The Progress Report: Ebola Scare and Obamacare

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Zachary: What could go right? Nothing. [laughs]
And it certainly feels that way sometimes, doesn’t it? What could go right is a podcast dedicated to looking at the world through a more constructive lens, which is getting awfully challenging these days, and yet, as they say it is when things are at their darkest bleakest hardest, that it is actually most important to.

Reaffirm and question what you’re doing and how you’re thinking about things. Meaning principles are great and easy when everything is on your side, but they’re difficult when things are difficult. So look, we’re all in various strains, and I think this is true. Like even if you’re a staunch supporter of Donald Trump and this administration, there’s a lot of things that are still challenging, right?

 

And so trying to make sure you look at the world through the lens of. What are we doing right? Not just what are we doing wrong is important. It’s not just important cognitively, it’s kind of important emotionally, spiritually, you name it. We do two forms of this podcast. We do a longer form podcast.

 

Obviously called What Could Go Right? Which is interview based, where we talk to someone that we think is interesting. Hopefully you will also think is interesting. And we do this shorter form progress report, which is what this is this week, where we try to look at some of the news of the week that most of us inevitably will have missed in the.

 

C of negative news that deluges us every day. But at the Progress Network we have under Emma Var Lucas, my co-host, and the executive director of the Progress Network, we scour the world for good news. We scour the world for news of things that are going right, of things that are positive. The news is almost always and inevitably about bad things.

 

So we try to highlight a few things every week that are going right as a reminder that at all times. Throughout the world, there are indeed things that are going well that auger for a better future for humanity. So Emma, what’s going right this week? 

 

Emma: Bipartisan consensus on guns. I bet you didn’t think I was gonna say that.

 

Zachary: I sure did not. 

 

Emma: People might have been paying attention to this news from the Supreme Court this week, or maybe it got missed in all of the other deluge of, you know, news coming from I. Current political administration not to lump the Supreme Court in with the current political administration. That’s not quite right.

 

But anyway, the Supreme Court has decided to uphold a 2022 Biden era rule that requires serial numbers and background checks for people to purchase ghost guns, which is great news because once that law came into effect in 2022. The soaring of finding ghost crus being used at crimes started to be dampened occurring less and less frequently after this surge and the fact that a very conservative Supreme Court, they have decided seven to two to uphold this law, they found that it is totally fine to be kept in place.  I think it’s very good news. 

 

News: In a seven to two ruling, the Supreme Court today upheld federal regulations that treat gun part kits the same way as fully assembled firearms, requiring manufacturers to serialize the kits and subject buyers to age limits and background checks. The self-assembled kits produce untraceable weapons known as ghost guns.

 

Emma: So I think what stands out is here is a seven Justice opinion ruling that regulators can pass laws pursuant to an act of Congress that place restrictions on firearms. 

 

Zachary: Yeah. And you did not have, or at least I didn’t notice any particular blowback. Nobody seemed to criticize the decision. There was no. As there often is when a decision is controversial, right?

 

You get a lot of commentary from one side or the other, kind of decrying what the court has done. I didn’t notice that as much I, I may not have been paying adequate attention, but it did not seem back to your bipartisan consensus observation that this was engendering much in the way of criticism.

 

Obviously, I don’t know the NRA or somebody I’m sure criticized it, but in general, this seemed to be a decision that most sides accepted as legit and valid. 

 

Emma: So there is, there is some common ground to be had around gun laws. Red flag laws are another one that I can report a little bit of good news on.

 

Stateline did a recent article about how red flag laws. Are ticking up in the states. So there’s 21 states now that have red flag laws and that’s basically it empowers a member of the community. Police officer. Could be someone like a priest, mental health professional to flag if somebody is a danger to themselves or others.

 

Basically an investigation ensues and if they find that that is the case, they will temporarily take away someone’s firearm for a year, usually about a year. Been quite helpful in preventing suicides in particular, and yeah, the state line investigation found that not only 21 states now have these laws.

 

Connecticut, I believe, was the first one to pass it in 1999, but there’s been an uptick since then and more states are actually using them. So states where the red flag laws are relatively new. They were off to a bit of a slow start in places like Nevada, but now people kind of know that they exist and they are getting used to implementing them and using them.

 

Zachary: Well, first of all, I’m surprised that there are the number of mass shootings there are in the United States, but it is equally surprising how many of those. Are subsequently followed by stories of such and such had been reported. There was erratic behavior, neighbors were concerned, schoolmates were concerned, coworkers were concerned.

 

There obviously are occasional times where someone just kind of out of the blue erupts and does something, and that’s equally common. But it is striking how frequently it appears that there were like signs that people noticed along the way that there was no real recourse for, like I’m more libertarian, so I do get concerned.

