The situation in Michigan, where unemployment hit 14.1% in May.
Despite billions of federal dollars being poured into Michigan’s unemployment benefits program, the safety net for jobless workers doesn’t stretch far or wide enough for a growing number of residents as the state jobless rate hits its highest mark in a quarter-century.
More than 232,000 jobless Michiganders — 34% of the unemployed — were not eligible for benefits due to the program’s rules, many of which were established decades ago.
Another major problem: A growing number of unemployed residents are running out of the benefits, even though payments have been extended several times.
The Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency estimates that between May and December, more than 99,000 Michiganders will have exhausted their 79-week benefits. They face a job market that’s expected to get only worse as more auto plants close.
Self-employed workers, part-time workers, and others are ineligible for unemployment benefits. One man quoted in this Free Press article had paid into the unemployment system for his employees, but when he had to close his business, he himself wasn’t able to collect unemployment.
According to the National Employment Law Program, Michigan can get $138.8 million in federal recovery funds if it modernizes its unemployment insurance system in two key ways: extending benefits to part-time workers and to workers in approved training programs. The Michigan AFL-CIO also supports it. The Chamber of Commerce opposes it. (Natch.)
$138.8 million is a drop in the giant bucket of Michigan’s economic needs, but job training can also provide a patch to keep more drops from leaking out of that bucket. The needed legislation has passed the House but is held up in the Senate (where it may be coming to a vote soon.
- Paul Krugman points out that the talk about the cost of health care reform leaves out the fact that the Bush tax cuts (which went overwhelmingly to the wealthiest Americans) cost more. For that matter, so did the Iraq war.
- At Daily Kos, DemfromCT runs through a mass of polling showing the popularity of a public health insurance option.
- Digby:
Other countries have systems that prioritize health care treatment on the basis of need — a triage system. We prioritize health care on the basis of who can pay. And in the most perverse form of rationing there is, we make the sickest people have the most difficult time getting access to health care. (The sickest, after all, can’t hold down a job, so the employer based system doesn’t really work for them, at least not in the long term.)
- Over at the HCAN blog, Jason Rosenbaum assesses the House health reform legislation and concludes “It’s excellent.”
It adds up to a bill that works. It preserves choice, so people can choose the plans and doctors that work for them. It controls costs, by establishing a strong public health insurance option to compete with private insurers and a capping personal expenses so they don’t break the bank. And it extends coverage by putting insurance in reach of everyone as well as asking employers to share in the responsibility of paying for care.
- Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan is asking the state for permission to raise rates for 400,000 policy holders. Because more expensive health insurance is just what people dealing with Michigan’s economy need.
by Tommy Todd—Minnesota
The other night, I was speaking with an older woman and her grandson. They had indicated that education was their top priority. I told them all the wonderful things Working America was fighting for in education, and before I even got a chance to mention dues, her grandson ran into the back room and returned with his Spiderman wallet. He took out $5 and said “Here you go mister. You’re doing a good job.”
Jenn Jannon is a Working America regional field director based in Pennsylvania. She oversees Working America’s phone and in-person conversations with our members there. That means she’s incredibly well positioned to know what working people are saying about the economy—the kind of people who every TV reporter wants to interview in a diner during the presidential election, but who pundits then forget about between elections.
What she’s hearing is sad and infuriating, because people are hurting and scared and angry—and they have reason to be. But it also shows us the moment of opportunity we’re in, because the fear and anger is so unprecedented in recent years.
Jenn says:
Overwhelmingly, members tell us that they’re hurting financially, that they’re really angry about the state of our economy, and that they’re laying the blame on the financial industry, George Bush, lack of government oversight, and corporate greed. And, more and more, we’re hearing people identify themselves as working class, where before they were more reticent to do so. They’re talking about an imbalance in how hard the economic crisis is affecting working families as compared to CEO’s and the wealthiest few Americans.
I was talking to a member a few weeks ago about the jobs crisis. It turns out that she had just lost her job of 5 years. She’s a single mom, and had 2 kids at home. She was telling me how hard it was to even put food on the table for her family. She told me that she kept facing this really tough decision in her job search: Should she put gas in her car so she could drive to an interview, or should she save that money to pay for groceries. Unless she spent her money on gas, she had no hope of getting a job, but she really couldn’t afford to buy that gas now that she didn’t have a job. Her frustration and anger were palpable, so I asked her, “Who do you blame for this economic crisis.” She immediately said, “Wall St and the big banks”. She said she felt like they were allowed to do whatever they wanted, they got to walk away unscathed, and folks like her were paying the price. And then I asked what she thought needed to happen to fix things, and this previously talkative woman went completely quiet. She didn’t have an answer.
That interaction really represents a sizeable portion of what’s happening with our members across the country. We knock on their door or call them up, and they know that they are hurting, and they’re mad, but they either don’t know who to hold responsible, or they don’t know how to hold them responsible. I’ve been doing community organizing for a decade now, and I’ve never had the kinds of interactions I’m having lately – there’s more anger and despair out there than I’ve ever felt, and it’s boiling up, but people don’t know where to direct it.
My earlier post on rescission mentioned some examples of people who’d had their health insurance rescinded through that practice. That’s appalling enough. But a Daily Kos diary by wiseacre makes clear that it’s not just the people who it happens to directly who suffer – there are people whose choices about what they can afford and how to protect themselves are influenced by knowing that having health insurance may not protect them:
I’m a self-employed professional in my 50s with a graduate degree. I earn a decent living as a contract employee but with no job security. I don’t have health insurance because I can’t afford it.
