Senate Health Care Debate Coming Up, and Other Health Care News
With Saturday’s successful Senate procedural vote behind us, the stage is set for a debate on health care reform after Thanksgiving. Getting this far—putting a comprehensive health care reform bill on the Senate floor—has never happened before. It’s a big victory, but the Senate bill is still flawed, because it relies on a new tax on workers’ health care benefits. Contact your senators and tell them they need to pass a real reform bill, not one that taxes the health benefits of middle-class families.
Here’s the latest news on health care reform:
- In a new report, “The Consequences of ‘No,’” the New England Journal of Medicine looks at the need for strong health care reform. It’s a must-read. The authors, Dr. Arthur Kellermann and Lawrence Lewin, conclude the rapidly increasing numbers of people without insurance have enormous cost consequences for those who have insurance and for the medical system. These findings confirm those of a similar study from the Institute of Medicine earlier this year that show crisis levels of uninsured and the serious cost effects for everyone in the health care system.
Tanker Contract: Corporate Serfdom or Quality Jobs?
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The governors of Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama are pushing the U.S. Defense Department to award in 2010 a $35 billion to $40 billion tanker contract to European-owned EADS/Airbus rather than U.S.-based Boeing Corp.
In doing so, Republican Govs. Haley Barbour, Bobby Jindal and Bob Riley are seeking to pit worker against worker, North against South, as a ploy to cover what’s really at stake: family-supporting jobs.
See, these governors loooove job creation in their states—as long as those jobs don’t pay much. Or offer affordable health insurance and retirement security. And especially as long as those jobs aren’t union.
If Boeing is awarded the contract for the refueling tanker aircraft, 44,000 family-supporting production jobs will be created across the country. In contrast, the few thousand jobs created under an EADS contract would be low-paid assembly jobs with no union protection.
Economic Recovery Package: Jobs, Jobs and More Jobs
Now that President Obama’s economic recovery package has been enacted, workers and political leaders are poring over the details of the plan to figure out the potential impact on workers and their unions.
Jeff Rickert, director of the AFL-CIO’s Center for Green Jobs, says the package will create millions of new jobs and open up opportunities for workers to gain long-term, quality jobs in areas of the economy where unions are strong—manufacturing, construction and others.
Case in point: Nearly $7 billion will be spent in Illinois alone on projects ranging from $1.6 billion for transportation infrastructure, nearly $1 billion for highways and $154 million in job training.
