Unsilent Generation

Entries categorized as ‘Congressional Democrats’

The Puppy Protection Act Offers (Slim) Hope to (Some) Abused Pups

July 19, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Congress.org reports today on bills recently introduced in both houses of Congress. The Puppy Uniform Protection and Safety (PUPS) Act (S 3424 and HR 5434) would “amend the Animal Welfare Act to provide further protection for puppies.”

The bills, from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.), were introduced at the end of May and tail a Department of Agriculture inspector general report regarding federal investigations of breeders.

The IG report, released May 25, says large breeders who sell animals covered under the Animal Welfare Act (AWA, PL 89-544) online are exempt from inspection and licensing requirements “due to a loophole in AWA.” The IG says there are “an increasing number” of these unlicensed, unmonitored breeders.

The bills would require licensing and inspection of dog breeders that sell more than 50 dogs per year to the public (including online) and would also outline additional exercise requirements for dogs at facilities – such as having sufficient, clean space and proper flooring.

According to a press release, Durbin said he would work administratively with the USDA to fix problems at its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services, and then introduce addition legislation if needed.

Supporting humane treatment of puppies would seem like a political no-brainer, right? As Liliana Segura pointed out on Twitter earlier today, what could be better in the upcoming midterm elections than “to be able to say ‘our opponents HATE puppies’”? Mainstream groups like the Humane Society have been pushing for legislation action on puppy mills for years, to little avail. (Click here to see video of a Humane Society raid on a massive puppy mill in Tennessee, and here to read some gruesome details from the USDA’s report on puppy mills.) Yet the bills are not exactly barreling their way through Congress; both are waiting for attention from agricultural subcommittees, and after two months, the Senate bill has only seven co-sponsors.

In addition, when it comes to animals routinely used in cosmetic testing, and animals (including puppies and dogs) treated cruelly in drug testing and medical research, the federal government has pretty much sat on its hands–or worse. To take one particularly galling example, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine last year exposed an effort on the part of the National Institutes of Health to sell young constituents on the idea of animal experimentation. As Stephanie Ernst wrote on Change.org:

[T]he NIH promotes, on its Web site, a children’s coloring book that gives a skewed view of animal experiments. The coloring book implies that researchers are trying to cure animals that are already sick—rather than purposely infecting them with diseases—and ignores the fact that animals suffer and die in the process. The coloring book, entitled The Lucky Puppy, was produced by an industry trade group, the North Carolina Association for Biomedical Research, whose members have a financial interest in the continuation of animal research…

The book erroneously portrays the lives of animals in laboratories as pleasant and carefree. Published scientific research and numerous undercover investigations clearly demonstrate that animals in laboratories suffer pain and distress from experimental procedures and routine laboratory practices. The coloring book also makes misleading claims about the benefits of animal experiments, implying that research findings from experiments on animals are directly applicable to both the animals used in research and to humans.

The federal government is also actively engaged in protecting animal testing and experimentation against animal rights activists. Anyone who chooses to take action against an animal testing facility is not, as one would expect, subject to charges of breaking-and-entering or vandalism. Instead, they are branded terrorists under the notorious Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act; for actions in which no human being were harmed, they can end up serving long sentences in a federal supermax Communications Management Unit.  (See the blog Green Is the New Red for the best information on AETA.)

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Categories: Congressional Democrats · aging animals · corporations · drug industry · media
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The Cleveland of Harvey Pekar

July 13, 2010 · 2 Comments

Cleveland photo by scottamus (Ohio signs set) from flickr

I didn’t know anything about Cleveland when I first went there in the late 1970s. I got off the plane, not expecting much, and went to the office of Dennis Kucinich, then the mayor. Kucinich, in what I now recognize as the Cleveland political style, immediately launched into an attack on the new people-movers that were being installed at the airport. From there he went on to the power company and from there to the banks, and behind the banks, the mob (which later put a hit out on him). That was my introduction to the city of Cleveland–a city steeped in corruption that had nonetheless managed to elect this crusading ”boy mayor”–and it won from me a kind of  grudging respect that I’ve never lost.

I asked one of his aides if there were any independent journalists there, and he sent me to Roldo Bartimole, who was then–and still is now–the city’s leading muckraker. Meeting Bartimole was a crash course in Cleveland politics. But if I wanted to really know about Cleveland, someone told me, I should read Harvey Pekar. Pekar was a comic book writer, and at that time he was still an underground figure in an underground world, operating in the shadow of R. Crumb, another Cleveland native who had helped him get his start. Pekar worked as a file clerk in a VA hospital, and he lived in and wrote about the old Cleveland neighborhoods that looked like it hadn’t changed in decades–low-key but no-nonsense, a little shabby but comfortable. And he matched his city. As the obituary in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer put it:

Pekar chronicled his life and times in the acclaimed autobiographical comic-book series, “American Splendor,” portraying himself as a rumpled, depressed, obsessive-compulsive “flunky file clerk” engaged in a constant battle with loneliness and anxiety.

