European hegemony may no longer be sustainable. The European economic community is being held together by a fragile piece of paper called the Euro. Aside from the currency, which a Pew Foundation survey reports is still favored by most European countries, there is little else Europeans agree about or even like about each other. Perhaps the onslaught of diversity perceived by growing right wing groups is the only glue left to hold Europeans together. The current economic crisis has seen much conflict and scapegoating regarding immigrants from mostly the African continent; but now Europeans seem to be turning against one another.
“The European Union is the new sick man of Europe. The effort over the past half century to create a more united Europe is now the principal casualty of the euro crisis. The European project now stands in disrepute across much of Europe.
Support for European economic integration – the 1957 raison d’etre for creating the European Economic Community, the European Union’s predecessor – is down over last year in five of the eight European Union countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2013. Positive views of the European Union are at or near their low point in most EU nations, even among the young, the hope for the EU’s future. The favorability of the EU has fallen from a median of 60% in 2012 to 45% in 2013. And only in Germany does at least half the public back giving more power to Brussels to deal with the current economic crisis.
The sick man label – attributed originally to Russian Czar Nicholas I in his description of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-19th century – has more recently been applied at different times over the past decade and a half to Germany, Italy, Portugal, Greece and France. But this fascination with the crisis country of the moment has masked a broader phenomenon: the erosion of Europeans’ faith in the animating principles that have driven so much of what they have accomplished internally.”
MORE via The New Sick Man of Europe: the European Union | Pew Global Attitudes Project.
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May 25, 2013 • 5:13 pm 1
States’ Policies on Health Care Exclude Poorest – NYTimes.com
It is dumbfounding! It paralyzes the brain, the heart and almost all hope–without need for audacity.
Ph.D.s, advocates, health professionals, and good old moms and dads come to the agreement that healthcare needs changing and that sick people should get help–especially those who have difficulty getting it. Presumably, it is logical and reasonable to think that many of these people are what we, all of us for hundreds of years, have called “the poor.”
Yet for as long as there have been those with and those without, those with often have the efficacy to get more and those without, perhaps by definition, get even less–always…
So here we are well into healthcare reform and the NYT is sounding the whistle on the haves once again–millions have been spent and the poor are somehow invisible once again when it comes to targeting the needs of those who are hurting and are having a difficult time getting good, reliable, continuos, patient centered, medical home care! Go figure… or better yet, go read the New York times…
“The refusal by about half the states to expand Medicaid will leave millions of poor people ineligible for government-subsidized health insurance under President Obama’s health care law even as many others with higher incomes receive federal subsidies to …”
More via States’ Policies on Health Care Exclude Poorest – NYTimes.com.
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Filed under: access to education, Aging, Behavioral Health Outcomes, Blogosphere, Children and Poverty, consumers, Death and Dying, Economic Recession, Feminization of Poverty, Health and Exercise, Health Literacy, Health Policy, Healthcare Reform, Maternal and Child Health, Medical Research, Medicare, News, Parenting, Policy ThinkShop Comments on other media platforms, Public Health, Public Policy, Public Service, WeSeeReason, healthcare for the poor; poverty and health needs;Planned Parenthood; Republican budget cuts; Medicaid and reproductive rights; paying for women's reproductive needs; women's health and people's polit, rich and poor, the poor