This is a test of the new image upload feature in the Blogger software.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Enough Already!
This week, I already have been buried under an avalanche of apocryphal hoaxes, rumors, and urban legends. It's almost like being trapped in the editorial HQ of The National Enquirer. I have read that U.S. Senators and Representatives don't participate in Social Security. I've read that Senator Hillary Clinton deliberately insulted members of the Gold Star Mothers (mothers of slain military personnel). I've posted — to this blog — a doctored image from the Hubble Telescope. I've been asked to pray for a nonexistent cancer victim. The list of stuff goes on and on. At the very least, this blog has never reported that Arnold Schwarznegger is either an alien or Hitler's grandson.
There is a valuable Internet resource for checking hoaxes, rumors, and urban legends. After bookmarking the site for Urban Legends, enter something like "Hillary Clinton and Gold Star Mothers" in the search window. Shazam! The story is nonsense. Enter something like "Pray for Cindy Hogan" in the search window. Pow! There may be a number of Cindy Hogans, but none fit the story circulating endlessly as forwarded e-mail. Enter "Congress and Social Security" for the truth, not the nonsense. Ditto for "The Eye of God and the Hubble Telescope." The beat goes on.
If this is (fair & balanced) honesty, so be it.
Friday, June 24, 2005
Identity Theft Update
This AM, I received a call from Detective Sergeant Jason Slaughter of the Radford, VA Police Department. Earlier, I had contacted the Georgetown, TX police department about my little Visa card problem.
While this blog was on hiatus and I was Up North in WI, a Georgetown police detective left me an e-mail message suggesting that I contact the Radford police because of the fraudulent change of address on my Visa account to "305 3rd Avenue" in Radford, VA. When I called the Radford police, I spoke with a Dectective Diaz. He assured me that he would "look into the matter" while I awaited particulars from the Fraud Detection Division of my Visa card issuer.
As it turned out, an investigation of fraudulent activity at the above Radford address was already underway with Detective Sergeant Slaughter in charge. Slaughter informed me that I was "one of many" credit card holders whose account addresses had been changed to the above address in Radford. It seems that an Internet "business" in Moscow, Russia was seeking "associates" to order/receive merchandise using credit card numbers supplied out of Moscow. The new agent — like the woman in Radford — was to order merchandise and have it delivered to the above address. In turn, the merchandise was reshipped to Moscow. The Radford woman was paid $24 per transaction. Detective Sergeant Slaughter characterized the woman as "not very bright." She has been charged with fraud and is cooperating with the authorities.
Slaughter is working with the FBI, the Secret Service, and the State Department (U.S. Embassy in Moscow) on this case. Slaughter was not optimistic that the Russian authorities would cooperate in halting this scam from Moscow. Slaughter also expressed frustration with the U.S. credit card companies who were reluctant to cooperate with his investigation. There seems to be a conspiracy of silence in the face of this fraud. Slaughter said that such scams have been operated out of Canada and a number of European countries. When I asked Detective Sergeant Slaughter how my credit card number came into the hands of this Russian crook, he replied that I had asked the 64 Thousand Dollar Question. Slaughter doesn't know how the card numbers have been compromised, but he guessed that it was a sophisticated electronic operation. Evidently my PIN, my Social Security Number, and my secret security question have all been compromised.
I have changed my Visa card account number and I have changed my PIN. I cannot change my Social Security Number. I feel as if I have a bullseye painted on my back.
Today, I wrote a letter to the Fraud Detection Division of Chase Bank Member Card Services. I told them about Sergeant Slaughter's investigation. I urged the fraud fighters to get in touch with Slaughter and I supplied his name, address, and number.
The irony of all this is that I have never been to Radford, VA, nor have I ever had a credit card transaction with a Russian vendor. If this is (fair & balanced) distrust, so be it.
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
(Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves: Hoax Victim!
First Identity Theft, now an Internet Hoax. Some days it doesn't pay to get out of bed. My Amarillo chum sent along this clarification. If you snooze, you lose. Welcome to the Blogoshere. I know now how Dan Rather felt. If this is (fair & balanced) mortification, so be it.
[x TruthOrFiction.com]
Mars is Going to Be the Closest to Earth Then Ever Before in Recorded History-Truth! But It Was in 2003!
Summary of the eRumor
The eRumor says that Mars is going to be close to the earth in July and August, the closest in recorded history, maybe the closest in more than 60,000 years, and will be the brightest object in the sky apart from the moon.
