneficiary above the estimated costs of Medicare.

$1,730
The gross profit margin posted by MA companies in 2021 – more than double their profit margin on the individual market.

$172 million
The amount that Cigna agreed to pay in 2023 to “resolve allegations that it knowingly submitted and failed to withdraw inaccurate and untruthful diagnosis codes for its Medicare Advantage Plan enrollees to increase its payments from Medicare.” The Justice Department continues to investigate similar allegations involving other MA providers.

Emma Curchin

Brandon Novick

Peter Hart

( Commondreams.org ) – The ongoing “bloodbath” in Lebanon fueled Monday calls for the United States to cut off weapons to Israel, a demand that people around the world have made for nearly a year, as the country has massacred tens of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

“An immediate arms embargo on the far-right Israeli government is urgently needed to stop American weapons, paid for by our nation’s taxpayers, from being used in the latest slaughter in Lebanon or in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which apparently now includes an ‘extermination zone’ in which all living beings will be subject to killing,” said Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) national deputy director Edward Ahmed Mitchell in a statement.

Mitchell cited CNN, which reported Sunday that “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering a plan to force all Palestinian civilians out of northern Gaza, including Gaza City, in order to lay siege to Hamas and force the release of hostages.”

Israel—which faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice—has killed at least 41,455 Palestinians in Gaza and injured another 95,878 in a nearly yearlong retaliation for the Hamas-led October 7 attack. Most of the enclave’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced and are struggling to access food, water, shelter, and medical care.

“Restoring the credibility of President Biden… rests on his willingness to act decisively to forge peace, especially in light of the latest escalations in Lebanon threatening to plunge millions more civilians across the region into crisis.”

Throughout the assault on Gaza, Israel has exchanged strikes with the Lebanese political party and paramilitary group Hezbollah. In recent days, Israel has escalated fears of a regional war by detonating thousands of electronic devices across Lebanon and with a bombing campaign that has killed at least 492 people and wounded 1,645.

As Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain reported Monday for Drop Site News, people in southern Lebanon have received warnings to leave their homes via text messages, calls with audio recordings, and social media.

“People have seen what’s happened in Gaza and they know that the Israelis are fully capable and they understand that basically the West has given up even pretending to do anything about it,” Karim Makdisi, a professor of international politics at the American University in Beirut, told the pair. “There’s no reason to believe that the Israelis will not go ahead and basically try to empty out a large section of the south and try to make the whole place totally uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.”

Makdisi also said that Israel wouldn’t have attacked Lebanon at this scale without a “green light” from the Biden administration, saying, “I think they’ve been given a kind of clear understanding that they have until the elections to do what they want.”

Democratic U.S. President Joe Biden dropped out of this year’s content and passed the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris in July, after his disastrous debate performance against the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump. Harris continues to frustrate critics of the Israeli assault on Gaza with what the Uncommitted National Movement described as her “unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing U.S. and international human rights law.”

However, regardless of who wins the November election, Biden is set to remain in the Oval Office until early next year, meaning anti-war voices continue to target him wth calls to stop sending Israel weapons and do more to secure a lasting cease-fire in the region. The president is set to address United Nations members on Tuesday.

“In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly tomorrow, foremost we need to hear one thing from President Biden: how he will use his power to end Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and ensure its compliance with international law in both Gaza and the West Bank,” Oxfam America president and CEO Abby Maxman said in a statement Monday. “To do so, he must commit to finally stopping lethal arms sales to Israel and applying the leverage necessary to stop a spiraling conflict with dire humanitarian consequences.”

“Restoring the credibility of President Biden—and the United States—on the world stage rests on his willingness to act decisively to forge peace, especially in light of the latest escalations in Lebanon threatening to plunge millions more civilians across the region into crisis,” Maxman argued, highlighting that the U.S. is in “a unique position” to sway Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The American leader “must use his influence to achieve a full and permanent cease-fire, the safe return of all Israeli hostages and illegally detained Palestinians, full access for humanitarian aid, and accountability for war crimes committed,” she argued. “As long as President Biden continues to obscure Israel’s flagrant violations of international law and provide the means for Israel’s unrestrained bombardment in Gaza, his legacy and the U.S. credibility will be utterly squandered.”

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Jessica Corbett

“Our private, profit-driven system means that we are paying more for less,” said one progressive activist.

Jake Johnson

( Commondreams ) – A report out Thursday shows that the United States’ for-profit healthcare system still ranks dead last among peer nations on key metrics, including access to care and health outcomes such as life expectancy at birth.

The new analysis from the Commonwealth Fund is the latest indictment of a corporate-dominated system that leaves tens of millions of people uninsured or underinsured and unable to afford life-saving medications without rationing doses or going into debt.

“Despite spending a lot on healthcare, the United States is not meeting one of the principal obligations of a nation: to protect the health and welfare of its residents,” the report states. “Most of the countries we compared are providing this protection, even though each can learn a good deal from its peers. The U.S., in failing this ultimate test of a successful nation, remains an outlier.”

People in the U.S., which spends roughly twice as much per capita on healthcare as other rich nations, “live the shortest lives and have the most avoidable deaths,” Commonwealth noted, pointing to frequent “denials of services by insurance companies” and other systematic defects of the American system, including massive administrative costs.

Image by Stefan Schranz from Pixabay

Meanwhile, insurance giants and pharmaceutical companies are raking in huge profits, benefiting in particular from the growing privatization of Medicare. More than half of the Medicare-eligible population in the U.S. is currently on a privately run Medicare Advantage plan.

