Thread: Feds to subsidize health insurance for early retirees

ug 31, 2010

Feds to subsidize health insurance for early retirees

05:17 PM

The Obama administration has announced it will reimburse about 2,000 company, union and government health plans 80% of costs for workers who retire early. About half the companies are among the Fortune 500.

The $5 billion program will cover workers age 55 to 64, and up to $90,000 per worker, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said in a statement.

Among those taking the federal subsidies are Levi Strauss, United Airlines, Kellogg Co., Mattel, Hewlett-Packard, Dow Chemical and Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in America.

Also following the money: Seven states suing over the new health care law because it requires most Americans to carry health insurance or face fines, the Associated Press says. The states — Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska and Nevada — are among 20 that have sued the administration.

Last week The New Yorker carried an illuminating profile of David and Charles Koch, "the billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama." Headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, Koch Industries is a privately run conglomerate with annual revenues estimated at $100 billion. The Kochs have donated hundreds of millions for civic, medical, philanthropic and political causes. They also fund think tanks and have emerged as big backers of the "tea party" movement.
Here's some of what the magazine reported:

The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch — who, years ago, bought out two other brothers — among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry — especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers' corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a "kingpin of climate science denial." The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health- care reform to the economic-stimulus program — that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

In a statement, Koch Industries said that the Greenpeace report "distorts the environmental record of our companies." And David Koch, in a recent, admiring article about him in New York, protested that the "radical press" had turned his family into "whipping boys," and had exaggerated its influence on American politics. But Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, "The Kochs are on a whole different level. There's no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I've been in Washington since Watergate, and I've never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times."

http://content.usatoday.com/communities ... retirees/1

This may be a way to deal with the unemployment numbers by encouraging people to leave the workforce.