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Insurance Plan For Farm Workers Falls Short Of Obamacare Rules

Insurance Plan For Farm Workers Falls Short Of Obamacare Rules

By Chris Megerian, Los Angeles Times

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Two landmark liberal health care achievements are on a collision course in California, and the result could be higher costs for taxpayers.

Years ago, legendary activist Cesar Chavez helped create the first health insurance plan for farm workers who toiled for meager wages in California’s fields. The plan, funded by the workers and their employers, is named after Democratic icon Robert F. Kennedy, who allied himself with Chavez.

But like many other insurance plans around the country, it doesn’t fully meet requirements set by President Barack Obama’s health care law. Unless supplemental insurance is purchased, the farm workers say, 10,700 people could lose coverage.

Some Democrats want taxpayers to pick up the $3.2 million tab for the extra insurance so the health care plan can keep operating.

But the proposed subsidy has sparked concern about Democrats trying to prop up one union’s health care coverage when other insurance plans have also struggled to meet new federal requirements.

“There is a question of fairness here,” said Timothy Jost, a health policy expert and professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law in Lexington, Va.

The proposal is being pushed by United Farm Workers, once led by Chavez. A legislative panel last week recommended including the money in the state budget, which is being negotiated by lawmakers and Gov. Jerry Brown ahead of a June 15 deadline.

Democratic state Sen. Ellen Corbett said the subsidy, which would be drawn from cigarette taxes, would “support some of our hardest workers, who bring our food to the table.”

It’s also backed by state Senate leader Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat. His spokesman, Mark Hedlund, said taxpayers will be on the hook for even larger costs if the farm workers wind up on Medi-Cal, the state’s health care program for the poor.

Other organizations — including the United Agricultural Benefit Trust, which provides coverage to 35,000 farm workers and their families — have shouldered the higher cost of upgrading their insurance to comply with Affordable Care Act regulations.

Clare Einsmann, the trust’s executive vice president, asked why the state should subsidize the United Farm Workers’ coverage.

“Creating a special set of rules for one plan, I don’t know if that’s appropriate,” she said. “Our plan absorbed the cost.”

A United Farm Workers spokeswoman did not respond to questions about why the union needs the state to subsidize its health care plan. The organization’s lobbyist, Esperanza Ross, refused to answer questions in the Capitol last week.

Hedlund said lawmakers would consider using additional cigarette tax money to help other health care plans if they faced similar problems.

When the proposal was introduced at a legislative hearing last week, Republican state Sen. Mike Morrell said it “came out of nowhere.”

“It seems like we are picking winners and losers,” Morrell said. “I don’t know why this particular group (would be) sent $3 million.”

United Farm Workers has lobbied on state budget issues since the beginning of last year, according to disclosures filed by the union, and is a reliable supporter of Democrats.

In 2010, the UFW’s national political action committee provided more than $10,000 to Brown’s gubernatorial campaign and thousands more to legislative candidates. And Dolores Huerta, who helped create the union with Chavez, has helped pitch Obamacare coverage to Latinos in California.

The union’s insurance, the Robert F. Kennedy Medical Plan, falls short of new federal regulations because it limits annual benefits to $70,000. Although the plan received a waiver to keep operating until September, such caps are being barred under Affordable Care Act rules.

Purchasing replacement insurance would increase costs by 35 percent to 80 percent, according to a legislative analysis that cited information provided by the Robert F. Kennedy Medical Plan.

However, the plan could keep operating with supplemental insurance that would cover costs exceeding the annual cap. A state subsidy would prevent the additional cost from falling on farm workers or on the businesses that employ them.

According to the legislative analysis, consultants with the Robert F. Kennedy plan say that without supplemental coverage, half its members would end up on government insurance rolls, costing $4.7 million — $1.5 million more than the price of the subsidy.

“The affected individuals know that they’re going to be out in the cold and we know that we’ll end up shouldering the cost,” said Democratic state Sen. Bill Monning.

The proposed $3.2 million subsidy would last one year. Meanwhile, Hedlund said, the union is trying to have its waiver extended.

