Health Care Kumbaya
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| Protest against health insurers need to have both a union and community face—like this march both against foreclosures and for the Employee Free Choice Act earlier in March in Lynn, Mass. |
The peasants are filing their pitchforks to a fine point in anticipation of an attack on the palace—and the target of their ire is not what we might have intended. At this critical moment in the health care debate, more than a few working folk are taking a suspicious look at the health care reform efforts of Senate Democrats, President Obama—and their own unions. A headline in my local newspaper, the Lynn Item, helped stir the tempest: “Obama Open to Taxing Benefits to Fund Reform.”
Vincent Panvani of the Sheet Metal Workers (SMWIA) warns:
If any of these Democratic Senators vote for this, they’ll be out in 2010, and it will be used against Obama….[Y]ou’re taxing the middle class.
Teamsters President James Hoffa calls taxing health care benefits “the poison pill that will kill reform.” The Laborers have attack ads at the ready. And Donna Smith, an organizer and legislative representative for the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC) notes that insurance companies continue discriminatory rates for older workers and ongoing rescissions of benefits—that is, targeting people with more than 1,400 medical conditions for “opposition research” investigations so their benefits can be cut off. “Ugly stuff,” she puts it. (At a health care forum in Lynn, Mass., last week, Rep. John Tierney reported that in congressional hearings he asked every insurance company if they would stop these viscous targeted rescissions—each one said “No.”)
Progressive Caucus Backs Public Health Insurance Plan
While one of the AFL-CIO’s key health care reform principles—a public health insurance option—has been vigorously attacked by the private insurance industry, it received important backing last week from the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC).
The CPC long has backed a single-payer approach for health care reform. But last week, the group said that is not a line in the sand that could not be crossed to win its backing of health care reform legislation.
In a letter to congressional leaders, the CPC said its 77 members could support a public insurance plan option within a reformed health care system that maintained private insurance. But, the group also stressed that it’s the “minimum” needed to win their support for reform legislation.
Options for Addressing Our Nation’s Health Care Crisis
This is the second in a series of occasional articles looking at health care reform proposals and initiatives from a wide range of groups and experts. We take a brief look today at two reports, one from a major health care union and the other by a group of CEOs from five large health plans or systems and a drug company president.
The incoming Obama administration is developing a comprehensive plan to address a broad range of health care concerns. The AFL-CIO has not endorsed a specific plan but has established certain principles that any plan should be built around.
