Mandatory: Keeping Our Hands On the Plow

It is now clear that we can no longer say we are making progress on race relations in America. We're going backward. Every day we find ourselves nearly speechless regarding what comes out of the mouths of so many people who call themselves leaders. Let us just stick with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had at least four years to observe extreme madness coming out of the White House and around the nation. We had an election in 2020 and had begun to believe the American people wanted to work toward semi-normalcy where most people desired to move forward and at least inching toward equality and basic human rights for all of us.

Instead, we are stuck with 24/7 of the Trump madness and a runner-up of a bunch of would-be Trumps! As an individual, I have often wondered what life would have in store for young Black people as they age. Some of them are absolute geniuses!

As the days, months and years go by,

I now wonder what is going to happen to all of us if we just watch life go by instead of keeping our hands on the plow as our ancestors did. It seems that not a day goes by without somebody coming up with a way to do harm to us. That is why I will never understand how a few of our people make themselves available to work with the racists who want to take the nation back to a time and place from which our ancestors died to free us. We had begun to have hope. When Congressman John Lewis died, we thought surely he was well-

Benjamin F. Chavis Jr.

liked on both sides of the aisle, so passing a voting rights bill to honor his work would be a piece of cake!

A growing number of people had begun to honor Dr. MLK by remembering him through a day of service for those in need, making a positive difference in their communities.

Young people of all races were joining rallies for various causes. They were activists like Maxwell Frost, who got elected to Congress.

A brilliant Black woman was confirmed to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court and the court surprised us

Safeguarding Charitable Medicine Programs in America

All Americans should have equal access to high-quality health care. As our nation steadily emerges out of the awful debilitating aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of communities of color, and in particular the African American community, are all facing lingering challenges and prolonged difficulties in having access to affordable and quality health care.

The United States Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has many important and life-saving public health-related programs that are structured and funded to ensure access to the best of health care offerings including the provision of affordable pharmaceuticals with respect to the most vulnerable and underserved communities across the nation.

One of those important governmental health care programs is known as the Charitable Medicines Program (340B). The 340B program began in the early 1990s when Congress want-

It's Time to Act

al rating is still underwater. Donald Trump, his likely opponent in the presidential race, is even less popular. What's going on?

ed to require pharmaceutical manufacturers, as a condition of benefiting from government programs, to donate low- or no-cost prescription drugs to charitable hospitals. These hospitals, overwhelmingly located in underserved urban and rural communities with patients of all races and ethnicities, were in turn expected to use these discount-price medicines to serve patients who otherwise could not afford these drugs.

Today, Americans are facing unprecedented times. We are rebuilding our economy from a global pandemic.

But there is another epidemic in this country (Entities putting profits over people) which must be addressed, and it must be addressed now. It's one of the few things reasonable Americans on all sides of the political spectrum can agree on these days. Where it happens, there ought to be robust, bipartisan reform efforts to fix it. When it happens inside the context of a government program meant to help the poorest among us, it should mean robust oversight from Congress and the administration. That's exactly what's going on now with the charitable medicines program with three positive cases on fair voting. A Black/Asian woman was chosen to be vice president.

Honorable Barack Obama had served two glorious terms as president and Michelle Obama had completed two terms as our flawless first lady. Many cities were electing Black mayors and not just in small Black towns, but also in Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, St. Louis, Kansas City, New York City, Atlanta and more.

The Congressional Black Caucus

WILLIAMS Page 58 known as "340B."

For a while, the program worked as intended. The average discount on a 340B drug is nearly 60%, and for many drugs, it's much more than that. But over time, greed has cropped up and made a mockery of the program, resulting in practices that further health inequities in our nation.

The definition of a "charitable hospital" was never well-defined in law, and today 57% of all hospitals participate in the drug discount program.

If things don't add up, it makes sense to see if something has been left out of the equation. That's the case today. The experts tell us that the economy is as good as it has been in decades — unemployment at record lows, inflation under control, wages finally rising faster than prices.

Yet, most people are unhappy and pessimistic. President Biden's approv-

Americans aren't wrong. They struggle every day with what pundits call a "polycrisis." That's a fancy word for a lot of big things going wrong in a big way all at once. Catastrophic climate change, pandemics, extreme inequality, a broken and unaffordable health care system, a dangerously decrepit infrastructure, a growing Cold War amid unending forever wars — this list can go on. These crises are real and present.

Families and communities take the hit again and again.

Extreme heat—or floods or forest fires or hurricanes — take lives and destroy homes. Ancient pipes serve up poisonous drinking waters. People can't afford to get sick. Big money and powerful lobbies block vital reform. Now billionaires are paying for a new party — the No Labels (and Dark Money) Party, as if owning the two major parties were not enough.

Joe Biden — much to the surprise of many — stepped up to address some of this. He passed the biggest bill to re- build America in decades, the biggest investment in renewable energy ever. He made a small start in making some drugs more affordable. He broke with our ruinous trade policies and began to crack down on the merger mania. First steps — but not nearly enough.

Trump's MAGA Republicans, meanwhile, are missing the bus. They — aided and abetted by a zealously right-wing majority on the Supreme Court — are focused on social reaction — rolling back the progress of the civil rights movement, stripping women of the right to control their own bod- ies, trying to make voting harder and opening the door to big money in politics, waging war on "wokeness" as if diversity were the source of our problems. They just overloaded the Defense Appropriations bill with a bevy of anti-woke provisions — while utterly ignoring the reality that we're starving basic investments at home while wasting billions of dollars and millions of lives trying to police the world. They may add to our problems, but they surely are not addressing the crises we face.

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