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Ethan Rome

By Ethan Rome
Executive Director, Health Care for America Now!

If the Republicans have their way and privatize Medicare, it will put millions of seniors at the mercy of health insurance companies and force them to pay $39 trillion more for Medicare coverage than they would under existing law, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). That’s why this is a massive windfall for insurers. The GOP budget plan will also shift trillions of dollars in costs onto America’s seniors and families. When the program begins, new Medicare enrollees would have to pay at least $6,400 more each year out-of-pocket for private coverage equivalent to current Medicare benefits. And the average Medicare beneficiary’s contribution to the cost of Medicare benefits would skyrocket from 25 percent under the existing system to an astonishing 68 percent in 2030, according to CEPR and the Congressional Budget Office.

The Republican plan will enrich insurance companies at the expense of consumers and actually increase the overall net cost of health care by $34 trillion over the next 75 years, the planning period Medicare trustees are required to use. The increased costs are because of the private health insurance industry’s excessive profits, obscene CEO salaries and the costs of the bureaucracy it creates to deny care to consumers. These private plan administrative costs often eat up 20 or even 30 cents of every insurance premium dollar compared to Medicare’s roughly 3 cents. And in the past few weeks it’s become clear that the industry’s profits keep going up as consumers are being crushed by ever-rising co-payments and deductibles. (more…)

Bill Scher

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

You are a congressperson. You just voted for a budget that would destroy Medicare. Then you traveled home this week to meet with your constituents. Most of them like Medicare. What do you tell them?

Tell them you want to “save Medicare.”

Bloomberg reports:

House Speaker John Boehner said Republican lawmakers should tackle head-on the Medicare issue during the recess….

…Before the House vote, Republican leaders circulated a package of charts, talking points and fact sheets supporting the budget to members, including links to a document countering the main attacks on the plan.

The document encourages lawmakers to highlight how the budget “saves Medicare,” and offers “future beneficiaries access to the same kinds of health-care options now enjoyed by members of Congress.” (more…)

Ethan Rome

By Ethan Rome
Executive Director, Health Care for America Now!

The Republican budget proposal released by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin would give millionaires and political campaign contributors huge tax breaks while punishing seniors and working families. Ryan’s extremist plan would decimate Medicare and Medicaid and terminate the Affordable Care Act, undermining the economic security of America’s struggling middle class.

The Republican plan isn’t based on the principle of shared sacrifice. There’s no fairness. The idea that we solve big problems in this country by working together and sharing the burden can’t be found. The super-rich and big corporations aren’t asked to pitch in. Instead the Republicans manipulate the tax code so the rich get even richer. This budget blueprint changes the rules and reshapes this country in a breathtakingly dangerous way.

The Republican budget attacks every single one of us. Health care programs that everyone in this country depends on would be eviscerated. For example, we all depend on Medicare and expect that it will be there for us. What happens if it is not? What will people really do? Many of us have friends and relatives who receive Medicaid benefits, including millions in nursing homes. What happens when states slash benefits and dump people from the program? And the new health care law, the Affordable Care Act, has already made a huge difference in the lives of millions in its first year – and ultimately will directly touch 200 million of us. Affordable health care we can count on is a key to economic security. (more…)

Ethan Rome

By Ethan Rome
Executive Director, Health Care for America Now!

In a week when the Republicans attacked Planned Parenthood, the freedom of workers to bargain for a better life, programs that help middle class families and a whole lot more, the one thing they didn’t challenge was the excessive profits of the health insurance industry.

In fact, they continued their relentless effort to undermine the Affordable Care Act, which will eliminate the worst of insurance company abuses (like arbitrary denials of our care) and put a check on out-of-control profits that fuel rising premiums that are crushing families and small businesses.

Yesterday Health Care for America Now released a report that shows that the big five insurers earned $11.7 billion in 2010 – a 51% increase since 2008 – as they cut the number of people insured by millions and reduced the share of premiums they spend on actual medical care. So they made more money by charging more and providing less. It’s a great business model if you can swing it – sell a product for higher and higher prices, offer less and then try to deny services to your paying customers when they actually need it. (more…)

Mike Hall

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

How’s this for a demonstration of cause and effect?

Cause—Yesterday, some 200 activists, led by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United (CNA/NNU) rallied outside Blue Shield’s San Francisco corporate headquarters to protest the health insurance giant’s premium hikes of as much as 59 percent for California consumers.

