The Two Faces of Chuck Grassley on Health Care

He was for it...while he was against it.

UFCW, DOL, and Mexican Consul General Launch “Labor Rights Week”

Labor Day is about more than just celebrating workers. It’s about renewing our commitment to worker rights. That’s why this week, the UFCW is partnering with the Embassy of Mexico, the U.S. Department of Labor and allied organizations to promote the very first “Semana de Derechos Laborales”, or Labor Rights Week. UFCW International President Joe Hansen is joining the Mexican Consul General of Chicago today in that city to launch the national outreach and education program.

President Hansen on the outreach program:

Semana de Derechos Laborales is a perfect way to empower Mexican national workers with information and promote full participation in the civic fabric of our nation. The UFCW has been a union of immigrants for more than 100 years and this weeks’ program helps ensure that a new generation of workers has the resources to have their voice heard on the job.

Semana de Derechos Laborales will focus on the inclusion of Mexican nationals in American workplaces and communities. Programming includes workshops and informational sessions on labor, immigration, and human rights. Educating immigrant workforces about rights in the workplace helps raise the standard of treatment for all workers in industries where new immigrants often work, including meatpacking, food processing, and grocery.

As Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan said:

In the past few years, a growing number of immigrant workers were subject to abuse under a mantle of fear that was created by policy approaches which allowed unscrupulous employers to use immigration status to threaten deportation if workers reported discrimination, wage and hour or health and safety violations. We recognize the leadership of Secretary Solis in this issue and believe that joint efforts like the Labor Rights Week will strengthen our ability to protect the rights of our nationals abroad.

The UFCW has been a national leader in the fight to develop a fairer, more humane immigration system. President Hansen recently served as founding chairman of a national commission which studied federal raids on workplaces and made recommendations, and these events are a continuation of the work the union has being doing on immigration reform.

And this week’s partnership with the Mexican Consulate and the U.S. Department of Labor is historic and will prevent worker abuses from happening again and again. After all, communities of workers who are informed and engaged in upholding the laws of the land means stronger, safer and more established communities. Together, the UFCW and its partners can ensure that our nation stays true to its rich tradition of welcoming those who seek a better life.

More details about the events planned are available at www.ufcw.org.

Friday Afternoon Links

Stay classy, Rush: Jason Lefkowitz over at CTW exposes Rush’s awfulness, but beware—you have to take a trip through “the fetid swamps of Rush’s fevered imagination.”

Here’s to your health—and wealth: We already ration health care. Ezra Klein explains how: “We make it too expensive for everyone to afford.”

Conservatives sure are morbid: Greg Sargent points out how conservatives really, really like to use the word “death” when they talk about health care. Scare tactics, much?

If you’re in NYC this weekend: Big health care rally in Times Square. Bring your anti-teabagger gear.

Senator Kennedy's Cause is Our Cause

Early this morning, we lost a great senator, a great man, and a great champion of working Americans. As UFCW President Joe Hansen said today:

Senator Kennedy was an unwavering champion for workers across the country. His passion, his vision and his devotion to the issues that matter ensured that working men and women had a voice in the halls of Congress. His commitment, his courage and his conviction brought dignity and opportunity to working families, to minorities and to recent immigrants.

And one of the most important issues for those working families--the one he called "the cause of my life,"--was, and remains, health care reform. Meaningful health care reform. Senator Kennedy devoted himself to the cause over many years, in every way imaginable. As Ezra Klein writes:

He was not of the party that voted for more than a trillion in unfunded tax cuts but cannot bring itself to pay for health-care reform. He was not of the party that fears the next election more than the next failure to help America's needy. Rather, he belonged to the party of Medicare and Medicaid, the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Children's Health Insurance Program, the Civil Rights Act and immigration reform. He belonged to the party that sought to advance the conditions and opportunities of the least among us.

