More than 1.1 million seniors in the Medicare program could die prematurely over the next decade because they cannot afford the exorbitant prices of prescription medications.

Unless drug prices are reduced, the analysis estimated that 112,000 seniors per year could succumb to early death as a result of not being able to afford their medications. If these trends continue, cost-related nonadherence to drug therapy will be “a leading cause of death in the U.S., ahead of diabetes, influenza, pneumonia, and kidney disease.”

“One of the biggest contributors to poor health, hospital admissions, higher healthcare costs, and preventable death is patients failing to take their medications as prescribed,” said Timothy Lash, president of the West Health Policy Center. “Cost-related nonadherence is a significant and growing issue that is a direct result of runaway drug prices and a failure to implement policies and regulations that make drugs more affordable.”

Medicare beneficiaries are required to pay 25% of the list price cost of generic and brand-name medications until they reach their out-of-pocket maximum.

“As drug companies continue to raise list prices,” the analysis explained, “patients may experience a significant increase in their coinsurance costs.” 

In addition, researchers projected that health complications stemming from the unaffordable cost of prescriptions will force Medicare to spend nearly $18 billion annually on avoidable medical expenses.

Researchers expect “cost-related nonadherence” to drug therapy to increase not only unnecessary suffering but also Medicare spending, as deteriorating health conditions drive up preventable expenses by more than $177 billion by 2030. 

According to the Council for Informed Drug Spending Analysis (CIDSA), allowing Medicare to negotiate and limit drug price increases could prevent nearly 94,000 deaths per year while also reducing Medicare spending by almost $476 billion by 2030.

Sean Dickson, director of health policy at West Health Policy Center and chair of CIDSA, said that “the costs of doing nothing about high drug prices are too high.”

“Especially when policy changes such as allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices would result in saving millions of lives and billions of dollars,” he added.

High Drug Prices Could Result in Premature Deaths of More Than 1.1 Million Seniors in Next Decade: Analysis | Common Dreams News

Governments across Europe are failing to protect their citizens from toxic air pollution, with most Europeans still breathing filthy air. Pollutants from farming, domestic heating and vehicles are beyond the levels needed to ensure breathable air within World Health Organization guidelines, despite EU legislation, government pledges and years of campaigning. Exposure to such pollution caused about 417,000 premature deaths across Europe – including non-EU member states – in 2018.

Only Ireland, Iceland, Finland and Estonia showed levels of fine particulate matter – one of the most dangerous forms of air pollution – that were below the WHO guidelines in 2018. Six member states – Italy, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and the Czech Republic – breached the EU’s limits for fine particulate matter, called PM2.5, in 2018. The EU limits are less stringent than WHO guidelines. There were 54,000 premature deaths from nitrogen dioxide (NO2) in 2018 in the EU-28, which includes the UK, which was then still a member of the EU. Ground-level ozone caused about 19,000 premature deaths in the EU-28 that year.

Green campaigners said governments must act urgently. Margherita Tolotto, the senior policy officer at the European Environmental Bureau, which represents campaigning groups across the EU, said: “How many wake-up calls do government officials need to take on air pollution? Their delay is costing us our health and a safe environment. They know what needs to be done to improve air quality: cleaner energy and industrial production, greener and smarter transport, and sustainable farming.”

European governments failing to protect citizens from air pollution, data reveals | Environment | The Guardian

Governments had failed to meet EU targets, the EEA said. Under EU rules, every member state should have submitted a plan for bringing air pollution within health limits in 2018. However, Italy’s plan is still at draft stage, while Greece, Luxembourg and Romania have yet to submit any plan.

 Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega was never a socialist according to the World Socialist Movement, one of the few critical voices of the Sandinistas over the decades. Our journals and our blogs revealed the authoritarian nature of his regime and the nepotism that existed.

So it did not come as a great surprise when Reuters did a feature on the corruption of the Ortega dynasty. 

The president, his family and close associates have gained ownership or managerial control of at least a dozen TV channels, radio stations, and online news sites. Some of the acquisitions, including the Canal 8 deal, were financed at least in part by funds provided by oil-rich Venezuela, said three current and former employees and people familiar with the acquisitions.

The Ortega family itself, according to 2020 tax and corporate registration documents reviewed by Reuters, controls ownership of Canal 8 and radio broadcaster Radio Ya.

Friends and close allies, according to the documents, own three additional television channels – Canal 4, Canal 13, and Canal 22 – all managed by children of the Ortegas. A fourth station, Canal 2, is also owned by an associate, according to people familiar with the channel, and the Ortegas manage its news operations.  

Through state ownership, the Ortegas control TV broadcaster Canal 6, national network Radio Nicaragua, and online news portals like El 19 Digital. Associates of the first family own at least three other radio stations, all openly allied with the government.

