|
|
|
|
Labor Strikes and Health Care
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Bara Berg, W A M M
|
In April, Phyllis Walker, president of AFSCME Local 3800, put her finger on the core issue facing unions today: “ATU Local 1005, representing over 2,200 transit workers, has been on strike for over one month. In October 2003, AFSCME Local 3800, representing 1,800 clerical workers at the University of Minnesota, was on strike for fifteen days. These two unions struck their employers for the same reason: dramatically increased health care costs.”
It is the same issue hitting all of us. Why are workers being hit by increased health costs? In brief, because entrenched corporate power is blocking reforms that would save money and expand health care coverage.
A single-payer health plan could save $3 billion to $5.5 billion annually in administrative and drug costs. Administrative savings would come from eliminating both redundant paperwork and the generous profits diverted to insurance middlemen. Drug savings would come by empowering the government, as single payer (as with Medicare), to negotiate with drug companies for the same cheaper prices other countries get.
The single-payer model would help prevent duplication in equipment but preserve choice of providers. The savings would more than cover the cost of extending full coverage without co-pays to everyone, including those now uninsured.
How does our present health care system stack up against that of the rest of the world? Not so well. The U.S. is the only industrialized country that has no universal health care and no form of control on the prices of drugs. The World Health Organization ranks the U.S. only 33rd of all nations in health care!
Thirty years ago pressure was building for a universal health care system based on Medicare. Richard Nixon successfully countered with mandated employment-based health care legislation. In the 1980s medical costs were soaring and several large unions joined consumer and community groups to endorse tax-supported single-payer legislation. But the ill-advised and ill-fated Clinton Health Security Act, which preserved private insurance control of health benefits, seduced the AFL-CIO and other unions into settling for the continuation of job-based health plans.
Of course, job-based plans offer no help for millions of self-employed, part-time, and temporary workers. And over the past 25 years, many workers who had won contracts guaranteeing paid retirement health benefits have had their benefits yanked by mergers, bankruptcies, and renegotiated contracts. In Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth Century America, Colin Gordon wrote, “Employment-based health insurance, floated as an alternative to public insurance in the middle years of the [last] century, is now little more than a leaky life raft for politicians clinging to budget-neutral solutions and workers with nowhere else to swim.”
Managed care, promoted as the cure-all for rising health costs, hasn’t worked. As bioethicist Art Kaplan said in 2001, “Events of the past year demonstrate beyond a doubt that managed care has failed—and failed dismally. The greatest single ethical crisis facing American health care as we move into the new year is what to do about it.”
Now medical costs are again soaring, underscoring the failure of managed care approaches and reflecting, in part, bloated insurance and pharmaceutical costs. The need for a publicly funded, single-payer, universal, and comprehensive health care system is even more obvious today.
The linkage of health care benefits to employment is literally killing some of us. Those without employment or full benefits are all too often denied necessary treatment. Lack of immunizations and optimum treatment of infectious diseases endangers us all. Unions are forced to spend resources and clout on health care rather than on job safety, work environment, fair employment, and compensation. Racism and xenophobia are exacerbated when workers are pitted against each other for scarce resources.
According to Rhoda Gilman, chair of the Minnesota Universal Health Care Coalition, “as long as health care is linked to jobs, it will be a preserve of private insurance companies and a bargaining chip between workers and employers. As health care costs escalate and as strike after strike is called because employees are asked to absorb those costs, the folly of treating the human right to health care as a market-driven commodity tied to employment status and to the concept of private insurance becomes more clear each day. The public good, as well as the interest of both workers and employers, demands a universal single-payer system of health care.”
Some economists, like Jeremy Leonard, are urging manufacturers to lobby our government to find ways to shift more health care costs to individuals. A better plan is to shift the tax burden from the poor and middle class to corporations and the rich in order to finance the kind of health care America needs.
We need to support workers who, like the bus strikers, are fighting on an issue important to us all. Let’s join them in demanding a universal and comprehensive, single-payer, publicly funded health care system. |
|
|
Cost of War
“Taxpayers in the U.S. will pay $125 billion for the minimum cost of war in Iraq. For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided: 22,355,800 people receiving health care.”
—National Priorities Project, www.nationalpriorities.org.
|
|
|
|
|
© 2004 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
|
 |
|
Complete May 2004 Index - click here
|
|
 |
|
|
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
|
|
|
|
|
