President Barack Obama will return from his trip to Asia just in time to see the Senate cast a procedural vote to begin debate on a sweeping health care reform bill. It may take quite a while before the world’s most deliberative body gets around to final passage.
Earlier in the year, Obama signaled that he wanted to sign a health care measure by October. Then the goalpost was moved to the end of the year. Now it looks as if he might not put ink to legislative parchment until January.
Health care reform’s momentum has been sapped in large part by doubts about its price tag. The gross cost of the bill the House narrowly passed November 7 is more than $1 trillion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could only cobble together a 220-215 victory for the nearly 2,000-page bill, losing 39 Democrats along the way.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, faces a monumental challenge in coming up with 60 Senate votes to pass health care reform despite the fact that his caucus totals 60. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Senate bill will cost $849 billion over 10 years.
Although Congress has extended unemployment payments several times and enhanced COBRA benefits, it is now considering doing more, like increasing spending on infrastructure projects, extending unemployment benefits again and helping small businesses.
The jobs rhetoric also is set to ramp up. Obama will host a Forum on Jobs and Economic Growth on December 3 at the White House.
“We’ll gather CEOs and small-business owners, economists and financial experts, as well as representatives from labor unions and nonprofit groups, to talk about how we can work together to create jobs and get this economy moving again,” Obama said in a statement before he left on his trip to Asia.
What Obama may hear on his road trip is that most Americans are either looking for a job or are concerned about keeping the one they have. The problem that he and other Democrats face is that those worries are not directly addressed in health care reform, the centerpiece of Obama’s first-term agenda.
In all of the praise and scorn of the health care bills that have emerged on Capitol Hill in the past several months, no one has claimed that the measures would create enough jobs to make any discernible difference in the unemployment rate. They usher in a massive overhaul of nearly 20 percent of the economy, but they don’t directly add to the economy.
But jobs are directly linked to health care. In our system, the best route to getting health insurance is through your employer. The more people are working, the fewer of them lack coverage. So, when you lose your job, you also put your health at risk, as friends of mine are discovering.
Even if the health care reform bill that finally hits Obama’s desk in January does increase health care coverage for the unemployed, the provisions won’t take effect until Obama’s second term, if he gets one. There won’t be any particular comfort in the bill for the currently unemployed.
It’s too late now, because Obama has already put all his chips on health care. But maybe he should have made jobs his priority for his first year. Instead, Democrats are trying to make massive policy changes—health care, energy—while they have large Senate and House majorities.
Americans may be getting confused. Here’s how Pelosi explained it at a press conference on Thursday, November 19: “When the [health care] bill emerges from the Senate, we’ll be prepared to go to the table as soon as possible to pass this important legislation. As I say, simultaneous with all of this, the issue of jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, has been our mantra. Jobs and deficit reduction.
How do we grow the economy, increase revenues coming in to reduce the deficit?”
Got it? The Democrats are doing everything at once—and taking a huge risk. They’ll either achieve a spectacular success or spectacular failure by Election Day 2010.
Late in the evening on November 7, I was driving through McLean, Virginia, listening to C-SPAN Radio coverage of a press conference by House Democratic leaders following the chamber’s narrow approval of a comprehensive health care bill.
At the time, it’s likely that I was passing the large homes of at least a couple business lobbyists who live in the tony Washington suburb.
No doubt they were still up and following closely the House vote that occurred during the 24th hour of that fall Saturday. They must have been relieved by the outcome.
Despite having 258 members, the House Democratic majority garnered only two votes more than the minimum to pass the bill—and one of those was from a Republican representing a liberal district. The employer mandates contained in the measure, along with its other provisions, are on somewhat shaky ground.
Business community criticism of the House health care measure is similar to what I heard at recent hearings on bills that would provide workers with paid sick days and prohibit sexual-orientation discrimination in the workplace.
Employers are leery of Washington telling them how to run their businesses and manage their employees. They want the flexibility to design health care and leave policies that best fit their workforces.
“SHRM has strong concerns with the one-size-fits-all mandate encompassed in the Healthy Families Act [the sick leave bill],” said Elissa O’Brien, vice president of human resources at Wingate Healthcare, who testified at a November 10 hearing on behalf of SHRM. “At a time when employers are facing unprecedented challenges, imposing a costly paid leave mandate on employers could easily result in additional job loss or cuts in other important employee benefits.”
O’Brien outlined her Needham, Massachusetts-based company’s generous paid-time-off policies. SHRM asserts that employers like Wingate should be exempt from federal leave directives.
