Women Hold the Keys to New Working-Class Prosperity

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Women Hold the Keys to New Working-Class Prosperity // Working-Class Perspectives
https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2017/07/03/women-hold-the-keys-to-new-working-class-prosperity/

America rediscovered its working class during the 2016 election, and many Democrats and progressives now call for fresh policies to address the nation's crisis of bad jobs and stagnant wages. Twenty-first century working-class prosperity, however, must involve a reinvigorated labor movement.   And women, especially women of color, will be more central than ever before.

Pundits and politicians often use "working class" as code for a white guy in a hard hat.  Yet America's working class is primary female and is disproportionately brown and black.  This is true no matter how we define the working class.

The media usually defines the working class as people without a four-year college degree, which includes two-thirds of Americans. By this measure, women are the majority of the U.S. working class. In fact, 52 percent of people over age 25 without a four-year degree are women, according to census data, and a disproportionate number are women of color. If we describe class by education, people of color will be a majority of the nation's working class by 2032, earlier than in the overall population.

But is a college degree the best marker of what it means to be working class?    Many people who are high earners don't have a college degree.  If we use income as our lens, then women still are overrepresented in the working class. Though government data often subsumes women's earnings within household data, women are disproportionately among America's lower earners.  A recent GAO report found that though women make up nearly half the nation's workers, they make up nearly 60 percent of the workers in the lowest wage quintile.  We all know about the wage gap – – the median woman worker is paid 83 cents on every male dollar, and for black and Hispanic women it's even worse. Even when women and men hold the exact same working-class job – – like as a housekeeper, trucker, or nurse – – men still earn more than women.

Maybe the kind of job you do is the best way to gauge class status. Here again, women are increasingly central.  Eight of the ten occupations with the highest projected job growth by 2024 are women-dominated, working-class jobs, such as personal care and home health aides, nurses, food preparation and serving and retail salespeople. The jobs women hold are at the heart of an economy that is more based on service and finance than on industry.

Perhaps the best way to measure class is to just ask people about their class status.  The Center for Economic and Policy Research recently tabulated data from the General Social Survey that polls Americans about class identification.  While white women and men were equally likely to say they were working class – – about 40 percent made this identification – – a full 56 percent of black women and 62 percent of Hispanic women identified as working class.

Any way you cut it – –  by education, income, job, or class identity – –  the U.S. working class tilts female, and clearly it is not just white.

Today's workers are women, and they're also mothers and caregivers. Four in 10 American households with children include a mother who is either the sole or primary wage earner. Yet the nation has not yet dealt with women's basic issues as workers, and societal and economic structures still assume a male, industrial breadwinner.  Unlike other industrial nations, the U.S. doesn't have robust child care and family leave policies.  Working-class people often face long hours and unpredictable schedules that are impossible to square with family life.  In most households, women still do most of the cleaning and cooking, doing the double duty of paid work and family caregiving. One recent AFL-CIO report found that women have less than forty minutes a day of personal time after fulfilling all their other responsibilities.

This is why issues that matter for all working families — universal child care and pre-K, paid family leave, free college and guaranteed fair scheduling, affordable housing, and fair wages — are especially important for working-class women.  Wealthier families can afford privatized versions of these essential tools. They can hire nannies, afford unpaid leave, pay for college, and cover the mortgage.  But working-class women are left to fend for themselves in an increasingly precarious economy.

Women are the core of the new working-class, and their concerns make up the nation's most pressing working-class issues. That's why women's leadership – – especially among women of color  — will be critical for a new working-class movement.

This is the goal of a new joint project by Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and Rutgers University's Center for Innovations in Worker Organization.  WILL Empower (Women Innovating Labor Leadership) will identify, nurture, and train a new generation of women leaders for today's workers' movement.  Participants will benefit from training and mentoring, apprenticeships, fellowships, and a public advocacy and research platform.  The project will help seed a new generation of women leaders who can help convene and lead a cross organizational collaboration to mobilize the full potential of today's working class.

WILL Empower builds on the fact that women are already at the leading edge of the resistance.  With five million global participants, the Women's March on Washington was perhaps the largest political mobilization in history. Women's leadership mobilized both men and women to express their outrage at the new political order.  Women have continued to march, huddle, strike, and organize since January, among them legions of young women workers. A Day Without a Woman further spotlighted women's role in the economy, and working-class women also drove a Day Without Immigrants.

