Labor Day, But Not Much To Celebrate

A study came out this past week - Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers.  They looked at front-line workers (not including managers and supervisors) in low wage industries in New York, Chicago and LA.

We found that many employment and labor laws are regularly and systematically violated, impacting a significant part of the low-wage labor force in the nation’s largest cities.

I'm reading the study now, and it's pretty disturbing.  I'm not surprised that this stuff is going on, but like most folks, I assumed that this was one of those "few bad apples" things.  There are many employers in low wage industried who don't screw their employees, but the magnitude and pervasiveness of the problem is shocking.  Of the people they studied, 3/4 of those who worked overtime were cheated out of some or all of their overtime pay.  Half of those who had a serious workplace injury experienced a violation of workmen's compensation laws by their employer.  43% of workers who complained about a workplace issue or tried to form a union experienced retaliation from their employer. 

Rebuilding our economy on the back of illegal working conditions is not only morally but also economically untenable. When unscrupulous employers break the law and drive down labor standards, they rob families of badly needed money to put food on the table. They rob communities of spending power. They rob state and local governments of vital tax revenues. And they rob the nation of the good jobs and workplace standards needed to compete in the global economy.

They're right about that, of course, but I don't suspect that we're going to see anything done about it any time soon.  Our country has a really weird relationship with it's low-wage workers.  We'd be completely sunk without them, although we don't like to admit it.  They're the grease that keeps our economy moving.  But we don't really value what they do, nor do we value them.  They're "not like us".  They're lazy, unmotivated, probably not very bright, probably not very honest.  We resist any attempts to raise their wages to an amount sufficient to pay for food, shelter, etc. because what they do isn't worth a decent wage.  We resent having to expend tax dollars for public assistance programs to make up the gap between what they're paid and what it costs to live.  

We stack the deck against them then tell them it's their fault they're losing, and that they'd be greedy and ungrateful to ask for a reshuffle, and disrespectful of all of the work their betters did in putting the deck together for them. 

It's a heck of a world...



FT

More on Health Care

I was cruising the news today and found this - Until Medical Bills Do Us Part   The article itself was pretty disturbing, talking about couples who divorced due to medical bills, but there was a comment on the story that shook me up a bit.  Here's a chunk of the comment -

What I learned, after a colleague was diagnosed with late-stage cancer that would require aggressive, long-term treatment, was that after 90 days out of the office on sick leave, an employee is placed on long-term disability and, if he is unable to make COBRA payments, has no further health care coverage. That's right; if you get too sick to work for three months, you lose your health insurance -- right in the middle of chemotherapy, or while you are recovering from a serious accident or stroke. That's because, once you are on long-term disability, your employer has no further obligations to you, including regarding benefits, and you are consequently dropped from the employer's plan. I was made to understand that the transfer to disability and cancellation of insurance benefits are required by the disability and medical insurance policies issued to all employers, and that no state or federal law currently can prevent such cancellations.

Even if you can afford COBRA (which is very expensive), your benefits will be extended no longer than 18 months. That means that eighteen months and 90 days after you fall ill, or have an accident, you no longer have any health insurance at all. You're on your own. No "government bureaucrat" will come between you and your doctor because, unless you have the money, you won't have a doctor.

This news shocked me, and made me wonder whether all those who oppose health claim reform on the ground that they prefer their employer plans, realize that they are not covered if they become chronically ill, or have a catastrophic accident, regardless of whether they are employed when the illness or accident occurs. Nobody has health care coverage in such circumstances. We are all uninsured.

That's pretty scary stuff.  I'm the primary breadwinner in our family, and our health insurance is provided by my employer.  If something were to happen to me, we'd not only lose my income but both hubby and I would lose our health insurance.  We couldn't afford COBRA if I was bringing home my regular paycheck, we certainly couldn't afford it if I was on disability pay.  We're not (yet) old enough for Medicare, so we'd be screwed. 

On the other paw, at present we have very little by way of assets, so we'd get to skip the gut-wrenching, soul-crushing step of liquidating our nest-egg and selling off everything we'd worked all our lives for in order to pay our medical expenses and be able to move right on to the humiliating process of joining the public assistance roles.  Somehow, that doesn't make me feel much better...


FT

Today in the News - Insurers Poised To Gain From Health Care Reform

I've been following the news on the health care crisis pretty closely.  A story in today's Hartford Courant is a bit troubling to me.  Insurers Poised To Gain From Health Care Reform

    Insurers want any reform to maintain what they call a "level playing field" on which companies are able to compete based on efficiency and service — something they say a government plan would undermine.

    "They would have a huge price advantage over us," said Mickey Herbert, chief executive of ConnectiCare, the Farmington-based health insurer. "And over time, you'd expect individuals and employers to migrate to lower rates."
   Private insurance would be forced to compete with the public plan payment rates, Herbert said.
   "In fairly short order, private insurance and our employer-sponsored health insurance system end up atrophying greatly, and we're on a slippery slope to a single-payer system," Herbert wrote recently to Congress.

The insurance companies themselves are saying that government can provide insurance at lower cost than they can.  Their arguments against a public option are centered on the fact that they will lose business.  Mr. Herbert fails to say why a single-payer system would be a bad thing, just beware the dreaded slippery slope.  In the realm of logical fallacies, it was more an Appeal to Consequences than it was a Slippery Slope. 

Reading the Building a Sustainable Health Care System document from WellPoint, it appears that a good part of their solution is for insurance companies to get more involved in the delivery end of health care - determining what is available, from whom and for how much.  This sounds very much like the getting-between-you-and-your-doctor stuff that people are concerned about. 

It appears they want the government to take on more responsibility for individuals with chronic conditions, as well as keeping the responsibility for the elderly and the poor.  Apparently the dreaded government-paid health care is good enough for those who aren't going to make a profit for the insurance companies. 

They don't start talking about reforms that are needed within the insurance industry until page 10 of the 16-page document.  It seems that all we need is more government money to fund the more expensive high-risk folks,  fewer regulations on insurance companies and changes to the tax code to give individuals and employers more money to pay for insurance premiums. 

This just doesn't sound like any kind of solution to me.  WellPoint appears to want more of a voice in care decisions.  They want to take the healthiest and most profitable of us as customers and leave the rest of us to government to care for.  Those of us who pay taxes would pay more to cover the increasing number of high-risk people getting government care and so that the low-income among us can afford to pay their insurance premiums.  The only winner I see coming out of WellPoint's plan is WellPoint.

I don't blame WellPoint for taking the position that they're taking, but their plan is all about sustaining their business model, not creating a sustainable health care system. They're as much as telling us in their document that they can't do anyting to improve the health care situation other than point out what providers, taxpayers and consumers should be doing.  I don't know that we need them to do that. 

I'm pretty sure that we don't need to be paying them to do that.  I think that if there needs to be some agreement on acceptable levels of service, that health care providers, patient advocates and government health officials can come up with something without help from the insurance companies.  If tax dollars are to be spent on health care, I want that money to be in the control of the taxpayers, through our government.  We have a lot greater chance for transparency from government than we do from the private insurance industry. 

I understand that the health insurance companies want to protect their profits, but in the big picture, this really can't be our primary consideration.


FT