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Income Can’t Keep Up with Health Care Cost Increases |
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Here’s more evidence why health care reform and controlling soaring health care costs is so desperately needed to help working families.
In Indiana, for example, between 2000 and 2009, the cost of a family health care premium provided by an employer increased 116.6 percent, but working families’ median income rose just 14.9 percent. In Pennsylvania, premiums were up 95.2 cent and income 17.5 percent.
Similar figures are repeated in state after state, according to a new study by Families USA.
But here’s the kicker: All that extra money going to the insurance companies isn’t buying more coverage. Benefits have been reduced and workers are paying higher deductibles and co-pays.
Says Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA:
Rising health care costs threaten the financial well-being of families across the nation. If health care reform does not happen soon, more and more families will be priced out of the health coverage they used to take for granted.
The study also finds that between 2000 and 2008, the total percentage of U.S. firms offering health coverage declined by 6 percentage points—from 69 percent of firms to 63 percent—with small businesses being the most likely to drop coverage. The report warns:
The combination of stagnant wages and rising health care costs is placing a growing strain on family budgets, and many families have reached a breaking point. Quite simply, America’s families are being priced out of health coverage.
Click here for state-by-state figures.
As Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC), points out, the United States is the only industrialized nation in which health care is not a fundamental right, “but bartered for profit by a maze of corporations.”
The result is about 45 million Americans with no health coverage and tens of millions more denied medical care because their insurer won’t pay for it.
In a column for the London Times website, Times Online, she says the current debate raging in the United States “must seem incomprehensible to many in the UK.”
Union members continue to take grassroots action for health care reform, mobilizing yesterday in California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, North Dakota, Tennessee and Virginia at congressional town hall meetings and other events.
You can join the debate, help counter the lies being spread and show that there is strong public support for health care reform. Visit our friends at Health Care for America Now! (HCAN!) and enter your ZIP code in the Take Auction in August box to find a town hall meeting or other event in your area.
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“she says the current debate raging in the United States “must seem incomprehensible to many in the UK.” ”
Hell, it seems incomprehensible to me, and I live here in Good Ole Number One!
Building Bridges: Your Community and Labor Report
National Edition
Produced by Ken Nash and Mimi Rosenberg
**************************************
Round Two: Stella D’Oro Workers Fight Against Plant Shutdown
with
. Joyce Alston, President Local 50, Bakery Workers Union
. Mike Philipo, Shop Steward
. Eddie Morrero, Foreman Bakery Dept.
Days after a judge found Stella D’Oro Biscuit Co. guilty of labor law violations and ordered the company to reinstate more than 130 workers on strike since August, Stella D’Oro’s owner Brynwood Partners announced it would close the plant. The union charges that the decision to shutter the plant is in retaliation against the workers strike and has filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to block the shutdown and force the company to reopen negotiations. Last August Stella D’Oro workers refused management demands for wage cuts by as much as $5 hour and slashes in health and pension benefits and have waged a militant strike which has received tremendous
support from N.Y. area unions and the community.
***************************
The Health Insurance Racket:
Getting Rich by Denying Americans Care
by Robert Greenward and Brave New Films
What does UnitedHealthcare CEO Stephen Hemsley have to lose if
Congress passes real healthcare reform this year? Well, for starters, his nearly three quarters of a billion dollars in unexercised stock options might lose a few pennies on the dollar.
What does Isabella, a four year-old girl in Winsconsin who is physically incapable of eating and has had to be tube fed her entire life, have to gain from healthcare reform? The treatment she needs to live a normal life.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
To Download or listen to this 27:06 minute program,
go to http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/34946
or
http://www.archive.org/details/BuildingBridgesStellaDoroRound2SickForProfit
for more information contact Ken Nash - knash@igc.org
Building Bridges is regularly broadcast live over WBAI,
99.5 FM in the N.Y.C Metropolitan area on Mondays from
7-8pm EST and is streamed, archived and pod cast at
http://www.wbai.org . Building Bridges National is broadcast over 30 broadcast and internet radio stations nationwide.
Our website is http://www.buildingbridgesradio.org
How about a union operated health insurance plan. Run by unoin people, for union people and those who have retired. Is it against the law? Imagine the pressure it would put on the insurance companies when they lose a third or more of their users to a more comprehensive and less expensive plan. Imagine the selling point for those looking to start a union in their place of work. Heck, maybe even the employers would be more inclined to have their workers unionized because it would save them money also because our plan would be cheaper for them also.