Senator Sanders

Filipino Typhoon The typhoon that struck the Philippines produced an outpouring of emotion on Monday at United Nations talks on a global climate treaty in Warsaw, where delegates were quick to suggest that a warming planet had turned the storm into a lethal monster. Scientists remain cautious about drawing links between climate change and any single storm, but say climate change is occurring. “The people who have studied this issue, the scientific community, feel a) that global warming is real and b) that it is caused by human activies and c) that it is already causing damage all over the world,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said in an interview Monday on MSNBC. VIDEO

Veterans Day “The Department of Veterans Affairs is slashing wait times for vets filing disability compensation claims, but more than 400,000 claims are still considered backlogged. “The improvement is not enough but we are making significant progress,” Sen. Sanders said on Monday on MSNBC. He called “clearly unacceptable” the long delays in processing claims for disability compensation. “As we honor our nation's veterans today, we must realize the important debt we owe them, a debt we can never truly repay,” Sen Sanders, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, wrote in The Caledonian-Record and The Hill. VIDEO, LINK

Health Centers Three new federally-supported community health centers will open in Vermont. Like eight centers already operating throughout the state, the new centers will offer primary care to both the insured and uninsured. Sen. Bernie Sanders says the new centers fit in with the goals of the Affordable Care Act. “The goal is to have them in every area in the state so that people can have good quality primary health care in their community, some place near where they live. “We are probably, per capita, doing better than any state in the nation in accessing community health centers,” Sanders told WPTZ-TV.

Bristol Health Center The Five Town Health Alliance was awarded $812,500, which will be put toward expanding services at the Mountain Health Center in Bristol. It was one of three practices in Vermont that were designated as “community health centers.” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was instrumental in securing the federal money. “As chairman of the Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging, I am proud we have seen in recent years a tremendous increase in the number of community health centers in Vermont,” Sanders said in an interview last Thursday with The Addison County Independent. LINK

Minimum Wage President Barack Obama on Friday threw his weight behind increasing the federal minimum wage to $10.10. This is more than a dollar higher than what he proposed in his State of the Union address. Sen. Tom Harkin's plan would increase the minimum wage to $10.10 and tie the minimum wage to inflation. So far, 31 Democrats and Sen. Sanders have come out in support of his legislation, according to U.S. News & World Report. LINK

Dental Tourism For Americans willing to hop on a plane, visiting a dentist in another country could save 70 percent or more on dental procedures such as crowns and root canals, according to data from medical publisher Patients Beyond Borders. Some 130 million Americans live without dental insurance, according a 2012 report to Congress called Dental Crisis in America from Sen. Sanders. Because even the insured face out-of-pocket costs, it might make financial sense to fly to your next dental appointment, according to a Fox News blog. LINK

White House ’16 Liberal leaders want Hillary Clinton to face a primary challenge in 2016 if she decides to run for president in order to prevent her from moving to the middle during the Democratic primary. Sen. Sanders predicts voters would embrace a candidate who challenges the Democratic establishment’s pick from the left. “I think people are hungering for a voice out there,” he told Playboy in a recent interview. “It would be tempting to try to raise issues and demand discussion on issues that are not being talked about: inequality in wealth and trade policy, protecting the social safety net, moving aggressively on global warming,” he said, before minimizing the chances of running himself to 1 percent, The Hill reported. LINK

Vermont Farmers Want Immigration Reform With Congress paralyzed much of this fall over negotiations to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government funded, efforts to pass a new immigration bill have completely stalled. The Senate passed an immigration reform bill June 27. Sen. Patrick Leahy shepherded the bill through the Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, to the floor of the Senate, where it passed 68-32. Sen. Sanders voted for the bill, The Addison County Independent reported. LINK

World

Relief Slow to Reach Victims of Philippine Typhoon A massive relief effort after one of the deadliest storms in a century was hampered early Tuesday by the widespread wreckage in the central Philippines, where the super-typhoon left trees splintered on the streets, bodies festering in open view, and desperate towns short of food and water. The destruction across a chain of Philippine islands leaves authorities with a complicated relief operation, on a scale exceeding any other in the history of the disaster-prone nation, The Washington Post reported. LINK

National

Insurers Press for Way Around Healthcare.gov Some major health insurers are so worried about the Obama administration’s ability to fix its troubled health care website that they are pushing the government to create a shortcut that would allow them to enroll people entitled to subsidies directly rather than through the federal system, The New York Times reported. LINK

Problems With Federal Health Portal Also Stymie Medicaid Enrollment Problems with the federal health insurance website have prevented tens of thousands of low-income people from signing up for Medicaid even though they are eligible, federal and state officials say, undermining one of the chief goals of the 2010 health care law, according to The New York Times. LINK

Most Americans for Raising Minimum Wage With momentum building at the federal and state level to increase hourly base pay, more than three-quarters of Americans say they would vote for raising the minimum wage to $9 per hour (it is currently $7.25) in a hypothetical national referendum, a five-percentage-point increase since March. About one-fifth would vote against this, according to Gallup. LINK

Pharmacy Bill Set for Senate Vote A year after a meningitis outbreak from contaminated pain injections killed at least 64 people and sickened hundreds, Congress is ready to increase federal oversight over compounding pharmacies that custom-mix medications, The Washington Post reported. LINK

Job Gap Widens in Uneven Recovery America's jobs recovery is proceeding on two separate tracks—a pattern that is persisting far longer than after past economic rebounds and lately has been growing worse. Despite three years of steady job gains, and four years of economic growth, many Americans have yet to experience much that could be described as a recovery. That sort of pattern isn't unusual in the aftermath of a recession, but it usually eases as growth picks up steam. Youth unemployment, for example, nearly always improves after recessions more slowly than that of prime-age workers, those between 25 and 54. Following the 2001 recession, it took six months for the gap between the youth and prime-age unemployment rates to return to its long-run average. After the early 1990s recession, it took 30 months. This time, it has been 52 months, and the gap has hardly narrowed. For those with decent jobs, wages are rising, albeit slowly, and job security is the strongest it has been since before the recession. Many families have paid down debts and are seeing the value of assets, from homes to stocks, rebound strongly, The Wall Street Journal reported. LINK

Vermont

Solar Power The Vermont Electric Cooperative is hoping to build the state’s largest utility-owned solar power project as part of a broader effort to help reduce the state’s dependence on fossil fuels, The Associated Press reported. LINK