More than 1 Million Households to Receive Mail, Phone Calls, Door Visits Highlighting McCain’s Plan to Tax Health Care Benefits, Scale Back Health Coverage

Focusing on John McCain’s plan to tax employer-based health care, the AFL-CIO today launched a new campaign to reach out to more than 1 million union swing voters in battleground states through mail, phone calls and worksite and door visits, urging them to reject McCain’s proposals. The effort is heavily targeted to union swing voters – many of whom are moderate Democrats and Independents – in key states like Ohio and Pennsylvania.

“Taxing health care benefits would be a bad idea anytime, but John McCain’s proposal to place an additional financial burden on the middle class during a once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis shows just how profoundly out of touch he is,” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said. “His risky health care scheme would neither improve access to care nor reduce costs on struggling families. The bottom line is that McCain’s huge new tax on working families’ health care would be the straw that breaks the back of our middle-class.”

The AFL-CIO begins a new wave of communication today to union swing voters in Colorado, Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida with a mail piece highlighting McCain’s wrong-headed health care plan. McCain’s proposal would create a record-level new tax on the middle-class but do nothing to reduce costs on working families or provide coverage to the more than 46 million without it. Analysts agree that the McCain plan would push more families into the private market to buy health insurance on their own.

The mail, featuring a testimonial from Ohio union worker Dave Fecke, says McCain’s plan would also allow insurance companies to deny coverage based on pre-existing medical conditions and destroy Medicare by privatizing it, a plan similar to a failed proposal McCain and President Bush pushed to privatize Social Security.

“McCain’s practically had free health care his whole life,” Fecke says in the mail piece. “He doesn’t understand how hard it would be for my family to pay more.”

In addition to the mail, this week AFL-CIO volunteers will distribute more than 1 million leaflets at worksites on McCain’s health care record and plans, and they will make more than 150,000 phone calls. On Saturday, more than 5,000 volunteers will visit the homes of swing voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

The effort is part of the largest grassroots mobilization in the AFL-CIO’s history. The AFL-CIO is currently mobilizing 13 million voters in 24 priority states in support of candidates who stand with working families. In addition to the presidential race, the AFL-CIO is engaged in 11 Senate races and more than 60 House races. All told, the AFL-CIO is working in 510 races nationwide, including state legislative elections.

For a PDF copy of the mailer, please contact 202-637-5018

Contact: Steve Smith (202) 637-5018