The project will amplify women's emerging role as the face of the 21st century workers' movement, a movement that blends traditional unions and "alt-labor" organizations, like workers' centers and wage campaigns. By 2023, a majority of union members will be female, and women are already leading many of the nation's largest unions, like the NEA, AFT and SEIU.  Women have been key leaders in new worker organizations, especially young women of color – – like at the National Domestic Workers' Alliance and the National Taxi Workers' Alliance.

A newly-mobilized working class could reshape the nation's economic and political landscape. Yet in order to build a winning movement for these times, working-class women's issues and leadership must be front and center to progressive core strategies, policies and organizations.   Women, it seems, hold the keys to the way forward.

Lane Windham

Lane Windham is Associate Director of Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative (K.I.) for Labor and the Working Poor where she jointly directs the K.I.'s WILL Empower partnership with Rutgers. She holds a doctorate in U.S. History.



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Should-Read: Brad DeLong (1995): Trade Policy and America’s Standard of Living: An Historical Perspective http://pages....

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Should-Read: Brad DeLong (1995): Trade Policy and America's Standard of Living: An Historical Perspective http://pages.... // Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/06/should-read-brad-delong-__-trade-policy-and-americas-standard-of-living-an-historical-perspective-j-bradf.html

Should-Read: Brad DeLong (1995): Trade Policy and America's Standard of Living: An Historical Perspective http://pages.ucsd.edu/~jlbroz/Courses/POLI142B/syllabus/delong.pdf: Before the Great Depression, the U.S. went through waves of protection and liberalization...

...as the federal government's demands for revenue and industry pressure for protection waxed and waned. Some advocates of protection then as now argued that it would enhance economic development: translated into the language of modern economics, they argued that protection shifted American economic activity toward manufacturing, and that increasing returns to scale and externalities made specialization in manufacturing uniquely valuable for economic development.

But even if protection generated endogenous productivity growth by increasing economic activity in the externality-generating manufacturing sector, it slowed the rate of growth of wages because high tariffs on imported capital goods retarded capital deepening and delayed the development of capital-intensive infrastructure and industry. For plausible magnitudes, this second effect dominates: whatever Americans gained in faster mastery of technology as a result of protection in the late 19th century, they lost more because the higher price of—imported—capital goods made it more difficult and costly to build America's transportation network and industrial base.


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Against epistocracy

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Against epistocracy // Crooked Timber
http://crookedtimber.org/2017/07/06/against-epistocracy/

I've finally been got around writing something about US philosopher Jason Brennan's arguments for "epistocracy", that is, restricting voting to people who are well-informed about the issues. For a long time, I assumed that such an idea would be ignored, and fade into oblivion, as most academic ideas do. But it's popped up here in Australia. Nathan Robinson in Current Affairs has a trenchant piece on a variety of anti-democratic commentators, including Brennan, to which I can't really add much.

So, I'll try to offer some more specific objections to Brennan's case for epistocracy.

First, suppose for the moment that university/college education was the criterion for having the franchise. What difference would that make to the outcome of recent elections? The answer, as far as I can tell, is "not much". Other things equal, more highly educated people tend to be more likely to vote for left or centre-left parties. But other things aren't equal. Higher education is correlated with higher income, and people with higher incomes tend to vote for right or centre-right parties. Historically, the income effect dominated, so people with more education, on average, voted more for the parties of the right. Nowadays, the two effects roughly cancel out. For example, exit polls from the US Presidential election suggest that most college-educated white voters supported Trump, though the margin wasn't as great as for white voters without a college education. Divisions on age and race have generally been sharper than those based on education.

Under current conditions, restricting the franchise wouldn't make a lot of difference. But even if it did, the discussion above points up the obvious problem. Whether more or less informed, voters are likely to support policies that benefit them personally (for example, by reducing their taxes) or reinforce their prejudices (by enacting their preferred cultural policies). Given the right political alignment, an election confined to college educated voters might produce outcomes that were more socially progressive (in the way this term is usually used) and more economically regressive (favorable to high income earners), than we see at the moment, simply because those are the policies that would suit the restricted electorate. I don't know whether Brennan supports such an outcome (from what I've seen of his writing, I suspect so), but there is no justification for loading the political dice in its favor.

So far I've focused on the decision of which party to vote for, and what kind of broad policy platforms we might expect. But what about specific policies? Brennan holds out as an example the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was politically unpopular and was abandoned by Trump. According to Brennan, "most experts" agree that the TPP "is good for the global economy".

