Sunday, June 9, 2019
Saturday, June 8, 2019
Demanding End to 'Rotten' Opposition to Medicare for All, Doctors and Nurses to March on American Medical Association's Annual Meeting
"It's time for the AMA to
join the majority of physicians who support improved Medicare for All."
Accusing the American Medical
Association of putting "profits ahead of patient care" by joining
the corporate fight against Medicare for All, a coalition of
physicians, nurses, and allies plans to march on the organization's annual
meeting on Saturday to demand an end to its longstanding opposition to
single-payer.
The AMA is America's largest
association of physicians, one of the largest lobbying
organizations in the U.S., and a
founding member of the Partnership for America's Health Care Future, a
coalition formed by insurance and pharmaceutical interests to combat Medicare
for All.
On Saturday, medical
professionals dressed in their scrubs and white coats intend to rally at the
AMA's gathering at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago to make clear that the
organization's anti-Medicare for All stance does not represent the view of
all—or even most—physicians and nurses.
"America's doctors see
the harm that our profit-oriented, fragmented healthcare system imposes on
patients—and how it impedes our work as physicians," tweeted Adam Gaffney,
president of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), which helped
organize Saturday's march alongside National Nurses United (NNU), Students for
a National Health Program, and other groups.
"So tomorrow," Gaffney
said, "we're calling on the AMA to join us in the fight for a better, more
just healthcare system for everyone."
In an op-ed for The Guardian on
Thursday, a group of medical students and organizers planning to take part in
Saturday's march wrote that while the "AMA claims to represent the
interests and values of our nation's doctors... it has long been the public
relations face of America's private health insurance system, which treats
healthcare as a commodity."
"Medical students and
professionals have had enough," the group added. "This Saturday's
protest is only one example."
In a 2017
survey, physician recruitment firm Merritt Hawkins found that 56 percent of
doctors either strongly or somewhat support a single-payer system.
Alluding to that data, Gaffney
tweeted that the "AMA is not speaking for the American medical profession
when it comes to healthcare reform."
"It's time for the AMA to
leave the Partnership for America's Health Care Future," Gaffney said in a
statement, "and join the majority of physicians who support improved
Medicare for All."
Bill Bianchi, a member of
progressive organization People's Action who plans to take part in Saturday's
protest, wrote Friday
that the AMA's opposition to Medicare for All "is rotten to the
core."
"You'd think the nation's
largest association of doctors—whose stated goal is 'the betterment of public
health'—would want patients to get care. But the AMA has opposed every major
effort to expand health access since 1917," Bianchi wrote. "We demand
that you and the other members of the Partnership for America's Health Care
Future step out of the way of Medicare for All. We are going to win care for
every American, with or without you."
The march on the AMA's
gathering will come as Rep. Pramila Jayapal's (D-Wash.) Medicare for All Act of
2019 gains momentum in the House.
On Tuesday, Assistant House
Speaker Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) became
the highest-ranking House Democrat yet to sign on to Jayapal's bill,
bringing the total
number of co-sponsors to 112.
Medicare for All is also set
to get a historic moment in the spotlight next week, with the House Ways and
Means Committee scheduled to hold its first-ever single-payer hearing on
Wednesday.
As The Hill reported,
the "June 12 hearing will mark the first time the proposal is considered
by a committee that has jurisdiction over healthcare issues."
"It's the biggest
congressional hearing to date," NNU wrote in an email to supporters on
Thursday. "All of the funding and policies for Medicare for All will
ultimately be decided by this committee."
Noting that 13 of the
Democrats on the powerful committee have not signed on to the Medicare for All
Act, NNU urged the public to dial up pressure on committee members ahead of
next week's hearing.
"This is no time for
half-measures or watered-down proposals," NNU said. "More than 70
million Americans are uninsured or underinsured, and we can't let Congress
maintain a status quo when so many lives are on the line."
As Study Shows Methane Emissions 'Vastly Underestimated,' Warnings That US Fracked Gas Export Bonanza Imperils Planetary Stability
"Science confirms that
gas is a climate killer."
