American conservatives love to bash Canadian health care but U.S. corporations love it
DAVE LINDORFF at Salon
http://www.salon.com/2017/05/28/american-conservatives-love-to-bash-canadian-health-care-but-u-s-corporations-love-it/
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President Donald Trump has been pushing hard, along with Republicans in Congress, to eliminate former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. But as he and leaders of the Senate and House struggle to come up with some alternative health care law, they might ask themselves why large companies like General Motors, Ford and Chrysler (now Fiat Chrysler) over recent decades have shifted roughly half their car and truck production — and the jobs that go with them — across the Detroit River into Canada.
Here’s one big reason they did it: Canada’s government-run single-payer health system, known as Medicare — to be clear, not the same Medicare as the American health care system for senior citizens — lowers those auto companies’ health care costs from more than $15,000 per worker in the United States to just a few thousand dollars in Canada, with all Canadian taxpayers, not just employees and their employers, picking up the tab.
House to send health care bill to Senate in a few weeks
Canada’s health care system, since it was established in 1968 and became fully implemented by the provinces in 1971, has functioned as a government insurance program for negotiating fees to and then paying physicians, hospitals and other health care providers. Funded broadly by individual and corporate taxpayers, the tax burden on Canadian employers for Canada’s Medicare system works out to about $1,000 per worker per year and several thousand more per family.
Although few if any executives of large firms in the U.S. have advocated a similar single-payer system here, executives of Canadian subsidiaries of those same companies not only say they like the system, but enthusiastically make use of it not just for their workers, but for themselves and their families. In fact, a decade ago, those executives of U.S. Canadian subsidiaries joined with executives and union presidents of Canadian-based firms to lobby the Canadian government to expand and increase funding for Medicare, seeking to have it cover long-term care, dental care and drugs.
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You know the same companies that support single payer in Canada spend money to oppose it here. And you know why? Well, at least one of them told the brilliant Jeff Faux (http://www.jefffaux.com) that it is because of class solidarity (you can read the anecdote in his book the Global Class War) (https://www.amazon.com/Global-Class-War-Americas-Bipartisan/dp/0470098287).
People need to stop fooling themselves that there isn't a class war in the US. There is. It is being waged very effectively by the rich against everyone else.
