Building Trades News

Hand Wringing, Name Calling Starts Again - All over Health Care

By Richard Slawson, Executive-Secretary

On three occasions now, over the last ten years, California politicians and the public have failed to bring healthcare coverage to all workers and their families. Why? Because big money doesn’t like the idea and spends big money to undermine voters’ confidence in any plan. It has been amazing to watch big business’ “publicity machine” go into effect against any government mandated healthcare plan. Today it starts with websites, where new ones are created for specific issues. Then newspaper commentators followed by editorial boards. And finally we see the television commercials. All of this activity and expense designed to defeat any legislation that would provide medical coverage to families in California. The saddest thing about this type of opposition is that it comes from the same business interests that have been against paying for medical coverage for their own employees or from businesses who have been canceling their company’s coverage for their employees. The opposition is over profits the stockholders demand and the big salaries and perks that the upper management enjoy, including medical coverage. Neither seems to have a conscience. Now we have another opportunity to implement a statewide health plan with three medical care proposals being supported separately by the Governor, the Speaker Pro Tem of the Senate and the Speaker of the Assembly. These plans all have a form of statewide coverage for workers and families. However, they differ greatly in how they are funded and how business would participate in the funding of the plans. Also, the State Federation of Labor and all of the Unions that are affiliated are offering a statewide medical plan. There are other organizations that are putting forward their ideas as well. What is needed is a plan that is available for everyone, funded through employment and through government for those who don’t have other coverage. This would provide the preventive care that every family needs. In an article in the Sacramento Bee (which is not a Labor friendly newspaper) on March 11, 2007, reporter Clea Benson said; “Massachusetts, the first state to require its residents to buy health insurance for face tax penalties, released the first details last week on how much individuals will have to pay for coverage if they don’t get it through their jobs. Consumer groups immediately charged that the insurance would be too expensive for some: People over age 56 making as little as $30,000 a year would have to pay at least $347 a month in premiums and could spend thousands of dollars more if they got sick”. That is obviously unacceptable. With these complicated funding mechanisms, how the program there will affect Massachusetts’ residents won’t be know until the plan has operated for some time. California lawmakers will face the same unknowns until a California plan is adopted. But at this time in California history, with the economic realities of healthcare in the state, and in the country for that matter, there is no long an alternative to a voter mandated health plan. According to recent government data there are more than 46 million uninsured people in the United States and over 6.5 million of them live in California. Millions more are underinsured even when holding down full time jobs and in many cases two jobs. According to the World Health Organization, the United States, meaning you and I, are spending over $7,129 per capita on health care annually, which is double what other industrialized countries are paying. You might understand the cost if we were at the top of the list for life expectancy, however, we are 27th. Even our children under the age of 2 aren’t faring well, with this country being 75th in those being immunized against measles. We must change the dynamic that has held back California wide and country wide healthcare for everyone. First, we can’t listen to the doom sayers who would spend millions telling us that a national or state plan won’t work. Medicare is a prime example of how well a plan can work for all of us. Private healthcare in the United States presently are carrying a 25% administration cost, where Medicare’s administration cost are running 4%. We could expand that plan to everyone and immediately improve our healthcare delivery system. But to move America in that direction, California can provide the leadership needed to kick start the effort. The healthcare discussions will be watched closely by business, labor and government. We need to keep the pressure on so that our elected officials don’t drop the ball again and aren’t scared away by another “profit driven,” big business publicity program. We can’t let the “Hand Wringing and Name Calling” divert us from winning this campaign.

 

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