After that visit I did read Pekar, and ever since then, any thought of Cleveland for me has conjured up his work. I recalled it one afternoon during the 2004 elections, at a Democratic campaign rally in a Cleveland housing complex. The candidate, whose name I can’t remember, never showed up. I met a middle-aged couple standing off to the side. The man was wearing an AFSCME jacket and the woman a raincoat. It was cold and they were passing a cup of coffee back and forth. The woman’s “Bush Gotta Go” sign hanging limply from the crook of her right arm.  They didn’t seem to know much about the candidate, either. I asked why they were there. “Oh,” the woman said in a matter-of-fact voice, “you know, to help out.” There are people like that all over Cleveland. A lot of them are still union people, including some who don’t have union jobs. They’re not flashy and they don’t waste words, but they have a kind of resolve. They don’t really expect much to change, but they come along anyway to help out. They know that most of life consists of just showing up. Nobody pays much attention to them–but in Harvey Pekar’s comics, they were the superheroes.

In the last decade, the world bent over backwards to make Pekar into some sort of star, like when he was on Letterman or when the movie about him came out. But that wasn’t really him. He was like Cleveland’s old neighborhoods, a little run-down but with some kind of resolve that kept him going. According to the Plain Dealer, 

R. Crumb said Pekar’s work examined the minutiae of everyday life, material “so staggeringly mundane it verges on the exotic.” Pekar himself summed it up as revealing “a series of day-after-day activities that have more influence on a person than any spectacular or traumatic events. It’s the 99 percent of life that nobody ever writes about.”

Categories: Congressional Democrats · arts and literature · media · unions / labor
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Meet the Real Death Panels: The Truth About Age-Based Health Care Rationing

July 12, 2010 · 3 Comments

The latest issue of Mother Jones includes an article by me about the controversy over age-based health care rationing, which got transformed by the right into government “death panels.” Unfortunately, liberals have fallen into a different trap, because they refuse to take on the real enemies of affordable health care for all: the insurance companies, drug manufacturers, and other profiteers of our private health care system.

As a result, old people are being asked if we would be willing to give up some expensive, life-sustaining treatment so that our grandchildren can have health care. This is a bogus question, and a bogus “choice.” The real question, as I say in the article, is whether we should give up the treatment “so some WellPoint executive can take another expensive vacation, so Pfizer can book $3 billion in annual profits instead of $2 billion, or so private hospitals can make another campaign contribution to some gutless politician.”

It’s a long article, and I’m including just the opening here, with a link at the end to continue reading at the Mother Jones web site. Or you can read the whole thing at MotherJones.com by clicking here. And if you’re one of those geezers who still likes reading print and turning pages, the July/August issue is on newsstands now.

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From Mother Jones, July/August 2010

There’s a certain age at which you cease to regard your own death as a distant hypothetical and start to view it as a coming event. For me, it was 67—the age at which my father died. For many Americans, I suspect it’s 70—the age that puts you within striking distance of our average national life expectancy of 78.1 years. Even if you still feel pretty spry, you suddenly find that your roster of doctor’s appointments has expanded, along with your collection of daily medications. You grow accustomed to hearing that yet another person you once knew has dropped off the twig. And you feel more and more like a walking ghost yourself, invisible to the younger people who push past you on the subway escalator. Like it or not, death becomes something you think about, often on a daily basis.

Actually, you don’t think about death, per se, as much as you do about dying—about when and where and especially how you’re going to die. Will you have to deal with a long illness? With pain, immobility, or dementia? Will you be able to get the care you need, and will you have enough money to pay for it? Most of all, will you lose control over what life you have left, as well as over the circumstances of your death?

These are precisely the preoccupations that the right so cynically exploited in the debate over health care reform, with that ominous talk of Washington bean counters deciding who lives and dies. It was all nonsense, of course—the worst kind of political scare tactic. But at the same time, supporters of health care reform seemed to me too quick to dismiss old people’s fears as just so much paranoid foolishness. There are reasons why the death-panel myth found fertile ground—and those reasons go beyond the gullibility of half-senile old farts.

While politicians of all stripes shun the idea of health care rationing as the political third rail that it is, most of them accept a premise that leads, one way or another, to that end. Here’s what I mean: Nearly every other industrialized country recognizes health care as a human right, whose costs and benefits are shared among all citizens. But in the United States, the leaders of both political parties along with most of the “experts” persist in treating health care as a commodity that is purchased, in one way or another, by those who can afford it. Conservatives embrace this notion as the perfect expression of the all-powerful market; though they make a great show of recoiling from the term, in practice they are endorsing rationing on the basis of wealth. Liberals, including supporters of President Obama’s health care reform, advocate subsidies, regulation, and other modest measures to give the less fortunate a little more buying power. But as long as health care is viewed as a product to be bought and sold, even the most well-intentioned reformers will someday soon have to come to grips with health care rationing, if not by wealth then by some other criteria.