With 50+ years of health history behind me, inevitably there are doctors I can’t remember, procedures that were inconclusive, or odd symptoms that went away. But inadvertently leaving any of these off a health insurance application would allow health insurance companies to yank my coverage – a neat little trick called recission.
In the past I have paid for health insurance and have been denied coverage. I paid good money for junk. I can’t afford to throw away $800 a month for junk insurance any longer.
The same diarist tells about breaking a rib and some toes in a fall and not going to the hospital because it would cost too much.
These things shouldn’t be happening.
by Matthew Hall—Minnesota
One day I was canvassing and encountered a member that was really excited to see me. She invited me in to meet her elderly mother. We talked for a couple of minutes and she informed me that she was on Minnesota Care and was worried about funding for the program with all the state budget cuts. Her and her mother decided to sign down as members and pay $5 in dues. Just then the door bell rang. She went to answer it but no one was there. She then informed me that her father had died last year and before he had died he had vowed to fix the broken doorbell but had never got around to it. The door bell had worked only twice since then. Once when they were having Easter dinner and the other time right then. I took this as a sign that her father approved of what were doing and wanted to show his encouragement.
Word of the day: rescission. That’s what they call it when you apply for health insurance, they accept you, you pay your premiums month after month and year after year, and then you get really sick. And they yank your coverage, because it’s expensive for them all of a sudden.
In 2006, Blue Cross was faced with lawsuits from 10 former Blue Cross members and five nonprofit hospitals for this sort of activity. The former members said their coverage was rescinded when they needed it most:
In each case, the suits allege, Blue Cross didn’t look into the member’s medical history until an expensive claim came in. Then, the plaintiffs contend, Blue Cross extensively scrutinized their records looking for something that had not been disclosed and seized on whatever discrepancies they found to justify revocation of the policy, even if the inconsistencies were inadvertent or irrelevant to the claim.
Yenny Shu of Los Angeles, for instance, says her coverage was canceled after she was diagnosed with breast cancer at 46. In its letter rescinding her coverage, Blue Cross allegedly told her that she failed to disclose her exposure to the hepatitis B virus when she was a child.
Other patients say they had, in fact, disclosed the information Blue Cross accused them of omitting.
It’s pretty intuitive. People lose their jobs or their hours or wages get cut, they make less money. In turn, they pay less income tax and their states have less revenue to provide needed services.
From the Wall Street Journal:
State income-tax revenue fell 26% in the first four months of 2009 compared to the same period last year, according to a survey of states by the nonprofit Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government.
(snip)
Withholdings from the first four months of 2009 were down 6.9% from the same period in 2008, signaling that “many people had a very bad start of the year” with lower salaries and wages, says Don Boyd, a senior fellow at the Rockefeller Institute.
Calculated Risk has assembled some important graphs of just what’s happening.
(Full-size version at Calculated Risk)
The degree to which income tax has fallen in any given state is a measure of the financial stress working families in that state are undergoing, and we can see that that’s extreme in many places. However, Calculated Risk points out that states which rely more heavily on income taxes for revenue will have proportionately greater revenue shortfalls as a result of these tax declines. In Arizona, for instance, income tax declined by nearly twice as much as it did in Oregon—but “personal income taxes make up 68.5% of the revenue in Oregon” and only 25.3% in Arizona.
But with this, we really see working people getting it coming and going—less money in their households, and cutbacks in state services just when they need support the most.
by Melissa Stiehler—Minnesota
I was organizing in Powderhorn and came across an unemployed woman, home in foreclosure and a lack of hope. She payed close attention while I gave her my rap. As always I told her that grassroots will win with strength from the community. She then began to tell me about her struggle.
As she spoke, she started to cry, explaining how life isn’t easy right now. Due to proposed health care cuts, she was laid off from her nursing job. She was the only working person in her house, supporting her family and her three unemployed sisters. Bills had been piling up for quite some time and she could no longer afford her house, which has been in her family for four generations. And while she wanted to get involved on every level, she didn’t have enough money to pay her taxes, let alone make a dues payment. She knew our issues, as she lives them everyday.
As she signed down for a membership, she thanked me, both for the Unemployment Lifeline, and for working hard for people like her everyday. Knowing that there is an organization that is fighting for the people and offering resources to those who have been left behind by capitalist values gave her more hope than she had felt in quite some time. While financially she couldn’t help, she is more than on board with letting her voice be heard and fighting for the right of happiness for working families.
- John Cole is right on this one. News that some people will lose food stamps because they got $25 a week extra unemployment insurance is a good reminder of why we want the government to take its time on health care reform—make sure they’ve had time to minimize unintended consequences.
- At the HCAN blog, Jason Rosenbaum reminds us that when the American Medical Association opposes a public health insurance plan option, they’re not speaking for doctors.
- Former President Bill Clinton met with a number of progressive bloggers recently. Some of them have written about the experience, in particular the discussion on health care. See Think Progress and Lawyers, Guns, and Money for write-ups.
- Jane Hamsher reports that Senators Kay Hagan and Jeff Bingaman are responsible for holding up a public health insurance option in the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee.
