Archive for October 2010
Weekly Pulse: Health Insurers Banking on Tea Party to Poison Election
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by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
The health insurance industry is spending millions to influence the implementation of health care reform, but thanks to a groundbreaking Supreme Court decision and lax campaign finance laws, the public record only reflects a fraction of total expenditures.
The Republican and Democratic parties are on track to spend a record-breaking $500 million dollars on the midterm elections with the help of corporations, unions, and the health insurance industry. The New York Times says that, thanks to the proliferation of opaque 501(c)4 groups, this election is shaping up to be “the most secretive since Watergate.”
Money in politics is hazardous to our political health. Symptoms of campaign finance poisoning include compulsive lying, combativeness, confusion, amnesia, and paranoia. The patient may become convinced that he or she is being stalked by a “death panel.” Epidemiologists don’t know exactly what level of cash exposure is safe for democracy, but everyone agrees that the U.S. is subjecting itself to untested doses of political money.
Health industry gives millions to Tea Party Caucus
The insurance industry has quietly shifted its political giving to massively favor pro-repeal Republicans, and health care providers are now the biggest backers the of the Tea Party Caucus, which is pledging to repeal health care reform, Lee Fang reports in AlterNet. The industry has given over $2.7 million to Republican members of the newly minted ultra-conservative caucus.
The insurers are also sinking big bucks into a $25 million slush fund that will sponsor attack ads against Democrats in 20 House races and a handful of Senate contests. The slush fund is a 501(c)4 group lead by Republican lobbyist Scott Reed.
“Citizens United opened the door for the unparalleled participation by corporations at the financial level,” Reed told a reporter. Citizen’s United is the recent Supreme Court decision that gave companies the right to spend unlimited amounts of their shareholder’s money to run attack ads. Before, companies could only spend money that employees donated to the company PAC and that was subject to limits. We can only speculate which companies are giving to Reed’s group. Since it’s a 501(c)4 and not a PAC, it doesn’t have to disclose its donors.
Fang says its unclear whether the donations to the Tea Party Caucus and the slush fund are part of the $20 million “war chest” that insurance giants UnitedHealth, WellPoint, Humana Inc., Aetna Inc. and Cigna Corp are rumored to be setting aside to influence the implementation of health care reform.
About that mandate…
The insurance industry is spending millions to elect members of the Tea Party Caucus and other Republicans who are promising to repeal the universal mandate, i.e., the stipulation that everyone has to carry health insurance.
Ironically, as Kevin Drum points out in Mother Jones, the mandate is one part of health care reform that the insurance industry loves. What corporation wouldn’t like a law that forces everyone to buy their product? What the insurers don’t like, Drum explains, are the regulations that prevent insurers from weeding out unprofitable customers. Even the pro-repeal Republicans are promising to keep popular provisions of health care reform that ban discrimination against people with preexisting conditions. In Drum’s view, the industry probably wouldn’t be giving millions of dollars to the GOP if they thought the Republicans were serious about repealing the individual mandate. He thinks it’s more likely that the Republicans plan to keep the mandate and scrap the popular consumer protections.
Mini plans, maxi ripoffs
Meanwhile, McDonald’s and 30 other employers including a New York teacher’s union will get a special waiver from the federal government to keep ultra-low benefits caps for their cheap health insurance plans. Ann Pietrangelo of Care2.net explains that McDonald’s currently offers so-called “mini plans” to its workers, but these plans run afoul of the Affordable Care Act because they spend too much on administration and too little on health care. The waiver means that McDonald’s can continue to cap benefits at $2000 for another year.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) has launched an investigation into these mini plans to determine if they deliver value for the worker’s dollar. The McDonald’s plan costs $14 per week for a plan that caps benefits at a $2,000 a year, or $32 a week for up to $10,000 worth of coverage. At $14 a week, low-wage workers are paying $728 a year for a mere $2000 worth of coverage.