The Truth
This story is true, but it was an event that took place in 2003.
For some reason, the story started circulating again in 2005 as though it was going to happen then.
A real example of the eRumor as it has appeared on the Internet:
MARS SPECTACULAR!
The Red Planet is about to be spectacular! This month and next, Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter that will culminate in the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287.
Due to the way Jupiter's gravity tugs on Mars and perturbs its orbit, astronomers can only be certain that Mars has not come this close to Earth in the last 5,000 years, but it may be as long as 60,000 years before it happens again.
The encounter will culminate on August 27th when Mars comes to within 34,649,589 miles of Earth and will be (next to the moon) the brightest object in the night sky. It will attain a magnitude of -2.9 and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide. At a modest 75-power magnification
Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. Mars will be easy to spot. At the beginning of August it will rise in the east at 10p.m. and
reach its azimuth at about 3 a.m.
By the end of August when the two planets are closest, Mars will rise at nightfall and reach its highest point in the sky at 12:30a.m. That's pretty convenient to see something that no human being has seen in recorded history.
So, mark your calendar at the beginning of August to see Mars grow progressively brighter and brighter throughout the month.
Share this with your children and grandchildren.
NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN.
Copyright ©2005 TruthOrFiction.com All rights reserved
Here Come De Judge
Molly Ivins tells the truth. If you can't stand the truth — to paraphrase the Jack Nicholson character (Col. Nathan R. Jessep) in "A Few Good Men" — stay out of this blog. Texas isn't any better than most 3rd World countries. "Seek the truth," said the Greatest Teacher of all, "and it shall make you free." If this is (fair & balanced) veridicality, so be it.
Explain Texas' justice system? Here it goes
by Molly Ivins
The U.S. Supreme Court rules yet again that another Texas case was wrongfully decided — this time because 19 of 20 blacks had been knocked off the jury pool — and I'm asked to explain what's wrong with criminal justice in Texas, in 750 words. Sure, no problem.
I don't like to be cynical, but one can get a little tired after a long time watching justice meted out in this state. The story doesn't change much, and nothing seems to get better. But for what it's worth, here's what's at the bottom of it.
(1) Racism. In 1998, James Byrd Jr. was dragged to death behind a pickup truck for being black in Jasper. Two of the three men responsible got the death penalty. This was not first time in Texas a white man was given the death penalty for killing a black man. It was the second.
(2) More racism. In 1999, about one-fifth of the adult black citizens of Tulia, population 5,000, were arrested and accused of cocaine dealing on the uncorroborated testimony of a bent narc and notorious liar. No one even stopped to ask how a town that size could support 46 cocaine dealers until a reporter from the Texas Observer showed up.
(3) We elect our prosecutors. There are 254 counties in Texas, nearly every one with its own elected district attorney. The way to get elected is to be "Tuff on Crime." The way to lose is to be "Soft on Crime." In the big cities — Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, among the 10 largest in the nation — we get the usual plead-out mill: perp's public defender advises him to cop to reduced charges, anything to avoid a trial.
But in the small towns and rural areas where heavy crime is rare, a D.A. has to whup on whoever gets caught. Sometime in the '80s, a guy in Lubbock stole 12 frozen turkeys. They were recovered, still frozen. Not only no damage, but no defrost. The guy bought 75 years, which works out to 6.3 years per bird. Don't steal a turkey in Lubbock.
(4) We elect our judges. Only way to get elected is to be Tuff on Crime. Only way to lose is to be Soft on Crime. In the Case of the Sleeping Lawyer, a guy on death row appealed on grounds his lawyer had slept through his trial, thus providing him with less than adequate counsel. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that even though the lawyer slept through much of the trial, he didn't sleep during the important parts, so the conviction stood.
(5) An appeal process that isn't worth squat. If you're in, you can't get out. If you draw the death penalty in Texas, you effectively have 30 days to present new evidence. After that, you're toast. Doesn't matter if someone else confesses on Day 31. Doesn't even matter if you could provide DNA evidence proving it wasn't you. (The Legislature is still trying to fix that one.) Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are of the opinion that actual innocence is not necessarily a bar to execution (Herrera vs. Collins). It took a near-miracle to get the Tulia drug defendants out.
(6) Gutless politicians. Texas runs one of the largest prison system on Earth. Texas executed the retarded, the insane and people who were children when they committed their crimes, until the Supreme Court stopped that only three months ago. Texas executes foreigners without notifying their home countries. Every poll shows Texans do not want to execute people in these categories. Politicians are afraid to stop it for fear someone will say they're Soft on Crime.