That depends on what you mean by "most experts" . Certainly, experts from thinktanks that specialise in these deals supported the TPP, but that's not very surprising – it's what they do. Also, a lot of foreign policy experts backed the TPP as a way of enhancing the influence of the US at the expense of China, but that's not obviously "good for the global economy." At least as far as the Australian economics profession is concerned, I'd say the range of opinion ranged from lukewarm support to strong opposition. For those who focused on traditional trade issues, the TPP represented the final abandonment of the global approach represented by the long-stalled World Trade Organization negotiations. Most were unenthusiastic at best about the emerging bilateral and plurilateral deals. For those concerned with intellectual property issues, the TPP was seen as a disaster, embodying even more monopolistic protections for the owners of such "property". And on the left, the Investor-State Dispute Settlement procedures, and the closed-door negotiations, were seen as entrenching corporate power.

There's no need to resolve these divergent positions here. The crucial point is that Brennan has chosen to illustrate his argument for requiring voters to be better informed about the issues by picking an issue on which he himself is clearly not well-informed. This is, I think, a case where ad hominem argument is entirely appropriate.

Finally of course, Brennan's casual reference to "most experts" raises the obvious problem with epistocracy. Who gets to decide who is well-informed? And who gets to decide who gets to decide? (I'll have a longer post touching on this v. soon)


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Strengthening Labour Rights Provisions in Bilateral Trade Agreements: Making the Case for Voluntary Sustainability Standards

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Strengthening Labour Rights Provisions in Bilateral Trade Agreements: Making the Case for Voluntary Sustainability Standards // Global Policy Journal
http://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/articles/world-economy-trade-and-finance/strengthening-labour-rights-provisions-bilateral-trade-agre

Since 2008, most bilateral and regional EU trade agreements contain so-called Trade and Sustainable Development chapters. Such sustainability chapters typically include commitments to core ILO labour ...Read more
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Enlighten Radio:He Came UP --- SMILING! Railroad Earth Returns, Best of the Left, Wolff, Dissent

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Blog: Enlighten Radio
Post: He Came UP --- SMILING! Railroad Earth Returns, Best of the Left, Wolff, Dissent
Link: http://www.enlightenradio.org/2017/07/he-came-up-smiling-railroad-earth.html

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"Trump Feels a Kinship With Authoritarian Leaders":

"Trump Feels a Kinship With Authoritarian Leaders": Richard Falk on Turmoil in the Middle East

C.J. Polychroniou - 3rd July 2017

Since Trump's visit to the Middle East, the region is experiencing new forms of turmoil, with the boycott against Qatar by several Gulf countries and Egypt reflecting the manifestation of geopolitical rivalries encouraged by Trump's support for dictatorial regimes in the region willing to join the US in the fight against terrorism. For the latest developments in the Middle East, Truthout spoke with Richard Falk, emeritus professor of international relations at Princeton University, who is now in the region for a series of public lectures.

C.J. Polychroniou: Richard, you are traveling and lecturing at the moment in the Middle East. How are the media in countries like Lebanon, Israel and Turkey treating Trump's policies in the region, and what's your reading of the mood on the ground among common folk?

Richard Falk: I have just arrived in Istanbul after spending several days in Beirut. While in Lebanon, in addition to giving a public lecture at the end of a cultural festival on the theme, "The rise of populism, Trumpism, and the decline of US leadership," I had the opportunity to interact with a wide range of people. As far as Trump is concerned, there was virtual unanimity that he is worsening an already volatile situation in the region. His trip to Riyadh was viewed in Beirut as a stunning display of incompetence and bravado, topped off by succumbing to a Saudi/Israeli regional agenda focused on building a menacing anti-Iran coalition and misleading publicity surrounding a nominal commitment to join forces to combat ISIS (also known as Daesh). Trump was viewed as a leader who did not understand the region and was more interested in pushing destabilizing arms sales than in genuinely promoting stability and conflict resolution.

Why is Qatar singled out on terror when it is a well-known fact that Saudi Arabia has been a chief supporter of the most radical ideological version of Islam, and Turkey's President Erdogan has been accused of aiding ISIS and other extremists against Kurds and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad?