To give you some idea of what a ripoff that is, consider that the average employee who gets insurance through work kicks in about $4000 a year to insure her entire family. Benefit caps vary, but even a minimally acceptable family plan covers at least $100,000 per person, per year. Some plans don’t have yearly benefit caps. If McDonald’s and company hadn’t gotten the waivers, they would have been on the hook for up $75,000 worth of care above the benefits cap next year.
The yearly premiums of the $14/week plan are 36% of the maximum possible benefit. Whereas, if you’re paying $4000 a year for up to $400,000 in potential benefits for a family of four, your premiums add up to just 1% of the maximum payout. That’s a pretty lousy deal in itself, but not nearly as bad as McDonald’s mini-plan.
USA: Uh, sorry we gave you syphilis
The researchers with the United States Public Health Service deliberately infected hundreds of Guatemalans with syphilis as part of an experiment in the 1940s.
You’ve heard about the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment in which black men with syphilis were denied treatment for their disease so that researchers could study their decline and death, right? It turns out that one of the doctors behind the Tuskegee study got his start paying syphilis-infected prostitutes to have sex with prison and mental hospital inmates in Guatemala. When that proved an inefficient mode of transmission, the team tried inoculating their subjects with the pureed testicles of syphilitic rabbits. The researchers were trying to find a kind of “morning after pill” for syphilis. At least these unwitting “subjects” were treated with penicillin if they contracted syphilis. The Tuskegee victims weren’t so lucky.
Democracy Now! interviews Dr. Susan Rerverby, the medical historian who discovered long-buried records of the Guatemala program in the papers of one of the doctors involved in the Tuskegee study. Reverby’s paper prompted official apologies to Guatemala from President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, and Secretary of Health Kathleen Sebelius.
Working sick, touching food
A new survey of restaurant workers by a restaurant employees’ advocacy group found that nearly 90% of respondents have no paid sick days. The investigators questioned over 4000 restaurant employees and conducted interviews with 240 employees and 240 employers in 8 states, according to Micah Uetricht of Working In These Times.
June Lindsey, an employee at Popeye’s fried chicken in Detroit, told her story to the investigators:
I could not call in sick because no work meant no money and I couldn’t afford it at that time. My kids were very young… Halfway through the day, the sneezing, coughing and runny nose got worse. I asked the manager, “I am really sick and need to go because I could make others sick…” She laughed and told me, “Try not to cough, then.”
So I had to work that day sick, and who knows how many customers I got sick… Later on all of us got sick one by one, and all this came from another worker that came to work sick like me, but was not allowed to leave work!
The study also found that nearly 90% of restaurant workers lacked health benefits of any kind.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Weekly Audit: One Nation with No Jobs
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Tens of thousands of Americans rallied for jobs and justice at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. on Saturday. Organizers say that 175,000 people turned out for the One Nation Working Together rally, which was organized by labor unions, the NAACP, and other progressive groups. In an interview with GritTV’s Laura Flanders, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, a leader of the One Nation coalition, summed up the agenda: “Jobs, jobs, and more jobs.”
America isn’t working
In total, 8 million jobs have been lost in this recession and 2.5 million homes have been repossessed. According to the official figures, about 10% of Americans are unemployed. The true number may be much higher because the official stats don’t count those who have given up looking for work. In AlterNet, NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous, another featured speaker at One Nation, points out that the black unemployment rate is nearly twice that of whites. Another 11 million Americans are underemployed, according Trumka.
No end in sight
An already bleak job market is about to get even bleaker. Last week, Senate Republicans scuttled a popular emergency fund to create jobs and an extension of long-term unemployment insurance benefits, as Andy Kroll reports in Mother Jones.
Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly offers more details on the now-defunct job creation program known as the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) emergency fund. The fund provided cash to create jobs in the public and private sectors. Over 240,000 people in 32 states and the District of Columbia worked at jobs created with TANF subsidies. Last week, Senate Democrats lost their fight to extend the program for another 3 months. With the TANF money gone, layoffs will soon follow.