In a country that already spends more than 16 percent of each GDP dollar on health care (PDF), it’s easy to see why so many people believe there’s simply not enough of it to go around. But keep in mind that the rest of the industrialized world manages to spend between 20 and 90 percent less per capita and still rank higher than the US in overall health care performance. In 2004, a team of researchers including Princeton’s Uwe Reinhardt, one of the nation’s best known experts on health economics, found that while the US spends 134 percent more than the median of the world’s most developed nations, we get less for our money—fewer physician visits and hospital days per capita, for example—than our counterparts in countries like Germany, Canada, and Australia. (We do, however, have more MRI machines and more cesarean sections.)

Where does the money go instead? By some estimates, administration and insurance profits alone eat up at least 30 percent of our total health care bill (and most of that is in the private sector—Medicare’s overhead is around 2 percent). In other words, we don’t have too little to go around—we overpay for what we get, and we don’t allocate our spending where it does us the most good. “In most [medical] resources we have a surplus,” says Dr. David Himmelstein, cofounder of Physicians for a National Health Program. “People get large amounts of care that don’t do them any good and might cause them harm [while] others don’t get the necessary amount.”

Looking at the numbers, it’s pretty safe to say that with an efficient health care system, we could spend a little less than we do now and provide all Americans with the most spectacular care the world has ever known. But in the absence of any serious challenge to the health-care-as-commodity system, we are doomed to a battlefield scenario where Americans must fight to secure their share of a “scarce” resource in a life-and-death struggle that pits the rich against the poor, the insured against the uninsured—and increasingly, the old against the young.

For years, any push to improve the nation’s finances—balance the budget, pay for the bailout, or help stimulate the economy—has been accompanied by rumblings about the greedy geezers who resist entitlement “reforms” (read: cuts) with their unconscionable demands for basic health care and a hedge against destitution. So, too, today: Already, President Obama’s newly convened deficit commission looks to be blaming the nation’s fiscal woes not on tax cuts, wars, or bank bailouts, but on the burden of Social Security and Medicare. (The commission’s co-chair, former Republican senator Alan Simpson, has declared, “This country is gonna go to the bow-wows unless we deal with entitlements.”)

Old people’s anxiety in the face of such hostile attitudes has provided fertile ground for Republican disinformation and fearmongering. But so has the vacuum left by Democratic reformers. Too often, in their zeal to prove themselves tough on “waste,” they’ve allowed connections to be drawn between two things that, to my mind, should never be spoken of in the same breath: death and cost.

Click here to the rest at MotherJones.com.

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Categories: Congressional Democrats · Congressional Republicans · Medicare · Obama Administration · Social Security · budget / tax policy · corporations · death / end of life care and choices · drug industry · financial crisis / recession · generations / intergenerational issues · health care · health insurance industry · lobbying · media · right wing
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Petition to Stop the Entitlement-Cutting “Catfood Commission”

July 12, 2010 · 5 Comments

Readers of Unsilent Generation may be interested in a new online petition directed at members of Congress, concerning the work of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility of Reform, which I’ve written about here many times before. Here is the introduction to the petition, which was started by Alternet. You can read the text of the petition, and sign it, here at Change.org. 

Right-Wing “Deficit Hawks” and their enablers are on a march to destroy the social safety net we built for our seniors and retirees. Shockingly, some of the most notorious advocates are actually in charge of the presidential commission that will soon determine the future of Social Security and Medicare. We need to stop them in their tracks! Join us in calling on Congress to Stop the Catfood Commission.

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has been dubbed by progressives the “Catfood Commission” because its goal appears to be cutting benefits so drastically that retirees will only be able to afford to eat pet food. It’s hard to tell exactly what the commission is planning because its meetings are closed to the public and the press. Based on past statements and the background of its members the proposals are likely to include raising the retirement age to 70, turning large portions of Social Security over to Wall Street, and cutting Medicare benefits.

The commission’s co-chairman Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, has stated he believes the founders of the Social Security program never expected anyone to actually live to 65 and collect. “People just died,” he has said. “Social Security was never [for] retirement.” Erskine Bowles, the other co-chairman, negotiated a secret but ultimately unsuccessful deal between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich to cut Social Security benefits. Any chances that the commission would make cuts to the US defense budget in its pursuit of fiscal responsibility seem slim owing to the fact that the CEO of Honeywell, a major defense contractor, is a member of the panel.

We can’t sit back and count on a Democratic-controlled Congress to protect our social safety net. Just a day before the July 4th holiday weekend, the House of Representatives passed a measure that would guarantee an up-or-down vote on the Catfood Commission’s recommendations in the current session of Congress if they pass the Senate. With this measure House Speaker Nancy Pelosi relinquished her power to prevent the vote from coming to the floor.

