Saturday, March 28, 2020

DEMOCRAT CONTROLLED DETROIT IN MELTDOWN - MAYOR DUGGAN SAYS SACRIFICE THE ELDERLY TO CORONAVIRUS - BUT HOW MUCH ARE THEY SPENDING ON "FREE" HEALTHCARE FOR ILLEGALS?,

Detroit mayor confirms denial of treatment to “extremely sick” patients: “What they put out is honest”


28 March 2020
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the city of Detroit and surrounding suburbs continued to escalate dramatically on Friday as the health-care system strained to the breaking point. Amidst the dramatic escalation of cases, Detroit’s Democratic Party Mayor Mike Duggan endorsed, on national television, the recently released policy of Henry Ford Health System that limited essential medical resources, such as ventilators, which would be given to patients most likely to survive the virus, leaving the most vulnerable patients to die.
Detroit Health Department heat map published on Friday shows the coronavirus "hot spots" in the city with a toal of 1,075 confirmed cases
The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) reported that the city of Detroit had 1,075 people with COVID-19 as of 2:00 pm Friday, an increase of 224 or 26 percent from the previous day. Of the state of Michigan’s total of 3,657 confirmed coronavirus cases, 3,038 or 83 percent are from the Detroit Metropolitan area of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties.
The number of deaths from COVID-19 in Michigan rose to 92 on Friday, with 23 in Detroit and 77 in the Tri-County Area. MDHSS also reported that the average age of the deceased is 68.4 years old and that two-thirds of them are men.
City health officials provided a chilling depiction of the virus spreading throughout Detroit on Friday with the publication of a heatmap showing the hotspots in neighborhoods where the virus is concentrated. The number of people with the virus in Detroit has grown by a multiple of 23 times over the past nine days; there were 48 infected individuals in the city as of March 18.
As the WSWS reported yesterday, Henry Ford Health System publicly acknowledged its policy that only the patients with the “best chance of getting better are our first priority” and, because of shortages of supplies and equipment, “Patients who are treated with a ventilator or ICU care may have these treatments stopped if they do not improve over time.”
A spokesman for the hospital system said that the policy has been developed as “part of a larger policy document developed for an absolute worst-case scenario” and is not an active policy. However, multiple reports by emergency room nurses on social media say that area hospitals are already practicing this “live-or-die” decision-making policy.
Melissa Steiner, an ICU nurse at Beaumont Health, posted a video from her car during which she broke down in tears as she described the COVID unit in her hospital. Steiner explained in her video: “So today was the first day that I’ve worked since our unit was designated the second COVID ICU in my hospital. And I don’t know what the f**k just happened for the past 13 hours. Honestly guys, it felt like I was working in a war zone — completely isolated from my team members, limited resources, limited supplies, limited responses from physicians, because they’re just as overwhelmed as we are dealing with a ton of other stuff.
“So basically, I just spent the last 13 hours, like, treating two critically ill COVID patients on the bed, basically by myself. And this is my normal for the next however many months it takes for this virus to die down. I’m already breaking, so for f**k’s sake people, please take this seriously. This is so bad.”
For the second day in a row, the situation in Detroit was featured on national television news media. On Thursday, CNN asked Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan about the “live-or-die” policy at Henry Ford Health System. Duggan resigned himself to a growth in the number of Detroit residents who will die by backing up the program as prudent, saying, “Henry Ford is one of America’s great health-care systems, and what they put out is honest... Everybody is doing everything we can to stop it, but you would be irresponsible as a health system CEO if you weren’t planning for that eventuality.”
This statement comes as no surprise given Mayor Duggan’s record of subordinating the city’s medical facilities to corporate interests. Before he became mayor of the city in 2014, Duggan was CEO of the public nonprofit Detroit Medical Center (DMC) located near the city’s cultural center and Wayne State University.
Duggan oversaw the sale of DMC in 2010 to Vanguard Health Systems and aggressively attacked the nonprofit model as “killing” health care in Detroit because it had long served as a last resort for the city’s indigent population. Bringing the private equity investment company Blackstone Group to the table, Duggan helped transform the only major public health-care complex in Detroit into a facility that would not serve those without health insurance.
Duggan has also been on the front line of the campaign to shut off water service to Detroiters who have been unable to pay their water bills. Since 2014, the city has shut the water off to 141,000 city accounts and last year, 23,000 households had their service disconnected. This basic necessity of life is now more than ever critical to survival in a city being overrun by the coronavirus while tens of thousands of people cannot wash their hands, take a bath or shower or wash their dishes or their clothes.
A March 9 promise from Mayor Duggan and Governor Whitmer that water would be turned back on through the so-called “Coronavirus Water Restart Program” has only restored service to 850 households with more than 5,000 homes to go.
It is under these conditions of immense poverty combined with unemployment, low-wage jobs, and rampant lack of health insurance and access to medical facilities, that the overall health of city residents has deteriorated dramatically over the past decade. All of these circumstances are contributing factors in the explosive spreading of the coronavirus in Detroit that is now underway.
In addition to the spike in cases among residents, Michigan Public Radio reported on Friday that there are now 24 confirmed cases of coronavirus among inmates at eight Michigan state prisons and nine cases among corrections officers.
Byron Osborn of the Michigan Corrections Organization, the prison workers’ union, said, “The problem is the ability to actually distance people inside the facility, that’s where the problem lies.” Osborne said that with a staffing shortage in Michigan prisons, the spread of COVID-19 is going to make matters much worse and a “tidal wave” of infected inmates is coming.
Dr. Homer Venters, an epidemiologist at the New York University College of Global Public Health and the former chief medical officer for the New York jail system, told Michigan Public Radio, “I think that most of our governors and our policy makers and certainly the CDC haven't yet contemplated how horrific it’s going to be in terms of people dying who don’t need to die.
“The primary thing is to get these facilities less crowded, and particularly less full of people who have the risk factors for serious illness and death.” Venters also said that state prisons are not prepared to move large numbers of very sick inmates to outside hospitals and the hospitals are not prepared for such an influx. He said, “What you do is you create a really toxic atmosphere that can quickly turn violent.”


