Who’s the Biggest Health Care Hustler?

The AFL-CIO community affiliate, Working America, is sponsoring Cliff Schecter, political analyst and national commentator, to cover its campaign on health care, In the Heart of the Health Care Hustle. Check out Schecter’s blog here and at Americablog.

In a country where millions go without health insurance — while pharmaceutical company executives sometimes have to struggle to pay for that fifth mortgage in Belize or scrape by to purchase that second corporate jet — Working America members have come up with the worst of the very bad health care hustlers in this nation: Big Pharma.

As part of the Heart of the Health Care Hustle campaign, some 11,000 Working America online voters selected Big Pharma over health insurers and other health providers as the worst hustler. The campaign enables us to get involved by sharing our health care horror stories, and just as importantly, to target which greedy industry and/or company was to blame.

You may know Big Pharma as the quality folks responsible for driving up the price of prescriptions throughout the 50 states by sucessfully lobbying Congress for a ban on allowing the government to negotiate lower prices for Medicare recipients. Or perhaps for the longtime U.S. ban on allowing Americans to import their prescription drugs from Canada, where they often are half the price of what they cost here.

Today, one of the representatives of Big Pharma, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, got a visit from some of its Working America friends at the company’s annual meeting in Morristown, N.J. The guests included a “Canadian moose,” which the executives may have glimpsed on their way from the seaweed rap to the deep-tissue massage. But, hey, they can run to the Jacuzzi, but they can’t hide.

Wyeth has implemented a policy of reducing supplies of its drugs to Canadian wholesalers and pharmacies that sell life-saving medicines to Americans who make the cross-border trip because “they are left with no other choice.”

Who said Big Business doesn’t have a heart? 

The Health Care Hustle campaign reminded those at the Wyeth stockholder meeting, as well as others across the nation, that our health care system does not have to be this way. It can serve the interests of the American people instead of the American aristocracy. 

Let the Wyeths be warned. American workers demand that we fix this broken system and replace it with one that serves all of us.

With 1.5 million members, Working America provides a voice for those of us who have been denied the right to union membership on the job. Individuals are allowed to join this community, which is comprised of those of us who don’t have stock options in Halliburton and don’t stay up nights worrying about the next day’s bank merger. 

Working America provides its members, who are located in a dozen states from Ohio to Oregon to Missouri to Minnesota, essential information on “good jobs, a just economy, affordable health care, quality education, retirement security and globalization.” And interestingly enough, the majority of Working America members identify themselves as politically moderate or conservative; one-third are “born-again” Christians and one-third own guns. Sorry to disappoint, Mr. Limbaugh. 

So what does all this mean? Well, Working America is putting its community where its mouth is. The Health Care Hustle campaign not only is bringing together the voices of working people exploited by Big Pharma to fight for change but also is targeting the bad actors that have destroyed our health care system.

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