Palin Praises Union Health Benefits
WASHINGTON, DC—Yesterday, in an effort to portray herself as “an everyday working class American,” Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) revealed that her family struggled to find health insurance “until Todd and I both landed a couple of good union jobs“:
But yeah, there’s been a lot of times that Todd and I have had to figure out how we were going to pay for health insurance. We’ve gone through periods of our life here with paying out of pocket for health coverage until Todd and I both landed a couple of good union jobs. Early on in our marriage, we didn’t have health insurance, and we had to either make the choice of paying out of pocket for catastrophic coverage or just crossing our fingers, hoping that nobody would get hurt, nobody would get sick. So I know what Americans are going through there.
Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) strong anti-union sentiment aside, “Palin is right to credit her and her husband’s ‘good union jobs’ with securing her family health insurance coverage.” Union workers “receive more generous health benefits than nonunionized workers,” contribute a significantly lower percentage of the premium than those in firms without any union workers, and are significantly more likely to receive health insurance.
Consider the following data from the 2008 Kaiser Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Benefits:
Unfortunately, McCain’s health care plan would throw 20 million Americans out of employer-sponsored coverage, leave 18 million Americans without health insurance by 2013, and increase “out of pocket” costs across the board. If Palin believes that she knows “what Americans are going through” because she was once uninsured, she will have many more Americans to sympathize with under the McCain-Palin health care plan.
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