“Our private, profit-driven system means that we are paying more for less,” progressive activist Jonathan Cohn wrote in response to the Commonwealth report.

The Commonwealth Fund’s findings bolster progressives’ case for transitioning to a Medicare for All system that would provide comprehensive coverage to everyone in the country for free at the point of service. Studies have repeatedly shown that such a program would cost less than the immensely wasteful for-profit system—which is set to drive national healthcare spending to $7.7 trillion per year by 2032—while saving lives.

Commonwealth observed Thursday that while affordability “is a pervasive problem” in the U.S., Australia “offers free care in all public hospitals, and the nation’s universal Medicare system provides all Australians with coverage for all or part of the cost of [general practitioners] and specialist consultations and diagnostic tests, with additional subsidies available for private hospital care.”

“The U.S. continues to be in a class by itself in the underperformance of its healthcare sector,” the report continues. “While the other nine countries differ in the details of their systems and in their performance on domains, unlike the U.S., they all have found a way to meet their residents’ most basic health care needs, including universal coverage.”

With the U.S. presidential election less than two months away, neither 2024 candidate for the two major parties has outlined a detailed healthcare proposal thus far.

Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, said during last week’s debate in Philadelphia that he merely has “the concepts of a plan,” while Harris—who once co-sponsored Medicare for All legislation in the Senate—said she “absolutely” supports “private healthcare options” and wants to “maintain and grow the Affordable Care Act.”

Just days after the debate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio)—Trump’s running mate—said the Republican nominee prefers a system in which “a young American” and a “65-year-old American with a chronic condition” are not placed in “the same risk pools,” suggesting a rollback of the ACA’s protections for people with preexisting conditions.

“You can’t really say people with preexisting conditions are protected if they are in a separate insurance risk pool and can be charged exorbitant premiums,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the research group KFF, wrote in response to Vance’s comments.

Via Commondreams

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( Commondreams.org ) – A spike in “relentless” Islamophobia across the United States that began in October with Israel’s U.S.-backed attack on the Gaza Strip continued through the first half of this year, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group said Tuesday.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) released data showing the sustained surge in anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian hate from January to June 2024, with 4,951 documented complaints, a 69% increase over the same period in 2023.

That came after CAIR received 3,578 complaints from last October through December, a 178% increase from a similar three-month period the previous year, as Common Dreamsreported when the data was published in January.

The largest share of 2024 complaints related to immigration and asylum cases (19%), which is in line with 2023. That was followed by employment discrimination (14%), education discrimination (10%), and hate crimes and incidents (8%).

So far this year, May has had the largest number of education discrimination complaints—which CAIR tied to “university administrations cracking down on anti-genocide student protestors,” beginning with Columbia University in April.

“Too many places of higher education, which have historically permitted Islamophobic speakers to poison their campus in the name of academic freedom, apparently find anti-genocide speech intolerable,” said CAIR research and advocacy director Corey Saylor in a statement. “Since last fall university administrators have been a primary perpetrator of anti-Muslim racism.”

“Our data shows that as student protests dominated media coverage of the movement opposing the Gaza genocide, employers also continued punishing their employees for their viewpoints,” Saylor added. “We are also seeing federal agencies like Customs and Border Protection and the FBI interpreting being Muslim or anti-genocide as suspicious activity.”

CAIR’s data release followed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States last week to address Congress—which was boycotted by dozens of lawmakers—and meet privately with President Joe Biden; Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the November election; and former President Donald Trump, the Republican candidate.

Enabled by weapons and diplomatic support from Biden and Congress, Netanyahu launched Israel’s ongoing assault of Gaza in retaliation for the deadly Hamas-led October 7 attack. As of Tuesday, Israeli forces have killed at least 39,400 Palestinians and wounded another 90,996, according to local officials—though experts anticipate the final death toll will be far higher.

South Africa is leading a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which ruled on July 19 that the decadeslong Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is illegal and must end. United Nations human rights experts said Tuesday that Israel must comply with the ruling, though Netanyahu’s government has shown no signs that it plans to do so.

CAIR has labeled the recent rise in hate across the United States “the Biden-backed Gaza genocide Islamophobia wave.”

“Islamophobia in the U.S. comes in cycles, with the last two large waves generated by Donald Trump’s 2015 announcement and 2017 implementation of his Muslim ban,” the group explained Tuesday. “As we have noted previously, this wave exceeds the combined totals of incoming incidents received during those two cycles.”

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If we want to build on the promise of Medicare, then we’re going to have to grapple directly with the power of corporate health insurance: That starts with taking on the so-called “Medicare Advantage” program.

Ed Weisbart

( Commondreams.org ) – Fifty-nine years ago today, President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law—a high-water mark in the fight for universal healthcare that had started decades before and that continues to this day.

Ever since Medicare became law, it has been a shining example of what is possible in U.S. healthcare: a truly public, truly universal program that has saved countless lives and prevented untold financial ruin among America’s seniors. But alongside this success, corporate health interests have also grown immeasurably more powerful. Insurers like UnitedHealthcare and Blue Cross Blue Shield have erected cruel barriers to care and are laughing all the way to the bank.

If we want to build on the promise of Medicare—and win the best possible version of Medicare for All—then we’re going to have to grapple directly with the power of corporate health insurance. That starts with taking on the so-called “Medicare Advantage” program.