Most Democrats in the House and Senate majorities, however, don’t want to depend solely on the market to provide sick days to employees and protect them from discrimination. They believe that achieving those social gains requires the intervention of Congress and the courts.
In some cases, they may be right. In other cases, they may be imposing overbearing government.
But it’s hard to deny one of their ripostes to employer criticism of the legislation: The economy has consistently prospered even after companies have warned that particular bills would undermine their ability to turn a profit.
At the hearing on paid sick days, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Connecticut, noted that business was in a lather about the Family and Medical Leave Act before it was signed into law in 1993. There were predictions of job losses and other setbacks.
“We haven’t seen that to be the case with FMLA,” DeLauro said.
Another frequent argument against employment legislation is that it will open the floodgates to lawsuits. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minnesota, pushed back against that trope, noting that Minnesota has had a sexual-orientation discrimination law in place since 1993 and has not had its courts filled with related cases.
“Minnesota’s sky has not fallen,” Franken said at the November 5 hearing.
Employers sound convincing when they say that FMLA causes administrative nightmares. Heads nod when they maintain that some employment laws generate costly lawsuits.
But if their arguments are going to resonate in a Congress with strong Democratic majorities, they have to show examples of real job losses or investment that was spiked because of Washington mandates.
Otherwise, the natural skill, resilience and ingenuity of American corporations fosters the notion that they can survive any bill that comes out of Washington.
Before casting the only Republican vote in Congress so far for a health care reform proposal on October 13, Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine cautioned that the journey toward final legislation has “miles to go.”
Now the two Senate bills and three in the House have to be combined into one in each chamber. The bills that the Senate and House approve are likely to be divergent and require potentially tense bicameral negotiations. Then each chamber votes again on the product that comes out of conference.
If you need evidence that this process is likely to take weeks, look at the situation with legislation to extend unemployment benefits.
The urgency of the matter is not in question. Congress has acted twice so far during the recession to add up to 53 weeks of unemployment benefits to the normal 26 weeks.
But now unemployment has reached 9.8 percent, and most experts believe it will continue to climb. At a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee last month, witnesses testified that there are about 3 million job openings for 15 million people seeking work.
As of September, nearly 5.4 million people have been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-New Hampshire, said in an October 15 speech on the Senate floor. Nearly 2 million will exhaust unemployment benefits by the end of the year.
But when the bill got to the Senate, Shaheen was one of the senators who held it up in order to expand it. New Hampshire’s unemployment rate is lower than 8.5 percent, and Shaheen didn’t want her jobless constituents to be left out.
Shaheen joined Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, and Sens. Max Baucus, D-Montana, and Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, to introduce a bill October 8 that would extend unemployment benefits for 14 weeks for workers in all 50 states. They would fund for the bill by extending a surtax on employers through June 2011.
They wanted to push the bill through the Senate that day, but Republicans slowed down the process. They said that they hadn’t had a chance to study the measure and wanted an opportunity to introduce amendments.
It looks as if the Senate will act on an unemployment extension during the week of October 19. Among the amendments that Republicans are likely to offer would be one to finance the unemployment extension with money from the $787 billion stimulus package Congress passed earlier this year rather than by increasing taxes on employers.
It’s not certain whether the Republican amendments will succeed, but Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Arizona, said that prospects for action on unemployment extension are “very good.”
Republicans want to have their say in shaping the bill, but it doesn’t look as if they will filibuster it. The political price—when so many Americans are facing long-term unemployment—is too high.
But even an issue that seems to be a slam-dunk has nuances. It’s inaccurate—and heartless—to say that more benefits will enervate the motivation of a jobless person, according to Gary Burtless, the Whitehead Chair in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Instead, an extension will make the labor market more efficient by allowing the unemployed to “look longer and harder for a job in which their skills will be fully utilized,” Burtless testified at a Senate Finance Committee hearing in September.
Jack Gross blends into a crowd after a Capitol Hill hearing.
The short, unassuming 61-year-old Iowan reminds me of people I knew growing up in Indiana. He’s plain-spoken and friendly. He could have stepped out of the Norman Rockwell painting that he says his childhood in Mt. Ayer, Iowa, resembled.
Like Ledbetter, Gross is that the heart of a controversial Supreme Court ruling. Her case centered on pay discrimination; his revolves around age discrimination. Congress passed a bill to overturn her case and vows to do the same for Gross’ case.
Goodyear paid Ledbetter less for her factory supervisor position than it paid her male colleagues, Ledbetter alleged. But the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that she had not filed suit before the statute of limitations expired.
