"Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the Justice Department would review all police reform agreements to make sure they don’t counter Trump’s primary concerns: reducing crime and promoting police morale. It also asked for 90 days to examine the Obama administration’s signed consent decree with the Baltimore Police Department, triggered by the rough treatment that led to the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in April 2015.
‘This is terrifying,’ former Justice Department investigator Jonathan Smith told the Washington Post. ‘This raises the question of whether, under the current attorney general, the Department of Justice is going to walk away from its obligation to ensure that law enforcement across the country is following the Constitution.’ The NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Sherrilyn Ifill tweeted simply:…
... The administration made another move toward promoting cruelty in the world by halting funding to the United Nations Population Fund, which provides family planning and maternal health services to women globally. Evaluators say the US contribution to the program prevented an estimated 100,000 unsafe abortions last year and 10,000 maternal deaths, but anti-abortion advocates have charged that the group may somehow, somewhere promote abortion—even though it officially does not provide or promote abortion services. George W. Bush pulled US funding because the agency was working in China, under its coercive “One Child” policy. But it no longer provides any services in China, a U.N. official told the Huffington Post’s Laura Bassett. The $76 million US contribution makes up 7 percent of the budget.
Maybe most shocking, to revive his dashed attempts at replacing the Affordable Care Act, Trump sent Vice President Mike Pence and other top officials to meet with the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, and they reportedly hashed out a proposal that would effectively gut the ACA’s most popular provision: ending insurance discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions. Freedom Caucus chair Mark Meadows insists the draft proposal holds on to that provision, but as the New York Times explains, that’s in name only.
THE STAKES ARE HIGHER NOW THAN EVER. GET THE NATION IN YOUR INBOX.
Enter Email SIGN UP!The plan would let states opt out of what the ACA describes as “essential health benefits” to be included in every plan, which currently range from maternity care to chemotherapy. That, after all, is the nature of “insurance;” it covers conditions we don’t expect to have. A woman who doesn’t expect to find herself pregnant can nonetheless find herself pregnant and needing maternity care; a healthy young man might get cancer and need chemotherapy. Conservatives and insurance companies don’t like that provision, so this proposal would let states scrap it. It would also do away with the requirement that insurance plans charge everyone in the same age group the same premiums, regardless of health history, known as community rating…."
(Via.). The Unvarnished Cruelty of Donald Trump’s GOP | The Nation:
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