The Strategic Importance of Medicare Advantage

Single-payer advocates understand that there can’t be “Medicare for All” if there is no “Medicare.” And no, Medicare Advantage (MA) doesn’t count as Medicare. The health insurance corporations that run these plans have a business imperative to prioritize profits above all else; this is anathema to any public health program.

Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) has compiled overwhelming evidence that MA insurers are harming patients, physicians, and hospitals by delaying and denying care—harms that are virtually unseen in Traditional Medicare. Nor is this cruelty even a trade-off for lowering the cost of healthcare. In fact, these corporations are paid far more than what is spent for similar patients in Traditional Medicare—up to $140 billion per year, or as much as 35% above the funding levels of Traditional Medicare.

There is no road to Medicare for All that ignores this existential threat.

Where we see middlemen standing between patients and the care they need, we should remove them. Where we see limited provider networks, we should expand them. Where we see piles of pre-authorization paperwork, we should shred them.

Thankfully, support for eliminating overpayments to MA extends far beyond those who are already committed to single payer. This fight builds our movement by mobilizing a wide range of people who understand, or can be educated about, the damage insurance companies are doing to patients. When we find common ground, we should walk together.

For that reason, PNHP is exposing MA overpayments and demanding a more fiscally responsible approach from policymakers. We are working closely with several organizations to change the national conversation and provide a badly needed counterweight to the lobbying might of big insurance.

When MA was created, way back in 2003, corporate insurers promised to reduce the cost of healthcare by improving care coordination and health outcomes. A healthier population, they claimed, would be less expensive. We should demand that MA corporations live up to these lofty promises without billions of dollars in overpayments.

We’d like to see them try.

Improved Medicare… for ALL

Winning back $140 billion in annual overpayments begs a tantalizing question: How can we use those funds to improve Medicare for all seniors?

Instead of the paltry benefits that MA plans offer, those funds would help us add robust hearing, vision, and dental benefits; totally eliminate Medicare Part B premiums; and fold in the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit. Imagine the relief a senior on Medicare Advantage would feel when enrolling in a plan that actually covers the full range of dental care, while also freeing themselves from the narrow provider networks and prior authorization requirements imposed by MA plans.

Most critically, we need to establish a low out-of-pocket maximum for Medicare. Insurance corporations lure seniors and people with disabilities into the MA trap by selling lower up-front costs while hiding substantial barriers to care. It’s a classic bait and switch. Eliminating the need to purchase Medigap would level the playing field and allow everybody to remain in Traditional Medicare.

Let’s work to build a movement of seniors, physicians, students, people with disabilities, and everybody else who cares about Medicare.

Well, not everybody—but that’s our ultimate goal. PNHP advocates for a national single-payer health insurance program, and what better way to get there than through an improved version of the already popular Medicare program?

Where we see middlemen standing between patients and the care they need, we should remove them. Where we see limited provider networks, we should expand them. Where we see piles of pre-authorization paperwork, we should shred them.

We should also expand benefits to include all medically necessary care, and ultimately eliminate out-of-pocket costs that deter people from seeing a doctor. Once these improvements are in place, we will have a program that’s truly worthy of the name Medicare for All.

The advocacy work for these priorities—ending MA overpayments, improving Traditional Medicare, and realizing our vision for single payer—overlap and build on one another.

Let’s work to build a movement of seniors, physicians, students, people with disabilities, and everybody else who cares about Medicare. Together, we can take on the corporate insurers that are wreaking so much havoc in our lives and lay the groundwork for winning a single-payer program that brings everybody in and leaves nobody out

.

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“Detecting the virus that causes polio in wastewater heralds a real health disaster,” Gaza’s health ministry said.

By Edward Carver | –

( Commondreams.org ) – Poliovirus has been detected in sewage samples at six locations in the Gaza Strip, the World Health Organization said on Friday, following announcements from both the Israel and Gaza health ministries.

Vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 was found in samples taken on June 23 from sites in Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah.

Public health authorities expressed grave concerns about the findings, which, though no cases have yet been discovered, raise the possibility of an outbreak of polio, a highly infectious disease that often causes paralysis and can be fatal.

“Detecting the virus that causes polio in wastewater heralds a real health disaster and exposes thousands of residents to the risk of contracting polio,” Gaza’s health ministry said in a statement.

Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care physician, toldAl Jazeera the presence of the poliovirus was a “ticking time bomb,” especially given the lack of ability to isolate and care for people who contract the disease.

Haj-Hassan warned that it would be “catastrophic” if the disease spread among healthcare workers, given that the medical system has already been “annihilated by direct targeting, by abductions of healthcare workers, by [the] killing of healthcare workers.”

Dahlia Scheindlin, a Tel Aviv-based political analyst, called news of the presence poliovirus “absolutely shocking, stunning, [and] unthinkable” in a series of social media posts.

“The health crisis in Gaza has been catastrophic from the start,” Scheindlin wrote, seemingly addressing Israelis. “If you’re incapable of realizing that civilians should never have been in this situation, maybe the prospect of anyone getting polio, river to sea, where we are ‘one epidemiological family,’ will get through.”

Conditions in Gaza have been ripe for an outbreak of infectious disease—the “perfect environment” for transmission, as WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier called it, citing “decimation of the health system, lack of security, access obstruction, constant population displacement, shortages of medical supplies, poor quality of water and weakened sanitation.”

