President Obama Announces Support for Changes to the 2010 Health Care Law

President Barack Obama told the attendees of the National Governor’s Conference in Washington, D.C., today that he supports amending the historic health-care bill passed by Congress last year to allow individual states to opt out of some of the law’s requirements three years earlier than they are currently allowed to do so.

Under the proposed legislation, states can request federal permission to bypass the health-care law’s mandates if they can prove that they can find alternative ways to cover as many people as the original law would at the same expense.

Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have praised President Obama’s announcement, because it will allow the states to enact health-care reform in an individualized manner, though states must do several things to obtain a waiver to opt out of the health care law’s requirements.

The Commonwealth Club has featured numerous programs related to health-care and health-care reform, which you can find on our special health-care resources page

–By Ella Arnold

The Debate Over Public Workers’ Rights Comes to California

Over the past couple of days, the debate over the rights of public workers in America to collectively bargain has spread from Wisconsin, where GOP Gov. Scott Walker proposed tough union legislation last week, to Indiana and now California, where Republican state assemblyman Allan Mansoor (R-Costa Mesa) introduced a bill on Tuesday that would eliminate collective bargaining rights for California’s public school teachers, nurses and every other public worker in the state.

The bill proposed in California likely faces an early death, because the state’s legislature leans heavily Democratic, and Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown has already vowed not to target public workers to help solve the state’s monumental budget woes. Many of California’s Republican lawmakers, however, are calling for dramatic public pension reform as a component of the state’s budget negotiations. Despite the numerical advantage enjoyed by state Democrats in the legislature, Brown still needs a handful of Republicans to cross the aisle before his budget can pass, notes Reuters.

The Commonwealth Club of California has often examined the role of unions in California and across the country, and below are some examples of related material:

• Cesar Chavez, November 9, 1984
• Robert F. Kennedy, January 4, 1968
• Upcoming event: Teachers Unions vs. the State, March 28, 2011

–By Ella Arnold