Big Health Insurance to Sick Kids: Suffer
It didn’t take long for Big Insurance to look for loopholes in the health care reform law. Just days after it was signed by President Obama, insurance companies are trying to weasel out of provisions designed to end the abuse and outrageous practices the insurance industry has inflicted on consumers and patients for years.
Sick kids are their first target.
Starting Sept. 23, the bill will ban insurance companies from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. But as The New York Times reports this morning, insurance lawyers are claiming the bill’s “fine print” allows them to refuse to cover children with pre-existing conditions such as asthma, diabetes, orthopedic problems, birth defects and other illnesses.
Record Profits Don’t Stop Health Insurer’s Record Rate Hikes
There’s a theory that trends happen first in California before spreading to the rest of the nation. If that’s true in health insurance, we’re all in deep trouble.
Last week, Anthem Blue Cross–whose parent company WellPoint posted a record $4.7 billion profit in 2009–announced it was gouging even more money from its 800,000 California customers by raising premiums as much as 39 percent.
Deborah Burger, RN, and co-president of the National Nurse United (NNU), says Anthem Blue Cross’s “disgraceful behavior may be particularly offensive,”
but it is not out of character for an industry engages systemically in price gouging and denial of care.
Cap and Trade Bill: Good First Step
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The U.S. Congress took a step forward toward a national policy that helps clean up the environment and create good green jobs, but there is still work to do, union leaders say today.
The American Clean Energy and Security Act, which passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee yesterday, would set a national ceiling on greenhouse gas emissions and let polluting industries buy and sell credits to meet it. This “cap-and-trade” system would limit harmful human-generated emissions and, hopefully, speed up development of renewable energy sources, create green jobs and help reduce our dependence on oil.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says the bill, as currently marked up, “makes significant, job-creating investments, while attempting to minimize impacts on existing workers.”
The AFL-CIO supports cap-and-trade legislation that takes a balanced approach towards an economy wide-program and prevents foreign competitors from getting advantages over American companies.
Union Leaders Join in White House Meeting on Health Care, Social Security
After eight years with a virtual “Do Not Enter” sign at the White House front door, President Obama has opened 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to leaders, policymakers and advocates of a wide range of views.
Yesterday, union and business leaders, conservative and progressive economists, and think tankers and Democratic and Republican lawmakers came together for a “Fiscal Responsibility Summit.”
At the opening session, Obama unveiled his outline to cut the $1.3 trillion federal deficit he inherited from the Bush administration in half by the end of his term by letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire, reining in tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas and drawing down troops in Iraq, among other items.