In late June, The Associated Pressreported on the nightmarish situation in Deir al-Balah, one of the areas where the poliovirus has since been discovered:

Children in sandals trudge through water contaminated with sewage and scale growing mounds of garbage in Gaza’s crowded tent camps for displaced families. People relieve themselves in burlap-covered pits, with nowhere nearby to wash their hands.

“Polio virus found in Gaza as soaring temperatures threaten drought • FRANCE 24 English Video”

Polio, which can spread through contact with the stool of an infected person, has been eliminated from much of the world following the development of a vaccine in the early 1950s and a campaign by U.N. agencies that began in 1980. Still, it hasn’t been eradicated globally, and there’s been a resurgence in Afghanistan and Pakistan in recent years.

Gaza has been polio-free for 25 years and 95% of the population was vaccinated against the disease as of 2022, according to the WHO, though Haj-Hassan, the pediatrician, said that many Gazans, including newborns, have gone without vaccines or boosters for the last nine months.

The WHO said that it’s working with other U.N. agencies and health authorities in Gaza to assess how much the poliovirus has spread and determine what measures may be needed, including a “prompt” vaccination campaign.

Combatting any infectious diseases will present challenges for Gaza’s public healthcare system, which has been embattled and largely destroyed by Israeli forces. Only 16 out of the enclave’s 36 hospitals are even partially functional, and only 45 of the 105 primary health care facilities are operational, according to the WHO.

The lack of medical care is part of a broader public health disaster, people on the ground in Gaza say.

“We’re talking about a very grim medical reality,” said Tareq Abu Azzoum, an Al Jazeera journalist reporting from Deir al-Balah, which faces severe overcrowding due to the roughly 700,000 displaced Gazans who have fled there.

Abu Azzoum cited Israeli military tactics as a reason for the dire conditions, arguing that the problems stem from attacks on “water wells, sanitation, and water waste treatment” and the blocking of “essential hygiene supplies.”

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( Commondreams.org ) – The United Nations’ top expert on human rights in Palestine condemned the Israeli military as it resorted to a familiar excuse for the killing of nearly 100 Palestinians on Saturday in an area that had been designated as a “humanitarian zone”—just the latest massacre of dozens of people whom the Israel Defense Forces dismissed as collateral damage in attacks they claimed were targeting Hamas.

“The justification is always the same: ‘targeting Palestinian militants,'” said Francesca Albanese, U.N special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. “When is the world going to stop this death machine?”

Albanese was referring this time to the bombardment of al-Mawasi, a coastal area west of Khan Younis where hundreds of thousands of Gaza residents have been sheltering after fleeing cities including Rafah.

Al Jazeera reporter Tareq Abu Azzoum described the attack as “a new massacre committed by the Israeli military,” with “five bombs and five missiles” hitting the area where Palestinians have been sheltering in makeshift tents for months.

Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported that at least 90 people had been killed in the attack, which the IDF claimed was based on “precise intelligence” and targeted Hamas commanders Mohammed Deif and Rafa Salama.

“We have seen time and time again attacks on areas where there are displaced Palestinians in the tens of thousands,” reportedAl Jazeera‘s Hamdah Salhut. “This is a tactic that is commonly used by Israeli forces, saying civilians are being used as ‘human shields’ for Hamas figures, using that as justification for killing dozens of civilians.”

Channel 4 News: “Israeli airstrike kills dozens in Gaza refugee camp”

The Washington Post reported that it was “unclear” whether Deif, who has survived multiple assassination attempts by Israel, was killed in the attack.

Paramedics and children were reportedly among nearly 300 people who were wounded, and an official at Nasser Hospital told Al Jazeera that the facility had no more capacity to treat wounded patients.

The British charity Medical Aid for Palestine reported that it was “forced to temporarily evacuate one of our medical points near the area, which is intended to provide primary healthcare services, due to the insecurity.”

“MAP’s Mohammed Al Khatib in Khan Younis reports: ‘Al-Mawasi is heavily crowded and has a big market where people move around to try and secure their basic needs,'” said the group. “We have been warning for months that there is no safe place for anyone in Gaza amid Israel’s military bombardment.”

“A number of victims are still under the rubble and on the roads, and ambulance and civil defense crews are unable to reach them,” the Health Ministry told the Associated Press.

The AP assessed footage that showed a “huge crater” in the area where thousands of people had been ordered to evacuate to when the IDF began its full-scale assault on Rafah in May. Burnt-out cars, household belongings, and charred tents—like those seen in previous attacks on so-called “humanitarian zones” in al-Mawasi and Rafah—were left after the bombings.

Academic and writer Ori Goldberg said it was “impossible to exaggerate the level of criminality, immorality, and crass, murderous stupidity that come together in the massacre Israel carried out in al-Mawasi this morning.”

“Israel used wildly disproportionate force [to] assassinate two people,” said Goldberg. “Israel pushed the displaced Palestinians to Mawasi, defining it a ‘safe zone.’ Then, assuming it had a chance to assassinate Muhammad Deif, one of the most senior Hamas leaders supposedly hiding there, Israel bombed the ‘safe zone.’ Dozens were killed. The death of a single person does not legitimize the slaughter of dozens.”

Goldberg noted that the massacre came shortly after U.S. President Joe Biden announced Hamas and Israel were inching closer to a truce, with both sides agreeing to a “framework” for a cease-fire.