The short answer is geopolitics. Saudi Arabia, like Israel, has a "special relationship" with the United States, meaning that in diplomatic practice, Washington adopts a subservient posture that includes seeing the world through a distorted optic provided by the Saudi monarchy. Trump did not initiate this American tendency to avert its eyes when it comes to the massive evidence of Saudi support for Islamic extremism, but he seems to be carrying further this form of geopolitical [ignorance].

When it comes to Turkey, the American attitude is ambivalent, regarding Turkey as a sufficiently important strategic partner via NATO, as well as the site of the important American Incirlik Air Base to justify looking the other way when it comes to indications of earlier Turkish support for ISIS in the context of implementing its anti-Assad Syrian policies. Of course, there is evidence of contradictions along similar lines with respect to pre-Trump US policies in Syria. All hands are dirty with regard to Syria. The Syrian people are continuing to pay a huge price for this mixture of internal struggle and a multilevel proxy war engaging regional and global actors.

Singling out Qatar is the strongest instance of the Saudi regional game. Saudi Arabia has long been bothered by the relative independence of Qatar in relation to a series of issues that have nothing to do with terrorism. These include the creation of Al Jazeera, a show of sympathy for the Arab Spring movements of 2011, asylum for the Muslim Brotherhood leadership after the Sisi coup of 2013, hosting Hamas leaders and tangible support for the Palestinian struggle -- including aid to Gaza, and relatively friendly relations with Iran partly as a result of sharing a huge natural gas field.

The "terrorism" angle is a cover story that hides the real objective of the anti-Qatar policy, which is to assert Saudi hegemony with respect to all Gulf monarchies, and to make an example of Qatar so as to demonstrate that there is no room for either challenging Saudi primacy or departing from its policies of hostility to Shia governments and political Islam -- that is, organizations within countries that build grassroots support for political movements among Muslims seeking control of the national governance process. Saudi policies, as in relation to Egypt, show a strong preference for authoritarian secular rule over an Islamically-oriented movement that achieved control of the state through electoral victories.

Saudi Arabia has two regional enemies: Shia Iran and political Islam, whether or not Sunni. Riyadh is sectarian when it serves Saudi regional interests in countering Iran, and repressive toward any kind of challenge directed at dictatorial government and monarchical authority, even if religiously oriented in its political identity. One dimension of its policy is directed toward sustaining royal authority at home, another is preoccupied with Gulf hegemony, another with crushing any democratizing movement in the region, and still another with its anti-Iran rivalry. When it comes to ISIS and jihadism, Saudi policy sends the West an anti-terrorist message while continuing to spend billions on disseminating Wahhabi versions of Islam far and wide.

The United States is more confused than Saudi Arabia when it comes to Qatar, but equally ineffectual if anti-terrorism truly tops its regional agenda. For one thing, Qatar is not a supporter of ISIS or of terrorism except to some extent in the context of Syria, where it is on the same side as Saudi Arabia, the United States and Turkey -- each of which has from time to time made expedient use of anti-Assad Sunni terrorist groups. For another, the United States maintains a major military base in Qatar staffed by 11,000 American troops. For another, while celebrating the post-Riyadh moves against Qatar, the US has concluded a $12 billion arms sales arrangement with Doha. While Trump boasts about his role in crafting the anti-Qatar policies as a triumph of counterterrorism, the American secretaries of state and defense are vigorously trying to bring the confrontation with Qatar to an end through diplomatic mediation, illustrating policy incoherence between the White House and the governmental bureaucracy.

Do you think Donald Trump's warm embrace of dictatorial regimes and authoritarian leaders in the region -- including President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey -- represents a new development in US foreign policy toward the Middle East?

Trump clearly feels a kinship with dictatorial regimes and authoritarian leaders throughout the world, and not just in the Middle East. As suggested earlier, the attitude toward Erdoğan is more complicated because of NATO considerations and overall Syrian policy coordination, and reflects a pre-Trump pragmatism with respect to the interface between American opposition to repressive government and the pursuit of a post-Cold War grand strategy in the Middle East and around the world. Trump is far less conflicted about embracing authoritarian leaders than his predecessors, especially Obama. In this sense, Trump's affection for autocratic governance patterns cannot be fully explained by the pragmatic priorities of earlier American leaders. It seems to reflect an ideological affinity that is independent of foreign policy goals. The sheer hypocrisy of Trump's approach to such choices has been recently underscored by his rollback of Obama's moves to normalize relations with Cuba because of its allegedly poor human rights record. Interpreted more transparently, this Trump move was a political payback to the support given his presidential campaign by Miami's right-wing Cuban exile community.

