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Health Care Reform Needs Public Option—Not Band-Aid
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Today, union and health care activists around the country are raising their voices against the private health insurance companies’ mutlimillion-dollar campaign to block health care reform. In dozens of rallies and demonstrations they are saying: “Big Insurance: We’re sick of it.”
Union members are joining a march on Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association’s Portland, Ore., headquarters. In a letter to Blue Cross President Scott Serota, Oregon AFL-CIO President Tom Chamberlain calls on the company to cease opposition to a public health insurance option and stop the use of union members’ premium payments to fund lobbying against a public option.
Union members in Oregon have spent too many years at the bargaining table knowing that they have to choose between bargaining for better wages, or maintaining their healthcare. This is unsustainable; healthcare reform with true cost controls is necessary. For union members to now see their healthcare dollars spent lobbying against the reform they support is absolutely unacceptable.
AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Baker Holt is leading a Philadelphia rally and march and to Cigna’s world headquarters and other demonstrations are planned at the headquarters and local offices of Aetna, United Healthcare and Wellpoint—including its subsidiary Blue Cross Blue Shield.
In a Huffington Post column today, Peter Drier points to WellPoint as “the poster child for health care reform.”
With 35 million customers, one of every nine Americans is a member of a WellPoint health plan. Its annual sales of $60 billion netted corporate profits of $2.5 billion last year.
WellPoint is one of the insurance industry giants leading the charge against President Barack Obama’s plan to create a “public option.”…WellPoint has spent millions of dollars—dollars it gets from the families and businesses paying sky-high premiums—to wield political influence.
Click here to read the entire column.
In several events across the nation in recent days, Working America, AFSCME and other health care activists also sent the message that the nations’ health care system is so severely broken it needs major reform—including a public health insurance option—not a patchwork of band-aid solutions.
In Portland, Maine, Saturday some 35 activists gathered in a local restaurant to mobilize support for comprehensive health care reform and to urge Sen. Olympia Snowe (R) to support a public health insurance option. Snowe sits on the Senate Finance Committee that this week is working on a health care reform bill from Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) that among its several shortcomings is a lack of a public option.
(Click here to see former Labor Secretary Robert Reich explain what a public option means for working people in a new presentation by Brave New Films.)
Standing in front of a wall with some 2,000 hand-written letters to Snowe attached by band-aids and with several hundred more band-aids signed by Maine voters, Trebor Serano, Working America’s Maine canvass director told the crowd:
We’ve never been this close to making sure everyone can have access to affordable health care.
Along with the letters that will be delivered to Snowe’s office, activists also made phone calls to Snowe urging her to back a public option. AFSCME’s Marianne Von Nordeck told Channel 13 WGME News that the letters and phone calls can make difference because Snowe has
listened to her constituents with an open ear and heart when they make their voices heard as loudly as they are now.
Spencer Blair-Glantz is a recent college graduate and Working America member. He says that many of the jobs he and young workers like him find do not offer health care coverage. That’s why he backs a public option.
I think a public option is the most important thing, because it allows more options and flexibility.
Similar band-aid events were held in Arkansas, Delaware, Nebraska, North Dakota and Virginia.
Meanwhile, NPR’s Morning Edition today reports many of the strongest opponents of health care reform that includes a public option represent districts with the largest percentage of people who don’t have health insurance and who could be the biggest beneficiaries of an affordable public health insurance option.
Many of those lawmakers are “Blue Dog” or conservative Democrats who say they back health care reform, but like the private insurance industry, oppose the public option.
NPR’s Peter Overby reports:
So far this year, the Blue Dogs’ political action committee has received $301,500 from health care and health insurance PACs.
The representatives say their opposition to a public option stems from the voices they heard at town hall meetings in their district this summer. But a large number of the loud and shrill voices attacking heath care reform came from an organized effort by extreme conservative groups—backed by health industry groups—to pack meetings.
The voices of the uninsured weren’t heard says Kevin Motl, a history professor at Ouachita Baptist University, in Arkadelphia, Ark. He attended a meeting with Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark), a leader of the Blue Dog Coalition whose district has one in five residents without health insurance—30 percent higher than the national average. Motl tells Overby:
Many of those individuals who would need a public health care option are those who are not likely to be able to take two hours out of their day to go to a public event like that town hall. They were too busy earning hourly wages and trying to keep roofs above their children’s heads. Those voices are not going to be present in that discourse.
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6 Comments
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Why do the articles on this AFL-CIO BLOG continue to advocate so-called “health care reform” and the “public option”, and still do not mention that the recent AFL-CIO convention passed UNANIMOUSLY IN SUPPORT OF “SINGLE-PAYER” MEDICARE FOR ALL HEALTH PLAN???
WHY IS THE NEW AFL-CIO “LEADERSHIP” OF PRESIDENT TRUMKA REMAINING SILENT ABOUT THE DEMANDS OF IT’S OWN MEMBERSHIP?
