Category Archives: health care

health care, Manufacturing, Steelworkers, trade unions

Aliquippa’s 1937 J&L Workers Come Up In Supreme Court Wrangling Once Again—This Time Over Health Care

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Ten Steelworkers, Five Justices, and the Commerce Clause

By Amy Davidson
The New Yorker

If there had been Twitter, instead of news tickers, in February, 1937, reporters and other observers would have been using it to follow the arguments before the Supreme Court in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.

It was the central case of five, argued in one extraordinary round, which challenged the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act, also known as the Wagner Act.

The J. & L. dispute involved ten steelworkers who had been fired from the company’s Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, mills for trying to organize a union. As with this week’s hearings on the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, those deliberations were being watched with an anxiety that extended well beyond any concern for the protagonists in the suit, or even the law in question, to an entire vision of government.

Jones & Laughlin and its companion cases involved the Commerce Clause, the constitutional conductor for a whole orchestra of New Deal programs and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s more urgent efforts to pull the country out of the Great Depression. (It gives Congress the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.”) The post-1937 conception of the Commerce clause has, as Jeffrey Toobin noted yesterday, become an assumed part of any number of government efforts today; it is the defense for challenges to the individual mandate but also to other aspects of the A.C.A., like provisions protecting people with preëxisting conditions.

Continue reading Aliquippa’s 1937 J&L Workers Come Up In Supreme Court Wrangling Once Again—This Time Over Health Care →

budget crisis, health care, Right Wing, safety net

How To Deal Seriously with Health Costs

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Save Lives and Money by

Expanding Medicare to All

By Dr. Quentin Young
Beaver County Blue via Fire Dog Lake

July 31, 2011 – With media attention focused on the debt-ceiling drama in Washington, and with so many Americans rightly preoccupied with the frightening level of joblessness and bleak state of the economy, it might seem strange to urge a national celebration of Medicare’s 46th anniversary this Saturday, July 30.

After all, if we’re to believe top lawmakers, Medicare is part of the problem, right? Aren’t we supposed to be talking about raising the eligibility age from 65 to 67, reducing benefits, increasing seniors’ co-pays and deductibles or, even more dire, abolishing the program altogether and handing seniors vouchers to buy private insurance?

Wrong. Despite its market-obsessed detractors and those who would weaken the program in the name of deficit reduction, Medicare is the solution, not the problem. More precisely, an improved Medicare for all – a single-payer health system – is the right prescription for treating not only our health care woes, but our ailing economy as well.

How so?

The biggest albatross around the neck of our health care system is the private insurance industry, which remains firmly entrenched under the new federal health law.

Continue reading How To Deal Seriously with Health Costs →

Community, health care, labor

Braddock: UPMC Wrecking Working-Class Health Care

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Braddock Fights for its Hospital

By Kay Tillow
Unions for Single Payer

Oct.17, 2010 – Braddock, the home of many a working class battle, now fights to save its hospital, the best building in town, from the wrecker’s ball. Braddock, Pennsylvania, the site of the US Steel’s Edgar Thompson Works, lies along the north bank of the Monongahela just up the river from Pittsburgh.

Braddock’s story is repeated across the country as mills close and once thriving working class communities are deserted by the hospitals they built. The people of Braddock are saying “no” to the gigantic University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) as it builds in wealthy areas while closing the hospitals where they are needed most–Braddock, Aliquippa, Southside.

The people of Braddock are fighting back. With the help of the Western Pennsylvania Coalition for Single-Payer Healthcare they organized “Save Our Community Hospitals” (SOCH). In an effort to stop the demolition they are maintaining a vigil at the hospital and seeking legal proceedings to block it. They won a victory when the demolition was halted by an invalid permit.

UPMC, an $8 billion corporation, now occupies the former US Steel building that dominates the Pittsburgh Skyline. In recent years UPMC has established itself as a global enterprise with overseas ventures in Sicily and Ireland. UPMC just announced a $16 million advertising and branding campaign with a new warm and fuzzy purple logo. It has plenty of money to keep the Braddock Hospital open.

SOCH urges supporters to call UPMC CEO, Jeffrey Romoff to demand that the hospital be saved and emergency service be restored to Braddock.

Romoff’s number is: 412-647-3555

The passage of HR 676, national single payer health care, would end the flight of hospitals and health care away from urban centers and hard hit areas that have lost manufacturing jobs. HR 676 would be publicly funded making everyone an “equally valuable” patient stopping the economic incentives that now close hospitals and physicians offices.