If we consider the question of whether Trump's comfort level with authoritarian governance should be regarded as a real change in American foreign policy toward the Middle East, we can only say now that it is too early to tell. There is no doubt that Trump's visit and talk to the 50 leaders of Muslim countries assembled in Riyadh allowed the most authoritarian among Islamic rulers (Iran excepted) a welcome sigh of relief. It meant they would no longer have to listen sullenly to lectures delivered by a liberal American president about the importance of observing human rights.

This may also help explain the closer policy coordination between the US and Gulf Arabs, illustrated by agreeing to ramp up pressure on Iran. The intensification of American hostility to Iran is more likely to flow from Trump's eagerness to please Israel than to be responsive to Saudi guidance. Unlike the Qatar initiative, which seems to disturb [US Secretary of Defense] James Mattis and [US Secretary of State] Rex Tillerson, the anti-Iran moves seem compatible with a shared militarist hostility to Iran, which is misleadingly blamed for spreading terrorism in the region through Tehran's support for such diverse groups as Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.

Now that ISIS is weakening, tensions and sectarian passions in the Middle East are actually on the rise. Any connection between the two factors?

ISIS certainly seems to be in the process of losing its territorial base and caliphate in Iraq and Syria, but whether it is really weakening overall is hard to tell. It has spread its terrorist operations to many countries throughout the world and still seems capable of causing havoc in Europe and the United States by using native sympathizers to mount terrorist attacks that inflame targeted societies.

With respect to the apparent rise of sectarian passions, there is a need for careful assessment. Sectarianism is used to mobilize support for the anti-Iran coalition and the Syrian War in Sunni-majority countries, but a more convincing explanation of these policies would emphasize the Saudi-Iran rivalry for regional hegemony based on competing expansionist aspirations. Sectarianism accounts for political alignments in Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, where Sunni rule feels threatened by Shia minorities -- in Yemen and Saudi Arabia -- and a Shia majority in Bahrain. As suggested earlier, where Sunni popular movements are perceived as threatening to the Arab monarchies, Sunni rulers will not hesitate to use or encourage bloody repressive tactics. In this respect, sectarian justifications for alignments are misleading unless interpreted as opportunistic. A more adequate understanding of Arab politics can be gained by evaluating intergovernmental tensions in the Middle East and related efforts to sustain the stability of existing political structures in the face of internal threats.

Both Jordan and Lebanon have managed to avoid becoming ISIS targets. What are the reasons for this?

I think there is no definitive explanation. It appears that ISIS is rather opportunistic in its selection of target societies, as well as in its tendency to treat some states as off-limits. By and large, where ISIS has enjoyed its greatest success in the Middle East and North Africa has been in countries experiencing chaos, combat and unrest, especially in contexts of American or European intervention.

Turkey and Iran have been targeted by ISIS, although neither can be considered chaotic or a combat zone. Turkey has been targeted in all likelihood in retaliation for switching from aiding and abetting ISIS to policies of belligerent opposition. There may be sectarian reasons for ISIS attacks on Iran, although this is highly conjectural. There are also rumors about various bargains struck by ISIS with governments and wealthy donors to engage in or refrain from certain attacks.

Jordan has been comparatively stable over the course of the last decade, which means that they do not seem to be the kind of society that ISIS targets. In addition, neither Lebanon nor Jordan has been active in anti-terrorist regional politics, although ISIS and Hezbollah are on opposite sides in Syria, and have there engaged in violent combat. There is very little public knowledge about the operational side of ISIS behavior, which means that either of these countries could come under pressure from ISIS militants at some future time.

How do you see the "Palestinian question" playing out under Trump's administration?

Everything about Trump's political style makes his position at one time subject to drastic revision almost on impulse. Up to now, Trump seems to be investing energy in the idea that a deal can be struck. This is highly unlikely to materialize, principally because Israel seems to be moving toward an imposed one-state solution, with its "Plan B" being a long-term apartheid administration of Palestinian territories that initially fell under its control 50 years ago in the 1967 War. The idea of revived negotiations seems like a Washington stunt that is given lip service by the Israeli government for public relations purposes and endorsed by the Palestinian Authority because of its weakness and vulnerability to the cutoff of foreign funding. Given the accelerated expansion of settlement-building, as well as the sheer number of settlers -- numbering at least 700,000 if the West Bank and East Jerusalem are combined -- the situation seems ill-suited for a political compromise envisioned by the two-state international consensus. In other words, a diplomatically induced end of the conflict seems currently implausible.

