(2 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Union Drops Health Coverage for Workers’ Children
One of the largest union-administered health-insurance funds in New York is dropping coverage for the children of more than 30,000 low-wage home attendants, union officials said. The union blamed financial problems it said were caused by the state’s health department and new national health-insurance requirements.
Just squeezed out.
The union fund faced a “dramatic shortfall” between what employers contributed to the fund and the premiums charged by its insurance provider, Fidelis Care, according to Mitra Behroozi, executive director of benefit and pension funds for 1199SEIU. The union fund pools contributions from several home-care agencies and then buys insurance from Fidelis.
“In addition, new federal health-care reform legislation requires plans with dependent coverage to expand that coverage up to age 26,” Behroozi wrote in a letter to members Oct. 22. “Our limited resources are already stretched as far as possible, and meeting this new requirement would be financially impossible.”
And the hits just keep on coming.
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I see many more just like it coming and as Union leaders keep backing Democrats, I see Union workers looking for change we can believe in.
because keeping them alive would reduce their profit margin. I don’t blame 1199 as much as I blame Obamacare and NYS for allowing the health insurance companies to become for profit entities.
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I wrote it over at DD on Wed Mar 10, 2010 and since I don’t know if the going out of business there is maintaining an archive, Cost Containment and Trust in “Bipartisan Reform.” The intro;
If the hearing word bipartisan makes you want to commit senseless acts of violence, chances are that you are probably one of those pacifist liberals. Just like so many words in American politics, bipartisan no longer means what we think it means. It would also seem that “progressive action” has come to mean being in the constant state of erasing lines in the sand.
All this time so many Democratic supporters were thinking that Social Security and Medicare represented the backbone of the Party of FDR but in the spirit of bipartisanship our Democratic president recently appointed a Republican as the chairman of the euphemistically named National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. That way the former Republican Senator from Wyoming can “save” the United States from “insolvency” by hacking away at Social Security and Medicare.
Now I’m feeling a bit naive because working to get Barack Obama elected, I was under the impression that health care reform was about a government run insurance option to keep the murder by spreadsheet gang honest. I was optimistically thinking that “no mandates” meant Americans would not be mandated into supporting Wall St. dividends. There was the “Hope” that Obama’s only mandate was mandating quality health coverage. I had this odd notion that there would be no back room deals with special interest groups and Americans would get drug price controls. I seem to remember that the Republican candidate wanted to do away with the tax exempt status of employee contributions and that Barack Obama was going to repeal Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, using that money to pay for health care reform.
Yesterday there was this story by James Ridgeway and he seems to have understood what to expect from the beginning. It really helps to redefine bipartisanship and understand where progress will be going under “bipartisan Democrats.”