AFSCME members at the March 9th “mass citizens’ arrest” of health insurance executives. (Photo by D.W. Matthews Studios, LLC)

Thousands of demonstrators, including hundreds of AFSCME members, participated in a “mass citizens’ arrest” of health insurance executives as they met in our nation’s capital on Tuesday to plan their continued efforts to defeat health care reform.

AFSCME activists from Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania joined the protest in front of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Washington, D.C. where the health insurance lobbying group, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), was holding its annual policy conference.

“We’re doing something that we should have done a while ago,” AFSCME President Gerald W. McEntee told the Los Angeles Times. “Whatever it takes, we’ll do.”

Speaking to the Huffington Post, McEntee let our elected representatives know they are on notice:

“I hope this sends a message to Congress. I think we have to demonstrate that we are not going to stand aside, that we are going to take them out if they don’t help us at all.”

George Estright, a member of AFSCME Local 2162, told the AFL-CIO Now Blog why he traveled from Harrisburg, PA, for the rally:

“We support health care reform to control insurance company profits. It’s not right for working Americans to pay for 200 percent profits for insurance companies. We need something that is fair and equitable.”

Press coverage included stories in McClatchy Newspapers, the Wall Street Journal, MedPage Today, the Baltimore Sun, Huffington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

See photos from the event on Flickr:

Read more about the March 9th action in this AFSCME WORKS Online Xtra and in posts on the AFL-CIO Now and Health Care for America NOW! blogs.

This ad in today’s issues of Politico, Roll Call and The Hill, urges Congress to pass President Obama’s health care reform plan now.

As the leaders of America’s health insurance industry meet today at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, DC, thousands of working men and women are urging Congress to take a stand against the insurance companies and their efforts to kill health care reform.

Busloads of AFSCME activists from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland have come to the nation’s capitol to confront insurance company executives who drop coverage for sick people and jack up rates to create unconscionable profits.

AFSCME President Gerald W. McEntee, joining more than 3,000 protesters outside the hotel where insurance company CEO’s and lobbyists are attending their annual policy conference, urged Congress to stand up to the insurance companies.

“For them, the bottom line is making money,” McEntee said. “They are paid millions to fight something every American should have – quality, affordable health care.”

AFSCME took out full-page ads in the three key Capitol Hill newspapers – Politico, Roll Call and The Hill – today urging Congress to pass President Obama’s health care reform plan now.

Via the Rachel Maddow Show blog comes this graph from Econbrowser:

From Maddow:

Consider three bills — two of them passed under budget reconciliation, the third heading for budget reconciliation. Each had an effect on the fiscal health of the nation, calculated by the Congressional Budget Office. The first two, the tax cuts pushed by President George W. Bush, blew a hole in the budget. The third, the Senate’s health reform bill? As you can see from the CBO projections, that’s a different story.

From our friends at Americans United for Change:

This morning, in yet another slap to the face of struggling,
out-of-work Americans, miserly GOP Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky again roadblocked measures in the Senate to extend unemployment benefits to 400,000 Americans and subsidies for affordable health care for thousands more. 

Senator Bunning’s “tough s—t” message to millions of struggling Americans, including 119,230 in Kentucky, was enthusiastically approved by Republican leaders.

It’s a sad new low for a party that believes they can gain politically keeping Washington in gridlock – drawing a line in the sand on virtually every issue, no matter how uncontroversial from creating jobs to financial regulatory reform to funding for our troops to health insurance reform and now unemployment and health care assistance for their constituents who need it most.

FYI – check out this new web video below on what the Lexington Herald-Leader calls Senator Bunning’s “callous grandstanding,”:

Not satisfied with record-breaking profits of $12.5 billion last year – a whooping 56 percent spike from 2008 – the nation’s five largest insurance companies have the audacity to raise their premiums on thousands of families who are still struggling in these tough economic times. One California insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, has threatened to increase premiums by up to 39 percent this year. It made an enormous profit of $4.7 billion in 2009.

As U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein puts it, these insurers “have gotten very greedy.”

She’s right. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), these companies raked in profits of 250 percent between 2000 and 2009. Now they want even larger premium hikes: 56 percent in Michigan, 24 percent in Connecticut, 23 percent in Maine, 20 percent in Oregon, and 16 percent in Rhode island.