 

As a general rule, when you empower the state to take action, particularly preemptively, I mean, it gets a little precogs for those of you who remember Minority Report, when you want to sort of stop a future crime, and that is of course open to lots of abuse, but on this flip side, it does appear that there’s often a palpable sense that this person is either a danger to themselves or a danger to the world around them, that people need to be able to somehow.

 

Act on that. And yes, it’s gonna be a balance. And I’m just highlighting, look, there is the libertarian part, is there too, meaning you could imagine a community identifying someone as problematic when they’re not, and that becoming a real problem for that person in ways that are completely unjust and unfair.

 

And you have to weigh those things right between, I mean, I suppose taking someone’s gun away is not gonna actually harm them in any way. It’s, it’s more like if you’re gonna incarcerate them. 

 

Emma: Yeah, that’s what I was gonna say. It’s not like you are even signing ’em into a psychiatric facility or something like that, where I can still, I come down on a certain way in the argument, but I can see the argument more than taking someone’s firearm away.

 

Yeah. I understand that it is looked at in a certain way in the United States, like it’s the right to have the firearm, but it is temporary. And in other laws that have been upheld by the Supreme Court, for instance, around taking guns away from a domestic abuser, precisely because it’s temporary, they found that it’s fine and constitutional.

 

Mass shootings obviously get a lot of play in the media for very obvious reasons, but a lot of gun fatalities are also suicides, so they have found that the red flag laws help a lot with that as well, because people who have studied suicide know that if you remove a method of suicide that is very effective, IEA firearm, and you do not have access to a method that is going to be for sure.

 

Accomplishing what you would like to do. Odds are you can make it past that period and you may not commit, try to commit suicide again. So for me, it’s worth it. I understand someone with more libertarian perspective says, well, if somebody wants to shoe themselves in the head, they can. But I come down a little bit differently on that, I guess.

 

Zachary: Yeah, no, that makes total sense. 

 

Emma: So let’s stick on the US news, just because people are feeling so. About the United States at the moment, and that is going to be also in the bipartisan consensus lane, sort of, kind of The economist did an interesting look at the impact of Obamacare recently. Uh, six charts showing the impact of Obamacare, and there’s a lot of really good stuff in here.

 

The uninsured rate has dropped to 8% in the US due to Obamacare. They found that the expansion of Medicaid, which is up to the states. There are some notable holdouts to this, but quite a few, even Republican states have decided to expand Medicaid access. Studies have found that that has saved something like 27,000 lives since that was implemented, and they found also due to the expansion of Medicaid, that bankruptcies are down improved credit scores and fewer evictions.

 

So there’s also the financial side benefit of getting people onto health insurance. People seem to still really like Obamacare, which is why Trump has. Stop saying that he’s going to repeal it. The real downside that the Economist talks about is, of course, national healthcare spending has gone up. I mean, it’s impossible to accomplish all of those things that I just listed was without it’s spending more money.

 

But overall, I mean not perfect. I mean, Obamacare did not accomplish everything that did its set out to do. It certainly didn’t lower costs. However, it’s not a bad report card, and there is legitimate issues there.

 

Zachary: Are we capable of maintaining widespread coverage without continually spiraling costs? And, and to some degree there’s something has to give and it’s already beginning to give a little bit on the margin.

 

So there’s been some effort to reduce prescription drug costs, certainly to the end user. There have been some efforts to reduce the procedure costs by, for instance, taking things out of hospitals and into surgical centers or outpatient. So there are. There are certainly moves afoot within the healthcare system writ large to say, look, we want to both deliver healthcare to as many people as possible, but we also need to halt this seemingly never ending spiral of costs.

 

So we’ll see how the political class confronts this. I mean, there’s reasons to be guarded about where those cuts and where those spending challenges will. Fall initially, right? Because like with everything else, it tends to be easiest to eliminate care and costs for people who are least politically able to resist it.

 

But I think that’s gonna be the next challenge. How do you continue this arc of coverage without continuing this non-sustainable increase in expenses? 

 

Emma: If it’s possible. I mean, it might just be the case that people get really mad when it’s taken away and then we just kind of end up back where we are now. 

 

Zachary: Right.  and look, no country really does this perfectly. I mean, yes, once again, we can look at kind of Scandinavian countries. The Canadian system does well, although if you’re Canadian, you have a lot of gripes with the way the Canadian system functions. And most systems are a hybrid of public and private, meaning even the best public healthcare systems tend to have a.

 

Parallel private market for those who can afford it. So it’s not like you can easily point to certainly no large country where all this works swimmingly. We’re sort of stumbling our way into, if not solutions and triaging problems, but we’re building on a principle that really has only been in place for 15 years, which is that everyone should have access to healthcare without the prospect of bankruptcy, which is very kind of the point of healthcare insurance, right?

