Mayors want health costs on ballot
Submitted by seachange on Thu, 2010-03-11 04:53.
Legislators say cities to blame for benefits. Sean P. Murphy, Boston Globe, March 10, 2010 A group of Massachusetts mayors, fed up with what they say is legislative inaction on skyrocketing municipal health care costs, has launched a ballot initiative for 2012 aimed at giving cities and towns more flexibility in reducing expensive benefits for employees, retirees, and elected officials. Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston hosted a strategy session of about 20 mayors in City Hall Friday. The group emerged with a proposal to allow communities to reduce benefits without union negotiations. ... Mayors
Take Single Payer to the Ballot
On November 4, 2008, the following non-binding question appeared on local ballots in ten state representative districts across Massachusetts:
Shall the representative from this district be instructed (1) to support legislation that would establish health care as a human right regardless of age, state of health or employment status, by creating a single payer health insurance system that is comprehensive, cost effective, and publicly provided to all residents of Massachusetts, and (2) to oppose any laws penalizing the uninsured for failing to obtain health insurance?
It passed overwhelmingly in every district, from the Pioneer Valley to Cape Cod. The Boston Globe, the Voice of the Vault, is orchestrating a bipartisan attack on workers and their unions. Public employees are currently in the cross hairs. We have told the press and the politicians there is a better way, a just and fundamental solution to the municipal and state fiscal crisis. Dr. Judy-Ann Bigby, the Commonwealth's Secretary of Health and Human Services, knows the solution. But the commercial insurance industry and the other profiteers hold the state in a stranglehold. This fall, we should put this question on as many local ballots as possible as a warming-up exercise to placing the Massachusetts Health Care Trust bill on the 2012 statewide ballot. We cannot afford not to. - Sandy Eaton, RN