The Hayes family at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., in July, from left: Pat Hayes with his wife, Libby, and daughters Hannah and Molly. Hannah Hayes, a midshipman, was inducted into the U.S. Navy and began summer training.

When President Bill Clinton proposed to reform the way our country delivers health care, I happened to be at the UAW-Local Union Press Association (LUPA) Communications Conference at Black Lake.

It was 1993, and health care reform was a hot topic then – just as it is now – and I wanted to find out what other local union communicators, like me, thought about the issue.

At each of the workshops, training sessions and informal gatherings at the Walter and May Reuther UAW Family Education Center in Onaway, Mich. – even in the dining room where I ate breakfast, lunch and dinner – I conducted an informal poll of my companions to find out what they thought about the Clinton plan.

What I learned that week in speaking to dozens of the union’s best communicators surprised me more than I can say.

The LUPA Conference is where local union news and video editors, writers, designers and photographers from all over the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico meet every 18 months or so to improve their communication skills with the membership. Often, top UAW leaders such as President Ron Gettelfinger are there to discuss important issues facing the union.

A key element of Clinton’s proposed plan was a mandate that employers provide health insurance coverage to their employees, something the UAW strongly supported.

While the UAW has always favored a single-payer approach, then-UAW President Owen Bieber said Clinton’s plan offered the best hope for restraining health care costs for large employers, such as Ford Motor Co. and then-General Motors Corp. and Chrysler Corp.

If implemented, Bieber said, the Clinton plan would keep labor costs at American companies competitive with the foreign competition.

Despite the UAW’s support, the intense focus on health care at the conference and widespread coverage in the national media, my informal polling found there wasn’t much support for – or interest in – health care reform among my fellow delegates.

In retrospect, I think it was because UAW members back then had great health insurance.

There were no co-pays for prescriptions or office visits. We hadn’t yet surrendered raises, bonuses and COLA adjustments to hang onto our health care.

Our retirees still paid nothing out of pocket for the care they’d worked so hard to win.

When Clinton proposed his health care reform plan, nobody had yet heard of a voluntary employee beneficiary association, or VEBA, and, to paraphrase Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler in “Gone With the Wind,” nobody much gave a damn.

In the 16 years since, the insurance industry and their servants in the Republican Party sent the Clinton plan down to defeat and autoworkers have seen a lot of changes – none of them good.

American auto companies have been pushed to the brink by foreign competitors who save billions of dollars because of government-sponsored health care in their home countries.

In Japan, for example, health care services are provided by national and local governments. For more than 25 years, payment for personal medical services there is offered through a universal health care insurance system that provides relative equality of access, with fees set by a government committee. Those without insurance through employers can participate in a national health insurance program administered by local governments. All seniors are covered by government-sponsored insurance, and patients are free to select physicians or facilities of their choice.

In large part because the Clinton plan was defeated, 83,000 UAW jobs have been lost in Michigan alone. Here in Missouri, Ford’s Hazelwood Plant and Chrysler’s twin truck and car plants in Fenton, Mo., have all closed. Miraculously, GM’s Wentzville (Mo.) Plant was spared, but workers weren’t so lucky at the company’s 67 dealerships that closed in Missouri and Kansas this summer.

Even more ominously, both GM and Chrysler, once two-thirds of Detroit’s Big Three, were forced into bankruptcy. And although Ford stood alone in not asking for a government handout, we all know the company is already asking for more givebacks from union members, even though we already reopened the contract and granted concessions just last February.

Today President Barack Obama is working with Congress to develop a new health care reform plan. Once again the insurance industry and their Republican allies oppose any reform.

This time autoworkers better get on board. We better fight for health care reform as if our jobs depended on it, because if we don’t, there may not be a next time for us.

An electrician by trade, Pat Hayes has worked at Ford’s Kansas City Assembly plant since 1986. He has been editor of First Local News, Local 249’s monthly newsletter, where this story first appeared in September, for 16 years.