These are “disturbing examples of the problems that make reforming our health insurance system more important than ever,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius points out. “Thousands of struggling families are left with an unpleasant choice between fewer benefits, higher insurance rates, or having no insurance at all.”

It’s time to pass real health care reform and stop health insurance premiums from soaring even higher.

This message regarding President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address comes from AFSCME President Gerald W. McEntee.

President Obama made it clear last night that he will fight for jobs. He knows that we cannot lose sight of the millions of working families who are still suffering from the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Too many Americans are out of work and too many jobs are at risk.

The President and Congress must act now or millions of Americans could lose their jobs in the months ahead. To this point, the President reminded the Democrats of their obligation to lead and served notice to Republicans that ‘just say no’ is not an option.

AFSCME agrees with the President that America needs to lay a foundation for long-term economic growth, and we continue to believe that providing affordable, quality health care for millions of additional Americans is not only the right thing to do, but is also a key to economic recovery.

We also agree that federal action is needed to keep our economy from slipping back into the ditch. Too many services in communities across the country are being cut to the bone. AFSCME members understand this first hand. Members like you are on the front lines of this crisis, trying to do more and more with less and less. State and local governments need help and they need it now.

AFSCME will fight for robust investment in vital public services. Indeed, investment in public services must be a part of federal jobs legislation. In the coming weeks and months, we will call you, our 1.6 million members, to lend your voice to our efforts to make this happen.

With Congress on the verge of passing historic health care reform, opponents are apparently willing to do just about anything to stop our efforts to fix the health care crisis, drive costs down and cover all Americans.

Among our key priorities, AFSCME is fighting to maintain important consumer protections in health care reform, and to rein in the abusive practices of the industry. The insurance industry has fought to undermine any new proposed regulations, even those they have publicly agreed to. Unfortunately, much of their lobbying is hidden and grossly underreported.

Now an explosive expose by the National Journal reports that the insurance industry secretly spent as much as $20 million on recent ads attacking health care reform, scaring the public and spreading misinformation. Big insurance companies, including Aetna, Cigna, Humana, UnitedHealth Group and Wellpoint, funneled millions through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and front groups to hide their contributions and negative campaign while they acted like they were willing to make a deal.

The industry’s covert tactics to protect their bottom line demonstrate why we need strong market reforms, such as ensuring access to a national health insurance buying pool with strong federal oversight, and stopping insurers from finding new and creative ways to deny care based on pre-existing conditions and other factors.

The health care crisis is dragging down our economy and making Americans sick, yet all the insurance industry cares about is their profits.

A group of 16 unions, including AFSCME, representing nearly nine million federal and postal employees and retirees sent a letter to key leaders in Congress this week calling for the removal of the proposed excise tax on high-cost insurance plans included in the Senate’s version of health reform legislation.

As reported by the Huffington Post, the unions object to the so-called “Cadillac tax” because it will unfairly target working-class families.

From the letter:

Characterizing this tax proposal as a “Cadillac tax” is a misnomer. It hits the average blue collar and white collar employee or annuitant. FEHBP [Federal Employees Health Benefits Program] insurers will simply reduce coverage and, as the taxes increase, a downward spiral towards less coverage will ensue, which is antithetical to health care reform’s states purpose. Penalizing FEHBP enrollees with this tax is a huge disincentive to qualified applicants seeking federal or postal employment. It is bad for the government and bad policy overall.

The following unions signed the letter:

American Federation of Government Employees
American Foreign Service Association
American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees
American Postal Workers Union
Federal Managers Association
Laborers’ International Union of North America
National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association
National Air Traffic Controller Association
National Association of Letter Carriers
National Association of Postal Supervisors
National Association of Postmasters of the United States
National League of Postmasters of the United States
National Postal Mail Handlers Union
National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association
National Treasury Employees Union
Professional Aviation Safety Specialists

Read the full letter. (PDF)

This entry by AFSCME President Gerald W. McEntee is cross-posted from Huffington Post and Firedoglake.

Working families are struggling with the high cost of health care, yet the health care bill passed by the U.S. Senate on Christmas Eve would tax their health care benefits. That’s a terrible mistake. Unfortunately, even some progressive leaders, like my friend Sen. John Kerry, have been taken in by myths that favor the tax. In a Huffington Post article published earlier this week, Senator Kerry asserts that an excise tax on high cost health plans will help control health care costs without taxing workers. The facts simply don’t support his conclusion.

