Healthcare
Deceptive ballot drive to kill the Living Wage!
A misleading campaign has begun for a San Diego ballot measure that would reverse a decade of CPI progress for workers and their families, including the Living Wage Ordinance.
City Councilmember Carl DeMaio, with funding from contractor groups, is collecting signatures for a November ballot initiative that would force privatization of city services and make San Diego the only city in the U.S. to ban Living Wage laws.
Healthcare status quo is truly scary
Reform that rewards insurers could be worse
In recent weeks, orchestrated outrage and loony scare tactics have drowned out the most basic fact about health reform: The status quo is far more frightening.
High and escalating costs. Rationing of care. Restricted choice. Long waits for care. Even “death panels” (read: insurance claim-review departments). Our private insurance system imposes all this already — on people lucky enough to be insured.
Healthy competition?
When Mayor Jerry Sanders wanted to reform city government, he turned to what he believed was an effective tool of market capitalism – competition. He claimed that pitting government workers against private sector companies would generate savings for the city.
Sanders, not an ideologue, grabbed on to “managed competition” so he could privatize city jobs and show his conservative backers that he was one of them. If it resulted in turning middle class city jobs into $12 an hour jobs without health care, that wasn’t his problem.
Now the debate about the effectiveness of public-private competition is at the center of the coming debate on health care reform in Washington.
Why are Health Insurance Companies Afraid of Competition
The Health Insurance industry is already gearing up, once again, to fight Obama’s health care plans. This time it’s not Harry and Louise, but rather cries of unfair competition with a successful model of government organized health insurance.
Insurance companies, along with other vested health care interests, have successfully thwarted every serious attempt at universal health insurance since the New Deal and are taking no chances to keep a solid streak. The standard line of attack is to raise the specter of government-run health care, long lines and losing our choice of doctor. They back it up with endless repetition of ideological arguments that free, unregulated markets are the only way to meet America’s needs.
