In 2003, 20 year old Michelle Morse was diagnosed with colon cancer. Her family soon learned that, at that age, for her to continue to be insured under her parents’ policy, she had to be a full-time student. Her family fought to find care for her that didn’t require her to remain a student, but ultimately, Michelle had to undergo “aggressive and debilitating” treatment while taking a full course load.
Michelle Morse died on November 10, 2005. Her mother, AnneMarie, had at one point been told by an insurer that if she didn’t like the fact that her daughter had to stay a student despite her illness, she should go change the law.
I doubt very much the insurance companies expected her to do that, but she did.
This month, Michelle’s Law went into effect on the federal level, “allowing seriously ill or injured college students to take up to 12 months of leave without losing coverage under their parents’ policy.”
What I learned is that Michelle’s Law plugged one loophole, but so many people – especially cancer patients – continue to struggle with being able to afford the care that they need.
The good news is that the health care reform bills currently being debated by Congress represent a huge improvement for people fighting chronic diseases.
In their current form, the bills will ensure that no one will be denied coverage or charged a higher premium because of pre-existing medical conditions; place an increased emphasis on prevention; and eliminate annual and lifetime dollar caps on benefits. These are enormous steps forward. But the only way that we can benefit from this progress is for Congress to pass health care reform legislation this year.
Six years ago, I saw something very wrong with our health care system, and I set out to change it. Thankfully, starting tomorrow, college students will no longer suffer. But my fight continues. We cannot reduce death and suffering from cancer if our country does not improve access to quality, affordable health care for all Americans.
The Hold Fast blog finds an interesting contrast between New York Times columnist Joe Nocera’s views on cutting pay for Wall Street vs. auto workers.
On Wall Street, now:
And the American International Group is contractually obliged to make bonus payments of nearly $200 million in March 2010. The company has promised to try to reduce that amount by 30 percent. But once again, there is nothing Mr. Feinberg can do because those bonuses were already written into contracts — and there is a high likelihood that the bonuses will create another furor in Congress, just as they did earlier this year. [Emphasis added]
On auto workers, a year ago:
For instance, it is critical for General Motors to be able to break its contracts with both its unions and its dealers. It needs to dramatically reduce its legacy benefits, perhaps even eliminating health care benefits for union retirees. It needs to close plants. It needs to pay its workers what Toyota workers are paid in the United States — and not a penny more. It needs to reduce the number of brands it sells — which means closing down thousands of dealerships, which is difficult to do because of state laws that protect car dealers. When General Motors shut down Oldsmobile, it cost the company more than $1 billion to buy out the Oldsmobile dealerships across the country. If it slims down its dealerships from 7,000 to a more appropriate 1,500, it will cost many times that amount. [Emphasis added]
Not only was it imperative for Nocera that GM not honor their contract with the union, Nocera was also arguing that GM must find ways to go against laws in states that protect car dealerships. Voiding contracts was not enough, he was arguing for voiding laws!
–snip–
The hypocrisy of how the contracts of Wall Street executives are being treated versus those of union workers is simply stunning. All I want to see in an economic crisis is fairness. If contracts are inviolable, they are inviolable for everyone, regardless of whether they are between blue collar workers in factories, white collar workers in office complexes, or the multi-millionaire executives on Wall Street. If the economic crisis demands that auto workers take a haircut on their pay, benefits, and pensions, Wall Street executives must be held to the same standard. Conversely, if the contracts between big banks and investment firms and their top executives simply cannot be changed, then it’s time to go back and honor the contracts between the auto industry and organized labor. It’s that simple.
(Full disclosure: Joe Nocera used to be my neighbor. I used to babysit for his kids. Regardless, this is offensive.)
Can you imagine living in a society in which having been raped can prevent you from getting medical care for years and years? If you’re in the United States, that’s the society you do live in.
An insurance industry pollster is protested with song. It’s a creative approach, anyway, and one that’ll be hard for the insurance companies to demonize real effectively.
Scumbags. Not just these five, but the company that continues to try to reward them.
Four of five managers in AIG’s Financial Products unit under the jurisdiction of pay master Kenneth Feinberg didn’t make good on pledges to return the retention bonuses as of August, Feinberg said in documents released yesterday. The fifth employee hadn’t made any promise, Feinberg said. The pay master rejected AIG’s proposal to pay the five executives a total of $13.2 million this year.