After you call Jeff Romoff, call your congressperson and urge co-sponsorship for HR 676.

Kay Tillow
All Unions Committee For Single Payer Health Care–HR 676
c/o Nurses Professional Organization (NPO)
1169 Eastern Parkway, Suite 2218
Louisville, KY 40217

Email: nursenpo@aol.com
http://unionsforsinglepayer.org/

antiwar, Community, health care, unemployment

Beaver County’s Big Knob Fair Meets the Peace and Jobs Movement

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Lessons Learned at the

Big Knob Grange Fair

 

By Randy Shannon and Carl Davidson

Beaver County Blue

The Big Knob Grange Fair, held Aug. 30 through Sept. 4 up in the lovely rolling hills above Rochester, PA, a distressed mill town at the confluence of the Beaver and Ohio rivers, is a “big doin’s’ in Beaver County, and has been for 70 years or so.

It features blue grass and country rock bands, tractor and truck ‘pulls,’ a demolition derby, dozens of rides for kids, booths for local politicians, hunting clubs, garden clubs, home improvement vendors, and local artisans. The Grange members serve delicious home-cooked food, display prize-winning livestock, fowl, and garden produce. The oldest and the latest in farm equipment are also on display. In recent years, the Fair draws from 30,000 to 40,000 semi-rural farmers and blue-collar workers with their families, and a horde of young people, and this year, with glorious weather, was no different.

This year the Fair had a new feature co-sponsored by Beaver County Peace Links and the 4th CD Chapter of Progressive Democrats of America. Near the middle of the big striped circus tent was a table with a large banner hanging behind it: ‘War Is Making You Poor!’ Many of the hundreds of passersby on any one of the five days stopped and did a double take. Some ambled on, but a good number stayed to chat and see what it was all about.

“We were there every day from 4pm until 10pm,” said Randy Shannon, treasurer of the 4th CD Progressive Democrats of America. “People start flowing in after work. In addition to our banner, there was a giant 4ft x 5ft poster showing that Beaver County taxpayers have shelled out $54 million per year for the last ten years for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is almost the same amount as the county’s annual general fund tax collections.”

Carl Davidson explained his contribution: “We set up an internet connection with a cell phone. With a monitor and a laptop I showed some antiwar videos picked by Beaver County Peace Links, including a looping video of an apple pie being divided like the US budget. The military got half the pie.”

Todd and Emily Davis made a unique contribution to the table. Todd, a Methodist pastor, is the chairperson of Peace Links. They labeled 10 jars with the main categories of the federal budget. They were arrayed in front of a small backdrop that read: ‘Take the penny poll: how would YOU spend your tax dollars.’

Continue reading Beaver County’s Big Knob Fair Meets the Peace and Jobs Movement →

health care, labor

Beaver County Adds Its Voices on Insurance Reform

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Street Heat in Aliquippa:

Congressman Altmire

Pushed to Change Stand,

Abandon Insurance Bigwigs

By Carl Davidson

Beaver County Blue

McLean Street in Aliquippa got plenty of heat of the sunny afternoon of March 16, as opposing rallies on the issue of health care gathered out the office of Jason Altmire, the 4th CD’s Democratic ‘Blue Dog’ representative in Congress.

Photo: Steve Kislock

The first rally was at noon, when a crowd of 120 people, organized largely by trade unions, retiree groups and health care workers and activists made a last-ditch effort to get a ‘Yes’ vote on the current insurance reform proposal. But at 4pm, a crowd of more than 300 GOP, Tea Party and anti-reform forces showed up demanding a ‘No’ vote. Earlier, the anti-reformers had tried to disrupt the progressive rally with a horn-blasting truck behind the speakers stand, but they were shooed away. “Remember to turn in your Medicare card,” shouted one of the rally attendees to the departing horn blasters. Both efforts got wide coverage in regional media.

Altmire wasn’t present.  But if he is at all astute and his staff took careful notes, one critical political fact will stand out: those calling for a ‘Yes’ vote were the hard core of his most active supporters in the past, while those calling for a ‘No’ vote are largely unlikely to vote for him over a Republican no matter what his vote is on this issue.