Brown’s Department of Finance is skeptical of the proposed subsidy. One of its analysts, Aaron Coen, expressed concern about “setting a precedent for other plans” that may want financial assistance.

AFP Photo/Scott Olson

Cesar Chavez’s Legacy Is At Work In The White House

Cesar Chavez’s Legacy Is At Work In The White House

By Christi Parsons, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — When prominent Latino activists meet with President Barack Obama, there’s one White House staff member present whom many of them have known since she was a child.

Julie Chavez Rodriguez grew up handing out leaflets and knocking on doors with her grandfather, Cesar Chavez, whose campaign to organize farm workers still inspires today’s Latino leaders.

As deputy director of the Office of Public Engagement, Rodriguez runs Obama’s organizing efforts in support of immigration reform and supervises Latino outreach.

On Monday — Cesar Chavez Day in California, Colorado, and Texas — she spoke about her family at a White House event to honor volunteers and community organizers from around the country.

“My grandfather used to tell us that the job of an organizer was to help ordinary people do extraordinary things,” Rodriguez, 35, told the crowd. “One of my favorite quotes from my grandfather says: ‘Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.’”

Rodriguez usually keeps a much lower profile as a Chavez descendant. Her role is to defend the White House’s slow-and-steady approach to immigration reform while many activists have demanded Obama use his executive powers to stop deportations.

Two top Latino leaders recently branded Obama the “deporter in chief,” challenging the president’s argument that he can’t take further actions on his own but can only press Congress to pass legislation to overhaul the immigration laws.

In support of Obama’s view, Rodriguez cites “Tata Cesar” and his decades of organizing farm workers. “My grandfather helped me to understand that change isn’t immediate,” she said. “It doesn’t happen overnight. It does take a lot of time and sacrifice. It takes consistent, sustained organizing and pressure to be able to see great progress in our country.”

Rodriguez was born in Delano, CA, home of the Delano grape strike and not far from the Chavez family home where her mother, Linda, was raised. Rodriguez grew up mostly at the United Farm Workers headquarters, a small community named Nuestra Senora Reina de la Paz, or Our Lady of Peace, in Keene, in the Tehachapi Mountains.

She and her cousins used to accompany their grandfather as he sought to build his labor union. They joked that while other people went on family picnics, they went on family pickets.

Dolores Huerta, the legendary United Farm Workers leader, was often around, as was a young organizer named Eliseo Medina. Members of the Robert and John F. Kennedy families visited.

Her first jobs after Tehachapi High School, while on break from her Latin American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, were in AFL-CIO union summer programs. She worked with the United Farm Workers organizing strawberry pickers in Watsonville, CA.

She worked for eight years at the Cesar Chavez Foundation as a program director, but when Obama ran for office in 2008, she traveled to Colorado to volunteer, knocking on doors. That led to a job in the administration working for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, followed by the White House in 2011.

Last year, she accompanied her boss to the National Mall to sit with Medina, who had recently stepped down as head of the Service Employees International Union, during his fast for immigration reform.

Rodriguez chose to remain outside the circle of fasters, noted Valerie Jarrett, head of the White House Office of Public Engagement. “Everyone in the tent knew who she was,” she said, “but she felt it was her role to be the staff that day.”

At the White House, conversely, most staff members don’t know they work with a member of the Chavez family.

Until two weeks ago, when the White House screened a new movie about Chavez, even White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough was unaware of Rodriguez’s relation to Chavez or to his successor as head of the United Farm Workers: Arturo Rodriguez, her father. The elder Rodriguez was among the immigration activists present for a summit with the president two weeks ago.

Going into that meeting, the White House was miffed by the “deporter in chief” remarks from Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, Obama’s fellow Democrat from Illinois, and Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, the country’s largest Latino advocacy group.

Afterward, activists emphasized their shared agenda: to pressure House Republicans to allow a vote on comprehensive immigration reform.

Medina, an old family friend, said Rodriguez was an effective spokeswoman for the president.

