The online progressive hub Daily Kos has gone AFSCME green for health care.
If you’ve visited Daily Kos today, you probably noticed the familiar orange color has been updated with a healthy dose of AFSCME green. We’ve taken out a full-page “skin” ad to make sure people call Congress today in support of the health insurance reform bill.
We think the colors work well together, and so do the combined efforts of labor and the netroots community. With a vote on H.R. 3962 coming as soon as Saturday, it really is all hands on deck to make sure this crucial legislation is passed now.
The Affordable Health Care for America Act provides a strong public option, protects working Americans from a tax on their health benefits, and requires large employers to provide insurance for their employees. It deserves the support of every member of Congress — including yours.
This message comes from Chuck Loveless, AFSCME Director of Legislation.
It all comes down to this.
The House of Representatives finally will vote on health care reform legislation as soon as Saturday. This is a truly historic and defining moment for our nation. Will we meet one of the most important challenges of our generation? With your help — yes we will.
You can help us cross the finish line. This is the vote that can put an end to our broken health care system — one that currently allows insurance companies to deny care for pre-existing conditions, has our premiums going through the roof, leaves 47 million Americans uninsured and drags our entire economy down.
The Affordable Health Care for America Act (H.R. 3962) represents the real reform that we’ve been fighting for:
H.R. 3962 pays for reform the right way — by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share and not taxing our health benefits.
The Affordable Health Care for America Act includes the choice of a public health insurance option, providing competition for private insurance companies to lower costs and improve quality.
The bill also requires most employers to provide insurance coverage for their workers or pay a meaningful amount into a fund to help low- and moderate-income workers buy their own coverage through the exchange that will be established in every state.
You can bet that Congress is hearing from insurance company lobbyists — that’s why it’s so critical that they hear from you, too.
Your voice will serve as a stark reminder that there is overwhelming public support for real reform — but only if you make the call. So please, go to: www.afscme.org/call
Yesterday we wrote about a critical vote in the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee which pitted regular people and our pensions against the Chamber of Commerce and The Business Roundtable. AFSCME has been playing a leadership role in that effort, and thanks to all our hard work we won the vote this morning 39-30.
This is a big step forward in ensuring accountability for corporate directors through creating real democratic elections. The next step in the process is to have proxy access included in the Senate Financial reform legislation.
The current economic meltdown has destroyed $11 trillion in family wealth, pushed unemployment above 10 percent and threatened millions with home foreclosure. Part of the solution is to hold corporate directors accountable for the risky decisions they make and the executive pay schemes they approve that promote greed.
Proxy access gives shareholders the power to replace these corporate directors, and this week the House Financial Services Committee will be voting on a proxy access amendment sponsored by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Rep. Gary C. Peters (D-MI). The Chamber of Commerce is aggressively mobilizing to defeat this amendment and protect corporate insiders.
Visit ShareOwners.org for more information and to take action to hold corporate directors accountable and help prevent another financial crisis.
The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything
On October 16, the Center for American Progress (CAP), in partnership with California First Lady Maria Shriver, released The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, a groundbreaking examination of how “women’s changing roles are affecting our major societal institutions, from government and businesses to our faith communities.”
For the first time in American history, women make up half of all U.S. workers and mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families. Considering that in 1967 women made up only one-third of all workers, this is a dramatic transformation that fundamentally changes how all Americans work and live, “not just women but also their families, their co-workers, their bosses, their faith institutions, and their communities.”
Unfortunately, America as a nation has not yet come to terms with what this means.
“This report tries to chapter those things out and say all of these institutions have failed to adapt to this change that has happened, and that in order for them to survive and become smart about the American worker they must adapt and must change,” Shriver said on NBC’s Meet The Press.
“Our policy landscape remains stuck in an idealized past,” writes CAP President and CEO John Podesta in his preface to the report. “This report contemplates what a new America should look like after we finally embrace this important new dynamic in our lives and the changes it has caused in our homes and businesses.”
AFSCME President Gerald W. McEntee issued the following statement regarding the introduction of the Affordable Health Care for America Act:
“Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House leadership have crafted a strong bill. It deserves the support of every member of the Congress. It protects working Americans from a tax on their health benefits, provides a public option and requires large and medium-sized employers to provide insurance for their employees. This bill will make quality, affordable health care a reality for millions of families. Instead of taxing the health benefits of middle class Americans, Speaker Pelosi asks the wealthiest people in the country to pay their fair share. We will mobilize our members across the country to build support for this bill. This is real health care reform. The time has come for Congress to enact it.”
The NewsHour on PBS dedicated a segment of their Tuesday broadcast to the new leader of the American labor movement with a profile of AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. The story highlighted Trumka’s start as a coal miner in Pennsylvania, his graduation from Villanova Law School, his rise to president of the Mine Workers and his key role in the tough battle against Pittston Coal Co. Included in the segment were clips from throughout Trumka’s career, including his emotional acceptance speech at the AFL-CIO convention in September.
As NewsHour pointed out, Trumka made his name “as a bulldog against corporate overreach” while he was AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer. The new AFL-CIO president made it clear he’s not about to let up now:
“I’ll stop demonizing big business just as soon as they put their country before their profits and they put their workers before their greed.”
CNBC’s “Street Signs” host Erin Burnett says the numbers take her breath away: mutual funds consistently vote in favor of management proposals that increase executive pay — 84% of the time in 2008 — and against shareholder efforts to bring compensation in line with performance. Those numbers are from a recent report from The Corporate Library and AFSCME exposing funds’ complicity in runaway CEO pay.
On Monday, Richard Ferlauto, AFSCME’s director of corporate governance and pension investment, appeared on “Street Signs” to discuss the worst “pay enablers” that just aren’t serving the best interests of most individual investors:
Learn more about this and other issues by checking out the AFSCME-supported shareholder online resources at ShareOwners.org.
The Senate health care legislation announced by Sen. Harry Reid on Monday will include a public option, but would pay for reform by taxing more costly, so-called “Cadillac” plans. Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson says the proposed excise tax is going to hit an awful lot of Chevy plans, too: the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation says the tax will hit one-third of Americans by 2019.
Supporters of the Senate plan say employers will buy less-expensive plans to avoid having to pay the excise tax, meaning employees will need to pay more health care costs themselves — but that’s okay since the money being saved on the cheaper plans will be passed on in higher wages.
Meyerson sees a different outcome:
[I]f employers opt for cheaper policies to avoid the excise taxes on more-expensive plans, their savings may not be passed on to workers as higher wages but simply kept by the employers. Out-of-pocket health costs for workers would rise, but into-pocket wage increases to cover those costs might not be forthcoming.
Earlier this afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) held a press conference to announce that the merged Senate health reform bill will include a public option which would allow individual states to opt out.
“I want to commend Senator Reid and other members of the Senate leadership who have worked so hard to produce this bill, which takes us closer to the goal of health care reform. While the bill is by no means perfect, it is a significant improvement over the proposal crafted in the Senate Finance Committee. Now we will work to improve the bill on the Senate floor and to pass a strong bill in the House. AFSCME continues to support health care reform that includes a robust public option and an effective employer mandate, while eliminating taxes on middle class health plans. The American people are ready for Congress to finish this bill and make quality, affordable health care a reality for all Americans.”
AFSCME’s 1.6 million members provide the vital services that make America happen. With members in hundreds of different occupations — from nurses to corrections officers, child care providers to sanitation workers — AFSCME is the voice of the dedicated workers who take care of America, and is a leading advocate for all working families.
The online progressive hub Daily Kos has gone AFSCME green for health care.
