PROVIDENCE – Rhode Island’s poorest residents pay more than double the amount of taxes that the state’s wealthiest residents do as a share of income, a new study has found.

Rhode Island families making less than $17,000 a year paid 11.9 percent of their 2007 income in state and local taxes, according to the study, which examined state and local taxes paid as a share of 2007 income, adjusted for policy changes through last month.

At the other end of the spectrum, the top 1 percent of earners – who made an average of $1.2 million in 2007 – paid 5.6 percent of their income in state and local taxes when the federal deduction for those taxes is taken into account. Without the federal offset, the wealthiest Rhode Islanders paid 7 percent of their income in state and local taxes.

Ocean State Action is a founding member of HealthRIght, and OSA's Executive Director Peter Asen is a member of HealthRIght's Executive Committee.

Even as Congress battles over how to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, a little-known Rhode Island coalition is moving ahead with its own home-grown reform plan for this state.

The group, called HealthRIght, got a significant boost recently with a $50,000 grant from the Rhode Island Foundation, which will enable it to move forward drafting proposed legislation.

What’s the point of state-based health-care reform when the Congress is already acting on it?

The answer, says Dr. Nick Tsiongas, who is spearheading the effort, is that HealthRIght’s proposal can build on any national changes — and possibly achieve in Rhode Island what’s politically impossible in Washington.

Read entire article here.

Health care reform advocates held a protest outside UnitedHealthcare of New England’s offices in Warwick on Tuesday, Sept. 22, as part of a national day of protest against insurance industry practices the advocates say put profit over people’s health.

United is part of UnitedHealth Group Inc. (NYSE: UNH), one of the nation’s largest for-profit health insurance companies and the subject of several controversies in recent years involving everything from executive compensation to allegedly improper use of billing databases.

As health care reform discussions gather steam on Capitol Hill, MoveOn.org is rallying the troops on its side of the debate, and in Rhode Island, it partnered with Ocean State Action and the Health Care for America Now campaign to hold last week’s rally.

At the event, Ed Benson, a retired university professor from Pawtucket and member of Moveon.org, spoke about his wife, Sue, and her experience with United when she had cancer in the late 1990s. After a six-hour operation to remove ovarian cancer cells that were found when she was having fibroids removed, he said, her doctor told her she would need four or five days to recuperate. But United would only pay for two days, so she was sent home.

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Ocean State Action, an umbrella group of public sector unions, advocates for low income Rhode Islanders, and social justice groups, staged a protest against United Healthcare late Tuesday afternoon.

The group claims United denies claims and care in order to boost its profit for its shareholders and that it is working against health care reform.

“Their obligation under the corporate laws of America is to protect their shareholders first, and the patients somewhere down the land,” said George Nee, President of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO.

“We need to stop this and the way to do that is through a public option.”

Ed Benson, a Pawtucket resident and Moveon.org member, spoke emotionally about his late wife’s struggles with cancer in the late nineties.

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Though these issues are critical pieces of the reform puzzle - ensuring good, affordable health coverage for everyone is very important - there is another step we must take to ensure equal access to good care. Racial and economic inequality that exists in our health care-system, and indeed in our nation more generally, has devastating effects on patients from minority and poor communities, in terms of their access to care and their overall health.

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"If we could bring a wide array of progressive forces together," Blum says, "progressives would be able to compete with the deep-pockets and insider lobbyists on the right."

That realization, combined with vast coalition building experience among the key players and a set of principles all could agree on, led to the creation of Health Care for America Now (HCAN)--the largest single-issue progressive coalition in modern American history. This August, with the battle over healthcare reform raging, the success of HCAN will be a determining factor in whether we get a progressive bill--a robust public option and a progressive tax to pay for it--out of Congress.

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Two days before July 4, about two-dozen protesters gathered around the Health Insurance Commissioner’s office in Cranston last Thursday and rallied in support of a so-called “public option” health care plan.

“What do we want? Health care!” chanted the crowd.

The protesters, all closely affiliated with Ocean State Action—a progressive, labor union-backed group—argued that private health insurance has failed the poorest members of society.

“Private insurance has failed,” said Peter Asen, Ocean State Action’s Interim Executive Director.

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Many government officials being asked to address this situation are saying all the same things — we should not raise broad-based taxes; there may need to be cuts in social services, especially impacting the elderly and disabled; there may need to be further reductions in aid to cities and towns; everything is on the table to try to find a solution and there are going to have to be sacrifices at every level.

Well, that last part isn’t entirely true, is it?

The phase-out of the capital-gains tax and the phase-in of decreasing alternative flat tax — implemented by laws enacted a few years ago — was all about stimulating the state’s economy because, it was argued, the wealthiest citizens of our state are the job creators, and making their lives better was going to trickle down and help us all.

The economy has soured, Rhode Island unemployment is one of the highest in America and lots of people are truly suffering — except those richest few who are able to employ the flat tax formula. (The flat tax stands at 6.5 percent this year and will decrease to 6 percent next year and decrease again to 5.5 percent in 2011.)

According to Department of Revenue figures, a total of 838 tax filers applied the alternative flat tax to their income during the 2007 tax year. Of that number, the majority — 719 — claimed incomes of $200,000 or more. (The Poverty Institute at Rhode Island College School of Social Work estimated last year that the average income of that upper-income group is, in reality, about $462,000.)

According to information from the State Budget Office and corroborated in figures provided by the House fiscal staff, the cost to the state in lost taxes as a result of those using the flat tax will be $34.7 million in the next budget year and more than $50 million in the 2011 budget year. (The Poverty Institute last year estimated that those individuals using the alternative flat tax would receive an average tax cut of about $5,000.)

Read entire column here.

The study concludes that this near-monopoly led to excessive pricing power and opposition to reform in Rhode Island, much as it does across the nation. It is a complex question, but there is no question that Ocean State businesses have been hit hard by insurance premium increases over the last few years.

Since 2007, however, Tufts Health Plan has entered the region, bringing increased competition. But the study endorses even more competition in the form of a public insurance option.

The report, issued by Health Care for America Now and its local partner, Ocean State Action, notes that Rhode Island has the second-most concentrated health insurance market in the nation, with the top two plans holding a combined 95 percent share as of 2007.

The dominant insurer, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island, held 79 percent of the market that year, the report shows, citing an American Medical Association analysis. While the Blues are big in many markets, only Alabama's had a larger share (83 percent).

The figures predate Tufts Health Plan's return last Jan. 1 to Rhode Island, but as of late last month, Tufts had only about 29,000 members in the state, about 20,000 of them employed by Rhode Island-based companies, according to a Tufts executive.

Blue Cross, meanwhile, has more than 600,000 members, and UnitedHealthcare of New England, more than 200,000. With their "near-monopoly," said Peter Asen, associate director of Ocean State Action, the two companies "not only set the prices, but they also make the rules and call the shots," blocking any reforms that could hurt their business.

The problem is national, the report says, with the top insurers gaining ground in many states and the options for small businesses, especially, becoming ever-more limited. And while insurers use their market power against smaller medical providers, the report asserts, they also work with larger providers "to increase profits for both," driving up the cost of care.