Millions Lose Health Coverage Since Recession and Job-Based Health Care Declines
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The decline in the share of workers with employer-provided health care, the dramatic increase in the number of workers losing their health insurance along with their jobs, plus reports that employers are planning to shift even more health costs to workers, highlights the desperate need for comprehensive health care reform for all.
(Tell us what you think should be included in comprehensive health care reform. Take the 2009 Health Care for America Survey. The survey gives you the opportunity to make your voice heard and help shape health care reform to meet the needs of working families. Take the survey here.)
According to a new report by the Center for American Progress (CAP), the percentage of workers with employer-provided health care dropped from more than 64 percent in 1999 to just over 59 percent in 2007.
Forty-six million Americans lacked health care coverage in 2007, when the national employment level peaked and before the current economic recession officially began. Today, that number is markedly higher as many workers who have lost their jobs have also lost their employer-provided health insurance.
‘It’s Time to Regulate All Global Financial Markets’
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The global financial meltdown demonstrates the need to regulate all international financial markets, not only the important institutions, says Damon Silvers, vice chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP). The COP is examining how the Treasury Department is spending taxpayer money to help rescue the financial system.
Speaking yesterday at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Finance Initiative, Silvers said the overhaul of the global regulatory system should be comprehensive.
All forms of money management in global markets ought to be under a regulatory scheme. Not just systematically significant ones, all of them. Otherwise, we ought to just basically admit that we don’t have regulated markets.
WSJ: Employee Free Choice Does NOT Eliminate Secret Ballots
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A striking concession today from the hard-right, corporate-friendly editorial board of the Wall Street Journal: In the midst of an angry editorial against the Employee Free Choice Act, the authors undermine years of messaging by anti-worker corporate groups by acknowledging:
The bill doesn’t remove the secret ballot option from the National Labor Relations Act….
However, the Journal writes erroneously that the bill makes secret ballots a “dead letter.” But as we’ve pointed out many times, the Employee Free Choice Act puts the choice of majority sign-up or a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election in the hands of the workers who want to form a union, rather than leaving workers at the mercy of management in that decision.