“There is a hostage deal on the table. Deif’s death will not bring about the collapse of Hamas; it will only make Hamas less willing to compromise,” said Goldberg. “Israel forces ‘evacuation,’ Israel bombs, Israel knows, Israel attacks and kills, Israel sets conditions, Israel balks. Israel has run out of options. It knows only death.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said that as with previous attacks on designated safe zones, the IDF’s massacre was made possible partially by the political and material support of the United States and other Western countries.

“Israel’s far-right government carries out this mass slaughter of Palestinians secure in the knowledge that it will be supported and excused by the Biden administration and that American bombs and taxpayer funds will continue to flow,” said Nihad Awad, national director of CAIR. “President Biden’s continuing support for and silence about the genocide gives a green light for more Israeli abuses and war crimes. President Biden must stop enabling these daily massacres and end our nation’s complicity in genocide.”

Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Published under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

By Scott Plous

( Commondreams ) – On Sunday, May 26—as graduating students at my school, Wesleyan University, tossed their caps into the air—bombs rained down on a tent camp for displaced Palestinians in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, killing 45 people, including a number of women and children. The weapons that killed them, GBU-39 bombs, were made by Boeing and supplied by the U.S.

“Many of the dead bodies were severely burned, had amputated limbs, and were torn to pieces,” according to a local physician. In addition, the bomb blasts and ensuing fires wounded another 249 people.

The next day, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the bombing a “tragic accident,” but by Tuesday, Israeli shelling and airstrikes killed another 37 Palestinians in the area, most of them sheltering in tents. “We will enter Rafah because we have no other choice,” Mr. Netanyahu had warned earlier, in his campaign to defeat Hamas after last year’s heinous October 7 attack on Israel.

In American terms, this concentration of explosive force would be like dropping five Hiroshima-size bombs over a land mass one quarter the area of Oklahoma City, with triple its population.

It is this mounting civilian death toll—carried out with U.S. weapons—that spurred students to protest and set up encampments in the spring on nearly 140 college campuses, including Wesleyan. Although each encampment was different, student protesters were largely united in calling on their school to divest any holdings in companies supporting the war. The divestment they were calling for was strictly institutional, but as I will explain later, it’s also possible for individuals to carry out acts of divestment on their own.

In the first three months of the war alone, Israel dropped 45,000 bombs on Gaza, the majority of which were designed or manufactured by the United States. Perhaps the most controversial of these weapons is the 2,000-pound “bunker busting” Mark-84 bomb, which has a lethality area equivalent to 58 soccer fields. In the first month of the war, Israel dropped more than 500 Mark-84 bombs, often in densely populated areas, according to a CNN analysis (and these 500 bombs, made by General Dynamics, are only a small fraction of at least 5,000 that the U.S. sent to Israel after the Hamas attack).

As described in a United Nations Human Rights Council report, the explosive blast from a Mark-84 bomb “can rupture lungs, burst sinus cavities, and tear off limbs hundreds of feet from the blast site, according to trauma physicians. When it hits, the [bomb] generates an 8,500-degree fireball, gouges a 20-foot crater as it displaces 10,000 pounds of dirt and rock and generates enough wind to knock down walls blocks away and hurl metal fragments a mile or more.”

All told, the explosive force of munitions Israel has used on Gaza since October 7 is estimated to be 75 kilotons—five times larger than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In the case of Gaza, though, its 141 square-mile territory is less than half the size of Hiroshima. In American terms, this concentration of explosive force would be like dropping five Hiroshima-size bombs over a land mass one quarter the area of Oklahoma City, with triple its population.

One of the most catastrophic results of this bombing is that roughly 1 out of every 133 Palestinian children in Gaza has now been killed—a number which, when scaled to match the U.S. population, would translate into the deaths of more than half a million American children.

It is hard to imagine the bitterness and hatred that such a death toll would generate in the United States, yet only three days into the war, Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Daniel Hagari publicly acknowledged that Israel’s bombing campaign was “focused on what causes maximum damage“—not on the accuracy of where bombs land or the need to minimize collateral damage.

In keeping with that focus, nearly half of all bombs Israel used in Gaza during the first two months of war were unguided, and even U.S. President Joe Biden warned that Israel risked losing international support due to its “indiscriminate bombing.”

Fox 61 Video: “Wesleyan students call for the disclosure and divestment of military weapons funding”

Wesleyan student protesters began sleeping in tents on April 28, and their encampment ultimately grew to more than 100 tents by the time it disbanded on May 20. The tent community was peaceful and advanced a set of demands, the foremost of which was that the university administration disclose its financial investments and then divest from companies and institutions which are supporting or profiting from the war and occupation of Palestinian territory.

As someone with Israeli family members, it pains me to say that I agree with the call for divestment. My agreement is not only because of the profound loss of life on both sides of the war, but for three additional reasons.

(1) Israeli leaders are violating international humanitarian law. Put simply, it’s illegal to starve civilians or willfully impede relief supplies as a method of war. Nonetheless, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu announced on October 18 that “we will not allow humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicines from our territory to the Gaza Strip.” As a result of that policy, “full-blown famine” hit Northern Gaza by May, according to the executive director of the U.N. World Food Program. Even worse, the program predicts that if the war continues, more than 1 million people (half the population of Gaza) will face life-threatening levels of starvation by mid-July.

Here is what Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court says about starving civilians and impeding relief efforts:

For the purpose of this Statute, “war crimes”… [includes] Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies.

To be sure, one could argue that Mr. Netanyahu’s statement doesn’t accurately represent the Israeli government’s official position, but several other top leaders have also publicly called for withholding food and humanitarian relief. For instance, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on October 9: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

Likewise, on October 12 Energy Minister Israel Katz posted this statement on social media: “No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened, and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home.”