You've met Labrador retrievers brighter than some of the people we execute. We had a guy on the row who thought he was going to die because he couldn't read. He spent hours on his bunk trying to memorize the ABCs. Never could do it. We execute people easily as crazy as the one in Florida who spent years crawling around on all fours, barking, under the impression that he was a black dog in the seventh circle of hell. But I'm sure they understand right from wrong, and know why they're being punished. Arf.
(7) A bent system. For years, Texas used an expert witness most people called "Dr. Death." Never saw a perp he couldn't guarantee would be a mortal menace for the rest of his days. Only one solution: Kill him. Just one little hitch: In many of those cases, Dr. Death never examined the accused, never talked to the accused, never got near the accused. He was reprimanded twice in the 1980s by the American Psychiatric Association, then expelled from the group in 1995 because his evidence was found unethical and untrustworthy.
In another case, the Supremes threw out the death sentence because the psychologist said the perp was a danger on account of being Latino. Then there was the Houston police lab, so unbelievably sorry, sloppy and just plain maliciously wrong that the courts had to throw out a bunch of those cases too.
But please don't get the idea that just because a few of these errors were caught on long-shot appeals, justice actually works here. We know about so many more miscarriages it would make you vomit, and can't even guess at how many we don't know about.
I'm at 932 words, and I haven't even gotten to the 5th Circuit, the parole board, why you can spend months in jail without ever seeing a lawyer . . .
Molly Ivins (W's favorite columnist along with Maureen Dowd.) is based in Austin. She wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.
Copyright © 2005 Cox Texas Newspapers, L.P. All rights reserved.
Ouch! Identity Theft Hurts!
Last week, a rude awakening intruded on my idyllic life here in Geezerville. I handed my Visa card to a local business and was told that the card was rejected and that I was to call my Visa bank. When I called, I was told that my account had been shut down due to suspicious activity. I asked for particulars and the Visa rep told me that my address had been changed to "305 3rd Avenue — Radford, VA 24141." I have never been to Radford, VA in my life. Not only that, but the fraudulent "Neil Sapper" charged an item for $1300+ from a vendor unknown to me. Now, I am dancing with Visa for the details of the fraud; the report is in the mail (supposedly). I have placed a Fraud Alert in my credit files maintained by TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian. See Jane Grieg's advice below. I have contacted detectives in both the Georgetown, TX and Radford, VA police departments. Visa shut down the vulnerable account and issued a new card for the changed account. The mystery is how in hell did some creep get my Visa card number? I shred everything containing my Visa account number. I did order something over the phone from Bag'n Baggage and I gave my Visa number to the sales rep on the other end. That transaction took place just before this little dance began in early June. Hmmmm. What if the Bag'n Baggage sales rep lives in Radford, VA? If this is (fair & balanced) paranoia, so be it.
[x Austin Fishwrap]
Here's a report: Get your credit history in one location
by Jane Greig
Dear readers, Texans can finally benefit from the recent amendment to the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires each of the nationwide consumer reporting companies to provide consumers with a free credit report copy (upon request) every 12 months. The three nationwide reporting companies (Experian, TransUnion and Equifax) have set up one central location to order. Visit annualcreditreport.com, call (877) 322-8228, or complete the Annual Credit Report Request Form and mail it to Annual Credit Report Request Service, P.O. Box 105281, Atlanta, GA 30348-5281.
Copyright © 2005 The Austin American-Statesman
Mark Your August Calendars
One of my chums in Amarillo sent an alert about an amazing nightly sight that awaits us in August 2005. I first thought about Mars when I read Edgar Rice Burroughs' series of John Carter novels. John Carter was a Virginia gentleman who somehow was transported through space to Mars. On Mars, Carter encounters a complex civilization that was echoed later in John Clavell's novel, Shogun. Both John Carter and John Blackthorne were strangers in a strange place. Later, I read Robert Heinlein's Mars novels and Arthur C. Clarke's The Sands of Mars. If this is (fair & balanced) fantasy, so be it.
[x John Walker's e-mail to this blogger]
The Red Planet is about to be spectacular! This month and next, Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter that will culminate in the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. Due to the way Jupiter's gravity tugs on Mars and perturbs its orbit, astronomers can only be certain that Mars has not come this close to Earth in the Last 5,000 years, but it may be as long as 60,000 years before it happens again.
