Who’s affected by the government shutdown? Severely ill patients, for one thing.

October 3, 2013 • 7:16 am

The Washington Post‘s business section gives a map and description of what has happened since the Republicans threw their idiotic tantrum in Congress:

The government shutdown jeopardizes the paychecks of more than 800,000 federal workers who were sent home. The federal government has almost 2 million employees. Civilians who remain on the job will be entitled to their salaries, but might not be paid on time. President Obama has signed a bill that ensures that certain members of the U.S. military and U.S. Coast Guard will be paid during the shutdown.

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And if that’s not all, here’s a story that is going the rounds, and it’s not fiction.  As you may know, the government shutdown includes both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation (as well as many other agencies), putting a stop to the flow of research funds. This has some dire consequences. As reported in RT (and many other places):

Patients seeking to enroll for treatment in research studies at the National Institutes of Health’s Maryland hospital are out of luck due to the government shutdown.

For every week the shutdown lasts, the agency’s research-only hospital will turn away approximately 200 patients – 30 of them children – who often seek participation in experimental studies after more traditional methods have failed, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins told AP.

Though prospective NIH patients are usually eligible for studies at other hospitals around the country, “this is the place where people have wanted to come when all else has failed,” Collins said. “It’s heartbreaking.”

A child with a life-threatening illness is likely the only exception, Collins said, and existing patients will continue to receive care at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda.

In addition, he said that all experimental studies are on hold as long as Congress cannot settle on a budget deal.

“If you expected new treatments for cancer or a new universal influenza vaccine or discovering the causes of autism were going to move forward at the maximum it could, that will not be the case,” Collins said. “This is a profoundly discouraging day.”

To put it bluntly, the Republican shenanigans could result in the loss of life. Children with life-threatening illnesses may be exempt, but screw those sick adults.  You’d think that the Republicans could make an exception for medical research, but what do they care? They’re all sitting pretty with their health insurance and big paychecks, which of course will still be issued during the shutdown.

Of course we look ridiculous to the rest of the world, but that’s not nearly as worrisome as imagining the people who could die because of Republican stupidity.

h/t: Skip, Grania

61 thoughts on “Who’s affected by the government shutdown? Severely ill patients, for one thing.”

  1. I heard an interview with a member of The Tea Party on CBC while driving to work yesterday. Here is a link to the segment via podcast. These people seem to live in an alternate reality, as she insisted that 85% of the government was functioning, that Obama was just trying to make things look bad & (this is my favourite part) after being asked if these actions threaten democracy, replied that America is not a democracy but a republic. Apparently there was scathing feedback on which they were going to play today but I didn’t get to hear it because I had arrived at work.

    1. It wouldn’t surprise me if the 85% number had some basis in reality. AFAIK the shutdown does not affect the mandatory spending programs (i.e., the programs that take an act of Congress to stop funding), only the discretionary programs (i.e., the ones which take an act of Congress to get funding). Those mandatory programs are over 40% of our budget. Congress also passed (and the President signed) funding for DOD – which is the single largest discretionary funding pot in our budget. Combining those two things, I can see how the money could approach 85%.

      Having said all that, her implied point is just wrong. Even a 15% loss of government function can have huge personal and economic consequences for Americans.

  2. It’s for the good of America, you see. The shutdown will force us to recognize our nation’s intrinsic needs: unregulated light bulbs, unconstrained ceiling fans, “freedom” toilets, and guns for all.

  3. I don’t understand Executive branch departments need to cease operations when the Prez can simply sign an Executive Order that they stay open, people get paid, and the bill goes to Congress (see what I did there?) or the national debt.

  4. Another punch line of this sick joke: the guilty Repukes spin it to their constituents that it is “Obamacare” that is holding the entire government hostage. And the kicker: their constituents absolutely EAT that stuff up. It seems clear to me that the only sane way out of our mess is a non-starter — we need to disenfranchise >50% of the voters (ever try to “educate” the willfully obstinate? The aggressively obtuse? The belligerently mentally deficient?).

    The original balance of the system took it for granted that the people electing our representatives had more skills than the ability to cause their hearts to beat. Unfortunately the chosen metrics for figuring out who was worthy involved being white male landowners… and subsequent “voting tests” had a horrible history of uneven construction and administration (a la Jim Crow). But our little experiment of expanding the tent to include every last knuckle-dragging moron – esp. after obliterating half the country’s centers of higher learning 150 years ago… the effects persist to this day. For this state of affairs to exist in the 3rd-most populous nation in the world, the nexus of the world economy — it’s just too scary for words. So I guess I have to real solutions… just venting. Sorry for that little spot of bile I left on the carpet.

