On January 27, the “new” president signed an executive order called “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” The order barred people from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from entering the US for at least 90 days, and it barred entry by Syrian refugees indefinitely.
The order was challenged in court, and in Febuary a federal judge issued a restraining order temporarily halting enforcement of the ban. On March 6, a revised ban was signed by the “new” president. It was challenged once again in court by several states, and on March 15 a federal district judge issued another order temporarily halting enforcement of the ban. The Trump administration is appealing the ruling.
Specifically with respect to Syrians, in effect, the “new” government is telling us that 5 million refugees from Syria and another 6.5 million Syrians who are displaced within that country are causing poverty in this country. The reality is that less than 15,000 refugees from Syria are in this country.
What does this have to do with our healthcare?
With respect to people from the other six countries included in the president’s latest travel ban, “Immigrant doctors from the six Muslim-majority countries included in President Trump’s revised travel ban play a critical role in caring for Americans, especially in many of the Rust Belt and rural areas that voted heavily for the Republican, according to an analysis by graduate students in economics at Harvard University and MIT.” (See “Doctors from banned countries serve millions of Americans, analysis finds,” Boston Globe, March 6, 2017.)
Today there are over 165,000 immigrant doctors in this country. Some 7000 of them are from the six nations covered in the new “ban.” There are many reasons for this. But the main reason is that almost half of the people in this country are either uninsured or participants in Public Health Programs such as Medicaid, Medicare, VA Health Administration and the Indian Health Service.
Some 3,700,000 of us are treated by doctors from those six countries in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
Today, there are 73 million people on Medicaid and 58 million people on Medicare. The Medicare population is projected to grow to 80 million people in the next few years.
Although America is not the planet, American Nationalism would have us believe it is. One of the aims of this nationalism is to destroy the Public Health System in this country.
We must resist this insanity by supporting the Nationalization of Healthcare Access. HR 676 – Expanded and Improved Medicare For All Act, has 61 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives. This is a political struggle with “new” government. Do not fall for “American” Nationalism. The planet is much larger than America and we are all the same human beings.
