Michigan Disability Resistance

This feels all too familiar.

I've seen this anger before.

For four years, my task was to learn to treat people who were sick. Even the ones who wore their Confederate pride openly, even the ones who threatened to shoot me on home health visits. My task was to learn from experienced physicians how to help people get well. Even when they witnessed racist behavior directed toward me. Even when they glossed over that bigotry.

The response to the violence in Charlottesville has had its fair share of denial -- people saying, this is not the city I know, the protesters came from elsewhere, this is not the America I know.

In Charlottesville, this was exactly the America I knew. This was the Virginia I knew. This was the medicine I knew. Even on graduation day, one the happiest days of my life, my family broke bread at a restaurant I later learned was owned by a man affiliated with the University of Virginia who had made controversial and racist statements.

Protest and Politics is the first global mapping of the sounds of protest, demonstration and political activism.

Sourcing field recordings from our own archive as well as from dozens of field recordists around the world, we assembled a database of protest sounds over summer 2017, and opened this up to artists and musicians to recompose and reimagine, bringing to bear their own experiences and memories onto these sounds.

You can explore the documentary field recordings of protests, spend time in the alternative sound world created by their reimagined counterparts, or flip freely between the two as you choose.

Sorry about the language, but interesting in view of Charlottesville......

https://goo.gl/ohghkx

It was September 1738, and Benjamin Lay had walked 20 miles, subsisting on “acorns and peaches,” to reach the Quakers’ Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Beneath his overcoat he wore a military uniform and a sword — both anathema to Quaker teachings. He also carried a hollowed-out book with a secret compartment, into which he had tucked a tied-off animal bladder filled with bright red pokeberry juice.

When it was Lay’s turn to speak, he rose to address the Quakers, many of whom had grown rich and bought African slaves. He was a dwarf, barely four feet tall, but from his small body came a thunderous voice. God, he intoned, respects all people equally, be they rich or poor, man or woman, white or black.

Throwing his overcoat aside, he spoke his prophecy: “Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures.” He raised the book above his head and plunged the sword through it. As the “blood” gushed down his arm, several members of the congregation swooned. He then splattered it on the heads and bodies of the slave keepers. His message was clear: Anyone who failed to heed his call must expect death — of body and soul.

Lay did not resist when his fellow Quakers threw him out of the building. He knew he would be disowned by his beloved community for his performance, but he had made his point. As long as Quakers owned slaves, he would use his body and his words to disrupt their hypocritical routines.

Skyrocketing price tags for new drugs to treat rare diseases have stoked outrage nationwide. But hundreds of old, commonly used drugs cost the Medicaid program billions of extra dollars in 2016 versus 2015, a Kaiser Health News data analysis shows. Eighty of the drugs -- some generic and some still carrying brand names -- proved more than two decades old.

Even after a medicine has gone generic, the branded version often remains on the market. Medicaid recipients might choose to purchase it because they're brand loyalists or because state laws prevent pharmacists from automatically substituting generics. Drugs driving Medicaid spending increases ranged from common asthma medicines like Ventolin to over-the-counter painkillers like the generic form of Aleve to generic antidepressants and heartburn medicines.

Among the stark examples:

• Ventolin, originally approved in 1981, treats and prevents spasms that constrict patients' airways and make it difficult to breathe. When a gram of it went from $2.58 to $2.90 on average, Medicaid paid out an extra $54.5 million for the drug.
• Naproxen sodium, a painkiller originally approved in 1994 as brand-name Aleve, went from costing Medicaid an average of $0.72 to $1.70 a pill, an increase of 136%. Overall, the change cost the program an extra $10 million in 2016.
• Generic metformin hydrochloride, an oral Type 2 diabetes drug that's been around since the 1990s, went from an average 10 cents to 13 cents a pill from 2015 to 2016. Those extra three pennies per pill cost Medicaid a combined $8.3 million in 2016. And cost increases for the extended-release, authorized generic version cost the program another $6.5 million.

Thirty-two years ago, a vehicle accident left Todd Mouw a quadriplegic, unable to feed himself and needing a ventilator to breathe.

Yet for decades he was able to live at home with the help of family, aided by medical staff who visited him daily to help provide 24-hour care.

That care abruptly ended when a for-profit company that Iowa hired last year to manage the state's Medicaid program announced that some of the staffers who had attended to Mouw all those years weren't qualified, and it wouldn't pay for the cost.

As he and his wife Cyndi futilely searched for qualified help, Todd's health dissipated. He had to leave his home for care, and on July 8 he died at age 53. 

Now, Cyndi Mouw is speaking out, blaming her husband's death on Iowa's decision to turn over its Medicaid program to for-profit companies she believes are unilaterally denying or revoking medical services to potentially thousands of other disabled or elderly Iowans.

"If they're trying to do this because they need to save money? Well, find other places," Cyndi Mouw said. "And, yeah, I'm sure he's not the only one."

Her criticisms have echoed those of other families who complain that the private companies now managing the state's Medicaid program are denying care that the state once approved.