After a frightening study from
last week showed that industrial methane emissions have been "vastly
underestimated," a new projection Friday that the United States is on
track to become the world's leading exporter of liquefied natural gas within
five years provoked warnings that the American fracking boom could "end
hope for climate stability."
Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is
primarily composed of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 84 times more potent
than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Methane emissions, by some estimates,
are responsible for about a quarter of human-caused global warming.
"Science confirms that
gas is a climate killer," Wenonah Hauter, executive director of the U.S.
advocacy group Food & Water Watch, said in a statement Friday, citing
methane's planet-warming potential.
Hauter's statement came in
response to an International Energy Agency (IEA) annual report, released Friday,
that featured the new projection about U.S. LNG exports. The IEA report states
that global demand for natural gas grew last year at the fastest rate in nearly
a decade and is expected to keep growing, "driven by strong consumption in
fast-growing Asian economies and supported by the continued development of the
international gas trade."
The IEA's new release came
just two days after Food & Water Watch published a
report which, as Hauter put it, "shows that the power, petrochemical, and
LNG export industries are propping up the fracked gas industry by manufacturing
bloated demand for its dirty product, all with the help of government subsidies
and intervention."
While the IEA report
attributes much of the increased demand to a growing number of natural gas
power plants in the United States and China, it also points to other
factors. U.S. News & World Report outlined the
agency's findings:
The industrial sector... also
played an outsized role in 2018, with factories, fabricators, and other
facilities using gas as both a fuel source and a feedstock to make plastics,
fertilizers, and other products—putting industry on track to account for nearly
half of global gas consumption by 2024.
The U.S., meanwhile, saw the
biggest jump in production last year since 1951, with output soaring by 11.5
percent. That made the U.S. the biggest contributor to gas production growth
around the world.
IEA executive director Fatih
Birol said in
a statement announcing the agency's report that "natural gas can
contribute to a cleaner global energy system. But it faces its own challenges,
including remaining price competitive in emerging markets and reducing methane
emissions along the natural gas supply chain."
Farhana Yamin, a climate
attorney and coordinator at the Extinction Rebellion, toldAgence
France-Presse, "Given that this polluting fuel can never be 'clean' and is
a key driver of climate chaos, the assertion that it can be part of the path to
cleaner energy is highly misleading."
Lorne Stockman, senior research
analyst at Oil Change International, also criticized the agency's position on
natural gas.
"When it comes to gas,
the IEA horse has blinkers on and is heading straight over the cliff of climate
disaster," he told AFP. "Gas is not clean, cheap, or necessary."
Food & Water Watch's
Hauter said, "The IEA's cheerleading of fracked natural gas as some type
of global climate solution is foolish and false."
"The time has come to end
the madness by ending artificial economic support for the fossil fuel industry,
and investing aggressively in truly clean, renewable energy sources like wind
and solar," she added. "The future of our planet depends on it."
The IEA report and subsequent
criticism followed a study about
methane emissions from the U.S. ammonia fertilizer industry published last week
in the peer-reviewed journal Elementa.
Researchers from Cornell
University and the Environmental Defense Fund used a Google Street View car
equipped with technology to measure methane emission to gather data from six
U.S. plants. They found that emissions were not only 100 times higher than the
fertilizer industry's self-reported estimate, but also exceeded the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimate for all industrial processes in
the country.
"We took one small
industry that most people have never heard of and found that its methane
emissions were three times higher than the EPA assumed was emitted by all
industrial production in the United States," John Albertson, study
co-author and Cornell professor of civil and environmental engineering, said in
a statement.
Noting methane's impact on
planetary warming, Albertson warned, "the presence of substantial
emissions or leaks anywhere along the supply chain could make natural gas a
more significant contributor to climate change than previously thought."
Workers With Disabilities Are Making Cents Per Hour — and It’s Legal
Jack Delaney
PUBLISHED June 7, 2019
Imagine making cents on the
dollar to toil in a warehouse, separated from the broader society, while
repeatedly piecing together widgets or engaging in manual labor for some
multinational corporation with which you’ve never interacted. For many
Americans, the concept of making nickels and dimes for your labor in the richest
nation in human history is incomprehensible. But for the tens of thousands of
Americans making far less than minimum wage due to their disabilities, it is an
all too familiar reality.