    3. Jon Stewart’s take on the complaints by Republicans that various services are getting (*the horror!*) shut down. Sorry in advance if the clip does not play for people outside the US — nothing to do with gov’t funding…

      The Repugs’ strategy indeed seems like a really bad Yakov Smirnoff joke: “in socialist Amerika, government shuts down YOU!”.

  5. Ah, Jerry, but the Repugs have offered to 1) fund the National Parks, 2) fund medical research, 3) fund the Department of Veterans Affairs. They want to seem like nice, considerate, reasonable people. Instead of extortionists and religious/ideological zealots. The dems an all rational folks must keep exposing these shenanigans for what they are.

    1. Ah, Jerry, but the Repugs have offered to …

      This is nothing new. Many kidnappers send the victim back one finger at a time.

  7. Would it be more appropriate to call it a “public sector shutdown” rather than a “government shutdown”?

    That’s a genuine question, BTW.

    1. ‘Federal’ might be even better. State and local governments aren’t shut down at all, they have their own funding and budget battles.

    2. No. “Public” is used differently in the US vs. the UK. Consider what “public school” means in the two places.

    3. For the funniest take of all, check out the Fox News website. Nowhere is it referred to as a government shutdown. It’s a government slimdown.

  9. Oy!

    You’d think that the Republicans could make an exception for medical research, but what do they care? They’re all sitting pretty with their health insurance and big paychecks, which of course will still be issued during the shutdown.

    No, no! You don’t get the level fundamentalists stoop down to. For religious (and social) extremists like the TP it is usually the other guys who has “provoked the gods” to make loss of life.

    Remember hurricane Sandy? This is “the fault of socialists promoting social security”. Oh, and the fault of people who frown on misogyny et cetera.

    Also, it is a reason to break out in rain dance prayer public obeisance of magic agents.

    ————-

    Adding to harm for sciences (which feels like a more neutral topic), NASA has shut down science on missions that continues in order not to be lost.

    The first critical item is MAVEN, the Mars atmosphere characterization tandem craft that is half the mission of Curiosity – local atmospheric data vs global. It was supposed to launch in the every-other-year window in November, and is at final testing.

    MAVEN had a buffer of week, it seems they can stretch that to 10 days with overtime, but then it gets critical.

    Launching 2 year later means adding 100’s of millions in storage cost, risking loss of mission since Curiosity is then working overtime (but more realistically has added loss risks), and delayed findings that are needed to constrain future missions.

    2. You’d think that the Republicans could make an exception for medical research

      AFAIK, they did, yesterday. The GOP offered to fund national parks and NIH in a separate bill.

      The Dems rejected it because, as a strategic decision, they don’t want to take the we’ll-fund-only-the-things-GOP-lets-us-fund approach. Taken to an extreme, the House GOP could just keep doing that sort of onesie twosie type of bill-making until they had funded everything but ACA, and then stop.

      1. …and in latest news today, there’s now 17 Repugs on board with the Senate’s “clean funding” bill — enough to get it passed with near unanimity from the House Dems, who one-by-one tried to get it to the forefront, only to be shut down by the Repug House chair Boner — to increasing unrest. Hmmm.

    3. They could have made MAVEN exempt though, (like the James Webb Space Telescope, which is undergoing testing [read that at spacenews]) but they didn’t. They probably thought the shutdown wouldn’t last that long … But yes, if they are to miss the launch window, that’ll be devastating.

      I’m also hoping nothing will happen to LADEE during the shutdown. Or all the other missions currently out there.

  10. I would have thought Los Alamos County, NM was a lot higher than 10% government employed.

    Like someone (gluonspring) said the other day [paraphrase]:

    No healthcare, no welfare, and pretty soon no science. It is like Christmas for some of congress.

    1. 10%’s pretty high given that the absolute highest locality is only 18%.

      Also, there are going to be some areas that don’t fit the overall pattern because they have leftover (i.e., obligated but not yet spent) funding from FY13. Irony of ironies, but those government agencies that were the least bureaucratically efficient at getting spending projects approved and started may now be in the best shape to weather the storm.

  11. The shutdown’s nothing. The Rethuglicans are likely to take the country into default in a mere fortnight. And, meantime, the sequester continues.

    I have no love for the Democratic party and its totalitarianism — see especially the near-unanimous support for the NSA’s rampant and blatantly uncivilized (let alone un-Constitutional) spying.

    But, as bad as the Democrats are, the Republicans are actively trying to play Samson to the American economy.

    As the jobless recovery continues, and after the hits from the sequester and now the shutdown, and combined with the havoc the NSA is actively wreaking upon the information technology sector (foreign customers are dropping American IT vendors as fast as humanly possible), I wouldn’t at all be surprised if a default, even a short-term one, has the American economy in full-blown depression by the end of the year.

    And, oh-by-the-way, petroleum reserves continue to dwindle, probably by now at an accelerating pace, and we’ve likely already blown past multiple ecological and climatological tipping points.

    Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen. We’re headed right towards a really nasty storm with little hope for evasion.

    Cheers,

    b&

    1. Maybe there’s something to those Armageddon tracts that Jehovah’s Witnesses keep leaving outside my front door.

      I always thought Gog and Magog was just a new-age jazz duo from Scottsdale.

    2. But on the bright side, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which helps state governments with their conservation efforts, is shut down. …along with the USDAs Office of Ethics. …and their Office of the Chief Economist. …and their Risk Management Agency. …and their Office for Rural Development.

      Damned high time, too. All that measuring, data, planning and oversight… it’s all just too goddamned complicated.

        1. What?! Don’t drag Canada and Mexico into this…we have our own problems to deal with.

    5. Other heartwarming sides to the developing news:

      Senate Chaplain Barry Black and House Chaplain Patrick Conroy have been praying for us all.

      Black: “Have mercy upon us, oh God, and save us from the madness… We acknowledge our transgressions, our shortcomings, our smugness, our selfishness, and our pride. Create in us clean hearts, oh God, and renew a right spirit within us.”

      Conroy: “May those who possess power here in the Capitol be mindful of those whom they represent who possess little or no power, and whose lives are made all the more difficult by a failure to work out serious differences.”

      That should satisfy all you heathens that think these offices are entirely worthless.

      And in more touchy-feely news, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, and an independent as well — huddled together in close quarters a few hours ago, in discussion of what could be done to deal with the impasse. Of course the reason they were huddling in close quarters was because they were hiding from a crazy lady (now deceased from lead poisoning) who was trying to drive her car (with her baby) into the White House moments ago.

      Just another day here. Nothing to see… nothing to see…

    1. Agree, although, not to minimize the personal stress of these patients, for things to really move ahead unfreezing an NIH budget that has dwindled steadily since early in Bush Jr’s reign would probably be more important…..but I’m preaching to the choir

  13. Yikes the stock market is falling to day.Look out for your 401k’s.Rather watch them also fall.

    1. Dickens said it first:

      “At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

      “Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

      “Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

      “And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

      “They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

      “The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.

      “Both very busy, sir.”

      …

      “I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”

      “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

      “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

    2. That article so depresses me that I’m having a hard time thinking about doing the work I should have been doing when I read it instead. Serves me right, I guess. Sigh.

  16. I consider it worse than bad behavior. I think it fringes upon revolt, perhaps even worse, maybe even sedition. If the Republicans are demanding the non-procedural repeal of a law passed by Congress signed by the President and not rejected by the courts, they are a demanding a change in the way the government fundamentally works. That is a revolutionary idea and not in the patriotic feel good way simple people think about the term. Its truly sad at many levels, but most frightening in what it portends.

    1. I think conservative political theorist James Burnham puts it well (1964, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism)

      Either liberalism must extend the freedoms to those who are not themselves liberals and even to those whose deliberate purpose is to destroy the liberal society—in effect, that is, must grant a free hand to its assassins; or liberalism must deny its own principles, restrict the freedoms, and practice discrimination. It is as if the rules of football provided no penalties against those who violated the rules; so that the referee would either have to permit a player (whose real purpose was to break up the game) to slug, kick, gouge and whatever else he felt like doing, or else would have to disregard the rules and throw the unfair player out.

      I’m all for throwing the unfair players out, declaring the R party outright illegal, much like the Germans did with the Nazis (at the Allies’ insistence, admittedly). I see no way for civil society to coexist with saboteurs in the ascendancy. Even when such a view is completely against the concept of a liberal democracy (and free expression). It all depends on how bad this stuff gets. (sorry, am a bit pissed off at the moment. Take the pills…)

          2. Wouldn’t be the first time. And I agreed more with you than Burnham!

            BTW, by both of you I meant you and John–I could have been clearer.

  17. In further shutdown-lunacy (is there accepet shorthand for that?), a graveyard in Britain, and probably a number in France, have been shut down because of the tea-baggers.
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-24386656
    The tl;dr version is that they’re military cemetries from one or both world wards.

    1. Incidentally, does American sexual slang have the same meaning for “tea bagger” (as noun and verb) as there is in British slang?

      1. Urban Dictionary would seem to suggest that both meanings have reached the US…

        1. I heard it hear among the youth years ago but Bill Maher had to keep explaining it to his guests when he used it, which was pretty funny.

  18. Francis Collins: “this is the place where people have wanted to come when all else has failed. It’s heartbreaking.”
    Questions for Collins: Have you prayed to your Gawd? Now, are you going to grill your Gawd as to why this thing happened? Tell him without fear that the fact this is happening looks so stupid to you? Would you say your Gawd is stupid [his existence not in question], or would you prefer to think he was more interested in creating a frozen waterfall?

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