Your representatives need to hear from you NOW.  Let’s stop the Catfood Commission from raiding the Social Security trust fund and slashing medical benefits for current and future retirees.

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Categories: Congress · Congressional Democrats · Congressional Republicans · Medicare · Obama Administration · Social Security · Wall Street / financial industry · age discrimination · budget / tax policy · financial crisis / recession · generations / intergenerational issues · poverty · right wing
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Congress’s Oil Industry “Reforms” = Election-Year Greenwashing

July 1, 2010 · Leave a Comment

This morning’s Washington Post reports on efforts in Congress to strengthen regulation of oil companies. 

Two key Senate committees approved legislation Wednesday that would change the way the federal government regulates offshore oil drilling and penalizes companies for oil spills…Both measures passed on bipartisan voice votes. One approved by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee would raise the civil and criminal penalties for a spill, require more safety equipment redundancies, boost the number of federal safety inspectors and demand additional precautions for deep-water drilling. The other, passed by the Environment and Public Works Committee, would remove oil companies’ $75 million liability limit and retroactively remove the liability cap for BP and the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

The Post says that these measures ”demonstrat[e] lawmakers’ eagerness to respond to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.” They might more accurately say that the measures demonstrate lawmakers eagerness to look like they are responding to the disaster. In the real world, the proposed measures will serve mostly as election-year greenwashing, with little genuine impact.

Just about everyone at this point knows that liability awards will be determined not in the hallowed halls of Congress, but by knock-down, drag-out court fights. More safety precautions can gradually be rolled back or ignored, just as the current safety regulations were in the years leading up to the BP spill.  And none of this goes to the basic dilemma of whether drilling at these depths should be allowed at all, when the dangers are so great and the stakes so high. Members of Congress can see the heat the White House has gotten for daring (in an uncharacteristic move) to impose even a partial moratorium on deepwater drilling: a federal judge declared the move illegal, while right-wingers attacked it as something just short of a Communistic plot to destroy the nation’s economy. As long as Congress tinkers around the edges of the issue, they can avoid the explosive core. As a character in a famous Italian political novel once said, “If we want everything to stay the same, everything must change.”

Let’s talk about the overriding fact that no one, apparently, sees fit to mention: The great bulk of our domestic oil lies in public domain territory along the outer-continental shelf of the United States. Since it is already owned by the public, and is supposed to be held in trust for our well-being, the threat of “nationalizing” oil is nothing more than a strawman. Oil is already nationalized in the United States–it is owned by the nation, and by the people. But we have basically turned over this huge asset  to the energy industry, especially the oil and gas companies. We have done this through a huge system of undervalued, underregulated leases that give companies a free hand to exploit the wealth of the public domain. And we have placed the disposition and oversight of this valuable resource in the hands of the federal Interior Department, with its long history of connivance with the extractive industries.

In sum, the citizens of the United States have given over the greatest natural resource wealth of our nation to private business interests–who naturally run it for their own profit, rather than for the public good. In return, we have demanded virtually nothing. And the little we have demanded–the most basic of safety precautions, the most modest of demands for fair pricing–have been ignored and derided by companies that regularly top the Global 500 list for profitability.

Keep in mind that these are not the mythological “Main Street” American business interests, the scrappy entrepreneurial spirits so beloved by conservatives and libertarians alike. These are not hundreds and thousands of little companies duking it out in the free market. They’re a few big multinational companies, whose hold on the world’s energy resources dates back a hundred years or more. They operate in secret through cartels to determine how these resources are parceled out, priced, and used.

One of many obstacles to any real change in this system is the absence of transparency and reliable information. For example, the oil companies, not the government, have been tasked with mapping oil and gas reserves on the public domain. This stands in the way of any real public scrutiny, and any impartial scientific judgement on how to administer the public trust. It also serves to obscure from view the massive ripoff that constitutes the leasing system. Historically, disagreements over this system—over whether reserves are over- or under-estimated, details of environmental impacts, disputes over fair costs–all have come down to information.

In the last energy crisis in the 1970s, I wrote a book called New Energy together with Bettina Conner, a colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies. At that time, there was a move in Congress to make knowledge of oil  reserves transparent. My book includes an excerpt from the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress in its investigation of the energy crisis in 1974. That report said: 

The lack of accurate,well-analyzed data regarding energy sources and uses has placed the United States government in a ludicrous position.When those officials directly charged with administering energy policy are unable to determine accurately the extent of the present fuel shortage or to estimate reliably its potential impact on the economy.  Nor can they determine fuel production costs with anything approaching the degree of accuracy necessary to administer the price control program.The government knows almost nothing about the extent of the vast mineral fuel resources contained in public lands.  Tax policy formulation is hampered by the lack of analysis of existing special tax provisos for mineral fuel extraction  and consequent ignorance of their impact.