“It is very important to have Julie at the White House as our country wrestles with the issue of immigration reform,” said Medina, who retired from the SEIU to dedicate himself to the issue. “Her personal story and family history make her uniquely qualified to help inform policymakers on why this issue matters to our nation and economy.”

Senior White House officials said Rodriguez’s message carried special weight.

“She and her cousins speak for the movement,” said Cecilia Munoz, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. “In the Latino community, it’s like knowing royalty. It’s a very powerful thing.”

Anunska Sampredo via Flickr

Two Versions Of Cesar Chavez Come To Light In New Film, Book

Two Versions Of Cesar Chavez Come To Light In New Film, Book

By Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — At least 25 streets and 46 schools are named in his honor, but many young people know little about Cesar Chavez, who in life was a polarizing figure, most famous for the successful series of marches, fasts and strikes he led on behalf of mostly immigrant farmworkers.

The next big act of Chavez’s afterlife begins this month, with the first dramatic film about the towering Chicano figure and a major biography due out days before California and other states celebrate Cesar Chavez Day on March 31.

Both projects seek to reclaim Chavez’s place in the American memory. But the book and the movie offer markedly different portraits of a man who joined the pantheon of American civic saints after his death in 1993.

In the film Cesar Chavez, by a Mexican production team led by the actor-director Diego Luna, he is a heroic and beatific figure using nonviolence to lead his people to victory. The movie ends with Chavez’s United Farm Workers winning contracts in 1970 from recalcitrant growers.

The 534-page book, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, by former Los Angeles Times editor and reporter Miriam Pawel, follows Chavez, from his birth in a Depression-era Arizona and his father’s loss of the family farm, to his death, following a long period in which the UFW was in decline. Much of the second half of the book delves deeply into what Chavez’s old allies call “the dark side” — his isolation and his embrace of what some saw as a cult of personality.

For Luna, the movie has been a four-year crusade, working largely outside the Hollywood studio system.

“We’re lucky (Hollywood) didn’t say yes,” Luna said in an interview.

Hollywood executives suggested Luna cast one of two bankable Spanish heartthrobs, Antonio Banderas or Javier Bardem, as the lead. Instead he gave the role to Michael Pena. Like many talented Mexican-American actors, Pena’s has a resume filled with mostly small roles, including as a faux Arab sheik in American Hustle.

Luna and his production company Canana (which he co-founded with actor Gael Garcia Bernal) have been screening the film for select, often largely Latino audiences across the U.S. ahead of its Friday release date. Last Wednesday, he also screened it at the White House for President Barack Obama.

Luna and producer Pablo Cruz were also recently at UCLA, at a standing-room-only event for more than 300 people, sponsored by the university’s Chicano Studies faculty and students. “Please help us spread the word,” Luna told the audience. “We have to send a message to the industry that our stories have to be represented. And with the depth and the complexity they deserve.”

“We found the right partners for the film,” Luna said. Mexican investors put up much of the funding. The $10-million film, shot in Sonora, Mexico, is being distributed by Participant Media and Lionsgate, and is opening in about 600 theaters.

Chavez declined offers to have dramatic films made about him during his lifetime, and since his death he has appeared on the big screen mostly in documentaries.

Luna made Chavez’s family life the emotional center of his story. He said he ignored another executive who asked, “How can you make this more sexy?” “I said that this is beyond sexy,” Luna said. “It’s not even just the story of Cesar Chavez. It’s the story of a movement.”

Cesar Chavez is filled with authentic visual details, including the religious iconography that was a staple of UFW events and the infamous “short hoes” that ravaged the bodies of farmworkers forced to use them. America Ferrera plays Cesar’s wife, Helen, with Rosario Dawson as union leader Dolores Huerta and Jack Holmes as ally Robert F. Kennedy. At 101 minutes, the film limits itself to a decade in Chavez’s life.

The book, published by Bloomsbury Press, is the first full-scale biography. “I’m writing beyond the hagiography,” Pawel said. “It does him a disservice to portray him in a more simplistic way.”