The clan’s media empire has silenced those opposed to Ortega. The National Assembly, the country’s pro-Ortega legislature, recently passed laws that further pressure rival media. One bill makes it a crime for anyone to spread “false” information via social media or in news outlets. Another imposes prison sentences of up to six years for anyone convicted of publishing information “not authorized” by the government. In 2018, an Ortega plan to increase social security contributions and lower pension payouts sparked demonstrations. At first, Murillo told state and allied outlets not to cover the unrest. “The order was to ignore everything,” said Carlos Mikel Espinosa, then an editor at El 19 Digital, a state-controlled online news portal. Espinosa quit when the upheaval intensified and the government response grew violent.

Over the past two years, Nicaragua’s government bought advertising worth an estimated $59 million from the three biggest TV channels owned or controlled by the Ortega family, according to data compiled by Media Gurú, a consultancy that tracks media spending. The government spent an estimated $230,000, less than 1% as much, at channels not affiliated with the Ortegas.  Over the past decade, Canal 8 hasn’t paid more than $4 million in tax and interest it should have under Nicaraguan law.

“They’ve created a system in which the money comes out of the national budget, runs through their holdings, and all stays in their pockets,” said Alfonso Malespín, a media specialist at the University of Commercial Sciences in Managua

The International Monetary Fund, in a 2017 report, estimated that Nicaragua received as much as $3.2 billion from Venezuela before the South American country’s economy imploded in recent years. Nicaragua’s own central bank has said the figure reached as much as $5 billion. But neither government has ever given a full accounting of the financing or how Ortega spent the money, which is equivalent to as much as a third of Nicaragua’s annual economic output.

As the media empire shores up the president’s power, his government is steering large sums of state money into the properties controlled by the family and its allies. By 2008, Ortega’s family and close associates had begun building what today is a business empire with assets in energy, security and other sectors. 

 Land inequality is rising with farmland increasingly dominated by a few major companies.

Just 1% of the world’s farms operate 70% of the world’s crop fields, ranches and orchards.

 Control over the land has become far more concentrated both directly through ownership and indirectly through contract farming, which results in more destructive monocultures and fewer carefully tended smallholdings.

Landlessness was  highest in Latin America, where the poorest 50% of people owned just 1% of the land.

Worldwide, between 80% and 90% of farms are family or smallholder-owned. But they cover only a small and shrinking part of the land and commercial production.

Asia and Africa have the highest levels of smallholdings, where human input tends to be higher than chemical and mechanical factors, and where time frames are more likely to be for generations rather than 10-year investment cycles.

Over the past four decades, the biggest shift from small to big was in the United States and Europe, where ownership is in fewer hands and even individual farmers work under strict contracts for retailers, trading conglomerates and investment funds. These financial arrangements are now spreading to the developing world, which is accelerating the decline of soil quality, the overuse of water resources, and the pace of deforestation.

“The concentration of ownership and control results in a greater push for monocultures and more intensive agriculture as investment funds tend to work on 10-year cycles to generate returns,” he said. This is also connected to social problems, including poverty, migration, conflict and the spread of zoonotic diseases like Covid-19.

“Smallholder farmers, family farmers, indigenous people and small communities are much more cautious with use of land. It’s not just about return on investment; it’s about culture, identity and leaving something for the next generation. They take much more care and in the long run, they produce more per unit area and destroy less.”

1% of farms operate 70% of world’s farmland | Farming | The Guardian

 Thousands of women who have come to the UK from outside the EU to accompany an existing employer in their private household on an overseas domestic worker visa, usually so they can send their earnings to families in their home countries.

In 2012, the government introduced restrictions which removed the rights of holders of the visa to change employer and renew their stay in the UK. Instead, workers entered on a six-month, non-renewable visa, on which they could not change employer, no matter the reason. Following a damning review of the visa scheme in 2016, the Home Office made changes to it which allowed domestic workers to switch employers within the six-month term of their visa, and to apply for further leave to remain as a domestic worker for up to two years if they were recognised as having been enslaved under the National Referral Mechanism (NRM), the UK’s framework for identifying modern slavery victims.

However, charities supporting domestic workers say the changes have made no difference to the levels of abuse and domestic servitude reported to them by women who have successfully escaped their workplaces, and that people are often left fearful of deportation after fleeing. Kalayaan, the UK’s leading organisation for domestic workers, along with the Voice of Domestic Workers, are calling on ministers to urgently reinstate the original overseas domestic worker visa. They argue that, due to the hidden and unregulated nature of domestic work, combined by the workers’ status as a migrant and dependence on their employer for work, immigration status and accommodation, it is placing domestic workers at heightened risk of abuse and exploitation.  Campaigners say that in order to prevent people from being left in a state of limbo after escaping from abusive situations – and to ensure that domestic workers aren’t discouraged from fleeing exploitation – ministers must revert the overseas domestic worker visa back to its pre-2012 requirements.