Palestinian prospects are increasingly dismal. The Trump presidency is not disposed to challenge Israeli policies, or to exert pressure on Israel to yield significant ground as to the manner with which it is administering the Palestinian people. The American ambassador at the UN, Nikki Haley, is outdoing herself by constant[ly] bashing the UN for its supposed anti-Israel bias. Whether these tactics of intimidation will result in a gradual disappearance of Palestinian grievances from the UN agenda remains to be seen, but it is clearly a major Israeli objective. It seems that with armed struggle no longer a threat and diplomacy at a dead end, the only real worry for Israel is the mobilization of hostile public opinion under UN auspices.

Palestinian hopes, such as they are, depend on several developments: continuing growth of the global solidarity movement as most vividly expressed by the BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] campaign, which is the centerpiece of "the legitimacy war" that has been discrediting Israel's policies and practices while giving the high moral and legal ground to the Palestinian national movement; eventual achievement of sustainable Palestinian unity, overcoming the rift between Hamas and Fatah; and more tangible expressions of solidarity by Arab neighbors with the Palestinian struggle.

If none of these Palestinian hopes … materialize in the next decade, the Palestinian struggle will increasingly come to be seen as a "lost cause." What Trump does and doesn't do is likely to influence perceptions as to whether the Palestinian goals are credible or not, but at this point, the policy impact of the Trump presidency seems mainly to be emboldening Israeli hardliners.

 

 

C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His main research interests are in European economic integration, globalization, the political economy of the United States and the deconstruction of neoliberalism's politico-economic project. He is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout's Public Intellectual Project. He has published several books and his articles have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into several foreign languages, including Croatian, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. this piece first appeared on TruthOut.

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Report Shows West Virginia Among Hardest Hit States Under Senate Health Bill [feedly]

Report Shows West Virginia Among Hardest Hit States Under Senate Health Bill
http://www.wvpolicy.org/report-shows-west-virginia-among-hardest-hit-states-under-senate-health-bill/

For Immediate Release 
Media Contact: Caitlin Cook, 304-720-8682

(Charleston, WV) – Senate Republicans are considering a health care bill that would hit West Virginia harder than almost any other state, according to a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. PDF news release. Read the report.

Under the Senate Republican bill, 218,000 West Virginians would lose coverage in 2022 compared to current law – dramatically increasing the uninsured rate for the state's non-elderly population by more than 300 percent, the largest increase in any state. That means that one in-every-seven non-elderly West Virginians who would otherwise have coverage would lose it under the bill, the report – which draws on Urban Institute data – shows.

"The Senate GOP health bill would be a disaster for West Virginia and is fatally flawed," said Ted Boettner, Executive Director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. "No amount of tweaks can fix the fundamental problems that make this bill so harmful to the people of our state: failing to ensure access to affordable coverage, failing to combat the opioid crisis, cutting Medicaid deeply and ending our expansion, and harming rural health care providers."

In addition to the large coverage losses, tens of thousands more West Virginians would face worse or less affordable health coverage. And, even West Virginians with job-based coverage could be hurt.

The Senate Bill Would:

•Ÿ Effectively end West Virginia's expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which covers 180,000 West Virginians and provides vital support to the state's rural hospitals;

Ÿ• Radically overhaul – and sharply cut – the underlying Medicaid program, through which many West Virginia seniors, children, and people with disabilities get their coverage;

Ÿ• Increase premiums, deductibles, or both for most of the roughly 30,000 West Virginians who purchase health coverage through the marketplace, especially older people;

Ÿ• Weaken protections for West Virginians who purchase individual market coverage, which would be especially harmful for people with pre-existing conditions; and

Ÿ • Potentially result in the return of annual and lifetime limits for a significant share of the roughly 700,000 West Virginians with job-based coverage.

By taking coverage and consumer protections from so many West Virginians, the Senate bill also would make it harder for those struggling with substance use disorders (SUDs) to get needed treatment, undermining West Virginia's efforts to address the opioid crisis.

Additional funding for treatment that Senate Republicans reportedly will add to their bill would fall far short of offsetting the enormous damage that the underlying Senate bill would cause.

"There are many opportunities for Congress to improve our health care system," said Boettner said.  "But this bill can't be fixed: the Senate needs to start over and take a different, bipartisan approach."

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