Fordes Health Insurance

600 hear speakers in Sequim on fixing economy

SEQUIM — They came from many parts of the North Olympic Peninsula, more than 600 strong, gathering to redesign the American political landscape to bring about a new economic agenda.

“Let this be a historic gathering on the Olympic Peninsula,” keynote speaker David Korten told the impassioned audience Tuesday night in Sequim High School’s auditorium.

He joined Port Townsend family physician Kathleen Ottaway, regional AFL-CIO executive board member Robby Stern and Dorothea Hover-Kramer, Clallam County MoveOn Council leader, at the highly publicized and promoted “American Awakening” community call-to-action event sponsored by MoveOn.

Balance

Korten, an activist working with citizen action groups who is the publisher of Yes! magazine, based on Bainbridge Island and produced to empower people, said the nation needs to build an economy to help everyone and be in balance with nature.

“This is economics we can all understand,” he said, adding that the other option was “footloose, publicly traded corporations” that care not for the economic imbalance that is leaving growing joblessness and abject poverty in its wake.

“Medicare is a threat to Wall Street insurance corporations,” Korten said. “It couldn’t be any simpler than that.”

He called for a “single-payer solution” for Medicare, which is medical care funded from a single insurance pool run by the state.

Under a single-payer system, universal health care for an entire population can be financed from a pool in which employees, employers and the state have contributed.

He supports a Social Security system that remains as it is, with one generation paying for the next generation of retirees.

Time for Des Moines Public School Teachers to Contribute Toward ...

Most school districts in Iowa have stopped paying total costs for family health insurance, a benefit that researchers say is rare in schools nationwide and unheard of in the private sector.

Some Des Moines taxpayers say the benefit is a luxury the district can’t afford, while union leaders call it a trade-off for lower salaries. The average teacher salary in Des Moines is $53,957. Iowa’s average teacher salary is $49,739.

The cost of health insurance premiums in the district topped $43 million last year, a 34 percent increase since 2004. The amount is equivalent to salaries for about 800 teachers.

Family premiums cost an average of $16,000 for each full-time employee last year, records show. The state average was $12,766, according to one study.

Even the feds are starting to have their workers pay something for their family premiums, and some state workers as well.  Polk County employees still don’t have to pay anything yet.

This isn’t the real world folks.  Des Moines still pays its teachers an average of $53,957… remember teachers (unless they work for a year-round school) work an average of 9 1/2 months and then they get the total cost of family health benefits paid.

The Des Moines School Board wants to raise property taxes , and yet they have this benefit.  Imagine if each full-time employee in the district (4,595 of them) contributed say $100/month average – some would pay more some less depending on how many dependents are insured… that would save taxpayers $5,514,000.  A drop in the bucket, but a start and yet they are unwilling to do even that and only having to pay $100/month is more than reasonable for those of us whose employers don’t pay anything.

Hupp quotes Melissa Spencer, a former teacher at North High School in Des Moines who heads the Des Moines Education Association:

Des Moines teachers received an average 1.98 percent increase in total compensation last spring, after Des Moines school leaders predicted they would need to cut 173 teaching jobs to plug a budget shortfall. The increases ranged from 3.6 percent to 5 percent in the four previous years.

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