AFL-CIO President John Sweeney Remarks on Fair Share Health Care Campaign
AFL-CIO
January 5, 2006
…AFL-CIO unions are taking bold steps and paving the way — state-by-state and piece-by-piece — towards health care reform through our landmark Fair Share Health Care campaign in some 30 states.
AFL-CIO unions have been working hard on this landmark legislation since early last summer. And we are proud to announce our final product.
Our Fair Share Health Care legislation would set a minimum standard for health care; it requires large employers to pay their fair share for health care (defined as a percentage of total wages) or pay into a state fair share health care fund that can be used to provide or subsidize health care for uninsured workers in the state.
The bottom line is that our health care system is broken — but it didn’t just split open. Big companies like Wal-Mart are pulling it apart and profiting at taxpayers’ expense.
Health care is a basic need of every family. It’s nothing short of immoral that big, rich companies are shirking their responsibilities to their employees — we’re talking about mothers and fathers who are pushed to tears because they can’t take their children to the doctor. And it’s happening every day.
To make matters worse, those companies that DO provide insurance are increasingly shifting the cost onto workers and cutting back on the benefits they provide…
http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/prsptm/sp01052006.cfm
And…
Governor Schwarzenegger’s 2006 State of the State Address
Office of the Governor of the State of California
January 5, 2006
His complete, unedited comments on health care reform in California:
Health care. I ask myself, what’s the quickest way that we can help the greatest number of people with the spiraling health care costs? I believe in the free market. I believe in free trade. I mean we buy food from overseas. We buy cars from overseas. Why not prescription drugs? So I call upon the federal government to permit the safe importation of prescription drugs. I say, let the free market work.
Comment: This year we will surpass $2 trillion in health care expenditures – more than enough to provide high quality, comprehensive health care services for absolutely everyone. We already know that we can easily accomplish this by dumping our fragmented, highly flawed system of funding health care and adopting a single-payer national health insurance program. Yet we listen to others when they tell us that this might be the ideal, but we can’t do it because it’s not feasible. So we turn to incremental measures.
What will the Fair Share Health Care approach do to improve health care coverage and access? Targeting large employers in thirty states sounds like a massive expansion, but the large target actually is comparatively small: Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart employs about 1.2 million individuals, and many of them are already insured. Even if Fair Share legislation passed in every state, the net impact on covering the 46 million uninsured would be almost negligible.
There is another very serious flaw in this proposal. Our fragmented system of funding care has left us incapable of controlling the seemingly-eternal explosion in health care costs. Legislators and the policy community have thrown in the towel and instead have turned to efforts to make health care premiums affordable. Without a lid on actual costs, premiums can be controlled only by reducing coverage, increasing cost sharing through patient access fees, and using devious methods to exclude from coverage those with greater health care needs.
It can be anticipated that the compromise with Wal-Mart will be to allow consumer-directed products, with affordable premiums, that fail to provide financial security for those who will need to access the health care system. Other employers are looking for a way out, and they’ll gladly jump on that train. The only losers will be the patients who need care and the health care providers whom they can no longer afford.
While waiting for comprehensive reform to become politically feasible, we generally have supported incremental measures that do expand affordable access and coverage. We are now staring at a runaway locomotive heading toward us. Although a few more may be covered, the increasing momentum of cost shifting to those with needs will further diminish affordable access for average-income Americans. The Fair Share campaign will merely stoke the fires, driving us to the cliff. Once we’re over the cliff, the feasibility of comprehensive reform will be obvious, but do so many really have to suffer for us to finally act?
If the AFL-CIO continues to support inadequate incremental measures, the day of reckoning will be delayed further. Will the AFL-CIO help take control of that runaway locomotive by supporting national health insurance, or would they prefer to sit down with Gov. Schwarzenegger and other state governors and discuss measures that would allow the free market to work?