House Health Reform Bill Debate Begins, and Other Health Care News
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The U.S. House’s historic health care reform legislation—which would dramatically improve health coverage in this country while cutting the U.S. budget deficit in the long term—is headed to the House floor today for debate. The vote on H.R. 3962 will happen later this week or early next week.
This comprehensive, fairly funded bill will provide millions of uninsured people with affordable coverage and put tough new rules in place on insurers to protect consumers who already have insurance. The bill includes real responsibility for employers, subsidies for low- and middle-income families to help pay for insurance and a public health insurance plan to compete with insurance companies.
Taxing Benefits: The Wrong Way to Pay for Health Care
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One of the principles that must be at the heart of health care reform is making sure it’s paid for fairly. Unfortunately, some members of Congress are trying to fund it in the wrong way—by taxing working families’ health benefits.
The Senate Finance Committee’s bill, unlike the bills passed by committees in the U.S. House, relies on an excise tax on health coverage, starting in 2013, to fund health reform. That’s a short-sighted policy that could hurt millions of people that health care reform is supposed to help.
A new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows that, under the current Senate Finance Committee proposal, the excise tax would hit about one-third of health insurance plans within the next decade. This could cause millions of middle-class families to suffer a tax increase or to get their benefits pared back, the report says.
To the extent that workers choose less expensive health plans for themselves and their families to avoid the excise tax, they will be faced with higher out-of-pocket costs. All else equal, lower premiums translate into less comprehensive coverage. Less comprehensive coverage often takes the form of higher deductibles, increased co-pays, higher out-of-pocket maximums, or other increased cost-sharing.
State Fed Leaders: Air Tanker Contract Should Go to Boeing
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Awarding the $35 billion contract for the Air Force’s refueling tankers to Boeing Co. is the clear choice for “investing in American workers, American knowledge, American security, and America’s future,” the presidents of 10 AFL-CIO state federations say in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
The letter, sent last week, urges the Pentagon to consider the impact on the U.S. economy and national security in deciding which company should receive the lucrative Air Force refueling tanker contract.
In September 2008, Gates, who also was George W. Bush’s defense chief, announced he was canceling the competition for the refueling tankers and leaving it to the next administration to decide. Gates said the competition between Boeing Co. and European-based EADS/Northrop Grumman was “too controversial” to be settled during the last four months of the Bush administration.
Beware of the Big Lie Bill
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Opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act in Congress made their Big Lie into a bill Wednesday, when Republican Sens. Jim DeMint (S.C.) and Mike Enzi (Wyo.) introduced the so-called Secret Ballot Protection Act.
Before we go further, let’s clear up the bill’s false implication right now:
The Employee Free Choice Act would not—repeat after me—would not, take away the secret ballot National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election process if workers seeking to form a union wanted to use it. The Employee Free Choice would ensure workers made the decision of whether to select a union via majority sign-up (card-check) or via ballot process. Choice is good. That’s one reason why we called it Employee Free Choice—because it would enable employees, not management, to make the decision of how to form a union.
The alleged goal of S. 478 is to:
amend the National Labor Relations Act to ensure the right of employees to a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board.
2008 in Review: Union Members: Yes, We Can; Yes, We Did
Here’s the final part in our series taking a look back at 2008. Be sure to check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.
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Change was in the air—and on the way—in November, as the AFL-CIO’s biggest-ever political mobilization headed toward the finish line. Tens of thousands of union volunteers packed local union halls to phone bank or to talk with union family voters in neighborhoods around the country in the final get-out-the-vote push to elect Barack Obama and win even bigger working family majorities in Congress.
Obama chose a union hall as his last campaign stop. On Election Day morning, he popped into UAW Local 550’s Indianapolis phone bank. Said Keith Neargardener, UAW Region 3 CAP director:
You know, to make the union hall your last stop before becoming president sends such a great message. It shows how he’s not afraid to say the word union and to embrace and support unions openly.
2008 in Review: McCain Sinking, Employee Free Choice Act Rising
Here’s the fifth part in our series taking a look back at 2008. Be sure to check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.
