Tax Credits, Insurance Exchanges Make it More Likely Employers Will Cover Workers
Small business owners say the Affordable Care Act will spur them to provide health insurance for their workers, the same small business owners Republicans claim to represent who are looking at health care reform as a way to cut their health care costs.
A poll of small business owners with 50 or fewer workers by the Small Business Majority finds that two key provisions of the health care reform law — small business tax credits and insurance exchanges — make them more likely to provide health insurance to their employees.
The poll shows that 33 percent of employers who currently don’t offer insurance said they’d be more likely to do so because of the tax credits. Another 33 percent of respondents not offering insurance said they’d be more likely to because of insurance exchanges. The results for employers already providing benefits are almost identical.
John Arensmeyer, CEO of Small Business Majority, calls the finds “encouraging” but says most employers are not aware of tax credit or exchanges.
“Once small business owners learn about the tax credits and insurance exchanges, they realize these provisions will help them provide insurance to their workers, many for the first time ever,” Arensmeyer said. “However, many employers don’t know these provisions exist, so it’s imperative to continue getting the word out so they can take advantage of these benefits.”
House Republicans have placed the repeal of health care reform at the top of their to-do list for 2011, and the labor movement is not going to allow that to happen without a fight. The House will begin debate in the Republican plan to repeal health care reform later this week and a vote is expected next week.
“Their fight against the Affordable Care Act is not only pure partisan politics, it is also an attack against the millions of regular working people and seniors who benefit from the new law,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a press release. “While an unprecedented flood of corporate cash drastically altered the political landscape in the 2010 elections, we will continue to fight for what we know is right — justice and compassion, and prosperity from Main Street to Wall Street.”
Republicans want to repeal the new law’s guarantee that children with pre-existing conditions cannot be denied coverage, and to do away with new rules limiting insurance company premium hikes and requirements that they spend money on health care not CEO perks.
Several new provisions of the Affordable Care Act kicked in Jan. 1 that could benefit tens of millions of working Americans.
If your insurance company doesn’t spend at least 80 percent of its premium dollars on health care, it may be forced to give rebates to you and other consumers.
The Economy and Jobs Named as Most Important Problems
Only 17 percent of Americans say they are satisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time, and for good reasons, according to the latest Gallup poll on the subject.
This marks a low point in a year when satisfaction levels generally have been in the 20 percent range. The current 17 percent satisfaction rating is low from a historical perspective, but still exceeds the all-time low, 7 percent in October 2008, the month before Barack Obama captured the presidency for the Democratic Party.
The United States’ continuing economic struggles are likely the main reason behind the low satisfaction levels.
Gallup’s “most important problem” question confirms this, as 30 percent of Americans say the economy in general is the top problem and 24 percent say unemployment or jobs specifically, easily the top two issues mentioned by the people surveyed. Thirteen percent mention dissatisfaction with the government in general. Ten percent say the federal budget deficit is the top problem, and 8 percent recognize health-care as the biggest problem that has yet to be solved, in spite of the health-care law passed by the Obama administration.
As it turns out, here’s a fact not reported by any of the mainstream media today when reporting that Obama’s national health care law was ruled unconstitutional.
Henry E. Hudson, the federal judge in Virginia who ruled only the mandate part of the health care reform law unconstitutional, owns between $15,000 and $50,000 in a Republican political consulting firm that worked against health care reform.
Can you say activist conservative judge with a conflict of interest?
Reports that a Fox News editor directed his staff to use a politically charged phrase recommended by a Republican pollster to misrepresent the Democrats’ health care reform plan is proof that Fox is driving a radical right-wing political agenda, says Ethan Rome, executive director of Health Care for America Now, a grassroots coalition that includes the AFL-CIO and several affiliated unions.
“At a time when right-wing extremists were trying to make the case that the health care reform bill was a government takeover plot, Fox News incorporated politically charged language into its day-to-day reporting to mislead its audience into thinking the public option was something that it wasn’t,” Rome said in a statement posed on the AFL-CIO Website.
“Fox News’ policy is to drive a political agenda and systematically influence its audience’s views,” he said.
Leaked e-mail messages show that at the height of the health care reform debate last fall, Bill Sammon, Fox News’ Washington managing editor, sent a memo directing his network’s journalists not to use the phrase “public option,” according to Ben Dimiero at Media Matters for America.
The question has come up in a serious forum in recent days — and no I’m not talking about Fox News here — on whether President Obama should seek a second term, based on whether he could do more for the country in the next two years by removing himself from political considerations.
The point was made in the Washington Post by serious thinking Democrats Patrick H. Caddell, a pollster and senior adviser to President Jimmy Carter and now a political commentator, and Douglas E. Schoen, a pollster who worked for President Bill Clinton and author of Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System.
Obama himself once said to Diane Sawyer: “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.”
According to Caddell and Schoen, “he now has the chance to deliver on that idea.”
Let me suggest that it would serve the ideal of Mr. Obama acting as America’s political Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play major league baseball in America, who as you may recall from your history, felt he had to be the ultimate class act.
When someone talks about pushing you off a cliff, it’s just human nature to be curious about them. Who are these people, you wonder, and why would they want to do such a thing?
That’s what I was thinking when corporate whistleblower Wendell Potter revealed that, when “Sicko” was being released in 2007, the health insurance industry’s PR firm, APCO Worldwide, discussed their Plan B: “Pushing Michael Moore off a cliff.”
But after looking into it, it turns out it’s nothing personal! APCO wants to push everyone off a cliff.
APCO was hatched in 1984 as a subsidiary of the Washington, D.C. law firm Arnold & Porter — best known for its years of representing the giant tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris. APCO set up fake “grassroots” organizations around the country to do the bidding of Big Tobacco. All of a sudden, “normal, everyday, in-no-way-employed-by-Philip Morris Americans” were popping up everywhere. And it turned out they were outraged — outraged! — by exactly the things APCO’s clients hated (such as, the government telling tobacco companies what to do). In particular, they were “furious” that regular people had the right to sue big corporations…you know, like Philip Morris.
The inmates took over the political asylum on Tuesday as a flood of bitter tea spilled all over the American landscape like a bloodbath, leaving the poor and the foundering middle class even more at the mercy of the rich and powerful, including corporations that now dominate life in the United States in a way no one has seen since the Robber Barons at the height of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century.
Incomplete returns showed the Republican Party picking up at least 60 House seats, far more then they needed to take over a majority in Congress where they are now in a position to control the national political calendar, the Congressional agenda and all the committees where government policy is largely set in the U.S.
“A Republican takeover of the House ushers in a new era of divided government after two years in which Obama and fellow Democrats pushed through an economic stimulus bill, a landmark health care measure and legislation to rein in Wall Street after the near collapse of the economy in 2008,” according to the staunchly mainstream Associated Press.
Yet not all the tea party insurgents won, according to the AP and other news outlets.
While many voters cast their ballots for representatives who likely hold a strong position either for or against the health care legislation signed into law in March, Gallup finds more than one in six American adults remain uninsured, unchanged from prior months this year, but still significantly more than in 2008, when Gallup and Healthways began tracking it, according to the latest survey on the subject.
The percentage of uninsured Americans shot up to 15.8 percent in November 2008, in the midst of the financial crisis, and entered into the 16 percent range in early 2009.
Gallup asks Americans about their healthcare coverage daily as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. The monthly data for October are based on interviews with more than 30,000 Americans.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
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