“The performance of AIG Financial Products has contributed significantly to the deterioration in AIG’s financial health,” Feinberg said. Compensation proposed by New York-based AIG for the staff doesn’t “adequately reflect the role of AIG Financial Products” in the decline of the insurer, he said.
Speaking of all that, a few executives at bailed-out banks will see their pay cut. But it’s a drop in the bucket.
The Obama administration this week announced a new plan to use remaining TARP funds to boost lending by community and other smaller banks. The idea is to make more credit available for small businesses, to help them grow and create more jobs — and do that with funds still available under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
This is one good step, and hopefully will be joined by many more good steps to begin to generate real recovery on Main Street.
But to seriously address the devastating employment crisis nationwide, and the weight of the recession on our still-fragile economy and neglected infrastructure, something bigger and bolder must be done.
Here is such a plan in a nutshell:
Direct TARP repayments to help capitalize a new National Infrastructure Development Bank.
Here’s how it might work:
Congress and the Obama administration could work to amend the TARP-authorization legislation to include two types of provisions. One would be to systematically schedule stepped up TARP repayments where and when they are institutionally feasible. The other would be to direct the repayments toward the ongoing and continued capitalization of a National Infrastructure Development Bank, which itself would be created under separate legislation.
The idea for such an Infrastructure Bank is not new. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert promosed it in his May 25 piece this year titled Our Crumbling Foundation
I’m not sure that the catastrophic job losses of this recession, the worst since the Great Depression, have really sunk into the public’s consciousness. And that would mean that the ground has not been prepared for the kind of high-powered remedies needed to get the economy back into some kind of reasonable shape.
America has become self-destructively shortsighted in recent decades. That has kept us from acknowledging the awful long-term consequences of the tidal wave of joblessness that has swept over the nation since the start of the recession in December 2007. And it is keeping us from understanding how important the maintenance and development of the infrastructure is to the nation’s long-term social and economic prospects.
It’s not just about roads and bridges, although they are important. It’s also about schools, and the electrical grid, and environmental and technological innovation. It’s about establishing a world-class industrial and economic platform for a nation that is speeding toward second-class status on a range of important fronts.
The infrastructure bank would be authorized to issue bonds, provide loans and offer loan guarantees to finance large-scale projects. The idea would be to leverage substantial amounts of private capital in support of such projects, and to make more prudent decisions about which projects move ahead.
If the U.S. is to have any hope of getting its economic act together over the next few years, there will have to be a much greater focus on putting people back to work. Rebuilding the infrastructure is the place to start.
Senate Banking Committee chairman Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) has long been an advocate of a new National Infrastructure Bank and earlier this year noted:
“President Obama co-sponsored our infrastructure bank legislation as a senator and endorsed the idea during his campaign. So, I’m hopeful to see action on the bill this year.”
Democratic Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (CT-3) has already introduced legislation this year to launch the National Infrastructure Development Bank, along with colleagues including Representatives Anthony Weiner (NY-9), Keith Ellison (MN-5) and Steve Israel (NY-2), and the proposal has attracted broad support from labor, economists and business.
The National Infrastructure Development Bank Act would fund and create a bank that would direct public and private dollars toward infrastructure projects of national or regional significance – a proposal included in the Obama Administration’s budget, as well as the Budget Resolution.
The National Infrastructure Development Bank, modeled after the European Investment Bank, would leverage private sector dollars to invest in transportation, environmental, energy and telecommunications infrastructure projects. It would objectively consider the economic, environmental, social benefits and costs of infrastructure projects, as well as other specific criteria, and fund projects of significance. The Bank would provide investment opportunities that would supplement current federal programs creating jobs, spurring economic growth and rebuilding an infrastructure system for the 21st century.
Initial capitalizations from stepped up TARP repayments could also be supplemented by the Federal Reserve as well as reinvestments of TARP profits where they exist. Public-private partnerships could be brought together to boost the bank’s lending.
Now, there will be those who would say we must immediately use repaid TARP funds to reduce the deficit, and that redirecting TARP repayments in this way would extend those deficits.
But the problem is you can’t simply move paper around to reduce the deficits in any sustained way. And we are simply not going to be able to do that unless we generate sustained economic growth. Sustained deficit reduction requires sustained economic growth. It was, after all, the relatively sustained growth of the 1950s that allowed us to pay down the debts necessarily incurred by first fighting to offset the Great Depression, and then fighting World War II.
And with the real economy stuck in a liquidity trap with both high unemployment and little traction for growth, a bigger, bolder plan like this one is needed.
