Editor’s note: This is Part II of a two-part story. Read Part I, which was originally published on January 10, here.
In 2004, Florida voters passed a three-strikes medical malpractice law. The law as passed would have revoked the medical license of any practitioner hit with three judgments of malpractice by a court in a lawsuit, or those who received an adverse finding by a medical board or an arbitrator.
In April 2013, Jim Doyle of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described the case of 53-year-old Regina Turner and a medical procedure that had gone horribly wrong. Turner had entered the St. Clare Health Center in Fenton, Missouri, for a left-side craniotomy bypass. However, that’s not what happened. Through what hospital officials later admitted was a breakdown in their procedures, Dr. Armond Levy performed surgery on the wrong side of Turner’s head.
There are over 4.1 million miles of public road in the United States. These paths of concrete and asphalt are the legacy of President Eisenhower’s Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which created the Interstate Highway System as well as being the impetus for other roads to support the expansion it caused.
This had massive economic and cultural reverberations, with estimates linking the highway system to significant direct and indirect job growth.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed long-known inequalities in the United States health care system, leading to low-income communities being disproportionately impacted. Even before the pandemic, these inequalities were part of why life expectancy for some neighborhoods in Baltimore is worse than in North Korea, Syria, and Yemen.
As the country deals with continuing controversies over gun-related violence, racial divisions tied to police actions, and bigotry against members of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, the embrace of firearms and rationalizations of killing people in the street by some is tied to power narratives that have long, deep roots in American culture. The fear of being a victim of crime drives people to accept some truly awful ideas as truth.
Everyone makes mistakes. However, some mistakes have lasting implications that can redefine a public image, particularly when it comes to politics. The extent to which politics is a dynamic between faith in institutions, ideologies, and people is largely a function of how those things are perceived.
Everyone makes mistakes. However, some mistakes have lasting implications that can redefine a public image, particularly when it comes to politics. The extent to which politics is a dynamic between faith in institutions, ideologies, and people is largely a function of how those things are perceived.
Why can’t we get some people to believe in universal healthcare, a Green New Deal, or the power of communities working together to effect change? We can’t even a good number of the population to trust their government to deliver a vaccine to help them. I work in healthcare, and when the COVID-19 vaccine rollout was announced under the Trump administration last year, I absolutely debated whether or not to get it, at first.
In thinking about how to describe 2020, I’m reminded of a TV show that compared all of the events over the course of an awful year in an effort to make sense of it. History books tell us the year 1937 was not a good one for the people of Earth. Japan invaded China, leading to numerous atrocities including the Nanjing Massacre. Tens of thousands died as Francisco Franco began to turn the tide in his favor during the Spanish Civil War.
The Atlantic was recently forced to retract a story about adolescent athletics after it was found aspects of it were fiction and there was a deliberate attempt to deceive readers. The 6,000-word article, originally published under the byline of Ruth S.
This year will see us celebrating a very different Halloween. In many places around the country, children will not be able to go trick-or-treating, and adults will not be able to dress up and make fools of themselves at the club, given the current pandemic. But what is Halloween without a scary story? And what is the nature of those spooky tales? Most of the time they are rooted in very real issues and very real threats.