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Amazon’s consumer chief says the company is ‘like the Bernie Sanders of employers’ but that ‘we actually deliver a progressive workplace for our constituents’

Amazon would really like Democratic lawmakers to forget stories about its warehouse workers peeing in bottles amid allegations of union-busting tactics.

The retail giant fired at one of its critics, Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan, on Twitter on Wednesday, saying: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.”

This was in response to Pocan’s earlier tweet about Amazon, in which he commented: “Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make you a “progressive workplace” when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles.”

Tensions between Amazon and some Democratic lawmakers, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, are running high as Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama vote on whether to unionize.

The reference to warehouse workers peeing in bottles out of desperation originates from a claim made by British author James Bloodworth in 2018, after he went undercover at an Amazon warehouse. He told Insider at the time that he had come across a bottle of urine on a warehouse shelf, and said workers were admonished for taking toilet breaks.

Drivers of Amazon-affiliated courier companies also told Insider that some workers urinated in bottles to save time on the road.

Dave Clark, Amazon’s consumer chief, claimed on Wednesday that the company is “like the Sanders of employers” but that “we actually deliver a progressive workplace for our constituents.”

He made the comments ahead of Sanders’ visit to Amazon’s Alabama warehouse to meet workers amid the vote.

“If you want to hear about $15 an hour and health care, Senator Sanders will be speaking downtown. But if you would like to make at least $15 an hour and have good health care, Amazon is hiring,” Clark added.

Amazon called on lawmakers to push other employers to provide better benefits.

“We hope you can enact policies that get other employers to offer what we already do,” the firm tweeted.

Amazon is raised its minimum wage to $15 following pressure from Sanders, and has recently been pushing for lawmakers to hike up the minimum wage nationally.

Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama have until Monday to vote on whether to form what would be the company’s first union.

Amazon has aggressively opposed this, telling employees that unions aren’t worth the money charged in dues and that the company already provides enough benefits to workers. The company placed anti-union ads on Twitch, reportedly posted anti-union messages in warehouse bathroom stalls, and pushed the National Labor Relations Board to require in-person votes.

Some Democratic lawmakers, on the other hand, have spoken out in support of unionization.

Without naming Amazon, President Joe Biden said in a video posted by Bloomberg that “the choice to join a union is up to the workers.”

“There should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda,” he added.

Sanders, on the other hand, has been much more outspoken in his criticism of Amazon’s anti-union push.

“[Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos, you are worth $182 billion,” Sanders said at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on March 17. “You’re the wealthiest person in the world. Why are you doing everything in your power to stop your workers in Bessemer, Alabama, from joining a union?”

An Insider survey of Amazon employees nationwide showed that about 40% wished they were represented by a union.

Taking Aim at ‘Rigged’ System, New Sanders Bills Would Reverse Trump’s Corporate Tax Cut, End Offshoring

Aiming to reorient a tax system he describes as fundamentally “rigged,” Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday morning is planning to unveil a pair of bills that would restore the corporate tax rate to 35%, eliminate rules that allow U.S. companies to skirt their obligations by moving overseas, and impose a new tax on ultra-wealthy estates.

The legislation will come as Sanders (I-Vt.) is set to preside over a Senate Budget Committee hearing on possible solutions to deep inequities in the U.S. tax code, which former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party made even more friendly to the rich and large corporations in 2017 by passing the deeply unpopular Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

The first of Sanders’ two bills, according to NPR, would reverse a key element of the Trump-GOP tax law by raising the corporate rate from 21% to 35%, where it was prior to the 2017 cut. The legislation would also “end rules that allow companies to further reduce their tax bill by shifting operations offshore,” NPR reported Thursday morning.

The Vermont senator’s second bill would take aim at the soaring wealth of the top 0.5% of U.S. households. Under the legislation, NPR explained, “those with estates between $3.5 million and $10 million would be taxed at 45%, the rate would jump to 50% between $10 million and $50 million, 55% for estates over $50 million, and 65% for estates valued at over $1 billion.”

“What we need to do, in the midst of massive income and wealth inequality, when the rich are becoming much richer, while the middle class struggles, we need a tax system which says to the wealthy and large corporations that they’re finally going to have to start paying their fair share,” Sanders told NPR in an interview. “At the end of the day, we need massive tax reform in this country so that we end the tax loopholes and the giveaways to the wealthy and large corporations.”

Sanders’ proposals come as President Joe Biden is reportedly considering tax hikes on the rich and corporations to help finance a forthcoming infrastructure plan. According to the Washington Post, White House officials have discussed raising the corporate tax rate to 28%—well short of Sanders’ 35% proposal—and increasing the top marginal tax rate for individuals from 37% to 39.6%.

As chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Sanders is positioned to have significant influence over the infrastructure package, particularly if Democrats opt to push the legislation through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process—which seems likely, given GOP opposition.

“The second reconciliation bill will deal with long-term structural problems that we’ve had in this country long before the pandemic,” Sanders told NPR. “We need to build millions of units of low-income and affordable housing. We must address the crisis of climate change and transform our energy system away from fossil fuel. And when we do those things, deal with infrastructure, deal with climate, we can in fact create many, many millions of good-paying jobs.”