Over the hot and steamy summer month of August, I was able to tour the most amazing factory, a Steel mill. Campaign for Ameirca’s Future and the Alliance for American Manufacturing arranged for this amazing tour of the Edgar Thomson mill (Mon Valley Works) US Steel mill.
I walked, coughing and wheezing, my way up what they said were 5 flights of stairs in about 50 lbs of safety gear but what really felt more like 10 stories. For some reason, being in Pittsburgh kicked in allergies I didn’t even know I had.
Walking through the mill reminded me of being a kid. My dad worked at a Steel Mill. I remember a really big bucket that poured this orange liquid into what looked like really big jello molds to me. I was a kid, so, they are kid memories. My dad worked in the Forge shop. He hammered out the pieces that were used in most of the American made convertibles up until about 1980. The company he once worked for still holds the patent even though the company no longer exists. But, I digress.
When I took the tour, I remembered the process, the liquid orange drink that went into the molds. It was a small operation in comparison to US Steel. What was most fascinating to me is how few people are needed now to do the same job performed by about (per the tour) 100 Chinese mill workers. The computers control and sense just about everything. The mill doesn’t pour the liquid orange drink anymore either, they have what looked like a lid on it. The liquid steel turned out the most beautiful looking bars of steel I’d ever seen. They looked so perfect. You could see them cooling from the bright deep orange to auburn to almost a red and then a brick red and gray/black. I could see the rising heat like I were staring at the pavement in summer as the water cooled it, sending steam and heat into the air. It was really more beautiful than anything I can remember seeing before.
I wish there were words for how I felt and what I saw. Amid the sneezes, coughing and sniffles I was thinking about how wonderful it was to see Americans manufacturing. I knew my dad did, but it had been a while since I saw real American manufacturing this close up and with this kind of efficiency. It was really just beautiful.
So, today, I was looking for pictures of the Edgar Thomson mill in Braddock when I got an e-mail from someone I know about a deal at the Container Store. Yeah, I know, it’s a girly thing.
I like the container store. I like organizing my apartment, but that’s because 1000 square feet with 2 bedrooms and a 16 year old needs some intense organizing to function.
I’ve bought from the container store and I knew they carried American made products because I’ve bought them there, but I had no idea that they actually allow you to browse by category for products and one of those categories is Made In The USA.
They have unique items like the Flip Fold and Flip Fold jr. When I worked in retail, we used these to fold shirts uniformly, oh and jeans too. Before these were available, we had to use a cutting board that we folded around. These cut our folding time in half.
I’m planning to buy these nifty power converters for my parents for an upcoming trip to Europe. My mother has never been and if you promise not to tell her, then I’ll share the surprise I’m hoping to give her. Okay, here it is, I’m hoping that when we arive in Barcelona, that we’ll be able to travel to where her father was born in Viitasaari, Finland. My mother has never been and I’d like her to see it at least once. I mean, come on, how can we go all that way and not actually make it to Finland? “Hyvää päivää!” to all my Finnish friends!!
My point here is that Americans make cool stuff. From pretty, hot, and orange planks of steel to the smallest of electrical converters. The way to pull ourselves out of the mess the banks and Wall-street have gotten us into is to re-invest in ourselves. And that means MANUFACTURING.
So, tell me what you made today. I’d love to know and I bet, so would everyone else.
But on Main Street most of the ‘green shoots’ we’re seeing are the ones coming up through the floorboards of the foreclosed homes, shuttered factories and abandoned shops and businesses.
After last month’s really bad jobs numbers, which pegged the official unemployment rate at 9.8% and reported the loss of another 263,000 jobs in September, there was renewed talk from the White House and the editorial pages about the need to address the employment crisis.
There has been movement in Congress on extending unemployment benefits for an additional 13 to 20 weeks to help the hundreds of thousands of unemployed Americans on the verge of exhausting their benefits. This should be an emergency safety net no-brainer. But as Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) writes at the Huffington PostSenate Republicans are blocking the measure, as if to show that they have neither hearts nor brains.
But beyond the obvious necessities to extend jobless benefits, COBRA access and food stamp relief, precious little has been offered thus far to go further in addressing the jobs crisis and the need for a real recovery on Main Street.
