The National Business Group on Health (NBGH) believes strongly that everyone should be required to have health insurance coverage for themselves and dependent children. NBGH represents more than 300 large employers – including 63 of the Fortune 100 – providing health benefits to more than 50 million Americans. Our members invest tremendous resources in their employees’ well-being and believe that reform should build on this model.

While both presidential candidates are talking about reform, a new survey of 3,000 employers from Mercer finds that employers of all sizes – particularly retailers and manufacturers – are skeptical of key elements in their respective plans:

• Employers of all sizes oppose ‘play or pay’ requirements like those being advocated by Senator Obama.
• A plurality of employers of all sizes oppose ending or capping the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health benefits, similar to a plan being touted by Senator McCain. Read the rest of this entry »

Barack Obama will not raise his income taxes.

But if Joe is successful in buying a plumbing business, and if he provides health insurance for his employees – then John McCain will make every single one of those workers pay an expensive new tax on health care.

And if Joe puts himself and his family on his new company’s health care plan, he’ll pay extra taxes too. McCain’s new tax will hit everyone in America who has employer-paid health care. That’s more than 160 million people!

Nicole Lowe, a member of UAW Local 160, is featured in a new UAW TV ad about McCain’s health care tax. Her five-year old son, Trevor, has asthma, and Nicole is worried about how McCain’s plan would affect her family. No wonder – the Center for American Progress estimates the tax will eventually cost her more than $2,800 a year.
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The Dow is plummeting.  We are in the throes of an historic financial meltdown because Wall Street and George Bush gambled with our future.  Families are struggling with a long-running economic squeeze, the totality of which is still unknown.  So what is John McCain’s response?  He thumbs his nose at the real issues facing working people – issues for which he has no good answer because his record of support for the Bush financial agenda is indisputable.  Instead of addressing the deep economic anxieties weighing on the minds of most Americans, he’s turned to Bush fear-mongering tactics to try to change the subject.

The McCain/Palin tactics are not just false, they’re offensive.  Sadly, they’re more of exactly what we’ve come to expect from the Bush White House — neglect of the economic issues that are reshaping working families’ lives.  Perhaps it should not come as a surprise from the presidential candidate who voted with George Bush 90 percent of the time.

We have entered a genuinely scary time, but not because of the McCain-Palin scare tactics.  Working people aren’t buying them. And here’s why. Read the rest of this entry »

“There may be better ways to provide health care than to require employers in the City of San Francisco to foot the bill. But our task is a narrow one, and it is beyond our province to evaluate the wisdom of the Ordinance now before us.” With this phrase, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the “pay or play” mandate of San Francisco’s health care ordinance in Golden Gate Restaurant Association v. City and County of San Francisco, holding that the city law is not preempted by the federal Employee Retirement and Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA).

This decision contradicts nearly thirty five years of judicial affirmation of the primacy of federal law. If allowed to stand, it will erode an essential element of the nation’s employer-sponsored health care system, the source of health coverage now serving most Americans. Read the rest of this entry »

Access to quality child care is critical to working families. It provides a stable environment in which children can grow and develop, and it provides much-needed support and peace of mind for working parents. In these tough economic times, the costs of child care can place a strain on household budgets that are already burdened by the rising costs of fuel and other basic necessities. In my home state of Arkansas, a growing number of families are currently in desperate need of child care assistance. Unfortunately, federal assistance for child care has not kept pace with inflation, resulting in a decrease in the number of children served through the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG). Currently, these grants are only able to assist one out of every seven eligible children.
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John McCain should not be traveling in a bus called the Straight Talk Express. No, that equivocating multimillionaire who kowtows constantly to the wealthy should be riding in one of those private, gilded railroad cars.

That would be symbolically appropriate as well since he is trying to railroad the middle class on taxes.

He is actually proposing a brand new tax on the middle class.

This has gotten so little attention it is astounding. And frightening, frankly, as television reporters and commentators focus instead on inane incidents like the lipstick-on-pigs remark.

McCain intends to tax workers for the value of health insurance that they receive from their employers.

Really. Read the rest of this entry »