Healing the System
Grassroots initiatives push health care reforms to the top
Just about any way you look at it there is a health care crisis in the United States.
One in seven Americans has no health insurance. Those with insurance are paying more out of pocket for fewer benefits. The cost of prescription drugs is crippling senior citizens financially.
A recent report by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies declared the current health care system “is incapable of meeting the present, let alone the future needs, of the American public.” Yet President Bush’s plans are only “free market” band-aid reforms to Medicare and prescription drugs for seniors.
But there is some hope. Initiatives for real reform that makes a difference for working people are rippling across the country. There are grassroots movements in at least 30 states that show what people really want.
Union push in Wisconsin
For instance, in Wisconsin the UAW and the AFL-CIO are working to establish
a state employer-based health care system.
“When adopted, this plan will mean if you have a job, you will have health care,” said UAW Region 4 CAP coordinator Red Platz, who represents the UAW on the union committee developing the Wisconsin plan.
Platz points out an important aspect of the health care crisis. Most of those one in seven uninsured Americans have jobs. People without jobs tend to qualify for public assistance. People in low-paying jobs with no benefits don’t. And employers who do provide insurance are asking workers to pay more or dropping it entirely as insurance costs skyrocket each year.
No tax increase
The Wisconsin proposal calls for establishing a labor and business commission
to negotiate specifics of insurance coverage, just like in collective bargaining.
From the outset, the plan is guaranteed to be close to universal and not funded
by an income tax increase. Rather, it will be financed by an employer-paid
assessment similar to how unemployment insurance is funded.
“We’re even going to small business and major manufacturers to build this coalition,” said Wisconsin AFL-CIO President David Newby. “Our research shows we can lower employer health care costs by 25 percent simply by lowering administrative costs through a single payer statewide plan.”
The fear of higher taxes has been key to those who oppose a single-payer health insurance system in the United States. But the numbers don’t support that. Here, we already pay about 14 percent of our gross domestic product on health care and not everyone is insured. The universal health care system in Canada only costs about 9 percent of the gross domestic product.
“National health insurance doesn’t mean spending more; it means spending wisely. By slashing bureaucracy and drug prices, we could save enough to cover all of the uninsured and improve coverage for the rest of us,” said Dr. David Himmelstein, co-author of a Harvard Medical School study on health care.
Support across the nation
The initiatives in various states provide an important beginning for the discussion
on universal insurance and how to provide it. They also show immense support
for the idea.
• A poll by the University of North Carolina in 2000 showed 83 percent support from all citizens for government action to insure all state residents. The UAW supports the North Carolina Committee to Defend Health Care’s proposed state constitutional amendment to make health care a human right.
• In Maryland more than 2,300 groups, including UAW Region 8, helped to get 70 delegates and 18 senators to endorse the Health Care for All resolution, a plan to provide health coverage for every citizen in the state funded by 5 percent of payroll surcharge on businesses that don’t offer health insurance to employees and an increase in the tobacco tax.
• Health Care for All-California is leading the way in building grassroots support for a single payer health care bill the state legislature has on its docket this year.
• Even Texas, home state to President George W. Bush, has The Health Care for All coalition that intends to introduce state legislation for universal, comprehensive and affordable health care this year.
Ohio goes for prescriptions
Other states, such as Ohio, are taking a smaller bite of the health insurance
pie. Kurt Bateman, the UAW CAP chair for Ohio’s Franklin County, spent
Election Day collecting signatures for the Coalition for Affordable Prescription
Drugs. That group is pushing the Ohio legislature to create prescription drug
coverage for uninsured and elderly citizens.
“We decided to get signatures at the polls Nov. 5 because we knew we could reach a lot of people that way,” said Bateman, a tool and die maker at the Delphi plant in Columbus. He and 30 other Local 969 members joined hundreds of health care activists in the petition campaign that day.
“By 6:30 p.m. election night, I counted 1,000 people having voted at the poll and over 500 had signed our petition,” said Bateman. “And this was in a precinct that voted solidly for a Republican legislator who opposed our bill.
The Ohio prescription drug bill is modeled after a statute adopted in Maine that has served as a model in other states. Under the Maine Rx program, the state negotiates discounts with drug companies and acts as the pharmaceutical benefits manager for citizens who don’t have prescription drug coverage. Enactment of the Maine law is on hold until a legal challenge by the drug industry is settled.
Cost shifting a labor issue
The current system of some employers providing most family health insurance
while others don’t has failed. Even those employers who do provide insurance
are more and more passing costs on to workers. This cost shifting has become
a bigger and more contentious issue at the bargaining table and it’s
not going away.
As UAW President Ron Gettelfinger says in his letter, “The health care crisis cannot be settled at the bargaining table.”
Still, with grassroots movements pushing the agenda, maybe fixing the system can start at your kitchen table, but it has to grow from there.
Gettelfinger set the challenge at the UAW’s Special Bargaining Convention last year, “As a union, we simply cannot give up the fight for affordable health care for all.”