In 1938 the Fair Labor
Standards Act (FLSA), a monumental piece of legislation, was ratified and
signed into law. Earning scorn from the business community and elitist
politicians alike, the law created the right to a minimum wage, required
overtime pay for some workers, and curtailed child labor. Yet, despite the law’s
worker-conscious stipulations, it contains an antiquated provision that is
being used by business executives today to pay subminimum wages to workers with
disabilities.
Section 214(c) of the FLSA,
which is known in disability policy circles as 14(c), allows employers that
hire people with disabilities to pay their workers a subminimum wage. Section
214(c) of the FLSA states that workers “whose earning or productive capacity is
impaired by age, physical or mental deficiency, or injury” can be paid based on
their “productivity” or on the “quality and quantity” of their labor. The
underlying assumption is that workers with disabilities are less valuable than
workers without disabilities and should thus be paid based on their
productivity to incentivize employers to hire them.
Originally, 14(c) was intended
to reduce the barriers to employment for people with disabilities, but over
time employers have taken advantage of this provision. It certainly has not
yielded equality for people with disabilities. Although some advocates say 14(c)
advances employment outcomes, people with disabilities are disproportionately
underemployed, unemployed or forced to live
in poverty compared to the rates of the general population.
A Pipeline for Cheap Labor
Currently, there are over
1,400 firms holding 14(c) certificates in the US, collectively employing
over 320,000
workers with disabilities. Certificate holders range from small operations
with a sole employee working under 14(c) to large-scale operations with several
hundred workers, and in a few cases, over a thousand. 14(c) certificate holders
are known as Community Rehabilitation Programs, or more commonly, sheltered
workshops. These organizations seek and receive contracts from large
corporations to generate products and services that fund their operations.
Sheltered workshops also
receive government funding through the AbilityOne Program, a program used to
provide federal contracts for people with disabilities, while also receiving
reimbursements from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Almost half of 14(c) certificate holders participate in the AbilityOne Program.
In other words, while sheltered workshops pay workers as little as a dollar an
hour, taxpayer dollars through CMS reimbursements and AbilityOne government
contracts are funding their operations.
At face value these
organizations seem like a harmless force in American communities, but they are
exploiting many vulnerable people. Many sheltered workshops’ workers make
extraordinarily less than the minimum wage, sometimes
even as low as 36 cents an hour. While their workers are compensated at
sweatshop rates, sheltered
workshop executives are often compensated to the tune of hundreds of
thousands of dollars a year. PRIDE Industries, a Sacramento-based sheltered
workshop, pays its CEO a salary
of $792,132, while 906 workers are employed at subminimum wages.
14(c) is being used as a
pipeline for cheap labor under the guise of “job creation” for an underserved
population. Certificate holders act as a vessel for larger corporations to
obtain inexpensive labor and form a symbiotic relationship based on revenue
generation and exploitation masquerading as philanthropy. Unjustly, in addition
to receiving little compensation, workers with disabilities are often held back
from receiving promotions or placement at jobs with competitive wages in
integrated settings.
Subminimum wages not only
unjustly impact workers with disabilities — they also have an effect on total
wages for all workers in a labor market. When labor’s costs are driven down,
the wages of all workers are decreased and businesses yield higher profits.
14(c) is not only inequitable for the workers with disabilities, but also for
the total labor force in a given market. Workers who are not categorized as
having disabilities have to compete against labor that is almost costless for a
corporation. Subminimum wages impact all workers’ wages.
Large multinational
corporations like Firestone,
Home Depot, Kohler, Kroger, Mary Kay, Raytheon, Time Warner Cable, Walmart and
Honda, are heavily invested in 14(c). They are able to secure contracts
where labor is only paid a dollar an hour. People with disabilities pay the
economic price so corporations and executives can continue amassing wealth.
Sheltered workshops that hold
14(c) certificates are segregated in nature. At a glance, businesses holding
14(c) certificates may seem philanthropic, but people with disabilities,
especially those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, have
historically been segregated from the rest of society.
