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House Health Care Reform Plan a ‘Crucial Roadmap’ |
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With thousands of union, health care and community activists set to descend on Capitol Hill tomorrow in what could be the largest ever rally for health care reform, the AFL-CIO is telling House committees this week that comprehensive reform must lower costs, improve quality and cover everyone.
Last week, House Democrats introduced a health care reform plan that AFL-CIO President John Sweeney calls:
a crucial roadmap for what health care reform should look like. Working families are desperate for an American solution that encourages choice, competition and opportunity for all Americans to choose the health care that works for them.
This week, the three House committees that developed the health care reform roadmap—Education and Labor, Energy and Commerce, and Ways and Means—are holding a series of hearings on the plan. In testimony for all three panels, Gerald Shea, AFL-CIO assistant to the president, says reform must build upon what works.
For the majority of Americans, what works in our current health care system is employer-based coverage—the backbone of health care coverage and financing in America. Over 160 million people under age 65 have health benefits tied to the workplace.
The House plan, says Shea, “outlines a reasonable and effective” pay-or-play requirement for employers. In pay or play, employers must provide coverage for their workers or pay into a fund. Shea says the public health insurance option in the House draft will:
inject competition into the health care system and lower costs for employers and workers alike.
He outlines three other areas the AFL-CIO says must remain in the committees’ health care reform proposal to stabilize and build upon the employer-provided coverage system.
- Special assistance for firms that maintain coverage for pre-Medicare retirees, which will prevent further deterioration of the employer-based system;
- Health care delivery reforms to get better value from our system and containment of long-term costs; and
- Insurance market reforms, individual subsidies, Medicaid expansion and improvements to Medicare, which will help make affordable coverage available to everyone.
The public health insurance option, improving and making more efficient the way health care is delivered, and a pay-or-play option will generate significant savings and revenue to help finance health care reform. But, especially in the short run, other revenue will be needed. Shea says the AFL-CIO supports President Obama’s funding plans, including
savings in Medicare and Medicaid, limiting the itemized deductions for households in the top two tax brackets and other modifications to reduce the tax gap, as well as making the tax system fairer and more progressive.
However, adds Shea, the proposal to finance health care reform through a tax on employer-provided health coverage:
is an extraordinarily bad idea that would undermine efforts to stabilize the employer-provided health care system. Employers would likely respond by increasing employee cost-sharing to a level at which benefits would become unaffordable for low-wage workers, or by eliminating benefits altogether.
Taxing health care benefits would not bring down health care costs, either. It would just shift more of those costs onto workers.
If you are in Washington, D.C., tomorrow, join us on Capitol Hill and tell Congress loud and clear, “Health care reform can’t wait.”
Click here for information on the rally. Click here to find out what 23,000-plus people said about the nation’s broken health care system in the AFL-CIO’s 2009 Health Care for America Survey.
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“…the AFL-CIO is telling House committees this week that comprehensive reform must lower costs, improve quality and cover everyone.”
These requirements cannot be met by “reforming” the existing system of profit-maximizing corporate health insurance. It is the intrinsic nature of a capitalist enterprise to always drive to MAXIMIZE PROFIT.
To maximize profit, “lower costs” are out of the question, as this would lower profits!
To “improve quality” is out of the question as this would increase costs and again reduce profits!
To “cover everyone” at an affordable level. “everyone” must include the elderly, the seriously ill, the poor, the unemployed, prior conditions, etc. The conditions that private health care plans have EXCLUDED just about everyone they can. The pay out for health care means to detract and diminish profits, which is the only reason the “health” corporations are in business. They
are not “in business” to provide health care for everyone. And they have not.
Is the AFL-CIO concerned about the needs of working people? Or is it concerned more about preserving these greedy parasites that are killing people by the thousands for profit?
On June 25th, raise the banner of SINGLE PAYER UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE!
I am a health insurance agent in Utah. I sit on the board of the Utah health underwriters as webmaster for http://www.bcbstx.info/ and http://www.utahinsuranceexchange.info/. I was heavily involved in designed a web connector to help Utah residents by pulling private and state sponsored insurance mechanisms together. It had a low budget of around $150k that virtually guaranteed health insurance coverage through either the private or state programs. Better yet all the local carriers agreed to split the costs. Our state insurance task force committee rejected the idea. They elected to go for a Massachusetts type connector program that isn’t working well when you actually dig deep and check facts of where they are now. Our state approved H.B. 188 with a zero fiscal note attachment! My point is, I have been a fly on the wall in countless legislative meetings, insurance board meetings, hospital board meetings, the list goes on. The problem is conflict with the market demanding profit in all sectors of the system. Tough order to fill and keep costs down? You are absolutely right when you claim that healthcare is now unsustainable. I have been crying that a long time. Nobody listens.
“Taxing health care benefits would not bring down health care costs, either. It would just shift more of those costs onto workers.”
Obama has not ruled this out, even though he strongly opposed this during the campaign.
“a crucial roadmap for what health care reform should look like. Working families are desperate for an American solution that encourages choice, competition and opportunity for all Americans to choose the health care that works for them.” 1 trillion $$ and not all 46-47 million uninsured American will be covered.
Sorry but seeing is believing, I don’t feel this will work.
We need health care reform precisely because employer-based coverage no longer works. The patchwork of employment, income, and age based plans is so shot full of holes that it guarantees people will fall through the cracks when they need help the most. Instead of a world of haves and have-nots when it comes to health, we need one system of payment for everybody. That’s if the purpose is health, rather than protecting profitability for the medical-financial sector.