Daily Herald: Chicago council to vote on minimum wage
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has called a special city council meeting on a proposal to raise the minimum wage in the city to $13 an hour. A workforce committee will meet Monday with the special council meeting on Tuesday. Emanuel spokeswoman Kelley Quinn tells the Chicago Sun-Times the mayor wants to act to prevent a possible attempt by the Illinois General Assembly to pre-empt the proposal.
Chicago Tribune: The risk in rushing an Illinois health exchange
Tens of thousands of Illinois residents will sign up for coverage under Obamacare over the next few months. Many of them wouldn’t be able to afford the insurance without a federal subsidy to help pay the premiums.
Those subsidies, however, are in jeopardy because the Affordable Care Act was poorly, hastily written. The U.S. Supreme Court will decide next year whether the subsidies are legal in Illinois and many other states that use HealthCare.gov, the federal Obamacare website.
Illinois could ensure that its citizens don’t lose their subsidies by setting up the state’s own health care exchange. Illinois officials recently submitted an application for federal funds to help set up a state-based exchange. But lawmakers in Springfield would have to agree to fund the exchange’s future operations. There’s a tight deadline for the application: The feds will take their money — as much as $300 million, proponents say — off the table at the end of the year.
Washington Post: More competition means some Obamacare premiums rising little in 2015
A surge in health insurer competition appears to be helping restrain premium increases in hundreds of counties next year, with prices dropping in many places where newcomers are offering the least expensive plans, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis of federal premium records.
KHN looked at premiums for the lowest-cost silver plan for a 40-year-old in 34 states where the federal government is running marketplaces for people who do not get coverage through their employers. Consumers have until Feb. 15 to enroll for coverage in 2015, the marketplace’s second year.
The number of insurers offering silver plans, the most popular type of plan in 2014, is increasing in two-thirds of counties, according to the analysis. In counties that are adding at least one insurer next year, premiums for the least expensive silver plan are rising 1 percent on average. Where the number of insurers is not changing, premiums are growing 7 percent on average.
Chicago Tribune: Minimum wage poses predicament for service agencies
As Democratic lawmakers renew their push to raise the state’s minimum wage, there’s a key sector of employers that finds itself stuck in the middle — nonprofit groups that care for some of the state’s most vulnerable, including the elderly and disabled.
That’s because while they’d like to pay their workers more, many of those agencies receive the bulk of their funding from the state. Given Illinois’ dire financial situation — which will only grow worse if portions of a temporary income tax increase expire as scheduled Jan. 1 — it means they could be on the hook for higher salaries without getting more money from the state to cover the additional costs.
As a result, groups that have operated on bare-bones budgets for years as government funding and private donations dried up may be forced to make even deeper cuts and further scale back services.
Chicago Tribune:FDA unveils tougher rules for displaying calorie information
Just as Americans begin to cook their high-calorie Thanksgiving dinners, the U.S. government is enacting sweeping changes it hopes will push people to pay more attention to how many calories they consume away from their dining room tables.
The new rules requiring calories to be shown on menus come after years of debate among restaurant operators, grocery store owners and others affected by the change. The requirements were passed in 2010 as part of the Affordable Care Act, yet won’t start to take effect until late 2015.
Some restaurants, such as McDonald’s, Panera Bread and Starbucks, already list calorie counts on their menus. Many restaurants started to do so to comply with various state and local requirements. But starting next fall, chains with 20 or more locations serving prepared food will have to comply.
Daily Herald: Illinois Route 66 gets electric charging stations
Illinois’ portion of historic Route 66 is getting a high-tech upgrade with the installation of a network of electric vehicle charging stations.
The project will allow drivers of electric cars to zoom along the 300-mile stretch from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River near St. Louis.
The $1 million project is being supported by automakers with technical help from the University of California at Davis. Work begins this month and should be finished by summer.
Washington Post: How Facebook plans to become one of the most powerful tools in politics
Political campaigns are obsessed with two things: Telling every possible voter exactly what they want to hear in order to get them to the polls and cast the “right” vote, and telling them that message for as close to zero dollars as possible.
It’s not a surprise, then, that Facebook has focused its social-Sauron eye on the world of politics. Already a focal point of political activity (of varying quality), the site has shifted its toolset to let campaigns target extremely specific audiences with very specific messages, for prices somewhat north of zero dollars. The end goal for the company seems clear: Replace, as much as possible, expensive, blanketed television advertising with much more immediate, much more specific ads appearing in users’ feeds — and then cash a whole lot of checks.
This is not as far in the future as you might think.