Libby Watson
Splinter
Washington, DC, United States
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Past articles by Libby:
Medicaid Work Requirements Are a Disaster by Design
The Medicaid work requirements that states have implemented since the Trump administration allowed them to are premised on a lie. Advocates claim the requirements are intended to motivate people to work, but this is clearly not true. The real intention is to punish and oppress poor people for the crime of being poor, to further enshrine the kind of callous cruelty that is the hallmark of… → Read More
The Minimum Wage Is Not a Difficult Concept
Centrist Democrats are ever so concerned, as they always are, about the unintended consequences of their progressive colleagues trying to be too darn nice to people. According to the Hill, some centrist Dems are worried, in absolute good faith and for totally not-stupid reasons, about a bill that would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. → Read More
America's Seniors Are Hurtling Toward Financial Doom
Despite America’s GDP continuing to grow and the president constantly reassuring us the economy is great, the fiscal outlook for many Americans continues to stagnate, and that includes seniors. → Read More
Bon Appétit's Claire Saffitz Will Teach You How to Bake a Cake
If you were to go to YouTube and let the algorithm guide you towards some content, much of what it suggests will be complete shit, and this is especially true of food and cooking content. It will recommend videos of food ‘hacks’ teaching you to make an orange into a cube for some reason, or titles like “I Baked Lipstick Into A Cake.” Even videos of actual recipes tend towards the ridiculous: The… → Read More
Americans Are Borrowing a Staggering Amount of Money to Pay for Their Healthcare
A West Health-Gallup survey out Tuesday found that millions of Americans are borrowing significant amounts of money to pay for healthcare, with an estimated total of $88 billion borrowed to pay for care in the last year. → Read More
Look at These Absolutely Ordinary Americans Who Hate Medicare for All
The Partnership for America’s Health Care Future is a lobbying group dedicated to fighting single-payer and even public option health plans, formed by the biggest players in the health insurance industry—pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and health insurers, among others. We don’t know how much money they have, but one of their members, the pharma trade group PhRMA, raised $456 million last… → Read More
The Affordable Care Act Did Almost Nothing to Stop Medical Bankruptcies
A new study out Wednesday in the American Journal of Public Health found the Affordable Care Act had little impact on the number of bankruptcies caused by medical problems. It’s a sign of how much about our broken healthcare system and social safety net has remained the same, and how deep the rot is. → Read More
Access Journalism Must Die
In the Atlantic today, Elaina Plott published what she described as a piece about “why it’s so annoying when people sneer at so-called ‘access journalism.’” She went there, folks. → Read More
Everything About Andrew Cuomo's Big Defense of the Amazon Deal Is Bad
Andrew Cuomo is mad online. After widespread criticism of New York’s package of giveaways to bring Amazon’s new headquarters to Queens, which will provide $2.8 billion in “incentives” to the giant corporation, the governor of New York had nothing better to do than to log on to Medium dot com to defend the deal. It is so bad in so many ways. Let’s dive in. → Read More
Jonathan Swan Is a Bootlicker
You might have woken up this morning, as I did, to the Axios headline: “Exclusive: Trump to terminate birthright citizenship.” In your bleary-eyed, pre-java state, you would struggle toward the thought: What... the fuck? Can he do that? He told Axios he can, but this is also a guy who thinks exercise is bad for you because it depletes the store of energy you’re born with. He isn’t smart. → Read More
Shocker: When You Make It Easier For People To Vote, They Do
As early voting lines in states like Georgia and Texas stretch for blocks and blocks, a recent study indicates something shocking: Making it easier for people to vote increases the likelihood that they will vote. U wot??? → Read More
Medicaid Work Requirements Exist to Punish the Poor
The New York Times’ Upshot blog has a depressing look today at Arkansas’ Medicaid work requirements, which earlier this month were reported to have already led to 4,300 people getting kicked off their health coverage. There are a lot of problems you can imagine with meeting these requirements, not least finding a job or a volunteer placement in the first place, but other, much more basic… → Read More
The Equifax Breach Is a Year Old and No One Is in Jail
Exactly one year ago on Friday, Equifax announced they had done a big whoopsie that allowed hackers to steal the personal data of 143 million Americans, a figure later revised to 148 million. This raised many questions, including: Why does a single private company hold sensitive, personal information for 147 million Americans at all? Why does Equifax even exist? Who’s going to pay for this… → Read More
Hospitals Essentially Just Make Up Insane Sticker Prices for Surgeries
American healthcare is a sick joke from almost any angle: how it neglects the disabled, and how the people who need it most are least likely to have it. It is morally unforgivable, but it’s also bewildering that anyone thinks this works: America spends 17.9 percent of its GDP on healthcare, or $10,348 per person, far more than other countries, and yet for our money we still have tens of millions… → Read More
DEVASTATING Russian Campaign to Take Down American Democracy REVEALED
You may have seen the frightening headlines today about Facebook’s latest revelation: “Facebook Has Identified Ongoing Political Influence Campaign,” said the New York Times; “Facebook says it has uncovered a coordinated disinformation operation ahead of the 2018 midterm elections,” read the Washington Post. As the Times reported, Facebook was “unable to tie the accounts to Russia,” but “company… → Read More
Government Healthcare Is Saving My Mum's Life
My mother has lung cancer. At the end of last year, she began feeling breathless and tired, struggling with walks around the village I grew up in; in March, we found out a tumor was to blame. → Read More
Texas Is Letting an Ex-FBI Officer Who's Obsessively Anti-Islam Train Its Cops
The problem of Islamophobia among U.S. police forces is well-documented: The Associated Press reported back in February that the Boston Police Department “swept up the posts of people using the hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter and a lawmaker’s Facebook update about racial inequality” in monitoring social media and, just last week, a former police officer at the San Jose Police Department alleged… → Read More
Facebook Does Not Understand the Conservative Grift
Some recent updates on Facebook, the for-profit panopticon and advertising company: First, BuzzFeed reported last night that Facebook has begun ranking news organizations by trustworthiness and “promotes or suppresses” content based on those rankings. Second, Axios reported this morning that Facebook will bring in outside advisers to audit the company both for civil rights violations and for,… → Read More
Fake Progressive Running for Michigan Governor: Hello Black People, I Too Enjoy Popeyes
There are three major candidates in the race for the next governor of Michigan: Abdul El-Sayed, a leftist candidate in the mold of Bernie Sanders; Gretchen Whitmer, an establishment candidate who happily holds fundraisers with health insurance companies; and Shri Thanedar, a completely fake progressive who claims he’ll be a “fiscally savvy Bernie” but didn’t even decide whether to run as a… → Read More
Getting Sick in America Can Make You Poorer Forever
The conversation about healthcare in America often (correctly) focuses on how utterly insane it is that the United States doesn’t provide healthcare to every citizen, but it turns out the outcomes aren’t much better for people with insurance. → Read More