Why are teachers in blue states paying for health benefits for coal miners in red states?

[PdxSean]

I know it's a loaded question, but how the hell can anyone justify lifetime healthcare for coal miners AND their widows when these red state coal miners are the first to argue against universal health care?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/coal-miner-benefits-government-shutdown_us_58f67521e4b0de5bac41b528?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

Congress in December extended health coverage for for retired miners and their widows, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) promised the Senate would vote to permanently fund it when the next deadline came around.

I should add that the funding is supported by democratic leadership.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Ryan and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “Anything less is an unacceptable and tragic failure of this body to keep its word to the men and women who powered our nation to prosperity at the risk of their own health and lives.”

This would be ironic if it wasn't so phuqed up.

[JustAnotherGen]

1. I'm heartless

I don't know the answer to the question - but agree it's fucked up.


I also don't understand why they are so "special".

[Gravitycollapse]

2. Coal miners are overwhelmingly white. That's why they're special.

That's why they get so much political and media attention.

[JustAnotherGen]

6. Oops!

I forgot! My bad!

[HAB911]

9. White, illiterate, untrainable

[Staph]

14. They're special,

because every day when they go to work, they have a chance of dying. Rock falls, methane explosions. Do you have that chance of unexpected death in your job? If you are police, military or firefighter, perhaps.

Oh, and do you end up coughing your lungs out with black lung, after twenty years on the job?

[JustAnotherGen]

15. Not my animals

Not my circus.

I live with A.S. I didn't make that genetic choice. They continue to cling to a choice that is dying.

[JI7]

3. because people in red states don't want to pay for blacks and mexicans

to get anything so they oppose these type of things.

they see blacks and hispanics in blue states getting things the don't have because of tax heavy blue states which those blacks and hispanics pay for and the red staters think THEY are paying for it.

[oasis]

4. +1000

[JustAnotherGen]

7. +1000 - Enter my heartless heart

They take bread off of my table - then accuse me of doing that to them?

Fuck that.

You know - Joe Manchin was on Morning Joe telling of his 'meetings with Constituents' during the first recess. Appeared with Clarie McCaskill- and he told them he was 'floating' the idea of 1/2 percent sales tax across the board to pay for infrastructure and his constituents' 'liked that' idea.

Uh- see -we had a sharp increase in gas tax in NJ in January - and Joe Manchin needs to stfu. We can't continue to pay 'all of these taxes'. Our gas tax pays for our improvements - WV can go raise taxes on themselves.

Because we KNOW the money will be given to them and we will never see a single fucking Fed Gov paid for road improvement in NJ.

The stone is dry WV/Coal Miners - there's no more blood or bread for YOU when you are obviously AGAINST us.

I is pissed.

[lies]

5. Why?

We don't get to decide what companies do.

Our health care is provided by companies (and they largely wrote the legislation) so it's easy to see why they're in charge.

To protect their bottom line they subsidize the cost of helping the sick and the poor (e.g. Coal miners) with the money of the healthy and not as poor.

If you want as close to fair as possible you'd have to basically strip the health insurers of their power, nationalize Healthcare, then vote for politicians that want what you want. And if enough people also wanted that, you could potentially get it, if the politicians kept their word... So... You know... A soft maybe.

[Orrex]

8. Excellent question--I see the same thing locally.

I live in the rust belt with a sizable population of aging union retirees and/or their widows, and the widespread sentiment among them is that people have it too easy today and should be happy with $7.00 per hour.

They are unable to recognize that they reaped the benefits of a booming economy for decades before Reagan and his heirs killed the country, and instead they praise themselves for their own hard work and rugged individualism.

And if it's suggested that maybe their pensions and benefits might not be as rock solid as they like to believe? Well, that's an outrage! Let children starve in the street and teen mothers die in childbirth, but don't you dare compromise the comfort of these rugged pensioners in their Make America Great Again hats.

[oberliner]

10. A booming economy before Reagan?

Were you alive in the 1970s?

[Hortensis]

11. Our nation is rich as a whole, not a crazy quilt of third-world

states butting up against prosperous ones, because of a very long practice of redistributing wealth.

Where we currently live, an hour outside a large southern city, might still not have electricity if extending it outside towns hadn't been subsidized many decades ago by people in more enlightened and therefore wealthy states. Without electricity and running water, this would be a dreadfully impoverished slough, inhabited only by those who hadn't fled long ago and avoided like the plague by others. Crime would likely be rampant.

As for civil unrest and worse between states! Our nation would have broken apart long ago. And deserved to. After all, being great requires the big progressive actions to be great, an idea most in this extremely conservative area emphatically do not ascribe to.

[Staph]

12. This is based on a federal bill passed in 1946,

promising all 20-year coal miners lifelong health and pension benefits, in order to keep the miners working in such a dangerous profession. The miners accepted less pay, in order to fund this, by the coal companies putting a part of every union miners' wages into a benefits fund.

But when the big coal companies, especially Patriot Coal (why do I never trust anyone or anything self-proclaimed as "patriotic"?), started declaring bankruptcy in this century, the benefit fund began to run out of money. A part of Patriot Coal's bankruptcy settlement included $400 million into the benefits fund, in hopes that it would allow the miners and retired miners continuing benefits, until Congress could do something.

As for teachers paying the miners . . . we're all paying the miners. And we're all paying teachers, and soldiers and sailors, and Donald Trump. That's what taxes are for.

Let me give you some reading material. After all, we are Democrats. We depend on facts, not on knee-jerk reactions.

In 2004, 28 miners died in accidents in coal mines. More than 700 died of black lung. And the incidences of black lung are increasing, in younger miners, as the quality of the coal being mined gets worse.

http://www.npr.org/2010/04/16/126021059/the-quiet-deaths-outside-the-coal-mines

[PdxSean]

16. Ouch, Staph!

Thanks for the info. Excellent points.

p.s. My comment was a play on republicans recently asking why miners should pay taxes to support PBS.

[Staph]

13. And as for miners arguing against universal health care...

you haven't been paying attention. In townhalls held by Joe Manchin in the last month, in Bernie Sanders' various visits to the state of West Virginia over the last year, miners (and other West Virginians) have been standing up for universal healthcare. Especially with coverage for drug rehab.

[PdxSean]

17. Hillary Clinton won ZERO counties in West Virginia.

Yes, a whole lot of anti-Obamacare miners care about healthcare now that their own healthcare is threatened.