With the passing of Senator Kennedy, we have lost a true advocate, a passionate fighter for working people and for quality, affordable health care for all Americans. It remains to us now to carry on his fight, and push harder than ever for real health care reform. In Harold Meyerson's fine words:

Unions and health care, the causes of Kennedy's lifetime, are in furious battle on the Hill. The Democratic head and the Democratic heart are more closely aligned than they've been in decades.

More than any other American, Ted Kennedy kept liberalism's flame burning through the dark of the Reagan era. The liberals who continue his battles will need all the wit and smarts and joy and passion for justice that he brought to those fights.

Go here for more on Sen. Kennedy's work fighting for affordable, quality health care.

No Good Reason to Wait

Another day, another voice chiming in to tell us pushy health care advocates that we should hold onto our horses. Have a little patience. Just...wait. A little longer.

Which, of course, is code for "let's wait to pass health care reform...until hell freezes over!" (Cue evil, echoing laughter.)

So who's our latest Sammy Slowdown? None other than Democrats' very good friend, Sen. Joe Lieberman, of course. He's just told Americans that we all need to take a deep breath, because--did you know?--we're in a recession, and in recessions, thrifty countries can't afford things like health care reform. "There's no reason we have to do it all now," he says.

Well (surprise, surprise) this is not exactly an accurate statement. Ezra Klein takes Lieberman's argument apart:

First, we probably are out of recession.

Second, health-care reform is scheduled to begin in 2013, by which time we will almost certainly be out of recession, and if we're not, we have bigger problems. Lieberman might be uncommonly pessimistic about our prospects for growth, but that would imply support for health-care reform, as it will pump a trillion dollars into the economy and thus stimulate demand.

Third, the costs of reform largely manifest in the later years of the decade, namely 2015-2019, by which point we may or may not be in recession, but if we are, it will probably be a different recession than the one we're in now.

There is, in other words, no connection between whether GDP growth is slightly negative in the third quarter of 2009 and whether we should spend money between 2013 and 2019 building a universal health-care system.

A new report by the Commonwealth Fund states that if no reform is enacted, "health insurance premiums could increase 94 percent" by 2020. That's $23,842 per family. Ouch.

And that's not even addressing the growing Medicare crisis. The L.A. Times reports that:

If costs keep growing at their current rate, healthcare will consume 20% of all spending in the U.S. by 2018. Nevertheless, critics of "Obama-care" argue that the country can't afford the reform bills moving through Congress. They claim the added costs imposed by the reform would lead inexorably to painful cuts in existing federal health programs, particularly Medicare. These concerns aren't unreasonable, considering the pressure that the enormous federal deficit will put on government services. But the better question is what might happen to Medicare if the healthcare system isn't isn't reformed.

With costs rising rapidly for health care, and Medicare without the reforms it desperately needs to stay solvent, doing nothing looks like the most irresponsible--and expensive--option of all. When politicians like Lieberman ask us to wait a little longer, we have to say no. Now is the time, and all the lame excuses in the world won't change what's right--we need meaningful health care reform, here and now.

Yet Another Reason Not To Shop At Whole Foods (As If We Needed One)

There are plenty of reasons not to shop at Whole Foods: the greenwashing, the ridiculously high prices, the holier-than-thou attitude, the low wages, the monopolization, the whole John-Mackey-pretending-to-be-someone-else-on-Yahoo thing. The history of being paternalistically anti-worker.

But now there's another reason not to shop there: Whole Foods CEO put out an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal criticizing Obama's health care reform.

Okay, being critical of health care reform is fine. We love some healthy debate. But it isn't fine to do it by being patently dishonest.

He begins his arguments by bemoaning the budget deficit. (I don't remember Mackey expressing this concern over tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans during wartime, but I just may have missed that). He forgets that the rise in health care costs due to the status-quo is a big reason why we have these budget deficits to begin with, and that without reform those will only continue to grow.

His solutions are a bunch of "the free market will take care of it" status-quo supporting ideas that will only continue to push more families into bankruptcy and make it easier for insurance companies to put profits before patients.