Kate Roberts, UK and Europe manager at Anti-Slavery International, said: “People who hold the overseas domestic worker visa have been repeatedly shown that restrictive immigration measures facilitate the exploitation of migrant workers. Domestic workers migrate because they need to work. People are making really difficult choices to work and support their families. And if they don’t have this right it work, it’s something exploiters can abuse to create this vulnerability. People need to be able to exercise their rights.” Ms Roberts pointed out that under the previous visa, domestic workers were able to exercise rights and leave and get another job without jeopardising their livelihood and their immigration status. “None of this is rocket science. It’s frustrating that it’s something domestic workers have been saying for so long, and they’re presenting a solution, but are not being listened to,” she added.

Marissa Begonia, a domestic worker and founding member of the Voice of Domestic Workers, said, “The government is so proud of their Modern Slavery Act and says it’s a world leader in ending modern slavery and trafficking. Yet forcing migrant domestic workers to apply under the NRM is not a solution but another form of exploitation. The pre-2012 visa protected and recognised us as workers because that’s what we are.”

Ministers urged to change policy that ‘facilitates exploitation’ of overseas domestic workers | The Independent

 Climate-heating gases have reached record levels in the atmosphere despite the global lockdowns caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization has said. There is estimated to have been a cut in emissions of between 4.2% and 7.5% in 2020 due to the shutdown of travel and other activities. But the WMO said this was a “tiny blip” in the continuous buildup of greenhouse gases in the air caused by human activities, and less than the natural variation seen year to year.

The data shows action to cut emissions is currently far from what is needed to avoid the worst impacts of the climate emergency. Scientists calculate that emissions must fall by half by 2030 to give a good chance of limiting global heating to 1.5C, beyond which hundreds of millions of people will face more heatwaves, droughts, floods and poverty. 

“The lockdown-related fall in emissions is just a tiny blip on the long-term graph. We need a sustained flattening of the curve,” said Petteri Taalas, the WMO secretary-general. “We breached the global [annual] threshold of 400ppm in 2015 and, just four years later, we have crossed 410ppm. Such a rate of increase has never been seen in the history of our records. CO2 remains in the atmosphere for centuries. The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration was 3m-5m years ago, when the temperature was 2-3C warmer and sea level was 10-20 metres higher than now. But there weren’t 7.7 billion  inhabitants.”

Talaas said a “complete transformation of our industrial, energy and transport systems” was needed. “The changes are economically affordable and technically possible and would affect our everyday life only marginally,” he said. “It is welcome that a growing number of countries and companies have committed themselves to carbon neutrality. There is no time to lose.”

Climate crisis: CO2 hits new record despite Covid-19 lockdowns | Environment | The Guardian

The word missing from Talaas’ statement is profitability

 China is planning to include new measures to encourage more births and address  its rapidly ageing population and shrinking workforce.

In China, the number of citizens aged 60 or over stood at 254 million at the end of last year, accounting for 18.1 percent of the population. The number is expected to rise to 300 million by 2025 and 400 million by 2035, putting huge pressure on the country’s health and social care system. The number of people of working age could decline by 200 million by 2050.

The Chinese government will offer extensive financial and policy support to encourage couples to have more children. The measures include introducing more affordable nursery services as well as relaxing the limits on the number of children Chinese couples are allowed to have.

“More inclusive population policies will be introduced to improve fertility, the quality of the workforce and the structure of the population,” Yuan Xin, vice-president of the China Population Association, explained.

The world’s most populous nation decided in 2016 to relax restrictions on family size and allow couples to have a second child in a bid to address the rapid increase in the elderly, as well as a dwindling workforce. Some experts say it should now scrap all limits entirely.

Policies aimed at suppressing population growth must be replaced by a system designed to boost fertility, the official Legal Daily said, citing government experts.

“More research and discussion is needed as to when the policy can be further relaxed, and to what extent it will be relaxed – whether all couples will be allowed to have three children, or whether the family planning policy will be entirely abolished,” said Lu Jiehua, a population studies professor at Peking University.

Despite the relaxation of the one-child policy in 2016, the number of live births per 1,000 people fell to a record low of 10.48 last year, down from 10.94 in 2018.

“To proactively tackle the ageing population, urgent measures are required to reform our country’s family planning policies and liberate fertility,” said Zheng Bingwen, an expert with the China Academy of Social Science.

China to introduce new policies to tackle ageing population | China | Al Jazeera

 The UK’s biggest supermarkets received £1.9bn in business rates relief given as a financial cushion in the pandemic.

Sainsbury’s disclosed business rates relief worth £230m in the first half of its financial year, while paying £231m in dividends.

In October, Tesco announced a £315m dividend despite receiving £585m in relief.

