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.”

Read the full report at americanprogress.org.

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.”

Watch the full segment here:

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.

Read the full column at washingtonpost.com.

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.

AFSCME President Gerald W. McEntee praised Sen. Reid’s efforts:

“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.”

Watch some of the highlights from Sen. Reid’s announcement here, courtesy of Think Progress: Wonk Room:

Yesterday afternoon, AFSCME joined more than 500 union members and health care activists at a rally in Washington, DC, where giant health insurance lobby group America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) was holding a conference just around the corner from our DC headquarters.

Led by Health Care for America Now (HCAN), we demanded the insurance industry’s top lobbyist, Karen Ignagni, meet with seven families whose lives have been turned upside down by insurance company bad practices and who traveled thousands of miles to be in DC. Ignagni never showed.

Listen to their stories:

Read more at the HCAN blog and the AFL-CIO blog, and check out some great photos from AMERICAblog:

From Health Care for America Now (HCAN):

The veil has finally come off the insurance companies’ charade as one of the insurance industry’s top lobbyists, Steve Champlin (who also works for AHIP, the insurance industry’s front group and lobbying arm), told Republican Members of Congress not to vote for health reform under any circumstances:

“There is absolutely no interest, no reason Republicans should ever vote for this thing. They have gone from a party that got killed 11 months ago to a party that is rising today. And they are rising up on the turmoil of health care,” said Champlin. “So when they vote for a health care reform bill, whatever it is, they are giving comfort to the enemy who is down.”

“Long before the Republicans discovered that the House bill was a strategy to kill seniors and all that kind of stuff the plan was already unpopular,” he added, underscoring why Republicans shouldn’t attach themselves to the legislation.

The remarks came during the opening session of AHIP’s annual State Issues Conference in which both Champlin and his co-panelist seemed to concede that reform would pass and will include a variation of a public option for insurance coverage.

The industry that treats rape as a pre-existing condition is finally coming clean. Their message: Republicans should kill health care reform, otherwise they will be giving comfort to the “enemy.”

So the insurance companies are finally coming clean that they’re against health reform and that they’ve always been against health reform. It’s slightly more honest of them.

Read more at HCAN’s NOW! blog.

And check out this interview from ThinkProgress with Wendell Potter, a former VP of communications at health insurance giant CIGNA, about exactly how insurance companies derail reform and preserve the status quo. Working in public relations for CIGNA, Potter had a direct role in multiple campaigns in the past to minimize public outrage at insurance company abuses and defeat legislation aimed at regulating insurers.

A new ad from MoveOn.org shows actress Heather Graham as the public option, forcing “lazy, bloated” private insurance companies to get back in the race and compete.

“Insurance companies have gotten lazy, bloated from the profits of raising our health care costs sky high while the health care crisis keeps getting worse. A public health insurance option is the key to quality affordable care for Americans. And over 70 percent of Americans want the public option. Some in Washington say this is unfair competition. But competition is as American as apple pie.”

Read more on HuffingtonPost.com.

Public support for a public health insurance option is increasing, according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll. 57 percent of all Americans now favor a public option, up from 52 percent in mid-August.

The poll also suggests, as pointed out by Greg Sargent, that a majority favors a public option over a bipartisan health care bill.

When this is explained clearly — and the WaPo framing is a far more accurate depiction of the choice the public and lawmakers face — a majority wants the partisan, Dem-only bill with the public option. Indeed, a majority wants the public option more than they want bipartisanship for its own sake. Okay?

In addition, the poll found that the majority of people — more than 60% — oppose a tax on benefits.

See more charts and read more on the poll from the Washington Post.