Health Care Free Fall, "the Foreclosure King," and the History of the Plague

#Bryce Covert, "Health Care Coverage Free Fall," The Nation, November 2-9, 2020. 

"John is one of 659,000 Texans who lost their health insurance in the first three months of the pandemic, adding to an uninsured rate that was the highest in the country before Covid-19." "As the economy slowed, millions of people have lost work, income, and with that, their health insurance. The state's uninsured rate has climbed from 17.7 percent in 2018 to 29 percent today." 

"Texas is one of only 12 states still refusing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act." "Before the pandemic, over half of uninsured Texans had no place they regularly went to for preventive medical care, compared with just over one-quarter of the insured." "Between February and May, 5.4 million people who lost their jobs in the United States, also lost their health insurance coverage -- the highest increase ever recorded." "Matt Broadduce, a senior research analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, has found that in Medicaid expansion states, on average, less than a quarter of unemployed workers become uninsured. By contrast, in states that haven't expanded Medicaid, on  average, more than 40 percent of workers who lost their job also lost their insurance." "On average, people using COBRA spent $7,000 on the insurance in 2019..."

"That leaves Medicaid as the last option. But its span is to only a very narrow slice of the population in the states that haven't expanded eligibility under the ACA." "Medicaid expansion has been found to save tens of thousands of lives." "Without insurance, people with chronic conditions like high blood pressure, asthma, and diabetes may have struggled to afford medication to keep those [conditions] under control before the pandemic. In Houston, were nearly a fifth of residents lacked insurance before the pandemic, and where many more face that prospect, there has been a huge spike in the number of people dying at home without going to the hospital or dialing 911."

"In Texas, 61 percent of the uninsured are Hispanic, and an additional 10 percent are Black." "Marketplace insurance has become nearly unattainable for residents without subsidies." 

" 'Exurbanization' is often an euphemism for white fight from metropolitan diversity."

#Sheelah Kolhatbar, "Dollar for Dollar," The New Yorker, July 20, 2020.

Steve Mnuchin, the current Treasury Secretary, may be said to have seen his business career take off when he formed a team with Edward Lampert. "In 2005, Lampert merged Kmart with Sears, and proceeded to close hundreds of stores and lay off hundreds of thousands of workers. He liquidated the retailers' real estate, and many of their other assets, earning enormous profits for a company named ESL..." 

Mnuchin's most notable venture before becoming the  Treasury Secretary, was his creation of One West, which he described as a "community bank," but in the next five years it foreclosed on thirty-six thousand homes in California, many of them in low income neighborhoods. "Local activists began to call Mnuchin"'the foreclosure king."  Mnuchin's business model was to seek out portfolios of distressed residential and commercial mortgages; he would modify or restructure the loans before selling them, months or years later, at a profit. 

#Lawrence Wright, "Crossroads," The New Yorker, July 20, 2020.

"Before arriving in Italy, the rampaging contagion had already killed millions of people as it burned through China, Russia, India, Persia, Syria, and Asia Minor. It was said that these were entire territories where nobody was left alive. Medieval mortality figures are a matter of speculation, but Bologna is believed to have lost half its population in 1348."

"The 1918 Spanish flu began in the early spring, disappeared in the summer, then returned in the autumn. October, 1918, was the deadliest month in American history." "The plague has never been entirely eradicated, but, with each wave, it may have killed so efficiently that it starved itself of human hosts."

"The relative standing of capital and  labor reversed: landed gentry were battered by plunging food prices and rising wages, while  former serfs, who had been too impoverished to leave anything but a portion of land to their oldest sons, increasingly found themselves able to spread their wealth among all their children, including their daughters. Women, many of them widows, entered depopulated professions, such as weaving and brewing." 

"The Middle Ages didn't end definitively until the fall of Constantinople in 1453." "The Italian Renaissance was perhaps the greatest efflorescence of science and art in Western civilization." "The U.S., meanwhile, had reached almost full employment, before plummeting to a level of joblessness not seen since the Great Depression. But after 9/11 the United States forged a dark path. Instead of taking advantage of surging patriotism and heightened international good will, America invaded Iraq and  tortured suspects at Guantanamo; at home, prosperous Americans essentially barricaded themselves off from their fellow citizens, allowing racial and economic inequalities to fester."