The Department of Labor will release the its monthly unemployment statistics on Friday. One group of independent analysts predicts that September’s unemployment rate will be higher than the previous month, according to Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo. Unemployment rose from 9.6% in July to 9.7% in August and experts surveyed by Bloomberg News expect the trend to continue. It’s doubtful that the economy produced enough new jobs to make up for all the census workers whose temporary jobs ended.
Job skills for America
On the bright side, President Barack Obama is scheduled to unveil a new job training program this week, Annie Lowrey reports in The Michigan Messenger. The program is called Skills for America’s Future. The goal of the project is to encourage partnerships between community colleges and corporations. Colleges and companies will work together to identify areas of rapid job growth and train students to fill those jobs. So far, five companies have agreed to participate in the program, including the Gap., Accenture, United Technologies, PG&E and McDonald’s.
Lowrey argues that this kind of training program will do little to help unemployment in the short term. Right now, companies aren’t hiring because there’s an economy-wide lack of demand, not because they can’t fill positions for lack of trained workers. Demand is low because unemployment is high. Quite simply, people buy less when they don’t have jobs, or fear that they will lose their jobs. It’s a Catch-22. The jobs won’t come back because not enough people have jobs.
Food stamps are stimulus
At the most basic level, an economic stimulus package is designed to break the no jobs/no demand/no jobs impasse by injecting large amounts of cash into the economy. Extending unemployment benefits makes for very effective stimulus because the unemployed typically spend their money quickly. Food stamps are another very efficient stimulus because recipients redeem them right away. To give you some indication of how quickly, consider the Wal-Mart at Midnight effect, which Lowrey discusses in the Washington Independent.
Wal-Mart managers are noticing that increasing numbers of customers are buying staples like bread, milk, and baby formula at midnight on the first of the month. That’s because state governments directly deposit welfare and food stamp benefits into debit accounts at midnight. Wal-Mart says it brings in extra staff to keep up with the influx of customers during this period.
By contrast, tax cuts are an inefficient stimulus, especially if the cuts go to people who are already wealthy. In tough times, people who already have everything they need may prefer to save their extra money instead of blowing it on luxuries. Rich people will not throng Best Buy at midnight on tax refund day, no matter how big their checks are.
The high cost of economic inequality
It would be nice to think that unemployment is part of a cyclical downturn, but there is mounting evidence that short-term unemployment is a symptom of a deeper problem: pervasive and growing inequality. Sam Petulla of the American Prospect interviews economist Jacob Hacker and political scientist Paul Pierson about their new book, Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned its Back on the Middle Class.
The authors note that the U.S. has greater inequality than other industrialized countries. Since the 1970s, the richest Americans have gotten much richer while the rest of us lagged further behind. The authors found that almost 40% of household income gains from 1979-2007 went to the richest 1% of households. The trend is accelerating: the top 1% of households pocketed over half of the economic gains of the 2000s. Hacker and Pierson blame tax cuts for the wealth, lax financial regulations that allow the wealthy to rake in unprecedented profits, and stagnating middle class wages for the widening gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of society.
This brings us back to the old demand/jobs paradox. Contrary to the platitudes of trickledown economics, shoveling an ever greater share of society’s resources to the ultra-rich doesn’t make everyone else better off. Shocking, right?
Right wing economists say that letting the ultra-rich accumulate still more wealth is good for the economy as a whole because the rich have more money to invest in businesses, which are the main source of jobs. The ultra-rich aren’t stupid, however. They aren’t going to start businesses unless they foresee demand for goods and services; and everyone knows that demand is flat because there are no jobs. Trying to stimulate the economy by making the rich richer is like shoving money into a black hole. The tried and true way to end a recession is to create jobs and provide social services for people who need the money enough to spend it.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Weekly Mulch: Why Building a Bike-Safe City is Key to a Clean Energy Future
by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
Congress couldn’t get it together to vote even on the smallest of possible energy bills—the renewable energy standard—before the October recess. That doesn’t change the reality that our energy dependent society needs to find alternatives quickly. Changing up our approach to transportation, one of the biggest sources of energy consumption, is a good place to start.
