Today's Liberal News

How to Appeal Insurance Denials, Abolish Medical Debt, and Fight for Medicare for All

We continue to look at the U.S. health insurance industry and how patients can fight back against their providers with advocate Elisabeth Benjamin, vice president of health initiatives at the Community Service Society of New York and co-founder of the Health Care for All New York campaign. She says her advice for patients is to always appeal denials and to seek outside help when possible, including advocacy groups like hers and external review boards.

UnitedHealth vs. Patients: NYC Man’s Battle to Get Lifesaving Drug Highlights Broken Health System

Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has been charged with first-degree murder and second-degree murder as an act of terrorism. Thompson’s assassination has brought renewed attention to the practices of the health industry and especially UnitedHealth Group, which reported $22 billion in profits last year.

Amazon Workers Launch Historic Strike to Demand New Contracts & End Unsafe Labor Practices

Thousands of Amazon workers on Thursday launched the largest strike against the retail giant in U.S. history, pressuring the company at the height of the holiday period to follow the law and bargain with those who have organized with the Teamsters union. The strike includes warehouse workers and drivers at seven distribution centers in some of Amazon’s largest markets, including New York, Atlanta and San Francisco; Teamsters have also set up picket lines at many other warehouses nationwide.

The ‘Anthropological Change’ Happening in Venezuela

Late last year, Venezuela’s democratic opposition set out to choose, jointly, someone who could challenge Nicolás Maduro, the country’s autocratic president, in an election that was sure to be violent and unfair. Hundreds of thousands of participants from different political parties voted in a primary held across Venezuela and in exile communities abroad. Although they risked harassment and arrest, people donated space in private homes and offices to make the vote possible.

The Custodian

Illustrations by Miki Lowe
Edward Hirsch didn’t always write poetry for a living. He’s been a busboy, a railroad brakeman, a garbage man; he’s worked in a chemical plant and in a box factory. “You never forget,” he once told an interviewer, “what it means to punch a clock.

Martin Short Deserved Better

If you weren’t aware that Martin Short was hosting Saturday Night Live last night, you might have had a difficult time figuring that out. It’s not that Short wasn’t in sketches—he was, using his natural flair for showmanship as he sang about getting medicated for the holidays. It’s just that a lot of other celebrities were also there. Lots and lots of them: Melissa McCarthy, Tom Hanks, Kristen Wiig, Scarlett Johansson, Paul Rudd.

The Edge of a Spiral

ESA / Hubble & NASA, R. Windhorst, W. Keel
Day 22 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: the edge of a spiral. Located roughly 150 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens, UGC 10043 is one of the somewhat rare spiral galaxies that are seen edge-on. From this point of view, we see the galaxy’s disk as a sharp line through space, overlaid with a prominent dust lane. One can see the lights of some active star-forming regions in the arms, shining out from behind the dust.

The California Job-Killer That Wasn’t

California’s new minimum-wage law hadn’t even gone into effect before it was declared a disaster. Business groups and Republican politicians have argued for decades that minimum-wage increases harm the very workers they are supposed to help, and this one—passed in September 2023 and setting a salary floor of $20 an hour for fast-food workers—appeared to be no different.