The use of subminimum wages is
inherently inequitable and contradicts the very mission of the FLSA. The FLSA’s
purpose was to promote worker protections and guarantee a minimum standard for
labor. Unfortunately, workers with disabilities are excluded from that guarantee.
14(c) is paternalistic and
does not account for the skills and contributions of workers with disabilities.
Social and scientific understandings of disability have certainly progressed
since the inception of 14(c) in 1938. The disability service system in America
is not only outdated, but also is skewed toward profit-generation, rather than
community inclusion and fair compensation.
Proponents of the subminimum
wage try to frame it as a civil rights issue and claim that the provision
offers more choices to people with disabilities. Yet for many workers with
disabilities, working for subminimum wages is not a choice. Because for-profit
corporations only see people with disabilities as profitable when working for
subminimum wages, 14(c) employment is often their only option for work.
The champions of the
subminimum wage also argue that sheltered workshops and their executives do not
have enough funds to pay their workers a decent wage and remain competitive,
yet the sheltered workshop industry employs dozens of D.C. and state lobbyists
to peddle influence in favor of this very issue.
Subminimum wage advocates also
argue that 14(c) is used as a training program to get people with disabilities
into the workforce. Yet a National Council on Disability report, citing an
audit by the Government
Accountability Office, found that less than 5 percent of 14(c) workers
ever transitioned to a job found in the broader community or earned competitive
wages.
No other classification or
grouping of labor in the US is paid based on employees’ productivity or at a
wage significantly lower than the minimum wage. Subminimum wages are a
violation of the civil rights of people with disabilities. They amount to
government-endorsed and corporate-sponsored discrimination.
Challenging Workplace
Exploitation of People With Disabilities
The FLSA has been amended over
20 times since its ratification in the late 1930s, and yet 14(c) remains
unaltered. Is a change coming? It’s possible: Advocates and organizers with
disabilities are leading the way in challenging these harmful practices.
Disability rights organizations and self-advocates (activists with
disabilities) are pursuing
litigation against corporations that are profiting off of overtly
exploited labor. Cutting off the pipeline of cheap labor that allows
multinationals to reap exuberant profits is an effective strategy and has the
apologists for subminimum wages on their heels.
However, advocates and
disability rights organizations should not be solely responsible for
confronting these unjust labor practices. An enormous responsibility also lies
with legislators, regulators, and the public.
Policymakers must ensure that
people with disabilities are not segregated and economically marginalized,
while also ensuring disability services are appropriately funded. To promote
fair wages and community integration, lawmakers must work to eliminate 14(c).
Solutions that reduce economic
disparities and eliminate exploitation and segregation for workers with
disabilities are long overdue. The public and members of Congress must support
the Raise
the Wage Act and the Transition
to Competitive Employment Act, both of which would phase out subminimum
wages over time and are meaningful steps in the moral direction. Policymakers
and the public must also be aware that the euphemistically titled Workplace
Choice and Flexibility for Individuals with Disabilities Act, or H.R.
5658, would promote state agency referrals to many 14(c) certificate
holders that participate in the AbilityOne Program and continue to place people
with disabilities in organizations that use 14(c) certificates. The holders of
14(c) certificates should not be allowed to receive government contracts while
they pay out subminimum wages. H.R. 5658 has not yet been reintroduced in this
Congress, but it is expected to make a return later this congressional session.
Another responsibility lies
with employers: 14(c) certificate holders must discontinue the practice of
subminimum wages. A vast majority of these organizations, funded by wealthy
donors, taxpayers, and corporate contracts, certainly possess the funds to pay
their workers with disabilities a respectable wage. For those that don’t, CEOs
and executive staff should take a pay cut to promote the fulfillment and
dignity for all of their workers, especially those with disabilities. The large
for-profit corporations that fund 14(c) contracts must also discontinue the
practice and work to include people with disabilities at fair wages and full
employment.
The era of certificate holders
and for-profit corporations benefiting from federally endorsed discrimination
and poverty wages is rightfully coming to a head, and the capabilities of
workers with disabilities are being realized. All working people must strive
for a system that fully integrates workers with disabilities and workers
without disabilities, with both receiving more equitable wages and benefits.
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