HOW MANY OF THESE CITIES HAVE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DEM VOTING ILLEGALS?

 

Why Are Liberal Cities Such a Mess?

Many major U.S. cities run by liberal Democrats are in rough shape. They are afflicted by the problems of homelessness, violent crime, gangs, and unemployment to a far greater degree than the country as a whole. Consider the following:
Chicago's violence and gang-related drug problems are well-known. What’s less well-known is that the city hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1927. The city’s finances -- like most Democratically-run major cities -- are in shambles. At the end of 2015, according to a 2017 report by the Fiscal Times, Chicago had assets of just $4.7 billion against liabilities of more than $14 billion, a funded ratio of barely 33%.
The homeless population in Los Angeles has risen from a staggering 33,000 in 2010 to over 55,000 in 2018. The city -- already dominated by a liberal super-majority of legislators -- has just recently pushed through massive local tax increases designed to address the homeless crisis.
San Francisco actually has maps so people can track where the worst incidences of human waste are on the sidewalks. The homeless population now approaches 7000 and there is no law prohibiting sleeping on the streets, sidewalks, or other public places. Discarded syringes are everywhere. San Francisco’s property crime rate is the highest in the nation and “smash and grab” thefts involving broken car windows are so commonplace that repair shops have waiting lists. The DA’s office no longer prosecutes “victimless” crimes like prostitution or drug possession, resulting in a massive influx of drug dealers into the city.
Frighteningly similar situations exist is nearly every other major Democrat-run city, all around the nation:
In New York City, Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, Hartford, CT, Newark, Philadelphia and on and on, the story follows the same pattern: Homelessness, high crime, underwater finances, soft policing, lax immigration control (often sanctuary cities), high taxes, and business-averse regulations. It’s a guaranteed formula for failure.
When Democrats are in control, cities tend to go soft on crime, reward cronies with public funds, establish hostile business environments, heavily tax the most productive citizens and set up fat pensions for their union friends. Simply put, theirs is a Blue State blueprint for disaster.
The question, of course, is why? Why do they choose to govern like that? Can anything about the efficacy and propriety of liberal governing doctrine be extrapolated from these examples?
The answer is a resounding “yes.” To boil down the essential difference between conservative and liberal governing philosophy into the simplest terms, it would be this:
  • Conservatives believe in equal opportunity.
  • Liberals believe in equal outcome.
The conservative’s view of government’s role in society (after fulfilling its fundamental responsibilities of national defense, common-sense safety/liability regulations, environmental protections and providing a basic social safety net for those in a temporarily disadvantageous situation) is to set up the game pieces such that those choosing to participate have a reasonably equal chance of winning. Not perfectly equal, perhaps, but a reasonable shot at success. In the conservative paradigm, individual initiative, hard work and a bit of luck can eliminate almost all the barriers to educational, professional and financial achievement.
In contrast, liberal doctrine stipulates an equal outcome for all people. Their view of government is that its responsibility is to ensure that every individual has at least a minimally acceptable share of society’s spoils (that share being quite arbitrarily determined by liberal politicians, according to their whims and the political exigencies in effect at the time). Liberal governing practices of wealth redistribution, punitive taxation, excessive regulations designed to impede runaway capitalistic profits and “cover every contingency” individual benefit programs all combine to produce -- in many instances -- the unintended consequence of short-circuiting personal initiative and ambition. Instead, these excessive giveaway programs essentially “teach” some people how to game the system and get the government to pay for their existence in society. That’s not the original intent, but that’s how it ends up playing out in many cases.
Liberal cities are governed by the guiding tenets of softness, misplaced “compassion,” and individual unaccountability. Examples include:
  • Hands-off policing style (NYC has long since abandoned the highly successful stop-and-frisk practices of the Giuliani years that led to low street crime).
  • Sanctuary cities, which give rise to higher incidents of crime, poverty, unemployment, and the wasting of taxpayer-funded public resources because of the undocumented population’s draining effect on the community.
  • The inexplicable decision of cities like Boston to no longer prosecute crimes such as shoplifting and breaking and entering, leading to urban stores not being able to remain open and be profitable (thus denying the community of a valuable resource).
  • Widespread locally approved abuse of the SNAP/EBT program, allowing its acceptance for alcohol and other nonessential items.
  • Explicit sanctioning of sleeping on the street or other common public areas and unrestricted public loitering.
Liberal policies have worked almost perfectly to degrade the quality of inner-city life for their residents to the point of abject unacceptability. Instead of raising the standard of living for all the city’s inhabitants, excessive giveaways (too often offered without requiring adequate, verifiable proof-of-need) and lax or missing enforcement of local laws and edicts have the opposite effect -- such governmental practice only teaches people that they are forever unaccountable as regards the purported norms of society and that they will be given their daily sustenance for free, without putting forth any commensurate effort on their part. In short, overindulgence by local city governments denies the notion of ownership over their own lives to the lower strata of society. That notion of self-ownership over the control and ultimate destiny of one’s life is absolutely critical to a well-functioning society. Without that sense of personal responsibility, there is no civilized order.
There is an old cliché that speaks perfectly to the societal dangers inherent when the individual does not feel the responsibility of ownership: “No one ever washes a rented car.” Liberal cities are strewn with the abandoned, rusted hulks of rented cars, their rotting carcasses a blight on the landscape, indisputable testimony to failed Democratic policy.


No comments: