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Fix Health Care Right—Don’t Tax Benefits
We’re continuing our campaign for real health care reform with a new AFL-CIO TV ad that sends a clear message: “Pass Health Care. Don’t Tax Health Benefits.” The ad, which started running in key markets around the country over the weekend, emphasizes that taxing benefits will lead companies to cut benefits and will shift cost burdens to families that can’t afford it. It urges Congress to pass health care reform all Americans can afford.
The Senate’s health care bill would set a tax on health plans worth more than $8,500 per year for individuals and $23,000 per year for families. For workers in high-risk occupations, for retirees 55 or older and for residents in the 17 highest-cost states, the bill would tax plans worth more than $9,850 for individuals and $26,000 for families.
This would amount to an enormous tax on workers’ health care benefits, one that would grow rapidly, as insurers increase premiums by an equivalent amount. It would shift health care costs onto the backs of workers—including many of the most vulnerable workers—without bringing down the cost of health care.
Here’s a fact sheet on why this new tax on middle class families’ benefits will hurt workers. This policy could:
- Increase premiums, cut benefits and raise out-of-pocket costs for middle-class families.
- Hurt one in five workers by 2016.
- Punish workers who are older, sicker or in dangerous jobs.
- Hit workers whose plans are more costly not because of extravagant benefits but because of the kinds of work they do or where they live.
There’s a right way to pay for health care. The House passed a better, fairer reform bill, and it’s paid for by a surtax on the very wealthiest earners-the ones who benefited from big Bush-era tax cuts for the rich.
We need health care reform-but we shouldn’t hurt middle-class workers and their health benefits in the process. Contact your Senators and ask for real reform.
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9 Comments
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First please get these red state governments to implement the latest extension of jobless benefits sighned by Pres.Obama on Nov.6.There seems to be a hold on this program before Christmas so the holiday spending suffers at the expense of the Democrats agenda.We need our Union Leaders in each state to put this story into our national discussion.
AFL-CIO has spent huge amounts of money and time helping elect Obama and the Democrats, all on the now obviously false hope that a “change” from the Bush regime poliicies would take place.
The AFL-CIO then makes a big campaign for EFCA, which is apparently not going to be passed or even seriously considered as only about ten percent of Democrats are considered “pro-labor”. The corporate financed campaign that has created the Obama/Democrat regime has given trillions to Wall Street, bankers, billions for more wars. But the EFCA, with it’s potential of reducing profits from the rightful demands of organized labor, is seen as a potential massive attack on profit by business.
The “health care reform” of Obama is universally understood as a corporate and capitalist “windfall” that enriches a few corportions, by extracting vast wealth from average working people desperately trying to maintain their health and lives. The most odious and corrupt provisions of the proposed legislation are noted in this article.
But it is especially hypocritical of the AFL-CIO to now beg that these provisions are critically essential to the maximization of profit of the “health care” industry parasites.
But the most hypocritical and anti-worker position of all, the AFL-CIO “leadership” has completely ignored the demands of member delegates to the September Pittsburgh convention. There the delegates voted unanimously vfor “single-payer” -Medicare for All -legislation to completely eliminate the corporate gangsters, essential to achieve a truely universal and affordable health care plan for working people.
The AFL-CIO “leadership” is incapable of promoting a winning strategy for electing pro-labor people to Congress. At this point, this would mean with the creation of a new anti-capitalist and pro-labor socialist political party to elect pro-labor candidates at every level of government.
The decades long conservative and pro-business “leadership” of the U.S. labor movement has effectively destroyed any expression of opposition to the corporate destruction of economy and the impoverishment of millions of working people.
For an alterntive socialist perspective of the kind of change is necessary for the economic survival of working people, see WSWS http://www.wsws.org
Lame.
“Compromise” and “pragmatism” are code words for “retreat”. Now here we are in December 2009, and we are seeing the results of the “compromise” and “pragmatism” that began even before the battle was joined. We’re at the cliff’s edge and have no further retreat left in us.
Retreat was, of course, a stupid blunder. (Perhaps blunder is too kind a word. Sell-out more accurately describes the “reform” debacle. Stupid is probably the wrong adjective too. “Calculated” would fit better.)
Politicians, be they Rs or Ds, salivate at the horn-o-plenty otherwise known as campaign financing and political patronage. Be it financial institutions, arms manufacturers, big oil, or the medical-profits industry, lawmakers dance with the ones what brung ‘em.
Decent people – the 90% of us who comprise working class America – are being lied to, misinformed, confused, and our very lives are being sacrificed in the process.
The “public option” scheme was an uninvited component that added new escape hatches for the ethically challenged. It did not originate with the working class.
Therein lies one of the great and age-old dilemmas.
“Intellectuals” take it upon themselves to view an issue and then contort it and distill it into their own notion of what constitutes a “solution”. They do so without bothering to first check to see if what they are proposing is in line with the needs of vox populi. They do not speak for us, yet their machinations ooze to the surface of what is euphemistically called “public discourse”. The voices of the people are muted in the process.
For me, however, the lousiest and most hurtful sell-out was the one perpetrated by many in the hierarchy of organized labor. Some of those suits and ties have never broken a sweat, yet they purport to represent those of us who have actually worked hard all our lives. The stench of corruption that has permeated Congress for years has seeped out into other citadels of power. I’ve been a dues paying union member for 42 years. Today’s labor-fakers-posing-as-leaders couldn’t carry the water for true labor heroes of yore.
Two years ago poll after credible poll showed that upwards of 60% of the people in our nation supported a national single payer health care program like Medicare for all. 75% of union members did too.
For reasons that remain unsavory, politicians and their apologists (and that includes the media) hired-on to act as surrogates for the medical-profits industry. Their first objective was to demonize single payer. They used scare tactics like “tax increases”, “death panels”, “rationing”, and “loss of choice” to attack the call for a national program.
Now here we are, and lots of people are attempting to extricate themselves from a debacle they helped create.
How do you spell “sell out”? C-O-N-G-R-E-S-S!
I am against the taxing of benefits even though I am a member of the USW Local 87 union,whom are about to loose our (70,000 members) health insurance the first of the year. Why are we not being heard from The United Steel Workers Union? Our local 87 union President is not getting NO help from USW, WHY NOT? It’s “ironic”, that at a time when the government is working for free health care, why did they take our earned contractural health benefits away from us? Thank you. Jim M. retirree USW Local 87 Dayton,Ohio??
The President says, “If you like your insurance, you can keep it.”
Why aren’t examples like yours and the Teamsters Local 25 in Chicago and others getting more publicity.
We were sold out again by the Democratic party!
For more on taxing benefits see:
http://thehealthcaremaze.us/2009/03/21/dear-prez-taxing-benefits-is-bad-health-policy/
http://thehealthcaremaze.us/2009/05/16/tax-my-benefits-the-devil-in-the-details/
This is why I’ve been against healthcare reform from the beginning. It seems that everyone — especially the AFL-CIO — wholeheartedly jumped on the bandwagon without ever first understanding where it was going.
A tax on existing benefits which were collectively bargained for through Union representation has long been under consideration. Why is it only now the AFL-CIO seems to be finding out about it?
And why would the AFL-CIO be so adamantly supportive of a program that takes away one of the Union’s main draws? ie, Good healthcare benefits are a mainstay of Union membership, so why is the AFL-CIO working so hard to give Union benefits to the anti-union?
It would seem the AFL-CIO has lost or is losing its way. Straying very, very far from the definition of Labor Union.
definition / labor union: an organization of workers formed for the purpose of advancing ITS MEMBERS’ interests in respect to wages, benefits, and working conditions