The encounter will culminate on August 27th when Mars comes within 34,649,589 miles of Earth and will be (next to the moon) the brightest object in the night sky. It will attain a magnitude of -2.9 and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide. At a modest 75-power magnification Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. Mars will be easy to spot. At the beginning of August it will rise in the east at 10 p.m. and reach its azimuth at about 3 a.m.
By the end of August when the two planets are closest, Mars will rise at nightfall and reach its highest point in the sky at 12:30 a.m. That's pretty convenient to see something that no human being has seen in recorded history. So, mark your calendar at the beginning of August to see Mars grow progressively brighter and brighter throughout the month.
Share this with your children and grandchildren. NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN
Copyright © 2005 John Walker
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Out Of The Mouths Of Babes
The latest post to the blog elicited a response from one of my favorite correspondents (in Armenia). I have transmitted the blogging virus to my family in Yerevan: go to the Simpson Family Blog for a view of life in a former Soviet republic. I was proud that my favorite international lawyer also caught David Gelernter's canard about the Vietnam War. At lunch today, another favorite person caught the error as well and pointed out that the United States hasn't been at war since 1945. The last U.S. declarations of war were signed by Franklin Roosevelt in December 1941; the last surrenders to the U.S. were signed in 1945. Even a Yale professor isn't safe from the keen eye of bloggers. If this is (fair & balanced) gloating, so be it.
Dear Dad,
Happy Father's Day. How was your trip [to Wisconsin] to see David? I haven't heard from anybody in weeks, and I hope everyone, including you, are all right. We went to Lake Sevan today. Simply gorgeous. Will post pics tonight, if we have the electricity. We were without water for 12 hours two days ago, and just got our hot water back. Reminding me of Uzbekistan (at least living conditions) more and more. Liked the article, but one thing that struck me: the point is to know history and use historical references correctly, but he [David Gelernter] called it the Vietnam War, and I thought I remembered from my Vietnam Conflict course that it was never a war b/c Congress never declared war. Anyhow, I'm certainly one of the more "ignorant" ones when it comes to history. Brushing up on Armenian history that's for sure. Ok, hope to hear from you.
Love, Erica
Fight Amnesia!
This past week, this blog went on hiatus while the intrepid blogger traveled north to see both his son and daughter-in-law in Madison, WI and friends "Up North." That latter expression is used by Cheeseheads to describe the North Woods that border the southern shore of Lake Superior. My friend and his lovely spouse hosted me in their "cabin" on Rock Lake (one of 1,500 lakes "Up North"). Their cabin has all of the conveniences of their home "Down Below" in a Madison suburb. My chum and I met eight years ago at the AP Reading in U. S. History at Trinity University; we worked for the Educational Testing Service. He and I sat at the same table and read essays in colonial history for that week in early June. We became fast friends bound by a love of history, especially the history of the United States. In honor of our commitment to Clio, this blog provides a thoughtful meditation on our history by a computer geek. Another good friend in Amarillo forwarded this column by David Gelernter to me. Gelernter's essay states (more elegantly) what I said over and over to each succeeding class of history students at the Collegium Excellens. Saying the same thing over and over proves that history doesn't repeat itself; old, broken-down history teachers do all of the repeating. Ignorance of history is the equivalent of amnesia. If this is (fair & balanced) nostalgia, so be it.
[x LA Times]
We Are Our History -- Don't Forget It
by David Gelernter
Not knowing history is worse than ignorance of math, literature or almost anything else. Ignorance of history is undermining Western society's ability to talk straight and think straight. Parents must attack the problem by teaching their own children the facts. Only fools would rely on the schools.
My son told me about a high school event that (at first) I didn't understand. A girl in his English class praised the Vietnam War-era draft dodgers: "If I'd lived at that time and been drafted," she said, "I would've gone to Canada too."
I thought she was merely endorsing the anti-war position. But my son set me straight. This student actually believed that if she had lived at the time, she might have been drafted. She didn't understand that conscription in the United States has always applied to males only. How could she have known? Our schools teach history ideologically. They teach the message, not the truth. They teach history as if males and females have always played equal roles. They are propaganda machines.
Ignorance of history destroys our judgment. Consider Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill), who just compared the Guantanamo Bay detention center to Stalin's gulag and to the death camps of Hitler and Pol Pot — an astonishing, obscene piece of ignorance. Between 15 million and 30 million people died from 1918 through 1956 in the prisons and labor camps of the Soviet gulag. Historian Robert Conquest gives some facts. A prisoner at the Kholodnaya Gora prison had to stuff his ears with bread before sleeping on account of the shrieks of women being interrogated. At the Kolyma in Siberia, inmates labored through 12-hour days in cheap canvas shoes, on almost no food, in temperatures that could go to minus-58. At one camp, 1,300 of 3,000 inmates died in one year.