One of the clearer voices offering substantive, specific ideas has been former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Writing on his blog in the wake of last month’s unemployment numbers, he asked, somewhat rhetorically, Specifically, What Should Be Done For Jobs? and outlined these four steps:
(1) Use existing authority under both the stimulus package enacted earlier this year and the nefarious TARP bailout fund — extending and combining them into a fund to make up for state and local cuts in public school budgets, childrens’ health, public health (we need workers to administer swine flu vaccine) and public transportation. Instead of bailing out banks and giant automakers, we should switch to bailing out public services that average people need.
(2) Propose a one-year payroll tax holiday on the first $20,000 of income. Republicans as well as Blue Dog Dems could go along with this, and it would be a highly progressive tax cut since 80 percent of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes.
(3) Give small businesses a “new jobs tax credit” for every net new job created over the next year. Granted, under normal circumstances this sort of jobs credit doesn’t have much effect, and it’s difficult to separate hires that would have happened anyway from net new ones. But we’re not in normal circumstances; small businesses, which are responsible for most new jobs, still aren’t hiring. They need a boost.
(4) Dramatically expand the Small Business Administration’s lending programs and have the Fed buy up the SBA’s debt. Big banks are not lending to small businesses. TARP has been an utter failure in this regard. The SBA and the Fed should circumvent them and help small businesses get the capital they need, so they can start hiring again.
These steps, Reich writes, would be beneficial and not too tough to do.
With the next unemployment report, for October, scheduled to be released in two weeks, we should be hearing more about specific proposals to support the jobless, create new jobs and generate a real recovery here on Main Street.
Steve Benen takes stock of where health care reform is in the House and the Senate.
There’s a rally today(update: originally said tomorrow. that was wrong) in Washington, DC at the Capital Hilton (leaving from the AFL-CIO headquarters at 2:30). Why the Capital Hilton, you may wonder. It’s because insurance industry representatives will be meeting there.
If you have flu symptoms, remind your doctor to treat you immediately rather than waiting for test results.
The Institute of Medicine is calling for new school lunch nutritional standards.
By the numbers, Alex is in the 99th percentile for height and weight for babies his age.
Insurers don’t take babies above the 95th percentile, no matter how healthy they are otherwise.
“I could understand if we could control what he’s eating. But he’s 4 months old. He’s breast-feeding. We can’t put him on the Atkins diet or on a treadmill,” joked his frustrated father, Bernie Lange, a part-time news anchor at KKCO-TV in Grand Junction. “There is just something absurd about denying an infant.”
Now comes word that a 2-year-old Erie girl has also been denied coverage because she doesn’t weigh enough.
Aislin Bates weighed 6 pounds, 6 ounces at birth. She now tips the scale at 22 pounds.
“She’s perfectly healthy, yet she has become a statistic,” said Aislin’s mother, Rachel Bates. “There’s no reason for her to be a statistic as a non-insured person.”
Taking them together, we see the insurance companies will always win.
(Without a public insurance option to provide real competition, anyway.)
With Congress and the Fed limiting things like unexpected increases in credit card interest rates and overdraft fees, what’s a greedy credit card issuer to do?
It probably wouldn’t surprise you too much to hear that annual fees will become more common. But that customers who’ve played by the official rules—paying off their cards fully and on time, not having overdrafts—will be hit with those new fees?
Starting next year, Bank of America will charge a small number of customers an annual fee, ranging from $29 to $99. The bank has characterized the fee as experimental. But card holders who have never carried a balance or paid late fees could be among those affected.
Citigroup, meanwhile, has started charging annual fees to card holders who don’t put more than a specific amount on their cards, typically $2,400 a year. Other banks are charging inactivity fees if customers don’t use their credit cards during a specific period of time. You heard that right: You could be spanked for staying out of debt.
These fees are the credit card industry’s response to credit card legislation that will, among other things, restrict credit card issuers’ ability to raise interest rates on existing balances. Credit card issuers are looking for ways to raise income before the new rules take effect in February. During the first quarter, 27% of credit card offers included annual fees, up from 18% a year earlier, according to Synovate Mail Monitor, a credit card direct-mail tracking service.
Ok, that shouldn’t actually be surprising, since those people aren’t paying their card issuers exorbitant interest rates and therefore aren’t profitable. But it still feels surprising that companies would be straight up saying “yes, we punish responsible behavior.” (And then they’ll turn around and blame the next financial crisis on the irresponsible behavior they’ve encouraged, while asking us to bail them out for their own far greater risk-taking and irresponsibility.)
As the linked USA Today article points out, though, people who pay off their credit cards all the time are likely to have good credit, which will provide them with more options. Don’t hesitate to look for a better deal if your credit card company is screwing you.
