UE Convention Resolutions
Healthcare for All
In the early 1990s, the demise of the national healthcare movement threw us back on the mercy of for-profit medicine. Since that time, our healthcare system and the health of our people have deteriorated markedly. The Bush administration continues to offer nothing to curb rising costs or extend coverage to those without insurance, instead blocking any and all progress on this front. President Bush’s efforts to block all attempts to improve and expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) is an example of his fanatical resistance to any, even minor, healthcare improvements. The corporate push for "managed care," which promised to contain health insurance costs by directing resources to good preventative medicine and public health, has failed. It has, however, succeeded in enraging the public by denying treatment to those in need. Insurance companies offer reimbursement rates to hospitals and nursing homes insufficient to encourage good care, further compounding the crisis. The U.S. now spends more on per capita medical costs – $7,000 annually – than any other country in the world, yet the statistics bear out the sad fact that infant mortality remains higher here than in all of our peer countries. In the U.S. today we spend a staggering 15.3 percent of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on healthcare alone, yet our system ranks 37th in the world and we are faced with more than 47 million people who lack health coverage altogether.
At the bargaining table, it has become more difficult for us to negotiate decent union contracts due in large part to incessant employer demands for increased healthcare cost shifting. This detracts from our efforts to make progress on other important economic issues. With health costs skyrocketing, our ability to bargain for good, quality, employer-provided healthcare coverage becomes harder and harder. Plan choices are disappearing, rates are increasing exponentially, and co-pays and deductibles proliferate. Even those of us lucky enough to maintain our medical insurance live perilously close to financial disaster; one serious illness can easily wipe out a life’s savings. Indeed, economists estimate that half of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are attributable to medical catastrophe.
In the face of a mounting healthcare debacle, our national "debate" has amounted to various actors in the system – employers, insurers and providers – each looking to push cost and risk onto one another. Mergers, acquisitions, pooling and other forms of industry restructuring seek to give hospitals an edge over insurers, or doctors an edge on the hospitals, or employers an edge over everyone. Ironically, the battle to grab a larger share of the healthcare dollar has driven up costs by diverting money intended for care to marketing and lawyering. Physicians themselves recognize the inefficiency and inadequacy of the current system. Membership in such groups as Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) continues to grow as more and more doctors become frustrated with the deteriorating healthcare environment. Stark evidence of this discontent is the fact that nearly eight thousand physicians recently signed an article in the Journal of American Medicine supporting single-payer health insurance.
Exacerbating the crisis is the fact that corporations like Rockwell Automation, General Electric, and others are spearheading the development of numerous corporate coalitions with the mission of further devising ways to shift costs to the workers. This strategy has worked well for the corporate coalition, but not workers.
In response to this multi-level crisis, over the past year our UE Mobilization for Healthcare and Retirement Security has engaged our union at all levels in an intensive educational, organizational, and political action campaign to better address this situation. This union wide effort has helped to educate the rank-and-file about the reality of the current system, encouraged Local unions to mount more effective responses to employer attacks during contract negotiations, and ramped up our political action activity in support of the single-payer solution. While much work needs to be done as the Mobilization approaches the end of its first phase, the early results and reactions have been positive.
A less recognized facet of the healthcare crisis is that, for most workers, medical leaves spell financial hardships, if not outright disaster. The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) offers workers some security against outright dismissal when they take a leave, though it is seriously flawed. Among other shortcomings, it offers no protection for part-time workers, workers who do not work for a full year, or for workers in small establishments. But FMLA’s most glaring fault is that it grants workers the right only to twelve weeks of unpaid medical leave and ironically, in many cases, employers are using this law in a sleazy attempt to whittle away at our contractually more substantial medical leave provisions. At the most stressful and expensive times in our lives – the illness of a family member, the birth or adoption of a new child, or our own sickness – it is unconscionable we are expected to manage without any pay.
Many states have been forced to enact legislation to attempt to curb some of the excesses of the insurance industry and deal with the worst aspects of our collapsing system. State requirements that women be offered a minimum of two day’s postpartum care are among the measures. This type of legislation has resulted in some relief, but is tantamount to placing a Band-Aid on a malignant tumor. In Wisconsin, many unions have pushed for passage of the Wisconsin Health Care Partnership Plan (WHCPP). All employers both public and private would pay for a plan that would be progressive and would provide quality, affordable healthcare to all workers.
