Tiny Vermont (population 647,000) has taken a big step: to use legislation to make giant oil companies accountable for a significant amount of damage that has been done to the earth’s environment by climate change. According to VTDigger, Republican Governor Phil Scott let the legislation, S.259, the “Climate Superfund Act,” go into effect without his […]
health care system
The World Happiness and “Shorter Lives” Reports: Important Warnings to Americans
We have commented earlier on the World Happiness Reports, published since 2012 by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. In the 2022 report, the US ranks 15th, just ahead of Germany and behind eight European Union nations, Australia, Canada, Iceland, Israel, New Zealand, and Switzerland. In March 2023, NPR reported that life expectancy in the US […]
Nurses, Ancient Goddesses and Healing: Reclaiming the Power of the Feminine Principle
Introduction Nurses throughout the United States, and indeed throughout the world, have been on the front line of care during the pandemic. They are among the heroes in our communities, but we know that they are facing severe challenges as individuals and as a profession. There has been a nursing shortage for years, and that […]
Happiness and Health: A Correlation?
The World Happiness Report is out for 2019. Is there anything we can learn from the current top three “happiest countries in the world” and their health care systems, especially as compared to our own in the United States? Is there a way to see how health care systems and citizen happiness are related? We […]
Updates on Issues Previously Raised
We have commented on a number of issues in the past which we can now update. First, we noted in “Hillary and Helen: Women ‘Deleted’ by the Texas Board of Education,” posted on September 21, 2018, that the Texas Board of Education had voted preliminarily in September 2018 to delete several significant figures from the […]
Medicaid Expansion in Red States
Health care proved to be a significant issue in the 2018 midterm elections throughout the country. According to Annie Lowery, writing in The Atlantic in November, the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) “came up in more than half of Democratic ads and nearly a third of those for Republicans,” a much higher rate than in the […]
The House is Blue
The midterm election is over, and the House of Representatives has turned blue. So have state legislatures and governorships around the country. What will we really do with this important change in our national make-up? We still have Donald Trump as President. But in many places throughout our country, especially in the districts where Democrats […]
Index to the Third Year
Thank you as always for checking in with WisdomWordsPPF! Here is a guide to the past year of blog posts (note that some posts appear in several categories). If you want a guide to the first year (October 2015-October 2016), you can find it here, and a guide to the second year (October 2016-October 2017) […]
Myths, Lies and Truths about Single-Payer Health Care as the Midterms Approach
With the midterm elections looming, it is becoming clearer that health care is very important to Americans across the country. A Gallup poll conducted in March 2018 found that 55% “of those polled said they worry ‘a great deal’ about the cost and availability of health care in the U.S. . . .This is the […]
Revisiting Quality-of-Life Issues in Our Sister Nations
Earlier posts have looked at quality-of-life statistics of the United States compared to other advanced democracies, especially in the European Union. As we have noted, a number of European nations have far higher standards of living than the US. By many measures, Finland consistently ranks as having one of the best education systems in the […]