Chavez earned his saintly hue by going on a 25-day fast in 1968 that helped turned public opinion in the UFW’s favor, an event that’s key in Luna’s film. But Pawel said the film only fleetingly captures the real Chavez’s genius for strategy and tactics. He could also be gruff leader who gave no quarter to perceived enemies, a quality he readily acknowledged.

“There is a big difference between being a saint and being an angel,” he told a reporter in an interview quoted in Pawel’s book. “Saints are known for being tough and stubborn.”

Pawel made ample use of archival sources, including Chavez’s papers, which he donated to Wayne State University in Detroit. She also listened to hundreds of tapes of interviews and UFW board meetings. The early tapes capture his “lyricism” and idealism, she said. But later tapes record the ethnic slur he used in the 1970s to refer to undocumented immigrants he considered to be strikebreakers.

The sharply different perspectives reflect how the film and book were made. Canana held the Chavez family’s film rights, and the family met extensively with Luna and his cast. But author Pawel is persona non grata to Chavez’s descendants, largely because she wrote a 2006 series in the Times that portrayed the modern-day UFW as an organization that does little to improve the lot of farmworkers.

“The family wouldn’t talk to me, but I knew that going in,” Pawel said. Only one family member responded to her emails: Fernando, Chavez’s oldest son, whose conflicts with his father are portrayed in the film. But Pawel said he too declined to talk to her.

Fernando, now a lawyer, is at the center of the movie because of a story Helen Chavez shared with the cast before shooting began. “She said that at one point, Fernando left the family,” Luna said. His conflicts with his famous father were just too much to bear.

For Luna, a native of Mexico, the story was a reminder of what led him to Chavez. Not long ago, his second child was born — in the United States. Luna, who has homes in Mexico City and Los Angeles, wanted to be able to tell his Mexican-American son more about the man revered as a pioneer of Chicano history.

“This is a movie about a father and son, and about how hard it is for a son to understand what his father needs to do,” said Luna, a former child actor and star of Y Tu Mama Tambien.

There’s an air of earnestness about Luna’s film. After it screened in Berlin, reviews suggested that he was too respectful and thus drained his protagonist of complexity. Cesar Chavez has also earned mixed reviews from those who worked with Chavez.

Current UFW President Arturo Rodriguez praised the film. But Marshall Ganz, one of Chavez’s closest aides, called it “a cartoon of the man and his leadership.” Although the movie often depicts Chavez alone, he “could not allow himself to be alone,” Ganz said in an interview. Nor was Chavez likely to do something he does in the film — begin shouting at a picket line.

“His charisma was a kind of counter-charisma,” Ganz said. “His leadership was built around his capacity to build relationships … He connected people to each other.”

Still, Ganz said he hopes the film will stimulate new interest in Chavez, and lead people to read Pawel’s book and the growing body of scholarship about the farmworker movement. That scholarship includes the work of Yale professor Stephen Pitti and Arizona State’s Matthew Garcia, whose own book From the Jaws of Victory focused on how the movement changed after the UFW’s great triumphs.

“He’s a man who’s been characterized as an ‘American Gandhi,’ but he was also a union man,” Garcia said. “The union world is rough and tumble.” In the 1980s, Chavez purged perceived enemies and “Communists,” and in his final years he isolated himself at his home in the Tehachapi Mountains. “It was his Lear period,” Garcia said.

Garcia hopes that renewed interest in Chavez will lead students to explore Latino history and discover leaders whose names are not as widely known, including the late activists Bert Corona and Luisa Moreno, both of whom were pioneers of the immigrant rights movement.

But Cesar Chavez the film seems destined to have an effect, especially among those yearning for courageous role models. Chavez has long been just a name on a street sign to many students, or a chapter in a school textbook. Cesar Chavez gives them a flesh-and-blood person.

At one screening this month at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in central Los Angeles, hundreds of students erupted into a rhythmic, united clap as the film’s final credits rolled.

“We don’t have to do big things to make ourselves leaders,” said student Jaewoong Lee during a post-screening discussion. “We have to unselfishly spend a little time for a cause and that’s what is going to make us into a greater individual that contributes to society.”

Photo: Pantelion Films/MCT