Effect—Blue Shield announced a 60-day delay in the massive increase. Says CNA/NNU Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro:

It’s not hard to connect the dots here between nurses and patients turning up the heat on Blue Shield’s barricaded doorstep the same day it agrees to a brief reprieve in its egregious rate increase.

Protest in California

Kerry Abukhalaf, who brought her son to the rally, says, “Our insurance is completely not worth the price. We pay almost half what we pay for rent.” (more…)

Ethan Rome

By Ethan Rome
Executive Director, Health Care for America Now!

You’ve probably read by now that Judge Vinson did the expected: The judge gave Republican governors and attorneys general what they wanted, a decision that advances the GOP’s extremist agenda to return control of our health care to the insurance companies. This is judicial activism on steroids. Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court will have the final say on the legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act, and it has corrected such lower-court mistakes when other major laws like Social Security, the minimum wage law and the Voting Rights Act were passed. Two other federal district judges have already upheld the new health care law.
Congress clearly has the authority to regulate the health insurance market, including protecting consumers from insurance industry abuses and reducing costs for families, seniors and businesses. The best way to protect consumers and control costs is to make sure everyone has health insurance, and that’s what the Affordable Care Act does.

With consumers already benefiting from the law, this litigation is really about the Republican Party protecting health insurance company profits at the expense of working families. The Republican politicians who marched in lockstep to bring this suit aren’t really interested in the new law’s individual-responsibility rule. This lawsuit is just another tactic in the Republican Party’s campaign to give our health care back to the insurance companies no matter what the cost. (more…)

Ethan Rome

By Ethan Rome
Executive Director, Health Care for America Now!

Yesterday the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) announced that the Republican plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would add $230 billion to the federal budget deficit over 10 years and $1.2 trillion in the decade after that. Since Speaker Boehner and company didn’t like those numbers – even though they usually praise what CBO has to say – they manufactured their own. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post took apart the Republicans’ fictional arithmetic in an excellent piece you can read here.

Rejecting the CBO’s numbers was yet another example of the astounding double-talk and hypocrisy we’ve heard from the Republicans in their first few days since taking charge of the House on Wednesday. They got elected by campaigning for deficit reduction, but the first thing they did was increase the deficit.

It’s clear that there is no promise the Republicans won’t break, no principle they won’t sacrifice and no fact they won’t ignore in order to let the insurance companies off the hook and strip consumers of important protections like the ban on denying care to people with pre-existing conditions.

The Republicans are trashing the nonpartisan CBO report simply because it’s inconvenient. Instead they cooked up their own numbers about the ACA costing money when it really saves $230 billion in the first 10 years and $1.2 trillion in the second decade.

And the impact of repeal on the federal deficit is only part of the problem. The Republicans insist on calling the ACA “job-killing.” It’s exactly the opposite – it creates jobs. A report out today by Harvard economics professor David Cutler concludes that repeal would destroy 250,000 to 400,000 jobs annually. Over the next decade, that’s up to 4 million jobs killed by repeal. (more…)

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Robin Hood, the guy who robbed the rich and gave to the poor, wore a short frock and tights. From the get-go, the guy serving the disadvantaged while sporting gay attire would fail the entrance exam required to become a card-carrying Republican.

The GOP is, after all, the anti-gay marriage, anti-repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell crew. More than that, Republicans are anti-working class. Their recent policies and activities show them clobbering the middle class while kissing the wealthy’s, well, you know.

Consider health insurance reform and tax cuts for the rich.

The GOP spent the entire fall election cycle yammering about the federal deficit. The world as we know it was coming to an end because of the deficit, they contended loudly and repeatedly.

Then, immediately after Election Day, Republicans insisted on extending tax cuts for the rich. They added more than $36 billion to that supposedly-cataclysmic federal deficit in 2011 so that they could pad the pockets of the nation’s millionaires.

To secure that bonus for millionaires, Republicans held hostage extension of unemployment compensation, which during this grave recession, sustains the nation’s workers who are out of jobs and, all too often, also out of foreclosed-on homes.  The deal comes down to this: The average millionaire will be $100,000 richer as a result in 2011. The average worker will get $15,236 in unemployment benefits if jobless the entire year of 2011.

Republicans insisted on giving the rich $84,764 a year more than the poor.

Repealing health insurance reform, as the GOP has said it hopes to do before month’s end, would have the same result – increasing that supposedly-cataclysmic federal deficit while slamming the poor and middle class.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has calculated that the Affordable Care Act will decrease the federal deficit by $140 billion over 10 years. That’s what the GOP wants to repeal – a deficit reduction measure. Republicans want to add $140 billion to the debt.

