Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
A new study by the liberal think tank Center for American Progress predicts health care reform legislation would affect employer-provided health insurance premiums in numerous ways and will help create between 250,000 and 400,000 jobs annually over the next decade.
The group says if health care cost increases slow down, businesses will find it more profitable to expand employment and workers will more readily move into new jobs. In Iowa, health care reform would mean nearly 4,000 new jobs, the group predicts.
Their conclusions are based upon two studies. The first, by health economists Neeraj Sood at the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics and School of Pharmacy at the University of Southern California, and Arkadipta Ghosh and José Escarce at Mathematica and University of California Los Angeles, shows the significant negative impact of rising health care costs on employment as firms struggle with health costs that they cannot pass along fully to workers or consumers.
The second study, by health economists David Cutler of Harvard University and Karen Davis and Kristof Stremikis of the Commonwealth Fund, estimates that health care reform will slow the growth of health care costs and health insurance premiums.
Health care reform legislation will “lower premiums by increasing the efficiency of medical care use, or modernizing health care,” thus leading to higher wages and higher employment.
A good part of the reduction in premium costs will show up as higher wages—the equivalent of a multithousand dollar tax break for the typical family. But lower insurance costs may also show up as increases in employment. Hiring low-wage workers is particularly sensitive to health care costs. Some of these workers are priced out of the labor force by rising insurance costs and will move back in when cost increases slow. Other workers choose not to work when health insurance costs are a large form of compensation—for example, if they have insurance through another family member. Lower insurance costs will raise wages for those workers and thus draw more of them into the labor force.
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