"Gulag" must not go the way of "Nazi" and become virtually meaningless. Europeans love calling Israelis "Nazis" — a transparent attempt to slough off their guilt like rattlesnakes shedding skin. ("See, the Jews are as bad as we were!") I'd like to ban the word "Nazi" except when applied to … Nazis. Lawbreakers would be ordered to learn what Nazi actually means.
I was amazed to hear about teenagers who don't know Fact 1 about the Vietnam War draft. But I have met college students who have never heard of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge — the genocidal monsters who treated Cambodia in the 1970s to a Marxist nightmare unequaled in its bestiality since World War II.
And I know college students who have heard of President Kennedy but not of anything he ever did except get assassinated. They have never heard JFK's inaugural promise: that America would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to ensure the survival and the success of liberty." But President Bush remembers that speech, and it's lucky he does.
To forget your own history is (literally) to forget your identity. By teaching ideology instead of facts, our schools are erasing the nation's collective memory. As a result, some "expert" can go on TV and announce (20 minutes into the fighting) that Afghanistan, Iraq or wherever "is the new Vietnam" — and young people can't tell he is talking drivel.
There is an ongoing culture war between Americans who are ashamed of this nation's history and those who acknowledge with sorrow its many sins and are fiercely proud of it anyway. Proud of the 17th century settlers who threw their entire lives overboard and set sail for religious freedom in their rickety little ships. Proud of the new nation that taught democracy to the world. Proud of its ferocious fight to free the slaves, save the Union and drag (lug, shove, sweat, bleed) America a few inches closer to its own sublime ideals. Proud of its victories in two world wars and the Cold War, proud of the fight it is waging this very day for freedom in Iraq and the whole Middle East.
If you are proud of this country and don't want its identity to vanish, you must teach U.S. history to your children. They won't learn it in school. This nation's memory will go blank unless you act.
David Gelernter is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. He also is a professor of computer science at Yale and chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies (New Haven). His research centers on information management, parallel programming, and artificial intelligence. The "tuple spaces" introduced in Nicholas Carriero and Gelernter's Linda system (1983) are the basis of many computer communication systems worldwide.
Copyright © 2005 The Los Angeles Times
Thursday, June 09, 2005
Laboring For An Answer To Skyrocketing Health Care Costs
Today, in the Summer Lecture Series of Geezer College (aka Senior University) at the edge of the Texas Hill Country, I heard a presentation on the rising cost of health care in the United States. The issues raised sent me scurrying to the Web when I got home. I found an intriguing essay written by some trade unionist. I have not belonged to an AFL-CIO organization since I belonged to the Hod Carriers and Common Laborers local on a summer job when I was an undergrad. If this is (fair & balanced) solidarity, so be it.
[x AFL-CIO]
What’s Wrong with Our Health Care System?
(No attribution supplied.)
More than 43 million U.S. residents have no health insurance, and the numbers keep growing. Between 2001 and 2002, the number of uninsured under age 65 increased by 2.4 million, the largest real increase since 1987, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Eight of 10 uninsured Americans hold jobs or share households with someone who is employed.
Because employers increasingly are moving in the direction of providing Wal-Mart-style health coverage by shifting health care costs to employees, America’s workers struggle to pay higher premiums, deductibles and co-payments—if they can afford such coverage at all.
Of the more than 43 million Americans without health insurance, nearly one-quarter or more than 10 million—are children.
Working families are experiencing double-digit increases in the costs of health insurance, more out-of-pocket costs for doctor visits and skyrocketing prices for prescriptions, forcing many to delay getting needed medical care or worse—to decline coverage for themselves or their families because of cost. Health care costs are rising at five times the rate of inflation. According to the Center for Studying Health System Change, health care spending rose 10 percent in 2002 and that followed a slightly more than 10 percent increase in 2001—the largest jump in more than a decade. In the first six months of 2003, health spending rose another 8.5 percent. Premiums for employer-sponsored coverage increased nearly 13 percent in 2002. As employers refuse to pay their fair share, this trend may result in millions of workers losing their employer-based coverage.
