Health Care:
Let’s get everyone in the pool
Message from UAW President Ron Gettelfinger
Everyone agrees: America’s health care system is in a serious crisis.
Premium costs are rising while benefits are eroding. Prescription drug costs continue to climb while pharmaceutical companies spend lavishly on advertising.
Health care workers, particularly nurses, face heavy workloads, long hours and have real concerns about the quality of patient care.
And, more than 40 million people have no insurance coverage and it’s predicted that number will soon top 44 million. The number of uninsured Americans now equals the population of 23 states and the District of Columbia.
One thing is clear: The health care crisis cannot be settled at the bargaining table. This crisis is a national issue and needs a national solution.
More and more, employers are trying to shift the costs of health care to workers, claiming that high insurance premiums put them at a competitive disadvantage. But shifting costs from employers to workers doesn’t reduce overall health care costs in the long run, nor does it result in better or more appropriate medical care.
If cost shifting won’t work, what will? The answer is as obvious as it is politically challenging: We need to expand our health care system to include all workers and all employers.
After all, one of the reasons that UAW-represented auto companies are able to offer comprehensive benefits is because they are large employers paying the health care costs for hundreds of thousands of people. A large risk pool helps control costs, because the majority of healthy people who make modest use of the benefits balance out the less healthy people who have higher medical costs.
The UAW has long advocated creating a health care system with the largest pool imaginable: Every man, woman and child in the United States.
The solution to our national health care crisis is not to pit one group against another but to build on our common interest: Care for those who need it, when they need it, at a price that everyone can afford.
