Give to KPFA, get this premium
If you like my radio show, Behind the News, then please give some money to KPFA, which in the closing days of a fund drive. I wouldn’t do the show if it weren’t for KPFA, and they’ve been very generous in giving me not only a show but one in a nice timeslot. For a pledge of $75, you can get a CD containing 37 interviews I’ve done since 2002. The CD is a collection of MP3 files, not an audio CD, to you can’t pop it into every CD player. But it’s… Read More
Workers with crappy health coverage now facing none at all
My Facebook friend Lara Shepard-Blue, a union organizer in Western Massachusetts, just posted this grim bit of news: The contract covering 42,000 Stop & Shop workers in MA, CT and RI expired last night with no agreement. The problem is the company’s Obamacare-prompted proposal to eliminate medical insurance and prescription coverage for part-timers. Because caps on coverage aren’t allowed under Obamacare and the current plan for PTers has a $20K cap, they say the cost of coverage for part-timers will increase to the same cost as for full-timers when this part of… Read More
That’s evade, not drop, though they’ll probably drop too
I wrote that last post when I was in a hurry to get out the door and pick up my kid. I said employers will “drop” coverage when Obamacare takes effect. I should have said they’ll evade the mandate by paying the penalty rather than the insurance premium. Most victims of this evasion don’t have health insurance now, so “drop” is clearly the wrong word for the set of workers that the FT article reported on. But the original McKinsey survey was about employers who now offer health insurance who are likely to drop coverage… Read More
Yeah, lots of employers are going to evade health coverage
Back in the summer of 2011, McKinsey released results of a survey they’d done of employers showing that many would not offer health insurance coverage when Obamacare* takes full effect. The liberal establishment united in loud criticism of the consulting firm’s report—but it’s looking like they were right. I wrote up the original report (“Bye-bye employer health insurance”) and experienced some of the loud criticisms, prompting a follow-up (“McKinsey: more right than wrong”) based on reading the full survey, something that some of the critics, including apparently Paul Krugman, hadn’t done. Ah,… Read More
The State of the Union: an old fartish complaint
[From my radio commentary this week.] A few words on the State of the Union address. What a plodding, tedious affair—enlivened only by its unresolved contradictions. Obama spoke against austerity—“we can’t just cut our way to prosperity,” the qualifier “just” being a tipoff that a confidence trick was being perpetrated—but quickly made it clear he wanted to cut Medicare and Social Security, lest, as he put it, “our retirement programs…crowd out the investments we need for our children, and jeopardize the promise of a secure retirement for future generations.” In the euphemistic language… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 