If more Americans used bicycles as a primary mode of transportation, the country would be closer to getting its energy use under control. So how can we make biking safer, easier, more mainstream? Infrastructure, safety, and education are key. It also helps to replicate model behaviors.
“Last spring, public officials from Madison, Wisconsin, returned home from a tour of the Netherlands, and within three weeks were implementing what they learned there about promoting bicycling on the streets of their own city,” reports Jay Walljasper for Yes! Magazine.
Cities like Portland, Madison, and San Francisco are trying to make cycling a way of life. But for the best answers, American leaders must look abroad, to cities like Copenhagen in Denmark, Utrecht and The Hague in the Netherlands, and Malmo in Sweden.
Safe riding
Improving safety is the first order of business to encouraging cycling, and that means investing in infrastructure specifically for bike use. As Change.org’s Jess Leber writes, “Every time there is a senseless death, there are going to be a group of residents who decide biking is too risky for their tastes.”
Many regular bikers admit that it’s frightening to ride down a street with a gigantic, roaring beast of car quickly approaching. “When I lived in New York City, I myself was too frightened to use my bike in many parts of the city,” Leber admits.
What kind of infrastructure do we need? Designated bike lanes indicate what sort of space bikes need on the road. But bike lanes should also be physically separated from cars. In Copenhagen, for instance, “the busy roadways are lined with cycle tracks (elevated bike paths painted bright blue for distinction),” writes Campus Progress’ Jessica Newman.
In the Hague, bike paths are separate from cars and trucks, Some streets are designated as “bike boulevards,” where bikes take precedence over cars, reports Walljasper in Yes! Magazine.
Ease of use
But safe infrastructure is a waste of money if no one uses it. While cities are out building better bike lanes, they should consider adding other features that will make it as convenient to bike as it is to drive or walk. In Malmo, bike riders stopped at red lights can grab onto railings to keep their balance—”a surprisingly popular feature,” reports Grist’s Sarah Goodyear.
Another Dutch project is to improve the process of parking. “Access to safe, convenient bike storage has a big impact on whether people bike,” as Walljasper reports in Yes! Magazine.
“The car is parked right out in front of the house on the street, while the bike is stuffed away out back in a shed or has to be carried up and down the stairs in their buildings. So people choose the car because it is easier,” one Dutch policy officer told Walljasper.
More mainstream
In both Utrecht and Copenhagen, one strategy for integrating cycling into its citizens’ behavior is to teach the young. In Copenhagen, “Instead of driver’s education classes, children attend biker’s ed in the third and ninths grades, where they learn traffic laws, proper bike etiquette and general agility,” according to Campus Progress’ Newman.
Going back to Yes!, in Utrecht, cycling is also built into the curriculum:
A municipal program sends special teachers into schools to conduct bike classes, and students go to Trafficgarden, a miniature city complete with roads, sidewalks, and busy intersections where students hone their pedestrian, biking, and driving skills (in non-motorized pedal cars). At age 11, most kids in town are tested on their cycling skills on a course through the city, winning a certificate of accomplishment that ends up framed on many bedroom walls.
“To make safer roads, we focus on the children,” [city planner Ronald] Tamse explained. “It not only helps them bike and walk more safely, but it helps them to become safer drivers who will look out for pedestrians and bicyclists in the future.”
Envisioning the future
What does a city with these sorts of programs in place look like? In Copenhagen, you see “streets crowded with bikes, with riders ranging from wealthy, middle-aged businessmen to mothers in tow of three or more kids to poor college students,” Newman reports. Thirty-three percent of Copenhagen’s citizens commute by bike; in Portland, by contrast, it’s just 5.81%.
Yes! Magazine points to another way to understand the difference between biking in an American city, unfriendly to bikers, and in a European city that embraces them. In Riding Bikes with the Dutch, Michal W. Bauch compares transportation culture in Los Angeles and Amsterdam:
Increasing reliance on cycling is not impossible. The tools are already there. American cities just need to use them, and quickly.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.