Like tort reform. Always a stand-by for blame by conservatives, who claim that the reason health care is so expensive is because of trial lawyers' lawsuits against doctors, forgetting that doctors and pharmaceutical companies do sometimes make mistakes, like, oh, Vioxx, and that civil suits are often the only way to hold medical providers accountable.

And this gem of a dumb idea: Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover.

I'm simply amazed at that one. Flabbergasted. Insurance companies are profit-driven, always looking to maximize healthy customers and cheap treatments and avoid paying for important measures when they become too expensive. This is how they make their money, by telling people what they can't have covered.

Remember in "Fight Club" when Ed Norton character is talking about the cost of doing an automobile recall in terms of an equation:

"Should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."

Same principle at work. If you remove all government mandates from health insurance companies, they would drop all their liabilities or people with preexisting conditions. Had cancer? No coverage. Might get pregnant? Do dangerous work? Have some expensive prescriptions? No coverage for you!

Thanks for the bright ideas, John Mackey!

Finally, MacKey comes down to health care being an issue of personal responsibility.

Oh, you mean if I eat right (and I'm guessing that Mackey means organic food from Whole Foods) and work out I won't need to go to the doctor?

If only that was the case. Anyone with half a brain just plain knows that people get sick, no matter what.

Even Lance Armstrong, for crying out loud, and that guy works out!

Town Hall Terrors

By now, you've heard at least something about the rowdy, often irrational, sometimes insane behavior at the health care town hall meetings across the country. You may have even been to a town hall meeting, encouraged by HCAN or Organizing for America to support health care reform and stave off the naysayers.

The script is roughly the same for each: a well-meaning senator or congressperson (doesn't seem to matter which party they're part of) holds a town hall meeting in his or her home district or state to dispel myths and answer questions about the health care reform being proposed in Congress. Protesters gather outside the building with signs, often depicting Obama as Hitler. And a few minutes, or sometimes even a few seconds into the meeting, participants begin shouting over their elected official's answers, loudly vocalizing their opposition to any health care reform. Many will ask strange questions, or shout accusations about Obama's "death panels." Some will go completely off topic, to protest Obama or said officials' supposed trampling of the Constitution. At least one even brought along a gun.

There's been a lot of debate about whether or not these people are being organized by anti-reform front groups. And there's been a lot of chatter on cable TV about whether or not Obama's PR team has been handling these folks the right way.

But really, who cares?

Because if you watch and listen to the loudest of the protestors, it becomes clear that health care reform is not really the main issue, or even the issue at all for a fringe few. It becomes clear that health care reform has simply become a catalyst for a larger fear of the unknown, a sense that their country is somehow being "taken away." (Seriously, listen to a selection of those crazy town hall videos and just count how many times someone in the crowd screams, "I want my country back!" or something similar. )
And all this would be okay if it were everyone were just voicing their opinion. Most are. And that's good. That's democracy. But the palpable fear of the fringe few is real. The anger is real. That gun was real--and loaded.

And I thought about that today, when I saw a new study released by the Southern Poverty Law Center today, showing that paramilitary militia groups are on the rise once more. The study finds that:

Almost a decade after largely disappearing from public view, right-wing militias, ideologically driven tax defiers and sovereign citizens are appearing in large numbers around the country. "Paper terrorism" — the use of property liens and citizens' "courts" to harass enemies — is on the rise. And once-popular militia conspiracy theories are making the rounds again, this time accompanied by nativist theories about secret Mexican plans to "reconquer" the American Southwest.

These are people who really, really don't like the federal government. So whether it's immigration reform, health care reform, education reform--they don't want any part of it, because they don't want any part of the government in their lives.

I just wonder how much all the media focus on these town halls, all the anger working like a magnet to draw more angry people out to the meetings, all the hatred of the government simmering just below the surface will serve to catapult extremists into action? As the SPL Center points out:

Authorities around the country are reporting a worrying uptick in Patriot activities and propaganda. "This is the most significant growth we've seen in 10 to 12 years," says one. "All it's lacking is a spark. I think it's only a matter of time before you see threats and violence."

In honor of Shark Week...

An excellent little video on the REAL predators out there.