Nathan wrote:
> Well, this is where we differ. I don't want to pay taxes to fund
> Wal-Mart's compensation costs. I want to tax corporate America and
> cut the tax burden on lower-income folks.
-Corporations need to pay more taxes, and I'd love to cut the tax -burden on lower-income workers (especially mine :->), but I want to -have corporations pay taxes to help fund a single-payer health care -system.
That would be nice, but that's not what's on the table. Corporate taxes have been completely slashed in the last few decades and the tax burden has been increasingly shifted onto working families.
The political reality is that direct employer mandates, because they don't get budgeted as a "tax", are actually getting political traction.
Yes, employer-sponsored plans are not necessarily the ideal, although there are lots of ways to build on them to gain most of the advantages of a single payer system. Remember, much of Europe is built around employer-based health care plans which get pretty universal coverage through a variety of means. Single payer systems are actually used in only a couple of countries. There is no reason unemployment insurance shouldn't also include health care, family leave could be linked to health care, and health care coverage should be a standard package with most education (and is in some cases). With a stronger Medicaid system covering the poor, you could easily have a system that would cover people in all transitional points between workplace-based health plans.
> an actual legislative victory that helps working families
-Since it's being litigated, we actually don't have any victory yet.
No, the victory holds until the courts suspend the law. As of now, the law is the law of the land.
And this is only first step, laws are moving forward in many other states and aim to cover much more than Wal-Mart. New York state is looking at various bills to cover employers with as few as 100 employees, which would massively expand coverage in the state.
And an even more comprehensive law was passed in California covering all employers with 50 or more employees and was only barely taken out by a couple of percentage points on a business-led referendum.
So serious expansions of health care coverage are being pushed across the country. And yet all I'm hearing are talking points about corrupt, self-interested unions, attacks that could be coming from (and are coming from) rightwing sources.
Nathan Newman