Democrats Gave Americans a Big Boost Buying Health Insurance. It Didn’t Come Cheap.

When Democrats pushed through a two-year expansion of the Affordable Care Act in the covid-relief bill this month, many people celebrated the part that will make health insurance more affordable for more Americans.

But health care researchers consider this move a short-term fix for a long-term crisis, one that avoids confronting an uncomfortable truth: The only clear path to expanding health insurance remains yet more government subsidies for commercial health plans, which are the most costly form of coverage.

The reliance on private plans — a hard-fought compromise in the 2010 health law that was designed to win over industry — already costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars each year, as the federal government picks up a share of the insurance premiums for about 9 million Americans.

The ACA’s price tag will now rise higher because of the recently enacted $1.9 trillion covid relief bill. The legislation will direct some $20 billion more to insurance companies by making larger premium subsidies available to consumers who buy qualified plans.

And if Democrats want to continue the aid beyond 2022, when the relief bill’s added assistance runs out, the tab is sure to balloon further.

“The expansion of coverage is the path of least resistance,” said Paul Starr, a Princeton University sociologist and leading authority on the history of U.S. health care who has termed this dynamic a “health policy trap.”

“Insurers don’t have much to lose. Hospitals don’t have much to lose. Pharmaceutical companies don’t have much to lose,” Starr observed. “But the result is you end up adding on to an incredibly expensive system.”

By next year, taxpayers will shell out more than $8,500 for every American who gets a subsidized health plan through insurance marketplaces created by the ACA, often called Obamacare. That’s up an estimated 40% from the cost of the marketplace subsidies in 2020, due to the augmented aid, data from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office indicates.

Supporters of the aid package, known as the American Rescue Plan, argue the federal government had to move quickly to help people struggling during the pandemic.

“This is exactly why we pay taxes. We want the federal government to be there when we need it most,” said Mila Kofman, who runs the District of Columbia’s insurance marketplace. Kofman said the middle of a pandemic was not a time to “wait for the perfect solution.”

But the large new government commitment underscores the disparity between the high price of private health insurance and lower-cost government plans such as Medicare and Medicaid.

Acutely aware of this disparity, the crafters of the ACA laid out a second path to provide health insurance for uninsured Americans beside the marketplaces: Medicaid.

The half-century-old government safety net insures about 13 million low-income, working-age adults who gained eligibility for the program through the health law and make too little to qualify for subsidized commercial insurance.

Medicaid coverage is still costly: about $7,000 per person every year, federal data indicates.

But that’s about 18% less than what the government will pay to cover people through commercial health plans.

“We knew it would be less expensive than subsidizing people to go to private plans,” said former Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee helped write the Affordable Care Act and has long championed Medicaid.

For patients, Medicaid offered another advantage. Unlike most commercial health insurance, which requires enrollees to pay large deductibles before their coverage kicks in, Medicaid sharply limits how much people must pay for a doctor’s visit or a trip to the hospital.

That can have a huge impact on a patient’s finances.

Take, for example, a 50-year-old woman living outside Phoenix with a part-time job paying $1,000 a month. With an income that low, the woman could enroll in Arizona’s Medicaid program.

If, one day, she slipped on her steps and broke an arm, her medical bills would likely be fully covered, leaving her with no out-of-pocket expenses.

If the same woman were to find a full-time job that pays $4,000 a month but doesn’t offer health benefits, she would still be able to get coverage, this time through a commercial health plan on Arizona’s insurance marketplace.

Taxpayers would still pick up a portion of the cost of her health plan, in this case about $300 a month, or half the $606 monthly premium for a basic silver-level plan from health insurer Oscar, according to a subsidy calculator from KFF, a health policy nonprofit. The woman would have to pay the rest of the monthly premium.

Unlike Medicaid, however, her Oscar “Silver Saver” plan comes with a $6,200 deductible.

That means that the same broken arm from her fall would likely leave her with medical bills topping $4,700, according to cost estimates from the federal healthcare.gov marketplace.

The main reason commercial health plans cost more and saddle patients with higher medical bills is because they typically pay hospitals, doctors and other medical providers more than public programs such as Medicaid.

Often the price differences are dramatic.

For example, health insurers in the Atlanta area pay primary care physicians $93 on average for a basic patient visit, according to an analysis of 2017 commercial insurance data by the Health Care Cost Institute, a research nonprofit.

By contrast, Georgia’s Medicaid program would pay the same physician seeing a patient covered by the government health plan just $41, according to the state’s fee schedule.

“It’s much cheaper to deliver health coverage to people through public programs like Medicaid than through private insurance because the prices paid to doctors, hospitals and drug companies are so much less,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF.

The price disparity also explains why the health care industry, including insurers and providers, for years has fought proposals to create a new government plan, or “public option,” that might pay less.

Industry officials frequently argue that hospitals and physicians couldn’t stay in business unless they charge higher prices to commercial insurers to offset the low prices paid by government programs.

The Biden administration and congressional Democrats for now skirted a battle over this issue by simply upping subsidies for private health insurers.