Labor Should Fight for Single-Payer Retirement, Health Care

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=19&ItemID=12999

Labor Should Fight for Single-Payer Retirement, Health Care
by Al Hart

June 06, 2007
Labor Notes
Printer Friendly Version
EMail Article to a Friend

Working people in the United States are being hammered by twin crisis affecting what were once called "fringe benefits": health care and retirement benefits. In recent years, nearly all unions face employer attacks on one or both of these vital lifelines when they go to the bargaining table.

The ranks of the uninsured are mushrooming; rising deductibles and co-pays mean that many of the "insured" can't afford to get sick; and the rapid disappearance of pensions leave the majority of baby boomers facing the prospect of retiring into poverty--or working until they die.

BROKEN BEYOND REPAIR

It's obvious that the U.S. health care system, where workers get health coverage through their employer is falling apart before our eyes. Some 47 million Americans have no health insurance, and the number grows daily. Health insurance is rapidly becoming unaffordable. Premiums rose an average of 73 percent in just five years (2000-2005.)

Employers deal with this growing burden by dumping it onto employees, as higher payroll deductions, co-pays, deductibles, two-tier benefits, and reductions in coverage.

The labor movement has been coming around to the view that the system of privatized health coverage is broken beyond repair, and that only a political solution is possible. HR 676--the single-payer national health insurance bill whose chief sponsor is Rep. John Conyers--has been endorsed to date by 255 labor organizations, including 17 state AFL-CIO federations and 69 central labor councils.

On March 6 the AFL-CIO Executive Council passed a resolution calling for universal health care based on expanding Medicare. This is precisely the approach of the Conyers bill, but the AFL-CIO statement did not explicitly endorse Conyers or any other specific piece of legislation.



FULL article at link.

[tech3149]

1. Not just labor, business should be out front on the issue

Much more of the cost of doing business and attracting and keeping a top level workforce hinges on being able to provide quality health care as an employment benefit. If you provide it, you spend countless hours and dollars trying to provide the best package available and even more trying to streamline the operation to pay for it.

If the typical MBA running most business's could pull their head out of their arses to look at the world around them, they'd realize how much better it would be for all of us. The last company I worked for never offered a good health care plan, but the cost went up year after year (not just for the company but the employees as well). Every couple of years we would waste a day or two while the provider and the owners would try and sell us on how good the plan was and how all the other alternatives were bad. Between the time wasted by office personnel doing research and the lost productive time during the sales pitch, we could have paid for the increase from the existing plan.

Anyone with a brain and access should be selling the idea to corporations on the premise of getting that monkey off their back. After all, one of the mantra's of today's business model is to externalize responsibilities and maximize profits. What better way to make that happen! KISS--- Keep It Simple Stupid Single payer is about as simple as it gets.

The only downside I see is the loss of jobs in the insurance industry but those people could be absorbed into the administration of a government run SPHC system. It might hurt the executives from the insurance companies, but that handfull of leeches will probably find another sucker industry to feed their need in short order.