According to the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the vast majority of revenue collected from the tax will come from individual income taxes and joint filers and not by insurance companies. Employers will respond to the tax by reducing the benefits they offer employees, so they can fit their premium charges under the tax threshold. To the extent insurance companies pay the tax, the tax will be directly passed through to employers and employees in the form of higher premium charges.

If Congress decides to tax health care benefits for the first time in American history, it will be middle class workers across America who will pay the price. The first thing employers will do is slash the health care benefits they provide to avoid the cost of the new tax. For years, workers have given up wage increases in order to protect their health benefits. Now, those workers and their families will lose the health benefits on which they rely.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and many supporters of the excise tax on health care benefits claim employers will pass along cost savings to their employees in the form of raises. They may also believe in the tooth fairy. According to a recent Towers-Perrin study of 433 executives from midsize and large companies, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, when asked what they would do, “If health care reform reduces benefit costs to the organization,” only 9 percent of the executives responded by saying they would increase salaries. The Economic Policy Institute backs up that study with convincing research demonstrating that “health care cost increases do not correspond to major movements in wages or compensation.”

Many of the proponents of the excise tax, including Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Peter Orszag, see virtue in the fact that it will force companies to trim their benefits and require workers to pick-up more of their health care tab. That’s a double whammy for workers. More importantly, it is certainly not the “change” our members expected when they knocked on doors and cast their ballots for President Obama and Vice President Biden. We believed their promise that health care reform would include a guarantee that workers who liked their health care benefits would keep them. A tax that falls disproportionately on older workers, workers at smaller firms and others with decent but not extravagant health care does not keep that promise. And it does not make sense.

The excise tax is not essential, or even relevant, to health care reform. The excise tax is a tax policy, not a health care policy. The CBO’s scoring of the Senate bill underscores this point. CBO calculates that the Senate bill will decrease the federal budget deficit by $130 billion over the 2010-2019 period while the excise tax will raise $149 billion. These numbers clearly demonstrate that the excise tax is not a necessary component of health care reform, even as a financing mechanism. It is simply a method to raise revenues to reduce the deficit.

There are far better alternatives for funding health care reform, just as there are better ways to reduce the deficit. The House bill would do it by asking the wealthy to do their part through a small surcharge on families earning more than $1 million annually. It asks the wealthiest Americans, and the insurance companies responsible for skyrocketing costs, to pay their fair share. And importantly, it doesn’t unfairly place the burden of reform on America’s middle class.

Make no mistake: A tax on health benefits will increase the taxes on the middle class. It will add to the burdens faced by middle class families already struggling with the high cost of health care coverage. It is a big mistake that needs to be corrected before Congress finalizes the bill. We are at a pivotal moment in the debate. The time for action is upon us. President Obama and members of the House must tell the Senate that their misguided and unnecessary tax on health benefits cannot survive in the final version of health care reform.

This message comes from Chuck Loveless, AFSCME Director of Legislation.

Help start the New Year off right — by finally making quality, affordable health care for all a reality.

Here’s what’s happening: the U.S. Senate passed its version of health care reform on Christmas Eve, and now Democratic leaders are merging the bill with the one passed by the House of Representatives in November. Once leaders have a final bill, it must again win passage in both the House and Senate before being sent to President Obama’s desk for his signature.

That’s why I hope you’ll send a message to Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi — they’re working out the final details and we need to make sure they finish reform right.

This is our last chance to make sure our historic health care reform actually fixes the health care crisis, drives costs down, and covers all Americans. Two changes are key to making sure that the final bill delivers the reform that Americans desperately need:

1. Our health benefits must not be taxed. Middle-class families must be able to afford health insurance and employers must be asked to provide good health coverage for their employees.
2. Insurance companies must be held accountable with strong regulations and consumer protections, and we must be given the choice of a national public health insurance option available on day one.

Please send a message to Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi right now and demand that the final reform bill include the choice and competition of a public health insurance option and doesn’t tax our health care benefits.

Thanks to your ongoing phone calls, e-mails, and faxes we got this far and passed a strong bill in the House of Representatives. But the Senate bill is much weaker and it taxes our benefits — that’s why your voice is needed today.

Please send your message right now and spread the word by posting this action on Facebook or Twitter.