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TEXAS AFT LEGISLATIVE HOTLINE--TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6,
2009 * State Legislators, Including 23 Texans, Lobby
Congress for Real Health-Care Reform "State legislators have been on the front lines of health care reform for decades," said Texas Representative Garnet Coleman, the Houston Democrat who co-chairs the legislative coalition known as the Progressive States Network. "Most proposed elements of federal reform are based on ideas already debated and in many cases enacted in the states. So state legislators know what is needed to make reform work." State legislators like Coleman want to make sure Congress lets states offer health-care consumers a higher level of protection from high rates and abusive practices than federal law itself provides. State lawmakers also don't want to be forced to implement unworkable ideas that already have been tried and found wanting in state-level experiments. (One example: the small-business insurance pool Texas created in the 1990s, which helped cut costs initially, until insurance companies cherry-picked businesses with healthier workers and left the pool stuck with just the highest-risk, highest-cost population.) Legislators like Coleman are concerned as well that Congress will be tempted to shift costs from the federal to the state level--a fear that is borne out by the Senate Finance Committee version of health-care legislation, which would force the states to pick up increased costs for indigent care. Experience on the state level puts these lawmakers on record in strong support of a public health-insurance option, strong affordability protections, and shared responsibility among individuals, employers, and government for health-care costs. An excellent summary of health-care lessons from the states, descriptions of key state-level policy experiments, and links to comparisons of the multiple health-care proposals in Congress, can be found at: http://www.progressivestates.org/node/23722. Their core message: Let federal health-care legislation establish a floor, not a ceiling, for reform. In Case You Get a Busy Signal From the U.S. Senate Switchboard: Tomorrow please be on the lookout for the AFT e-activist alert, allowing you to reach your two U.S. senators in support of real health-care reform, by way of a toll-free call to Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Just in case the lines into Congress are jammed, though, there's another way you can reach U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison. That's through their district offices across Texas. For most of you, that's going to be a local call to one of the following numbers: For Sen. Cornyn's district
offices:
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