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Food for Your Children or Medicine You Need. What Would You Choose? |
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Like most parents, Marie from Wisconsin puts her children’s welfare above her own, even when it means foregoing the medicine she needs so she can feed her kids.
Employed and with health insurance, Marie told the AFL-CIO/Working America 2008 Health Care for America Survey that the nation’s broken health care system has failed her, as it has for too many millions of others in the nation.
What would you do if you had to choose between food or medicine? Because of rising health care costs, that is a question that is frequently asked in my home. I work full time and have health care through my employer, but only a percentage is paid by them. I need a better-paying job, but as a single parent…I cannot go to school and work at the same time—I need the money to pay for myself and my two children to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. Adding extra things to our budget is devastating.
I recently needed medication for an ailment, but did not get the medicine—I couldn’t. What would I choose? I chose my children and what they need, whether it be food or medicine. I am the one who will go without before they suffer.
Marie was one of the more than 26,000 women and men, insured and uninsured, young and old, union and nonunion who took the comprehensive survey, while nearly 7,500 took the time to write about their personal health care experiences. The overwhelming majority, 95 percent, say the health care system needs fundamental change or to be completely rebuilt.
One in three say their families had to skip medical care because of cost, a quarter had serious problems paying for the care they needed, and a huge majority—79 percent—say health care is a top voting issue.
The AFL-CIO will present the results of this survey to candidates for public office at every level and increase its mobilization to help ensure that candidates who win in November go into office with a mandate for real health care reform.
The two Democratic candidates contending for the presidential nomination, Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.), have released comprehensive health plans aimed at providing health care coverage. The proposal by Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) relies on the current private insurance industry-based system and new taxes on working families with employer-provided coverage. If McCain’s proposal sounds familiar, that’s because it resembles George W. Bush ’s failed health care proposal. More of McSame.
For more on the AFL-CIO’s health care reform campaign, click here. Click here to become a health care activist.
2 Comments
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Clinton’s “comprehensive” plan consists of mandates. If you are unemployed, or worse homeless and unemployed, then how in the holy hell can people be mandated to buy insurance? Obama offers a mandate to parents to insure children, and offers negotiating with a “round table discussion” of a “regular Joe”, Obama’s staff, the insurance industry and God know who else. The insurance industry lobbyists will try everything in their power, (even those infamous contirbutions) to kill anything that cuts into profit for these CEOs of the “health care” industry.
Obama talks about giving Americans the same covrage that members in Congress have.
It is time to invest, and quit putting band-aids to a dying system. Let it RIP. Invest into making single payer a reality. There will be no more for-profit, no more denying coverage, denying due to due “pre-existing conditions” and in turn, quality health care for ALL.
Labor has the backbone to endorse this, and should. With single payer, it would eliminate employers from cutting this benefit and won’t be a negotiating issue as everyone will be covered.
Clinton, Obama and McClone are just recycling unworkable ideas. There is no way there can be a health care plan without kicking out the three “bloodsuckers” in the health care mess: big pharmaceutical companies, private health insurance companies and the “malpractice” lawyers who will sue at the drop of a coin, whether the case has any merit or not.
There is a private group Citizens Alliance for National Health Insurance (www.hr676.org) who analyzed the mess and came up with workable solutions, but it would be a tough job to overcome the “big three” and get a workable plan.
One item from their site “private insurance corporate bureaucracies inefficiently siphon $350 billion per year, or 20 - 25% of your hard earned dollars away from doctors, hospitals and patient care into the pockets of their executives, administrative employees, shareholders and politicians”.
It is obvious that they are not doing their job in a responsible fashion and working America is paying the price…for nothing…..