 

You know, no one should lose their home because they have a health crisis. do.dot. 

 

Emma: I like triaging problems. So it was a good medical metaphor. That’s good.

 

Zachary: Thank you.

 

Emma:  Very apt. 

 

Zachary:  It kind of snuck its way in. Alright. Turning to the rest of the world. 

 

Emma: This great article in Nature Africa, African Sciences Set Genomics World Speed record in confirming Ebola outbreak in Uganda.

 

What does that mean? I’m gonna tell you. Basically, Uganda has been dealing with an Ebola outbreak since January. The CDC at the moment has, as of March put, uh, the outbreak in their optimistic scenario, which means that the case count is probably gonna stay under 25, in part because they have done a really excellent job at.

 

Reacting very fast to the first case that came out in January, and that’s part of this, this world speed record. In quotes, as they’re saying, it took them only 24 hours. The team of scientists camped out in the central Public Health laboratories in Uganda overnight to see if this first case that came out in January was an extension of an outbreak that was in 2022.

 

If it was a new Ebola strain, which would’ve been. An issue or if it was a strain that was already known to them. It turns out it was a strain that’s already known to them. It’s called the Sedan Virus Disease, which is one of the six strains of currently known Ebola viruses that they actually have a vaccine in trial for.

 

Because this team moves so fast, and I should say they also worked in concert with a team of scientists from South Africa because they were able to get this around in 24 hours, which they think is the fastest that it’s ever been done in the world. They’ve been able to contain this outbreak really well, to the point that most people in the United States and in Europe probably haven’t even heard that there is an Ebola outbreak going on in Uganda right now. 

 

Zachary: Wow. 

 

Emma: They thought that they had actually ended it a few weeks ago, but then another case cropped up. They also have a fatality rate right now of. Just under 30%, which is lower than it normally is. Sedan virus disease has a general fatality rate of almost 50%. And in the past, in outbreaks in Uganda, it’s been more like 40.

 

They’re doing a really excellent job with, a difficult hand that is being played to them right now. 

 

Zachary: Early detection, early identification, early treatment. Uganda’s a kind of a fascinating mixed bag story, right? So Musi, who’s been president now for decades and is. Essentially President for life in a, an extremely repressive political system has also been extraordinary in the degree to which he is created order and a healthcare system, public safety, you know, in, in many ways, he falls into the category of a bunch of global leaders who are largely anti-democratic, but not like rapacious authoritarian.

 

They’re, they’re sort of. Public good authoritarians, and we don’t have a good category for that ’cause we tend to binary do democracy good, authoritarian, bad. And there’s been a lot that Munia has done for Uganda that has been unbelievably constructive, including very high level healthcare, high level healthcare tracing.

 

And you know, that too. It’s, it’s hard for us to have these conversations often because we, we tend to immediately go to the yes but right. Oh yeah, he is doing all that. But look at what he’s doing politically and jailing his opponents. And so I think it’s yet another example of one can hold two truths to be simultaneously true.

 

Like Mussina could be very good for Uganda in a whole set of ways and not so great for a whole other set of ways. And kind of there you have the human condition in a nutshell. 

Emma: That holds true for a more than one African country right now too. It’s kind of similar story in Wanda too, where they’ve come such a long way and yet they’re also doing some really sketchy military activity.

 

Anyway, point aside from that. There is one other aspect to the Uganda story, which is the USAID cuts. They have been affected by the USAID cuts. They have had to cut down on the number of personnel they’re using to track this outbreak to the point that health services in Uganda ask people to volunteer their time.

 

So just so people are aware, this is having real effects, you know, the cutting off of, of American money, but they’re still doing a good job, even if they’re doing it with volunteers now, who knows? 

 

Zachary: All right, well on that note. That is our weekly progress report, a somewhat more complicated progress report.

Hopefully it’s a somewhat more complicated one than future ones, but I guess we’ll see. The world keeps changing as it always does. It spins on attacks, it revolves around the sun and human lives come and go and societies rise and fall, and who knows where we are in that particular matrix. So we will be back with you next week with some more news of the world, news of the day that Emma et all will have.

Found for us that we will comment on. And if you who are listening have stories that you think we should highlight, please, please, please email them to us at info@theprogressnetwork.org and we will do our best to highlight them as well and identify you if we use it. So thank you for listening. We will be back with you with our longer form interview with our progress report next week.

Again, we value your time. We honor your attention, and we treasure your passion. So thank you very much. 

Emma: Thanks Zachary, and thanks everyone for listening as per usual.