Ledbetter asserted that she didn’t know that Goodyear was shortchanging her until decades after it made the first unfair pay decision. Earlier this year, Congress approved a bill that renewed the statute of limitations each time a worker receives a paycheck diminished by discrimination.
From the time of the court’s decision in the spring of 2007 until Congress passed a bill bearing her name last January, Ledbetter grew into a political symbol for Democrats.
As the party battled the threat of a Republican filibuster in the Senate and a veto by then-President George W. Bush, Ledbetter became a political touchstone for women’s groups and for Obama, who was working to appeal to supporters of then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Gross also represents a powerful constituency: older Americans. One of Washington’s behemoth lobbying organizations—AARP—is putting its weight behind the Gross bill.
What is most compelling about Gross is his story. He suffered chronic ulcerated colitis in his youth and worked his way through college. Upon graduation, he took a job with the insurer Farm Bureau in Iowa, where he has been employed for about 30 years. He worked for several years in the late 1970s until 1987 for a seed company, then returned to Farm Bureau.
Gross was eventually promoted to the position of claims administration vice president. He consistently received strong evaluations and developed an insurance policy package that is an exclusive Farm Bureau product.
But when the company’s Iowa and Kansas operations merged earlier this decade, Gross asserts that all claims department employees in Iowa with a rank of supervisor or higher were forced to take demotions. Many of his tasks were reassigned to younger workers.
Gross filed suit in 2003. He has been battling the company ever since but continues to work there, which means that he has had to “endure retaliation for exercising a legal right,” he said in prepared testimony.
“Many of my friends are also farm or small-town kids who now feel like they are the forgotten minority,” Gross wrote. “Some have been aggressively looking for work for months, only to find doors close when they reveal the year they graduated. This fight has become more about them than it is for me.”
He is upset that his name is now associated with a case that has made it harder for plaintiffs to prevail in age discrimination suits.
“That’s a heavy burden to place on one guy who simply tried to right one single act of age discrimination,” he said in an interview.
As is the situation with so many employment lawsuits, if Farm Bureau had used Midwestern common sense and treated a high performer fairly, regardless of his age, the Gross lawsuit and the resulting bill could have been avoided.
My beat as the Washington correspondent for Workforce Management is pretty broad. I define it as legislation, regulations and court rulings that affect employers. On most days, there are a couple news events that are part of my portfolio.
Much of the time, I have to do triage, ignoring some potential news while turning my focus to another promising area. One way that I’ve done this at the committee level is by concentrating on the “labor” portion of the House and Senate panels that oversee labor and education policy.
But a recent bill is causing me to rethink my approach. When it comes to workforce preparation, employers increasingly are just as concerned about the K-12 level as they are about college education and incumbent-worker training.
Congress and the Obama administration have emphasized this point in a bill that the House approved September 17, the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act. It would overhaul the college student loan system while instituting other changes, including reform of community colleges and early childhood education programs.
In a news conference urging passage of the bill, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that education and, in effect, workforce preparation has to be viewed holistically. In his view, it’s a seamless path from Head Start to K-12 to college.
“We have to address these together,” Duncan said.
If a student stumbles at the beginning of his or her educational journey, it’s tough to catch up, according to one House leader.
“Many of them don’t recover in terms of their ability to prosper in our economy, in our democracy,” said Rep. George Miller, D-California and chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.
Education ties in directly with innovation—the holy grail for business. Companies that come up with killer apps—or products and services—are the ones that will prevail in the global market.
“We know that the nations that out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow,” said President Barack Obama in a September 21 speech about innovation. “The ability of new industries to thrive depends on workers with the knowledge and the know-how to contribute in those fields. Unfortunately, today, our primary and secondary schools continue to trail many of our competitors, especially in the key areas of math and science.”
The student aid bill has its detractors. Republicans argue that it is another example of the government takeover of the economy orchestrated by Democrats—this time in the student loan sector. Banks and other financial institutions are resisting the measure because it largely eliminates their role in education lending.
But most members of the business community can get behind other dimensions of the bill, including the community college reforms and the focus on early childhood education.
After a February speech in Washington, Intel president and CEO Paul Otellini told reporters that the U.S. had to become a “high-knowledge industry economy.”
For instance, he sees biotechnology as a big part of America’s future. That sector depends on a steady supply of scientists and engineers.
“The biggest threat is if the educational system erodes the ability to [create] those jobs here,” Otellini said. He advocated a broad, bottom-up approach, starting with K-12.
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