William Simon, Nixon’s administrator  of the Federal Energy Office, acknowledged the situation before the joint economic committee in January 1974 when he declared, “Let me say right at the outset that there has never been in existence an adequate energy data  system…Today and in the years ahead we need better data on everything from reserves to refinery operations to inventories…Data we can check, verify, and cross check.’’

Despite all the study and debate, the Congress never did anything to remedy the situation. The late Wisconsin Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson introduced legislation to create independent public libraries of basic information. Under his bill, failure to make public such details would make officials liable to prison sentences and fines. The legislation was bottled up in committee and died a silent death at the hands of powerful energy interests in Congress.

Then there was a move to establish a Federal Energy Corporation to conduct research on alternative energy and new uses of fossil fuels. This Federal Energy Corporation would have been empowered to gather and decipher data on oil and gas holdings, and even produce a limited amount of oil and gas itself, for our strategic reserve. The government would control no more than 20 percent of total oil from public territories offered for leasing, and would be a supplier of last resort. In effect,it would act as a yardstick against which to measure the private petroleum industry. It would be a hedge against the unrestrained power of this industry, which periodically gouges the American public at the pump, even though the public owns the very oil and gas it is buying from these companies. Needless to say, that initiative, too, died a sudden death.

In the 1970s these measures may have failed; today they would never even be proposed. Set against the national debate that took place four decades ago, the current discussion in Congress and the proposed remedies, the passive stance of Obama and his administration, are extraordinary. It seems like our members of Congress don’t know recent American history–or, when it comes to the older members, even remember it. But they seem to know, by instinct, well that adage from the Italian novel: “If we want everything to stay the same, everything must change.”

Categories: Congress · Congressional Democrats · Congressional Republicans · Obama Administration · corporations · energy · environment · legal issues · right wing
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Robert Byrd, 1917 – 2010: Will the Circle Be Unbroken

June 28, 2010 · 3 Comments

Categories: Congress · Congressional Democrats · death / end of life care and choices · elder books / arts
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I Was Not a Victim of Age Discrimination at Work (Not)

May 5, 2010 · 1 Comment

When I was fired by the new owners of the Village Voice in 2006, after working there for 30 years, it had nothing to do with age discrimination. At least, that’s what the official documents say.  

For a number of reasons, I initially suspected that age had something to do with it. But I must have been wrong, because I later signed an agreement saying I had not been discriminated against on the basis of age. The document also happened to say that I would get some severance benefits I really needed, being 69 years old and suddenly jobless–but I’m sure that didn’t affect my decision to sign it.  

I have no doubt that the following scenario is experienced by thousands of older Americans who lose their jobs (though not, as I’ve mentioned, to me). They are pretty sure they know what is going on, and why. They discuss it with their attorneys, who are sympathetic but explain how difficult it is to prevail in such cases. The lawyers also tell them that the case could drag on for years–implying, though they don’t like to say so, that the geezers could be dead before it is resolved. So the geezers tell their lawyers to negotiate the best deal they can, and sign whatever they need to sign in order to get that deal. Or so I’ve heard. 

Age discrimination in the workplace (somethat that I, as I’ve said, did not experience), has always been notoriously difficult to prove to the satisfaction of the American justice system. But last June, the Supreme Court made it all the more difficult with its 5-4 ruling in Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc. The Court held that for workers to sue under the Age Discimination in Employment Act of 1967, they must prove that the employer would not have taken a particular action “but for” the person’s age. This sets age discrimination apart from all other forms of discrimination in the eyes of the law. As the New York Times put it in an editorial criticizing the Court’s decision:   

When employers discriminate, they generally do not admit it, so Congress and the courts have established calibrated rules of proof to give victims a fair chance. Generally, if workers can show that an illegal consideration, like race or national origin, was a factor in their being fired or demoted, the employer then has the burden of showing that it acted for nondiscriminatory reasons.  

That should be the rule under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, but the Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 vote, decided that it is not. Older workers, Justice Clarence Thomas declared for the majority, have the full burden of proving that they were fired because of their age. That is an unfairly difficult standard, and it is an unreasonable interpretation of the law.  

Last fall, the Democratic chairs of three key Congressional committees introduced legislation that would ”restore vital civil rights protections for older workers in the face of the Supreme Court’s decision in Gross v. FBL Financial.”  In announcing the bill, called the ”Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act” (H.R. 3721), the sponsors stated: ”In Gross, the Supreme Court rewrote civil rights laws, overturning well-established precedent and making it harder for workers facing age discrimination to enforce their rights.”   

Today, the Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and Labor held its first hearing on the Court’s ruling and the proposed legislation. As the Legal Times blog reports:  

The AARP is supporting the legislation, and Gail Aldrick, vice chair of the group’s board, also testified today. Those registered to lobby on the bill include the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.    

