For more than a half century, the UAW has advocated a comprehensive, national health care plan. America has never been closer to realizing this humane endeavor than we are today. For the first time in these long decades, business, the American Medical Association, as well as many of our friends in the labor movement and in social justice organizations, have joined together to pressure Congress to act.

Throughout those decades, the UAW has weighed in on the need for a national health security program that would cover all Americans. Here are some representative comments.

Leonard Woodcock

“Despite some 30 years of private insurance company effort, 30 million Americans have no (health) coverage whatsoever. What coverage there is, is so limited that today, private health insurance covers just over a third of consumer health expenditures.”

– Testimony to Subcommittee on Health of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare,
Feb. 23, 1971, Washington

“Health care has emerged as the number one industry of the nation because its costs have increased much faster over a much longer period of time than costs in other industries.”

– Speech to Blue Cross/Blue Shield Symposium; “Health Care Crisis
University of Chicago Center for Continuing Education, Nov. 18, 1976.

Doug Fraser

“We in the labor movement are painfully aware of the need for a comprehensive national health plan. We are unable to solve most of our members’ health care problems at the bargaining table.”

– Address to the American Public Health Association, Detroit, Oct. 23, 1980

“Ultimately, the answer is comprehensive national health security which will control costs through budget controls, elimination or waste, and improved efficiency, as other nations have done … We cannot afford to wait for such a fundamental solution. We must act with dispatch.”

– June 22, 1982, address to
Group Health Institute, Detroit

Walter Reuther

“I share the view that the right to good health is a basic human right, that comprehensive, high-quality health care must be made available to every citizen as a matter of right.”

– Speech delivered to the 8th annual Bronfman Lecture to the American Public Health Association;
Nov. 14, 1968

“… in no area of our national life is there a greater gap between promise and performance than in health care.”

– as chair of The Committee of 100, 1969

Owen Bieber

“The health care needs of all Americans can only be met by a universal and comprehensive national health care program.”

– UAW News release, May 20, 1987, on the proposed Minimum Health Benefits for American Workers Act of 1987

“As long as employers have to compete on the basis of their health care costs, there will be a significant incentive for employers to seek ways to reduce these costs and, in particular, to cut or eliminate benefits.”

– Testimony to Subcommittee on Labor of the
Committee on Labor and Human Resources, March 2, 1993, Washington

Stephen P. Yokich

“Instead of systematic reform that includes universal coverage, cost containment, quality assurance and more equitable financing, we are faced with a ‘free market,’ piecemeal approach that leaves gaping holes in coverage, cost and access.”

“We must continue the fight to bring the United States in line with other industrialized countries in the world by instituting a reformed national, comprehensive and fair health care system.”

– President’s Report to
32nd UAW Constitutional Convention, 1998

Ron Gettelfinger

“The time has long ago come for all of us to agree that affordable, high-quality health care should be a right, not a privilege.”

– Aug. 5, 2009, Detroit News editorial

“Comprehensive national health care reform has never been more urgent – both for the sake of the uninsured and to reduce costs for U.S. companies.”

– June 20, 2009,
Washington Post editorial

Compiled by John Hammond