Employers are responding to growing cost pressures by shifting more and more health care costs onto workers, especially through larger co-pays and deductibles that must be paid at the time treatment is sought. Employer’s demands to slash health care coverage for workers was the major issue in the recent southern California grocery workers' strike and lockout in which nearly 60,000 workers saved affordable health care benefits and beat back employer demands to freeze pension funds after holding strong on the picket line for five months. Under grocery management’s original proposals, a worker making slightly less than $20,000 a year would have had to pay nearly $5,000 to maintain the same level of benefits they had in the previous contract.
Other cost increases hitting workers include larger hikes in the cost of family coverage, less access to needed prescription drugs through stricter HMO formularies and higher prices for more comprehensive coverage. (See the Consumers Unions’ Health Care Plans and Managed Care.)
Consumers are using more prescriptions, at younger ages and for more conditions, and substituting newer, more expensive medications for established products. As a result, pharmaceutical spending increased by 17.4 percent annually between 1999 and 2000 and another 16 percent from 2000 to 2001. Read how the drug industry keeps prices high in “What the Drug Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know” in America@work.
The lack of quality health care in the United States also stems from our system’s lack of comprehensive quality measure and assurance programs, which unions now are establishing with community partners.
Our most successful public health insurance program, Medicare, is increasingly under attack at a time when the lack of access to health care is already a crisis in America. Most Americans ages 65 and older rely on Medicare, which serves more than 40 million beneficiaries in the United States. Instead of strengthening and modernizing Medicare to include a comprehensive, affordable prescription drug benefit for all seniors, the Bush administration in late 2003 strong-armed through Congress a Medicare prescription drug bill that moves Medicare toward privatization. The new Medicare bill also:
Our health care system lacks safety controls that endanger front-line workers and patients. Staffing levels are dangerously low in hospitals, nursing homes and other health care facilities. As a result, medical errors are rising—and account for an estimated 44,000 to 98,000 needless death each year. See Medical Errors and Patient Safety and 20 Steps to Prevent Medical Errors from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
How can we fix our health care system?
Require employers to pay their fair share. The U.S. system of providing health care coverage is employer-based. Unfortunately, this system leaves too many working families uninsured or underinsured. Fifty-six percent of uninsured workers worked full-time in 2002. New incentives and rules can change this. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) has proposed legislation to require employers of more than 50 workers to provide employees with health insurance, and in 2003, California passed a state law that requires employers to provide insurance for workers or pay into a state fund to insure workers. With little federal action on health care, more states are addressing health care issues.
Beware of new “defined contribution” health care coverage. Shifting health care costs onto working families already is creating hardship at the doctor's office and the bargaining table. Now, many employers are talking about passing most or all of the risk of rising health care costs onto employees by adopting "defined contribution" plans (also described with terms including "vouchers,” “consumer driven health care,” “tiered benefits” and “fixed premiums”).
These defined contribution plans can come in many shapes and forms, but they share one feature that makes them different and more harmful to working families than the traditional "defined benefit" plans, which guarantee a certain amount of coverage. In a defined benefit plan, employees are guaranteed a fixed package of health insurance benefits. But in a defined contribution plan, the employer pays a fixed amount toward the premium, regardless of how much it costs, leaving it to the employee to pick up the rest. So under a defined contribution plan, a worker in poor health or someone who has a family member with medical problems would have to shoulder a much larger financial burden than a healthier person. Learn more about these plans through health care research group websites.
Provide coverage for all children. To expand health coverage to the more than 10 million children in America who today lack health insurance, Congress in 1997 passed the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to work with the Medicaid program to cover low- and moderate-income families. Bringing eligible families into the program requires extensive education and outreach, and unions are playing a key role. But states are facing their biggest budget crisis since World War II. Confronted with three-plus years economic downturn, and the Bush administration’s cuts in state aid, coupled with larger financial burdens imposed by new and under-funded federal mandates, states are cutting back on health care programs such as Medicaid and SCHIP.
Help curb runaway prescription drug prices by supporting state legislation that gives lawmakers the power to negotiate drug discounts with pharmaceutical companies just as HMOs and insurers do. States then can pass savings to seniors covered by Medicare and to working families who lack drug coverage and make less than 300 percent of the poverty level. Read about the Center for Policy Alternatives’ model legislation.
Everyone loses when health care workers are forced to work overtime and are exposed to life-threatening diseases because of unsafe equipment. After years of struggle, health care workers won federal legislation to require safer needlesticks in 2000 and 24 states now have safer needlestick laws on the books. States can pass their own legislation mandating safety devices for needles
Copyright © 2005 AFL-CIO