thanks to every member of Local 152 who put their boots on the pavement and humbly asked the public for their support of the 3/4 cent sales tax to restore the financial health of our pension.  We gained national attention from the IAFF with the visit of General President Schaitberger.  Springfield has now become a model for success, showing the nation how a community can pull itself up by its own boot straps when faced with pension shortfalls.

Our work is not done.  We will work carefully with city management to install the safeguards to make sure this problem will never rear its ugly head again.  And we will do so while protecting the benefits we have worked for, fought for, and paid for.

Stay Safe!

 Shawn

Local 152 will raffle off this custom knife valued at over $240 donated by Jim Lane. 

Tickets will be $5 each, with all proceeds go to the Ellis Family. 

Drawing will be during the October 29th Exective Board Meeting. 

See your Executive Board member for tickets, or call the office at 864-5804.

Knife donated by Jim Lane of http://site.rockfarmknives.com/

IAFF Position on Health Care Reform

Last week, in a speech before both houses of Congress that was broadcast to the entire country, President Barack Obama spoke eloquently about the need for health care reform in the United States.

As health care insurance costs continue to rise at an incredible pace, and the burden of those rising costs continues to shift to our members' wallets, the IAFF, as your union, believes in and is fighting for health care reforms on your behalf, including assuring that all of our retirees retain coverage until they are Medicare-eligible.

This union's over-riding principle in fighting for reforms is simple and clear: Do no harm to our members. That means we're working to protect the benefit plans our members have and reduce the costs both to our members and their employers.

This is the message the IAFF continues to press hard as we lobby Congress concerning the debate over health care reform:

• The IAFF strongly opposes a tax on employee health insurance benefits AND we oppose an excise tax on insurance companies because those excise taxes are likely to be passed on to our members.
• The IAFF is against a single payer system and                                                                            
• we are against a government-run health care system.
• The IAFF supports reform that will contain the cost of care that has spiraled out of control, including provisions that would allow more competition, helping lower prices.
• The IAFF strongly supports reforms that will fix the broken policies of many health insurance companies, including:|
  -Forcing insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions.
  -Eliminating caps on benefits or coverage for certain treatments while a patient is receiving care.
• The IAFF supports reasonable limits on malpractice suits, or tort reform. That means we support allowing doctors to care for patients without the threat of unreasonable lawsuits, while at the same time giving victims the ability to seek reasonable compensation for gross negligence by a medical provider.
  
  Your union will keep pressing our case in Congress and at the AFL-CIO Convention this week in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, strongly conveying these positions during the debate on issues related to health care reform.
   

                                                                                     –Harold Schaitberger, IAFF General President