Continue reading Beaver County Adds Its Voices on Insurance Reform →

health care, labor

Maine AFL-CIO Calls for Labor Summit & Strategy to Win Single Payer

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2009 Maine AFL-CIO Convention

Maine AFL-CIO Calls for Labor Summit & Strategy to Win Single Payer

by Matt Schlobohm, Public Policy & Poltical Mobilization Director, Maine AFL-CIO, and Charlie Urquhart, Organizer, Maine Labor Group on Health

On Friday October 23, 2009 the delegates at the Maine AFL-CIO’s 27th
Biennial Convention unanimously passed a resolution calling on the AFL-CIO to convene, after the current healthcare reform process in Congress concludes, a democratic strategic planning process to develop a long term strategy to win Single Payer national health insurance.

Continue reading Maine AFL-CIO Calls for Labor Summit & Strategy to Win Single Payer →

health care

Expiration of COBRA subsidy will hit families hard: Americans need Medicare for All

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Family health insurance to rise sharply without COBRA subsidy

Tony Pugh | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: December 01, 2009 06:32:41 AM

WASHINGTON — A new study estimates that the end of a hefty government subsidy could force millions of laid-off workers to pay more than 80 percent of their monthly unemployment checks to keep their job-based family health insurance coverage intact.

An estimated 7 million jobless workers and their dependents are thought to have received the temporary subsidy, which pays 65 percent of their health insurance premiums under a law known as COBRA, the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act.

Continue reading Expiration of COBRA subsidy will hit families hard: Americans need Medicare for All →

health care

Senate Grovels before Insurance Lobbyists – Where is our democracy?

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FDL Statement on Senate Combined Health Care Bill

By: Jane Hamsher Thursday November 19, 2009

It is encouraging that Senator Reid respected the will of the American people and included a public option in the merged Senate bill. However, the addition of a state opt-out provision threatens to leave millions of Americans at the mercy of private insurance monopolies, with the federal government acting as enforcers for a product with no competition to keep prices down.

The President set an arbitrary $900 billion 10-year price tag for the final bill. In order to comply with this, the Senate bill delays the ban on excluding people from coverage for pre-existing conditions until 2014. According to a study by the Harvard Medical School, nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, and it is estimated that medical costs contribute to 62% of all bankruptcies. This is a callous decision that has an enormous cost in human lives and untold suffering.

Continue reading Senate Grovels before Insurance Lobbyists – Where is our democracy? →

health care

Third Wednesday Protest for Healthcare not Warfare at Cong. Altmire’s Office Nov. 18th at Noon

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Dear Friends,
 
Tomorrow is the 3rd Wed of the month. Progressive Democrats of America is starting up a brown bag lunch campaign throughout the country to let Congress people know how we feel about their actions.
 
We, as your local Progressive Democrats chapter, will be conducting a noontime protest at Congressman Altmire’s Aliquippa office at 2110 McLean Street. Please bring a brown bag lunch and join us at 12:00 noon. We will be letting Congressman Altmire know how displeased we are with his role in defeating healthcare reform. Please write your own letter, sign it and bring it to Congressman Altmire’s office with you.
 
If you can’t show up at noon, please drop the letter off at Altmire’s office sometime during the day tomorrow. His office is open from 9:00-5:30.
 
If you can’t drop it off in person, mail it tomorrow.
Congressman Jason Altmire
2110 McLean Street
Aliquippa, PA 15001
 
Thanks,
Tina B Shannon
Chairperson PA 4th CD Chapter of Progressive Democrats of America
health care, labor

‘Health Care for All’ Advocates Dig In for Long Fight

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Photo: Gilda Deferrari, PDA member in Hopewell Township, sends Altmire a message to change course on health care

Health Care ‘Street Heat’
On the Rise at Altmire’s
Aliquippa Office

By Carl Davidson
Beaver County Blue

Nov. 12, 2009 – The ongoing battle over health care reform hit the streets of Aliquippa, Pa on this mild and sunny fall afternoon, as nearly 50 Beaver County residents chanted slogans and heard searing speeches over their lunch hour at the local offices of 4th CD Congressman, Jason Altmire. At the close of the rally, they marched into the building and packed the office vestibule, leaving written statements and petitions.

The message was loud and clear. The health care crisis, expanding costs and shrinking coverage, was taking a heavy toll on the working class and retirees of this entire economically distressed Ohio River Valley region. The gathering here was angry with Altmire’s ‘No’ vote on the current health care reform package in the Congress, and demanded that he change course. Continue reading ‘Health Care for All’ Advocates Dig In for Long Fight →