Eric Dreiband, partner in a firm that does corporate defense work, testified in opposition to the bill, calling it a “broad and ambigous” measure that would “enable some lawyers to earn more money” but probably wouldn’t help older workers all that much. 

But Michael Foreman, who directs the Civil Rights Appellate Clinic at Penn State’s law school, called the proposed legislation a “fair, balanced, indeed conservative attempt to return the law to where everyone, the courts included, thought it was” before the Gross decision.  

The final testimony came from Jack Gross, plaintiff in the case that bears his name. At the age of 54, Gross was demoted by his employer, FBL–along with a group of other employees over 50 who refused to accept buyouts. He initially won his lawsuit against FBL, but it was appealed up to the Supreme Court, which decided against him. Gross told the Committee: “I hate having my name associated with the pain and injustice now being inflicted on older workers.” 

In the unlikely event that Democrats succeed in quickly passing the new law, it won’t come a moment too soon. According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the recession has been terrible for older workers, who to all appearances have suffered more than their fair share of layoffs. In 2008, the EEOC saw a 30 percent increase in the filing of age discrimination charges, which outpaced all other types of bias claims. The numbers were so dramatic that the acting chair of the EEOC wondered whether “the public generally realizes that age discrimination is illegal.” 

It seems to me that even if they do know it’s illegal, much of the public–like the courts–don’t seem to take age discrimination too seriously.

But of course, I really wouldn’t know.

  

Categories: Congress · Congressional Democrats · Obama Administration · age discrimination · financial crisis / recession · jobs / employment / unemployment · legal issues · lobbying · older workers
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Health Care Reform: The Older You are, the More You Pay

March 23, 2010 · 4 Comments

Another thing about the health care reform act: Insurers, including those in the exchanges, can charge higher premiums to older people. The legislation permits “age-rating,” which is terrible for people ages 50-65, who are too young for Medicare, but old enough to pay twice as much as younger people. But of course, AHIP’s Karen Ignazio is complaining that the ratio limit is too low–they want to be able to pay 5 times as much. Why? because, they say, the old geezers drive up costs for young people. Poor babies. Seems like the one thing the health insurance can’t stop doing is  promoting a phony generation war.

Age-rating has received little attention from the media, even from those criticizing the legislation. The exception is women’s groups, who today pointed out that the reform promotes both age-rating and gender rating (not to mention limiting payment for abortion). 

In a press release, NOW says:  

Fact: The bill permits age-rating, the practice of imposing higher premiums on older people. This practice has a disproportionate impact on women, whose incomes and savings are lower due to a lifetime of systematic wage discrimination.

Fact: The bill also permits gender-rating, the practice of charging women higher premiums simply because they are women. Some are under the mistaken impression that gender-rating has been prohibited, but that is only true in the individual and small-group markets. Larger group plans (more than 100 employees) sold through the exchanges will be permitted to discriminate against women — having an especially harmful impact in workplaces where women predominate.

We know why those gender- and age-rating provisions are in the bill: because insurers insisted on them, as they will generate billions of dollars in profits for the companies. Such discriminatory rating must be completely eliminated.

I also wrote about age rating on Unsilent Generation last year, when it was part of the so-called Baucus plan in the Senate. You can read that piece here.
Probably the best report on age rating came out last year from the Urban Institute last October. While it’s now out of date when it comes to the numbers, it provides a good understanding of what’s involved.

One of the central goals of comprehensive health care reform is to eliminate discrimination by health status in the sales and pricing of health insurance and reduce the financial burdens associated with poor health. Consequently, current proposals being considered by Congress would prohibit health insurers from setting premiums based explicitly on the health experience of enrollees. These proposals would promote sharing of health care risk by limiting, but not eliminating, the differences in premiums charged to individuals of different ages.

The age rating limits are quite different across the proposals under consideration. The Baucus proposal (as of September 16, 2009), for example, would allow age rating bands of 5:1 (i.e., the premiums charged the oldest adults could be no more than 5 times those charged younger adults), while the House Tri-Committee proposal and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension (HELP) Committee proposal would limit age rating bands to 2:1. The larger the variation permitted in premiums based upon age, the less broadly risk is shared, as health care expenditures tend to increase with age.2 The smaller the variation permitted, the greater is the extent to which younger individuals who purchase coverage will tend to cross-subsidize the health care expenses of older individuals.

Such differences in age rating bands will lead to significant differences in the distribution of health care burdens across individuals and families of different ages, particularly those enrolling in coverage independently through the proposed National Health Insurance Exchange (referred to here as “the exchange”). This analysis highlights these differences, providing insight into the trade-offs inherent in this policy choice. We compare the distributional consequences across individuals and families under a health care reform approach similar to that delineated in the House Tri-Committee proposal (H.R. 3200) using age rating of 5:1, 2:1, and 1:1 (i.e., pure community rating where all ages are charged the same premium).