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The presidential campaign dominated the headlines as summer turned to fall.
By Labor Day, the traditional start of the campaign season, the tens of thousands of union volunteers who had been on the ground for months intensified their efforts. On the job, at the doors and on the phones, they talked with even more union members about the stark differences between Barack Obama’s working families agenda and John McCain’s corporate platform.
In a Labor Day message, Obama told workers:
It’s time you had a president who honors organized labor—who’s walked on picket lines; who doesn’t choke on the word “union”; who lets our unions do what they do best and organize our workers; and who will finally make the Employee Free Choice Act the law of the land.
2008 in Review: Workers Win Unions, Crown Bad Bosses
Here’s the fourth part in our series taking a look back at 2008. Check out Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here.
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In July, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka gave a speech to delegates at the United Steelworkers (USW) convention warning that as the presidential campaign heats up, there will be attempts to divide workers by race. His bold and much-needed statement went on to became a YouTube, Internet and blog sensation throughout the campaign season:
Barack Obama has always, always been on our side. This is a guy who’s voted with labor 98 percent of the time….There’s not a single good reason for any worker—especially any union member—to vote against Barack Obama. There’s only one really bad reason to vote against him: because he’s not white.
2008 in Review: Workers Sign Up with AFL-CIO Unions
Here’s the third part in our series taking a look back at 2008. Check out Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
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May-June
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Union members knocked on the first of what would be 10 million of union voters’ doors around the country to talk with them about the key working family issues in the 2008 elections. In the late spring and early summer, we focused on John McCain’s record on health care and the economy.
Along with door-to-door walks, union members mobilized through phone banks, labor council meetings, political training, worksite leafleting and public events.
As union volunteers talked with union members about McCain plans to tax their health care benefits, other union activists were shadowing McCain’s every stop, demanding real health care solutions answers and not just Band-Aid solutions.
2008 in Review: McCain Revealed and McCain Reviled
Here’s the second part in our series taking a look back at 2008. Check out Part 1 here.
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March-April
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The job loss hits kept coming—63,000 in February and 83,000 in March. But President Bush and congressional Republicans kept up their fight against extending unemployment insurance benefits to workers who run out of benefits before finding new work in a crumbling economy.
In April, more than 400 central labor councils begin dedicating their monthly meetings to educating and mobilizing their members around health care reform for the coming elections. Most saw huge turnouts.
Union members continued making endorsements in the primaries, many selecting Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) or Barack Obama (D-Ill). But they were unified in their opposition to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and showed up at campaign stop after campaign stop urging him to meet with workers. He never did.
Meanwhile the AFL-CIO launched McCain Revealed, a website detailing McCain’s long anti-working family career and dangerous policy proposals.
2008 in Review: Remember January, With a Jobless Rate of 5 Percent?
It was a classic “Good News-Bad News Year” for working families in 2008. First, the good news. Working families mobilized to Turn Around America and gave a pink slip to McBush, electing Barack Obama and ending eight years of the most anti-worker administration in U.S. history.
Now, the bad news. Millions of workers got their own pink slips as the Bush economy tumbled even faster toward disaster. In between, the Employee Free Choice Act gained momentum, health care reform jumped to the forefront in the public debate and workers continued to fight anti-worker employers and weak labor laws to form unions and bargain for a better life.
Here’s the first of a six-part AFL-CIO Now blog series on the year that was.
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January-February
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In what became a month-by-month flood of bad economic news, the first unemployment report of the year showed the jobless rate jumping to 5 percent—at the time, the highest level in two years. But the worst was to come. A month later, news came that for the first time in four years, the economy lost jobs—17,000 of them. That first wave of job loss was a tsunami by year’s end.
With the economy’s downhill ride gaining speed, the AFL-CIO proposed a five-point economic-recovery plan to turn it around. President Bush and congressional Republicans blocked the sweeping stimulus package, even denying aid to the growing number of jobless.
In a rare bit of good economic news—the result of a 2006 and 2007 mobilization by the AFL-CIO and other groups to raise state minimum wages—low-wage worker in 14 states got a pay raise Jan 1.