Working people are faced with the growing drumbeat by politicians that promote healthcare "reform" that compels workers to buy their own health insurance. Led by the Massachusetts and California plans, these endeavors seems doomed from their own contradictions and shortcomings.
Polls consistently show that U.S. residents overwhelmingly favor some sort of universal national healthcare established on the single-payer model. The single-payer plan as introduced into Congress, the United States National Health Insurance Act - Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act (H.R. 676), would provide sweeping and overdue reform. Led by Representative John Conyers (D-MI) and Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) this legislative remedy would provide universal coverage – including hospitalization, doctor visits, prescription drugs, dental work, emergency medicine, physical therapy and rehabilitation, home healthcare, long term care, vision care, substance abuse treatment and more, all at less cost than what our nation spends today. This is accomplished by expelling the insurance companies from the scene altogether, replacing thousands of these inefficient "payers" of healthcare bills with one "single-payer" government agency. High profits, enormous executive salaries and bonuses, advertising, duplication, unnecessary and redundant paperwork, and other forms of waste are currently commonplace in the private insurance world. Physicians for a National Health Program estimates administrative costs make up 31 percent of all U.S. health spending. Contrast this with current Medicare administration fees of less than 2 percent, and the single-payer option is the only sensible choice.
A single-payer healthcare program is reasonable, feasible and popular; what stands between us and its achievement is corporate opposition, insurance company opposition, weak or corrupt politicians unwilling to stand up to the insurance industry, and our inability to organize a movement that forces them to change. Let us therefore mobilize our members and allies to achieve what has previously been unachievable, and claim this basic human right for all working people.
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 70th UE CONVENTION:
- Calls on the U.S. Congress to create a single-payer system and support enactment of the United States National Health Insurance Act – Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, (H.R. 676); and until we achieve single-payer insurance, calls on Congress to immediately restore and increase reimbursements to hospitals, nursing homes, and other healthcare providers and that these increases be used to hire staff, raise wages and provide more care to the sick and elderly;
- Calls on UE regions and locals to continue and expand the high levels of involvement in our union-wide Mobilization for Healthcare and Retirement Security activities, workshops, and political action;
- Encourages UE locals, regions, and the National Union to participate in coalitions working for single-payer healthcare reform, and to continue our work with single-payer allies such as the All Unions Committee for Single-Payer Health Care, Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), Jobs with Justice, the Universal Health Care Action Network (UHCAN), and the Campaign for a National Health Care Program (CNHPNow!);
- Encourages UE locals to "up the ante" in the public debate on single-payer universal healthcare by supporting workplace actions, mass mobilizations and civil disobedience, as well as supporting calls for the imposition of additional taxes or penalties on insurance companies, healthcare providers, medical device manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies which make excessive profits off of our healthcare needs;
- Urges UE locals to support efforts to enact single-payer legislation at the state level, and in the meantime to join with groups working to curtail the abuses ingrained in managed care;
- Directs UE locals to continue to fight for the best possible employer-paid healthcare plan, including the following protections:
- No changes in plan design or provider groups, no new exclusions or limitations unless mutually agreed;
- A grievance procedure with provisions for union representation;
- Medical care providers, not insurance bureaucrats, to determine what treatments are medically necessary;
- No pre-existing limitations or exclusion clauses;
- In HMO and PPO plans, a meaningful choice of primary care physicians, specialists and hospitals to cover your group, with an option to go outside the network with no co-pays;
- The highest level of protection for all accidents and emergencies;
- Fast turn around time (ten days or less) for all bills in dispute, and the members not to be responsible for bills in dispute;
- Extended coverage for specialists who may charge more than usual and customary charges;
- No paperwork, easy to follow plan documents and a confidential member services hotline;
- Urges UE locals to resist all "Consumer-Driven Healthcare" scams such as Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), Health Reimbursement Accounts (HRAs), and all other devices that penalize workers for actually using healthcare;
- Encourages UE locals and regions to oppose and stop the development of corporate coalitions designed to explore ways of shifting co-pays and other out of pocket costs to the workers;
- Urges UE at all levels to withhold support from any candidate in any race who refuses to endorse and actively campaign on a platform that prioritizes the need for a state-based and national single-payer universal healthcare system;
- Urges UE locals to contact the local Veterans’ Administration to learn what medical benefits are available to veterans, and to lobby for restoration of fully funded medical benefits for veterans and their families and preventive testing and screening of all veterans potentially exposed to depleted uranium.