The current “debate” about the “public option” is totally corrupt as there is NO “public option” that will serve the needs of the people, when the health care access is based on corrupt corporate greed to maximize profit.
Of course any of Obama’s “health care reforms” WILL BE EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE BECAUSE OF THE CORPORATE PROFIT AND OVERHEAD AND MILLION DOLLAR SALARIES OF EXECUTIVES.
Throughout Canada and Europe, their public health systems
DELIBERATELY EXCLUDE PROFITEERING CORPORATIONS FROM THE SYSTEM. FOR THIS REASON THESE EUROPEAN HEALTH CARE PLANS OPERATE ALMOST AT ONE HALF THE COST, AND THEY COVER EVERYONE!
IT IS EXTREMELY DEPRESSING THAT THE AFL-CIO SHOULD CONTINUE TO SUPPORT OBAMA’S CORRUPT “HEALTH CARE REFORM”.
THIS IS PERHAPS INDICATIVE OF THE NATURE OF “LEADERSHIP” THAT CAN BE EXPECTED ON THE MANY CRISIS ISSUES FACING WORKING PEOPLE? THAT IS, TO FOREVER SUPPORT CORPORATE CLASS INTERESTS OVER THE NEEDS OF WORKING PEOPLE??
You know we are deciding who among us is worthy of health insurance (single-payer). We cannot allow people who are fat or who smoke to be demonized. We want to deny people who don’t “deserve” our respect because they don’t meet the current “moral” standard of appearance or habit. Until everyone — the driver with lots of speeding tickets or the person who is anorexic or the person who owns guns — is held to some high standard of worthiness when it comes to deserving what should be a right and not a privilege then we need to be careful of making groups of people somehow unworthy of our compassion or their rights as human beings. In our country, even “bad” people have rights.
Jerry Wells you are exactly right!
They are beating their own drum and not listening to the American public, AFL-CIO BLOG members or not!
Medicare for ALL Americans!
Take my Insurance, Please!
People talk about “pork” in the stimulus bill, the insurance industry and HMOs are just as bad when it comes to wasting money that should be paying legitimate claims and covering more people. If they “clean up” the private insurers, the HMOs, boot out the tort lawyers and force big pharma to quit charging Americans twice or more than what the rest of the world pays, then private insurance would become more reasonable and there would be fewer people to be covered by a public option. Why not a catastrophic insurance for people who can pay normal medical expenses out of pocket but still need coverage for unexpected huge bills to cover those young and healthy people who chose not to buy regular healthcare insurance? There are other options besides Obamacare that can meet peoples’ needs without bankrupting the country. Obamacare does nothing to stop the escalating costs of medical care or the huge waste of healthcare dollars. The current bill is so poorly written that lawyers are saying that it will make a huge mess in the courts as insurers, patients and lawyers hassle over exactly what is meant in the bill. Another problem to add to the pile….
People are mobilizing and the media need to be warned. We will not accept those who ignore what people are suffering in their lives.
Working people are losing access to health care in droves! Do not imagine for a minute that you can’t lose yours.
Just ask the big steel retirees or the auto industry retirees. Enhanced Medicare for All! The only solution to corporate usury of the health non-system.
Corporations have taken enough!
A “public option”? What in God’s name does it look like? It is only a concept, and a flawed one at that. We’re being asked to sign a blank check made payable to “Public Option”. The majority of workers want single payer. That should be our demand. Nothing less! Congress cannot be trusted. They must be forced to do what is right, and so should the AFL-CIO!
Over the years, revisionists were allowed to steer the AFL-CIO to the right, and we’ve been on the run ever since. Once, 37% of America’s workers were organized. Today we’re down to 12% (7% in the private sector).
Every retreat by labor has been accompanied by a reduction in union density.
Red-baiting and cold-warrior antics first took their toll. Next, Reagan was allowed to bust the air traffic controllers. By then only 22% of us were organized. When Clinton got away with shoving NAFTA down our throats we had fallen to 16%. By the time Bush assumed office, only 12% of us were in unions. Bush got away with tossing union workers out of airports.
Labor has not drawn a line in the sand in over 50 years. The results speak for themselves. We’re down to 12%.
Here are $64,000 questions: What will labor do when Congress passes crap “health care reform”? What will labor do when Congress passes a watered-down Employee Free Choice Act? If history repeats itself, the honchos will declare victory while the rest of us accept defeat.
My fervent hope is that Rich Trumka and the new AFL-CIO leadership will mobilize the ranks! If that does not happen, it will be same old, same old in a new dress. And we’ll shrink some more. In the final analysis only people like us will suffer. The rich won’t. They never have and they never will.
Isn’t it time for us to mobilize around issues that are in our own best interests? When we do, we’ll discover that the struggle will also be in the best interests of our families, friends and neighbors. It’s our time. But we’ll have to get off our couches and make it happen!