And National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has gone on record as saying that it would be a “grave mistake” for the Israeli government to allow “the transfer of humanitarian aid” into Gaza unless Hamas frees Israeli hostages.

There’s a relatively quick and simple step that individual citizens can take, not as a substitute for institutional divestment, but as a complement to it. They can make sure their own financial holdings are divested.

In other words, the starvation of civilians and suspension of humanitarian aid is explicit, sustained, and willful. Even Israel’s closest military ally and defender, the United States, issued a report on May 10 concluding that Israel has “contributed significantly to a lack of sustained and predictable delivery of needed assistance” and likely violated international humanitarian law (for more on that report, and claims by a former U.S. State Department official that it understated violations of international law, see coverage in The Guardian and PBS NewsHour).

Along similar lines, many Americans believe that laws have been broken. A national poll of Americans by The Economist/YouGov in May asked the following question: “Do you think Israel has violated any international laws in Gaza?” Only 28% of respondents answered, “No.”

Indeed, on May 20, the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor requested arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, charging them with war crimes and crimes against humanity, and citing violations of Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Rome Statute. (The prosecutor also sought to arrest three Hamas leaders for a list of crimes that included rape, torture, and kidnapping.)

In addition, the ICC appointed an independent Panel of Experts in International Law to render an opinion on whether there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that crimes had been committed. In its report, the panel unanimously concluded:

[T]here are reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant formed a common plan, together with others, to jointly perpetrate the crime of using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. The Panel has concluded that the acts through which this war crime was committed include… cutting off supplies of electricity and water, and severely restricting food, medicine, and fuel supplies.

Although President Biden called the ICC prosecutor’s charges “outrageous,” the next day a report documented that Israeli soldiers and police officers were tipping off far-right activists about the location of aid trucks delivering vital supplies to Gaza, colluding with vigilantes to block the trucks from reaching their destination. Then, on June 12, a commission established by the U.N. Human Rights Council released a finding that “Israel has committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law.”

(2) U.S. taxpayers are funding Israel’s activities in Gaza. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has been the world’s largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, totaling more than $300 billion in American taxpayer money, adjusted for inflation. Moreover, military aid to Israel shows no sign of slowing down. Between 2019 and 2023, nearly 70% of Israeli arms imports came from the U.S., and since the Israel-Hamas war began last year, the U.S. has supplied Israel with weapons via more than 100 arms transfers.

Even after the U.S. State Department released its May 10 report concluding that Israel was likely committing crimes, the U.S. has continued to underwrite Israel’s actions in Gaza with $12.5 billion in military aid during fiscal year 2024—the second-highest level of U.S. military aid ever provided to Israel.

In a very real sense, then, Israel’s war in the Middle East has become America’s war—a joint project, as reflected in the results of a national poll conducted in April. When Americans were asked whether they thought the U.S. was at war in the Middle East, 56% said either yes or they weren’t sure.

By supplying most of the bombs dropped in Gaza while knowing that humanitarian assistance is being withheld, the U.S. is not only morally culpable—it is breaking federal law. Providing military aid to Israel under such circumstances violates Section 620I of the 1961 U.S. Foreign Assistance Act, which bans foreign aid to any country that “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.”

On March 11, eight U.S. senators sent a letter to President Biden raising precisely this concern, and on March 27, six additional members of Congress sent a similar letter reiterating the point:

It is apparent that the Netanyahu government is repeatedly interfering in U.S. humanitarian operations in direct violation of the Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act—Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961… We [are] imploring you to enforce U.S. law with the Netanyahu government.

Providing Israel with weapons used in the commission of war crimes also violates Article Seven of the Arms Trade Treaty, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly, ratified by 113 states, signed by 28 others (including the U.S. and Israel), and supported by several Nobel Peace Prize recipients, notable among them Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

Nor is the problem limited to the 2,000-pound bombs made by the United States. On June 6, Israel killed at least 40 people—including women and children—with American-made GBU-39 small diameter bombs in an attack on a school where Palestinians were sheltering. One day later, the U.N. publicly announced that it was adding the Israel Defense Forces (as well as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad) to a global list of offenders that violate the rights of children. Because the United States is still supplying Israel with lethal weapons while being aware of how the weapons are being used, many people around the world regard the U.S. as complicit.

(3) Divestment can promote political change and moral alignment. Divestment movements have been around since at least 1783, when Quakers urged members of their community to divest their holdings from the slave trade. As explained by sociology professor David S. Meyer:

[T]he idea wasn’t to financially cripple the slave trade. The idea was to get their [own] conduct in line with their beliefs so they could advocate more effectively, sort of a strike against hypocrisy.

Consistent with this explanation, modern-day divestment campaigns rarely have a major financial effect on the targeted countries or businesses, but they can raise public awareness about an issue, signal its urgency, and generate political action. One such political campaign was the global movement to divest from South Africa, which is widely credited as having hastened the end of apartheid in that country and provided a model for the movement to divest from Israel.

When I asked Wesleyan student protesters why they were calling for divestment, some said that they hoped it would help publicize the plight of Palestinians and contribute to political change. Others spoke of moral alignment, saying that they didn’t want Wesleyan to fund or support war crimes. And still others felt that schools should not profit from war, arms sales, or the death of civilians. As climate activist Bill McKibben famously said when explaining the logic behind divesting from fossil fuel companies, “If it is wrong to wreck the climate, then it is wrong to profit from the wreckage.”

