Join Biden in Live Webcast on the Economy and the Middle Class Today
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Click here at 10:30 a.m. EST to join Vice President Joe Biden as he hosts a live webcast with a panel of leading scholars to discuss the unique challenges facing America’s middle class in the 21st century economy.
This special Center for American Progress (CAP) and Economic Policy Institute (EPI) event will cover economic developments and trends affecting middle-class families, including changes to the overall labor market in recent decades, shifting gender roles, the need for a work-and-life balance in today’s economy, economic inequality and mobility, and the increased gap between productivity and wages.
Biden is chairman of the White House Task Force on Middle Class Families that President Barack Obama established in January to ensure the administration’s economic recovery effectively raises the living standards of middle-class families and those aspiring to be in the middle class.
Click here to watch.
Insurance Companies Run Death Panels When They Deny Coverage
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Health care reform protestors, extremist radio and television talkers and some mainstream Republicans trying to kill President Obama’s health care reform initiative have frequently, but falsely, claimed the health plan would create government “death panels” to decide who gets treatment and who dies.
(Click here to find out the truth behind other big lies about health care reform.)
What these defenders of the private health insurance industry don’t say is that those panels already exist. But they are not operated by the government—they are run by the private health insurance industry itself.
Unions and Our Allies Keep Health Care Debate Civil
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At town hall meetings, rallies and candlelight vigils, union members, health care activists and community allies are showing that the health care reform debate doesn’t belong to the loudest or most outrageous.
As a report form the Minnesota AFL-CIO says:
“The throng of union members who attended the recent town hall meeting that Rep. Tim Walz (D) held in Mankato know that their presence was crucial to keeping the debate thoughtful and respectful as right-wing fringe opponents of health care shouted and yelled in a weak attempt to disrupt the evening’s discussion.”
The 100 Minnesota union members were among the 800 or so residents who attended the Thursday town hall that filled a high school auditorium. According to news reports, the crowd was about evenly divided, but one group of opponents loudly booed and interrupted throughout the meeting. But, according to one participant, many left before the meeting was over.
Once they were gone, the air was lighter and people were able to calmly disagree with each other.
Teachers to Obama: We’re Ready to Work with You
Last week, President Obama unveiled a $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” fund to help states finance improvements in public education. The final rules for the program won’t be released until late August, and that’s when the AFT will be able to fully judge the initiative, says AFT President Randi Weingarten.
We are going to use our own four criteria when reviewing the department’s plan. They are: Does it help kids? Is it fair and helpful to educators? Is it transparent? And does it require shared responsibility? If the answer is “yes” for each, then we have a real chance of improving the quality of teaching and learning and raising student achievement.
The Race to the Top fund will provide grants to encourage and reward states for plans in four core educational reform areas aimed at improving teacher and principal quality, academic standards, data collection and turning around low-performing schools. The money is part of the nearly $100 billion set aside for education in the economic recovery package passed earlier this year.
Kaiser Model Shows the Way to Improving Health Care Delivery
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Using a combination of integrated, team-based care and technology, Kaiser Permanente of Southern California developed a Healthy Bones initiative that not only reduced fractures in the most at-risk patients by 37 percent, but lowered the care cost for the same patients by 30 percent.
Similar Kaiser programs have reduced heart disease deaths and treatment costs in Colorado and diabetes complications and costs in Hawaii.
Yesterday, a forum hosted by the National Labor College (NLC) and the Kaiser Permanente Health Care Institute explored how health care delivery and quality can be vastly improved and costs significantly lowered with integrated care and technology and by maximizing the unique labor-management partnership at Kaiser Permanente, where some 96,000 health care workers are unionized.
With the nation in the midst of a debate over how to reform the nation’s broken health care system and how to expand and improve care and reduce costs, the Kaiser model provides a promising blueprint.