Categories: Congressional Democrats · Obama Administration · age discrimination · generations / intergenerational issues · health care · health insurance industry
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Big Pharma Wins Big in Health Care Reform

March 22, 2010 · 7 Comments

The Republicans look a sour lot this morning, but the pharmaceutical industry, which helps foot the campaign bills of a sizeable chunk of members of both parties, is delighted with the legislation, and with its Democratic friends in the White House and on the Hill.

Members of Congress in both parties generally have lined up behind the insurance and pharmaceutical industries from the get go. So it should come as no surprise that the Democrats, who long ago gave up any pretence of opposing corporate power, found a way to accomodate the pharmaceutical companies on the way to its tepid reform. To a large extent, the “debate” over health care was a show debate, an extended round of Washington smoke and mirrors. The administration early on cuts its deal with Big Pharma, and pretty much stuck to it throughout the process.

In fact, the Dems actually made the drugsters look good, celebrating the industry’s generous “concessions” and “discounts” while ensuring that no real threat to Big Pharma’s profits would make their way into the final bill.

The industry’s  main goal from the very beginning has been to fend off any government power to negotiate or seriously regulate drug prices–and this they did. 

Big Pharma’s second big win was to prevent any measure that would have opened the way for American consumers to buy less expensive drugs abroad, especially from Canada.

At the same time, the supposed give-backs by the drug industry are projected to more than pay for themselves. The much-lauded discounts on brand name drugs for seniors in the Medicare prescription drug program, for example, are good for Big Pharma because they discourage oldsters from switching to generics.

And more insured people simply mean more money coming into the coffers, for Big Pharma as well as for the insurance industry.

Confirmation of the industry analysis came early in the day from the stock market, where drug stocks initially remained level; there certainly was no rush to dump shares, which is what would be expected if the bill actually represented any threat to profits. And by 1 p, EST, CNN Money was reporting a rally in health care stocks.

“I was unable to find anything in there that would cause me to have anxiety if I were a shareholder in a pharmaceutical company,” Ira Loss, a senior health-care analyst at the research firm Washington Analysis, told Dow Jones. According  to the ticker story:

Billy Tauzin, who led the industry’s negotiations on health care with lawmakers, said overall drug makers fare well. “While we’re not totally happy,” Tauzin began, “we generally feel like it tracks with our principles.”

Sanofi-Aventis SA (SNY) Chief Executive Christopher Viehbacher said in an interview that the impact of the legislation will be neutral to slightly negative “but better for the industry than if healthcare reform didn’t pass.”

Tauzin, head of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America or PhRMA, and Viehbacher said getting protection for brand-name biologics is among the important provisions for the industry. Drug makers pushed hard to get 12 years of exclusive market protection while the White House and some lawmakers wanted to lower the protection to seven years.

Despite fees and rebates imposed by the legislation, “analysts say drug makers will end up recouping those costs through new customers: The bill would provide insurance coverage to an additional 32 million Americans.” The Dow Jones story continues:

Chalk up another good round for Pharma and Biotech in health care reform,” began a note to clients Friday from Concept Capital, a research firm.Ken Tsuboi, co-manager of the Allianz RCM Wellness Fund, sees the impact of bill, and its $90 billion in concessions over 10 years, as relatively minor in an industry that has annual global sales of about $750 billion, with about $300 billion in the U.S., and margins close to 30%.”I think that it is actually a pretty good deal for Pharma,” Tsuboi said.

The GOP, which purports to be the party of big business, ought to be applauding at least these portions of the health care reform–and perhaps when the cameras go away, some of them will quit bitching and count their blessings.  As for the obnoxious Tea Party gang, if they start threatening the real power in this country, which is vested in corporations, they may well find themselves whipped and isolated.

Categories: Congressional Democrats · Congressional Republicans · Medicare · Obama Administration · Wall Street / financial industry · corporations · drug industry · health care · health insurance industry · lobbying · right wing
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Kucinich Explains His Yes Vote on Health Care Reform

March 19, 2010 · 1 Comment

Following is the full statement issued on March 17 by Dennis Kucinich on his decisions to vote for the health care reform bill in the House. Even readers who are angry with the vote may want to read this for some of the broader comments Kucinich makes, in the last few paragraphs, on the current political scene. 

Each generation has had to take up the question of how to provide for the health of the people of our nation.  And each generation has grappled with difficult questions of how to meet the needs of our people.  I believe health care is a civil right.  Each time as a nation we have reached to expand our basic rights, we have witnessed a slow and painful unfolding of a democratic pageant of striving, of resistance, of breakthroughs, of opposition, of unrelenting efforts and of eventual triumph.