Joining the call for divestment also offers a way for student voices to be heard, for protesters to network within and across campuses, and for students to exert more collective leverage than if they act alone. In the case of Wesleyan, for example, students were able to secure a promise from the administration to have the Board of Trustees consider a proposal later this year to divest Wesleyan’s $1.5 billion endowment, $25-30 million of which is currently invested in aerospace and defense businesses.

The Missing Element: Personal Divestment

One of the most powerful aspects of university divestment is that it makes a statement from a respected institution known for its erudition and scholarly expertise. At the same time, a promise to consider divestment is not the same as a promise to divest, and even if a school were to opt for divestment—as Wesleyan has with respect to fossil fuels, and as it may in the future with respect to defense contractors—the process could take months or years to complete, by which time the war in Gaza would presumably have ended.

In the meanwhile, there’s a relatively quick and simple step that individual citizens can take, not as a substitute for institutional divestment, but as a complement to it. They can make sure their own financial holdings are divested.

This is no small thing. American college and university endowments total an estimated $839 billion—an astronomical amount that would have far-reaching political effects if it were divested—but the divestment campaigns on college campuses miss a source of funds 45 times larger: $38.4 trillion in U.S. retirement accounts held by individual employees.

Even after the current war is over, we will be better off in a world that divests from companies selling weapons of mass destruction, fossil fuels, and tobacco products than in a world that financially invests in their growth.

In a matter of minutes, many employees with retirement accounts can divest by moving their assets into environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds that exclude defense contractors. ESG funds also typically exclude fossil fuel companies, the tobacco industry, and corporations known for worker abuses.

In days gone by, these “socially responsible” or “sustainable” investment funds tended to perform more poorly than broad mutual funds set up to mirror market indexes such as the S&P 500. Not anymore. In fact, according to a New York University meta-analysis of more than 1,000 research papers, today’s ESG funds often outperform other funds.

To take just one example, the Statista Research Department compared the classic S&P 500 index and an ESG S&P 500 index between 2021 and 2024, and it found that by the fourth quarter of 2021, “the S&P 500 ESG index began to steadily outperform the S&P 500 by four points on average.”

A Morgan Stanley study of more than 10,000 mutual funds from 2004 to 2018 also found that ESG funds tend to be less risky than other mutual funds, especially when markets are turbulent. The conclusion, according to the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing, is that “incorporating ESG criteria into investment decisions makes good sense financially.”

Of course, not everyone has a retirement fund, but for those who do, these results are reassuring. What they suggest is that individual employees can divest from defense contractors like Boeing and General Dynamics—makers of the GBU-39 and Mark-84 bombs discussed earlier—without compromising retirement savings.

This divestment option applies to a broad range of retirement accounts, including traditional and Roth IRAs, 401(k) plans, 403(b) plans, and 457(b) plans. For further details on how to divest, see these tips on how to divest retirement accounts.

All well and good, you might say, but what about after a cease-fire or the war ends—would it still be worth the effort to divest? Without question, my answer is yes. First, cease-fires are often fragile. In the 2014, for example, Israel and Hamas had nine truces, during which more than 2,000 people were killed, before there was a relatively lasting agreement to stop the fighting. And even after the current war is over, we will be better off in a world that divests from companies selling weapons of mass destruction, fossil fuels, and tobacco products than in a world that financially invests in their growth.

Admittedly, personal and institutional divestment are both blunt instruments, and ESG investing has its critics. Nevertheless, ESG investments are growing worldwide and estimated to reach $53 trillion by next year (one third of all global assets under management). The reason for this meteoric growth is not just that ESG investment strategies exclude certain industries. They also embrace prosocial values and goals that are aligned with emergent global regulations, priorities, and needs.

In short, ESG investing is here to stay, and personal divestment can serve as a refusal to support or profit from the use of American-made weapons in Gaza—a small but significant statement. As Mahatma Gandhi reportedly said with respect to the impact of individual actions, “Almost anything you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”

Scott Plous is professor of psychology at Wesleyan University and founding executive director of Social Psychology Network

Via Commondreams

( Commondreams.org) – They’re competing unfairly with Medicare, and you and I are paying for it. It’s obscene.

When former U.S. President George W. Bush and congressional Republicans (and a handful of bought-off Democrats) created Medicare Advantage in 2003, it was the fulfillment of half of Bush’s goal of privatizing Social Security and Medicare, dating all the way back to his unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978 and a main theme of his second term in office.

Medicare Advantage is not Medicare. These plans are private health insurance provided by private corporations, who are then fully reimbursed by the Medicare trust fund regardless of how much their customers use their insurance. Thus, the more they can screw their customers and us taxpayers by withholding healthcare, the more money they make.

These giant insurance companies ripped off our tax dollars last year to the tune of an estimated $140 billion over and above what it would’ve caused us if people had simply been on real Medicare.

With real Medicare, if your doctor says you need a test, procedure, scan, or any other medical intervention you simply get it done and real Medicare pays the bill. No muss, no fuss, no permission needed. Real Medicare always pays, and if they think something’s not kosher, they follow up after the payment’s been made so as not to slow down the delivery of your healthcare.

With Medicare Advantage, however, you’re subject to “pre-clearance,” meaning that the insurance company inserts itself between you and your doctor: You can’t get the medical help you need until or unless the insurance company pre-clears you for payment.

