For sick or injured Bahrainis, going to the hospital means risking a prison term—or even death. Describing the “militarization of hospitals,” Rula al-Saffar, president of the Bahrain Nursing Society, said patients with “head traumas, broken bones or burns” are first interrogated by police to determine if they are involved in protests against the government. Health professionals are only allowed to treat patients after police investigate and clear them for treatment. For some, the delay means death.   

In 2012, the federal government recovered $5 billion in settlements from drug companies that manufactured, marketed and sold products in violation of federal law.

Today, a coalition of 13 investors, led by the UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust, announced they had reached an agreement with six major companies to claw back executive pay when individuals in a company cause serious financial harm as a result of violating health care laws and company policies. 

Earlier this week, we told you that a coalition of unions and community groups were able to move a paid sick leave bill to near fruition in New York City, while we also brought you a column by Ellen Bravo, director of Family Values @ Work, that explored the momentum behind the growing paid sick leave drive in cities across the country.

Juicy Couture, that hip, L.A.-centric, high-end clothing and apparel chain, is engaging in what can only be described as tragically unhip corporate behavior. It is, workers say, replacing its full-time workforce with part-timers in order to duck its obligations to provide paid leave and health care for the workers.

Wonkblog's Ezra Klein published 21 charts yesterday from the International Federation of Health Plans that illustrate just how ridiculous our health care prices are in the United States.

Klein writes:

This is the fundamental fact of American health care: We pay much, much more than other countries do for the exact same things. For a detailed explanation of why, see this article. But this post isn’t about the why. It’s about the prices and the graphs. 

Pharmacy chain CVS announced a new policy that will require 200,000 employees who receive health care through the corporation to submit personal health information to the company or face a $50 monthly fine, ABC News reports. Workers must submit their weight, body fat, glucose levels and other vital signs or pay an additional $600 per year for their existing health coverage. Employees have until May 1, 2014, to comply with the new policy or face the fine.

The Portland City Council approved unanimously a measure today to allow employees to earn paid sick time off. 

Are people really living longer? That depends...how much money do you have?

Media pundits and Washington elites love to point to their own lives and say, "Hey, we're living longer, why not raise the Social Security retirement age and Medicare eligibility age?"

What they fail to realize is that large gains in life expectancy are closely related to how wealthy a person is. Just look at the case of the two counties in Florida that Washington Post reporter Michael A. Fletcher examined in Research Ties Economic Inequality to Gap in Life Expectancy.

A coalition of immigrant rights activists, including the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), the AFL-CIO and AFSCME, submitted a letter to Congress and President Obama asking that lifelines and public services that meet basic human needs be included in commonsense immigration reform.

While many Republicans balked at passing $60 billion in relief for Hurricane Sandy cleanup (they eventually passed a little higher than $50 billion), TIME’s Steven Brill wrote that the United States spends nearly that much in health care costs each week.

In Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us, Brill asks the question very few people raise: Why does the United States pay so much for health care?