 A stockbroker Shore Capital told the Times it was “absolutely right” for Sainsbury’s to look after “its retail and pension fund shareholders”.

Telecom Plus – a FTSE 250 utility company – paid a dividend for the same period as it claimed furlough funds from the government. In a response that mimicked Black’s comment, it said: “We ensured those shareholders who are reliant on the dividends would retain this important source of income.” Asked if the shareholders it had in mind were pensioners, the company said yes.

BlackRock manages more than $7 trillion (£5.3tn) of funds and makes it clear that lobbyists for the organisation represent the interests of hardworking pension savers.

When the finance industry gets into trouble, it pleads that it is funding ordinary people’s retirements. It isn’t true. Pensioners are a useful defence in the City’s fight to preserve its privileges. Unwittingly they are wheeled out as human shields by the finance industry, and increasingly major corporations, to serve and protect probably the most powerful interests in the UK.

Individual shareholders own just 13.5% of the London stock market. UK pension funds own 2.4% and insurance companies, which could be said to be investing on behalf of pension savers, account for a further 4%. Collectively, that is less than a fifth of the market. The largest slice is held by overseas investors, who own 55%. 

The myth of the ‘poor pensioner’ helps shield the City | Financial sector | The Guardian

 “Making billions from arms exports which fuel the conflict while providing a small fraction of that in aid to Yemen is both immoral and incoherent.”  Oxfam’s Yemen Country Director, Muhsin Siddiquey remarked  “The world’s wealthiest nations cannot continue to put profits above the Yemeni people.”

The members of the G20 which is currently being hosted by Saudi Arabia have exported over $17 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia since it intervened in the Yemen civil war.

Yemen is in imminent danger of the worst famine the world has seen in decades, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned.

“In the absence of immediate action, millions of lives may be lost,” Guterres said.

 The UN requires about $1.5 billion this year for its humanitarian operations in Yemen. To date, it has received less than half of that. 

In contrast,  the USA has  through the $23 billon sale of 50 F-35 fighter aircraft, 18 MQ-9B Reaper drones, air-to-air missiles and various other munitions to the United Arab Emirates, another member of the Saudi Arabian-led coalition that has been pounding Yemen since 2015.  

The Yemen Civil War Arms Bonanza | Countercurrents

Parts of the Guatemalan parliament were set on fire by anti-government protesters on  Saturday, demonstrating against  controversial budget bill. People took to city and town squares around the country with demands ranging from a presidential veto of the budget bill and prosecution of corruption to resignations across all branches of government and the constitutional assembly.

“We’re tired of corruption,” Karla Figueroa told Al Jazeera at a rally in Guatemala City’s central plaza. “It doesn’t matter which government – they’re all the same,” Figueroa said.

Guatemala’s Congress had passed the budget bill Tuesday night, increasing lawmakers’ own expenses for meals while it axed $25m destined to combat malnutrition. Guatemala has one of the world’s highest rates of chronic malnutrition and the hurricanes have exacerbated hunger; for many, the funding cut affecting malnutrition was the last straw.

Flori Salguero, one of the demonstrators, said she wants Giammattei and the legislators who passed the budget bill to resign.

 “We are tired of so much theft. I don’t want my kids and my grandkids to live in such an indebted country,” she told Al Jazeera.

Due to the failure of the leftist governments in several countries in Latin America ( South, Central and Caribbean )  peoples have elected right wings government but it has been proven that both sides  are two wings of the same bird known as capitalism, and both sides have been allied or representative of the local  ruling class, and also it has been proven that the problems facing the working class  around the world are not the presidents, political parties,  or the ministers, it is the mode of production, but due to the lack of proletarian consciousness peoples are going to come back to fall in  the hands of the left

The governments are placing austerity on the peoples because as we have said for many years that the state is financed with surplus-value and the rich peoples are not contributing with any taxes and the state is forced to cut down education, social benefits, and health services, but they have increased the budget for state ministers, and debts with the IMF,  in some countries, ministers arrive at the congress palace without any money and they leave driving helicopters and Rolls Royce and living in big mansions, and religious leaders ( Catholics and protestants )  are also allied of the right-wingers because they are also part of the budget

The ironic thing is that the Vice President of Guatemala has asked the President to resign and he will also resign for the good of the country, but probably it is just another political tactic to look for his own re-election later on, but the president insists staying in power. This is a different situation to the USA where one sector of the working class is supporting their own rulers, but in this case,  the peoples are rejecting all of them.

This is a very corrupted government involved in several criminal activities including drug trafficking and it is one of the puppets of the USA, there is a  saying in Latin America that when the USA intervene in any country, drugs and corruption come along with that, it is like in Haiti since the invasion the traffic of drugs has increased drastically, but drugs traffic is also part of the production of profits in the capitalist system, it like selling cars, chairs or any other capitalist commodity.