These companies thus make much of their profit by routinely denying claims—1.5 million, or 18% of all claims, were turned down in one year alone—leaving Advantage policy holders with the horrible choice of not getting the tests or procedures they need or paying for them out-of-pocket.

Given this, you’d think that most people would stay as far away from these private Medicare Advantage plans as they could. But Congress also authorized these plans to compete unfairly with real Medicare by offering things real Medicare can’t (yet). These include free or discounted dental, hearing, eyeglasses, gym memberships, groceries, rides to the doctor, and even cash rebates.

You and I pay for those freebies, but that’s only half of the horror story.

This year, as Matthew Cunningham-Cook pointed out in Wendell Potter’s brilliant Healthcare Un-covered Substack newsletter this week, we’re ponying up an additional $64 billion to give to these private insurance companies to reimburse them for the freebies they relentlessly advertise on television, online, and in print.

And here’s the most obscene part of the whole thing: The companies won’t tell the government how much of that $64 billion they’ve actually spent. They just take the money and say, “Thank you very much.” And then, presumably, throw a few extra million into the pockets of each of their already very-well-paid senior executives.

Photo by Online Marketing on Unsplash

For example, the former CEO of the nation’s largest Medicare Advantage provider, UnitedHealth, walked away with over a billion dollars in total compensation. With a “B.” One guy. His successor made off with over a half-billion dollars in pay and stock.

Good work if you can get it: All you need do is buy off a hundred or so members of Congress, courtesy of Clarence Thomas’ tie-breaking vote on Citizens United, and threaten the rest with massive advertising campaigns for their opponents if they try to stop you.

Project 2025 and candidate Trump both promise to end real Medicare “immediately” if Trump or when another Republican becomes president.

And while the companies refuse to tell us how much of the $64 billion that we’re throwing at them this year to offer “free” dental, etc. is actually used, what we do know is that most of that money is not going to pay for the freebies they advertise. As Cunningham-Cook noted, in one study only 11% of Advantage policyholders who’d signed up with plans offering dental care used that benefit.

Another study showed over-the-counter-drug freebies were used only a third of the time, leaving $5 billion in the insurance companies’ money bins just for that goodie. A later study found that at least a quarter of all Advantage policyholders failed to use any of the freebies they’d been offered when they signed up.

That’s an enormous amount of what the industry calls “breakage;” benefits offered but not used. Billions of dollars left over every month. And, used or not, you and I sure paid for them.

In my book The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, I lay out the story of this scam and how badly so many American seniors—and all American taxpayers, regardless of age—get ripped off by it.

When he was president, Donald Trump substantially expanded Medicare Advantage, calling real Medicare “socialism.” Project 2025 and candidate Trump both promise to end real Medicare “immediately” if Trump or when another Republican becomes president.

These giant insurance companies ripped off our tax dollars last year to the tune of an estimated $140 billion over and above what it would’ve caused us if people had simply been on real Medicare, according to a report from Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP). If there was no Medicare Advantage scam bleeding off all that cash to pay for executives’ private jets, real Medicare could be expanded to cover dental, vision, and hearing and even end the need for Medigap plans.

But for now, the privatization gravy train continues to roll along. The insurance giants use some of that money to buy legislators and some of it for expensive advertising to dupe seniors into joining their programs. The company (Benefytt) that hires Joe Namath to pitch Medicare Advantage, for example, was recently hit with huge fines by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive advertising.

The FTC news release laid it out:

“Benefytt pocketed millions selling sham insurance to seniors and other consumers looking for health coverage,” said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “The company is being ordered to pay $100 million, and we’re holding its executives accountable for this fraud.”

And what was it that the Federal Trade Commission called “sham insurance”? Medicare Advantage. Nonetheless, the Centers for Medicare Services continues to let Benefytt and Namath market these products: Welcome to the power of organized money.

And it’s huge organized money. Medicare Advantage plans are massive cash cows for the companies that run them. As Cigna prepares for a merger, for example, they’re being forced to sell off their Medicare Advantage division: It’s scheduled to go for $3.7 billion. Nobody pays that kind of money unless they expect enormous returns.

Traditional Medicare has been serving Americans well since 1965: it’s one of the most efficient single-payer systems to fund healthcare that’s ever been devised. But nobody was making a buck off it, so nobody could share those profits with greedy politicians. Enter Medicare Advantage, courtesy of George W. Bush and the GOP.

While several bills have been offered in Congress to do something about this—including Reps. Mark Pocan’s (D-Wis.) and Ro Khanna’s (D-Calif.) Save Medicare Act that would end these companies’ ability to use the word “Medicare” in their policy names and advertising—the amounts of money sloshing around D.C. in the healthcare space now are almost unfathomable.

So far this year, according to opensecrets.org, the insurance industry has spent $45,173,132 showering gifts and persuasion on our federal lawmakers to keep their obscene profits flowing.

It’s all one more example of how five corrupt Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing political bribery with Citizens Unitedhave screwed average Americans and made a handful of industry executives and investors fabulously rich.

Thus, here we are, handing billions of dollars a month to insurance industry executives so they can buy new Swiss chalets, private jets, and luxury yachts. And compete—unfairly—with Medicare itself, driving LBJ’s most proud achievement into debt and crisis.

Enough is enough. Let your members of Congress know it’s beyond time to fix the court and Medicare, so scams like Medicare Advantage can no longer rip off America’s seniors while making industry executives richer than Midas.

Thom Hartmann