I have spent my life struggling for the rights of working class people and for health care.  I grew up understanding first hand what it meant for families who did not get access to needed care.  I lived in 21 different places by the time I was 17, including in a couple of cars.  I understand the connection between poverty and poor health care, the deeper meaning of what Native Americans have called “hole in the body, hole in the spirit”. I struggled with Crohn’s disease much of my adult life, to discover sixteen years ago a near-cure in alternative medicine and following a plant-based diet.  I have learned with difficulty the benefits of taking charge personally of my own health care.  On those few occasions when I have needed it, I have had access to the best allopathic practitioners.    

As a result I have received the blessings of vitality and high energy.  Health and health care is personal for each one of us.  As a former surgical technician I know that there are many people who dedicate their lives to helping others improve theirs.  I also know their struggles with an insufficient health care system.

There are some who believe that health care is a privilege based on ability to pay.  This is the model President Obama is dealing with, attempting to open up health care to another 30 million people, within the context of the for-profit insurance system.   There are others who believe that health care is a basic right and ought to be provided through a not-for-profit plan.  This is what I have tirelessly advocated.

I have carried the banner of national health care in two presidential campaigns, in party platform meetings, and as co-author of HR676, Medicare for All.   I have worked to expand the health care debate beyond the current for-profit system, to include a public option and an amendment to free the states to pursue single payer.  The first version of the health care bill, while badly flawed, contained provisions which I believed  made the bill worth supporting in committee.  The provisions were taken out of the bill after it passed committee.  

I joined with the Progressive Caucus saying that I would not support the bill unless it had a strong public option and unless it protected the right of people to pursue single payer at a state level.  It did not.  I kept my pledge and voted against the bill.   I have continued to oppose it while trying to get the provisions back into the bill. Some have speculated I may be in a position of casting the deciding vote.   The President’s visit to my district on Monday underscored the urgency of this moment.

I have taken this fight farther than many in Congress cared to carry it because I know what my constituents experience on a daily basis.  Come to my district in Cleveland and you will understand.

The people of Ohio’s 10th district have been hard hit by an economy where wealth has accelerated upwards through plant closings, massive unemployment, small business failings, lack of access to credit, foreclosures and the high cost of health care and limited access to care.  I take my responsibilities to the people of my district personally.  The focus of my district office is constituent service, which more often then not involves social work to help people survive economic perils.  It also involves intervening with insurance companies.

In the past week it has become clear that the vote on the final health care bill will be very close. I take this vote with the utmost seriousness.  I am quite aware of the historic fight that has lasted the better part of the last century to bring America in line with other modern democracies in providing single payer health care.    

I have seen the political pressure and the financial pressure being asserted to prevent a minimal recognition of this right, even within the context of a system dominated by private insurance companies.

I know I have to make a decision, not on the bill as I would like to see it, but the bill as it is.   My criticisms of the legislation have been well reported.  I do not retract them. I incorporate them in this statement. They still stand as legitimate and cautionary.  I still have doubts about the bill. I do not think it is a first step toward anything I have supported in the past. This is not the bill I wanted to support, even as I continue efforts until the last minute to modify the bill.

However after careful discussions with the President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Elizabeth my wife and close friends, I have decided to cast a vote in favor of the legislation.   If my vote is to be counted, let it now count for passage of the bill, hopefully in the direction of comprehensive health care reform.  We must include coverage for those excluded from this bill.  We must free the states.  We must have control over private insurance companies and the cost their very existence imposes on American families. We must strive to provide a significant place for alternative and complementary medicine, religious health science practice, and the personal responsibility aspects of health care which include diet, nutrition, and exercise.
The health care debate has been severely hampered by fear, myths, and by hyper-partisanship.  The President clearly does not advocate socialism or a government takeover of health care.  The fear that this legislation has engendered has deep roots, not in foreign ideology but in a lack of confidence, a timidity, mistrust and fear which post 911 America has been unable to shake.
This fear has so infected our politics, our economics and our international relations that as a nation we are losing sight of the expanded vision, the electrifying potential we caught a glimpse of with the election of Barack Obama.  The transformational potential of his presidency, and of ourselves, can still be courageously summoned in ways that will reconnect America to our hopes for expanded opportunities for jobs, housing, education, peace, and yes, health care.
I want to thank those who have supported me personally and politically as I have struggled with this decision.  I ask for your continued support in our ongoing efforts to bring about meaningful change.  As this bill passes I will renew my efforts to help those state organizations which are aimed at stirring a single payer movement which eliminates the predatory role of private insurers who make money not providing health care.   I have taken a detour through supporting this bill, but I know the destination I will continue to lead, for as long as it takes, whatever it takes to an America where health care will be firmly established as a civil right.

Categories: Congressional Democrats · Congressional Republicans · Obama Administration · financial crisis / recession · health care · jobs / employment / unemployment
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