Most injured by repeal would be the nation’s poor and middle class. That’s because rescinding the law would once again allow insurers to deny health care to children with pre-existing conditions. It would mean the elderly would once again pay more for preventative care and prescriptions.  It would permit insurers to once again withdraw coverage from people when they get sick. It would mean insurers could kick out young adults who are now covered under their parents’ plans until age 26. It would permit insurers to re-impose “lifetime maximums,” so that they could cancel the coverage of people with costly illnesses. It would permit insurers to once again pocket for profit and “administrative expenses” an unlimited percentage of premiums paid by workers and employers. It would mean small businesses would lose tax breaks that will help them pay for health insurance for workers.

The GOP intends to deny tens of millions of uninsured Americans the hope that soon they’ll be able to afford coverage.

Republicans want to, as they put it, “undo” the health insurance benefits that the Affordable Care Act provides to Americans. And they’re offering nothing in return, nothing to help the uninsured, nothing to help the untold millions cheated by insurance corporations, nothing to require premiums to be spent on health care.

That’s the way Republican-hood rolls, protecting the wealthy, pummeling the poor. The rich, in the case of health insurance, are CEOs earning millions while increasing rates in double digits during a recession. The Los Angeles Times reported in August, for example, that the top executives of the nation’s five largest for-profit health insurers pulled down $200 million in compensation in 2009. The poor, in this case, are policy holders who the insurers charged rate increases as high as 39 percent.

House Republicans would exempt their cancelling of health insurance reform from their own rule that new legislation be paid for. So they wouldn’t have to find an additional $14 billion when they attempt to fulfill their campaign pledge to slash $100 billion from domestic programs – that would be from the programs most needed by the nation’s workers – those that help pay for education and transportation, for example. Because these domestic programs are such a small part of the budget, securing $100 billion from them would cost each department approximately 20 percent of its funds this year. That means painful reductions to areas like law enforcement and medical research. This is accompanied by Republican demands for cuts to many workers’ only retirement plan – Social Security.

In the meantime, the main concern of most Americans, as it was in the grueling days of Robin Hood, is jobs. Not the deficit. The GOP offers no plan to increase jobs for formerly working people, to end the suffering of tens of millions of Americans. Republican-hood is, instead, focused on pampering those who don’t need it.

***

Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.

The nation’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, talks about the department’s achievements during the past year, including its role in implementing the Affordable Health Care Act. Secretary Sebelius supervises 80,000 federal employees who work to keep Americans healthy and ensure they get health care and essential human services.

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

Over the past few hours, the mediasphere has been ablaze with talk that Republicans and their insurance industry backers supposedly won a huge victory with a Virginia court’s ruling that the mandate to buy private insurance is unconstitutional. On the policy merits, this seems to make no sense. At all. In fact, the Republicans pushing this court case may have inadvertently helped America take a progressive step on health care, if progressives can actually take advantage of the situation. Hear me out.

The mandate to buy insurance was always a huge giveaway to the private insurers. It guarantees them a pool of customers that will pad their profits for eternity, thus solidifying private insurance as the profit-taking middleman in the American health care system. The Virginia court, however, struck down the mandate but did not strike down the other mandates forcing the insurers to sell you insurance. For instance, the court ruling did not eliminate the mandate for insurers to sell you insurance despite your preexisting condition; did not eliminate the mandate for insurers to use a certain percentage of their revenues to provide health care services (rather than padding profits); and did not eliminate the mandate that ends lifetime caps on health care benefits.

So, assuming this ruling stands (which, granted, is a big assumption), we have a situation whereby the insurance companies no longer have the state forcing you to buy a private product with no public alternative (ie. a public option), but the insurance companies do have the state forcing them to offer their product to you in a way that doesn’t discriminate against you on the basis of pre-existing condition, and in a way that allows you to buy their product when you want to buy it.

Someone please tell me how this is a bad thing for the progressive cause of cracking down on the insurance industry and empowering health care consumers.

This is exactly why you have the insurance companies freaking out, threatening ever-higher premiums unless they get the mandate they originally rammed through Congress. And like loyal corporate lapdogs, this is why you have the Obama administration – which crafted the original health care bill with the insurers – telling the New York Times that “if (the mandate) eventually falls, related insurance reforms would necessarily collapse with it, most notably the ban on insurer exclusions of applicants with pre-existing health conditions.” It’s a scare campaign aimed at making sure the insurers get their ransom – aka the guaranteed profits and power that come with a customer mandate. (more…)