What on earth are American businesspeople thinking? Why aren’t employers fighting for a real alternative to this ineffective and inefficient system of employer-based healthcare? As we see in the news today, the broken health care system leads to labor unrest and an unsustainable squeeze on small businesses. On a broader scale, it is decimating (has decimated?) American manufacturing, makes the US less competitive internationally, and could save employers in just one state--Connecticut--$590 Million. Given that, why on earth would businesses support expanding the employment link to health care (with "employer mandates") or maintaining it (with "individual mandates")? They are letting an out-of-control insurance sector eat up all their profits, and make their employees sick and poor. Don’t they care???
This country needs a visionary business leader to stand and deliver the economic/business case for single-payer healthcare, which will make us all healthier and wealthier. If you have any ideas on how to find her or him, let me know!
Brought to you by the National Nurses Organizing Committee as we organize to make 2007 the Year of Single-Payer Healthcare.
Most of the nastiest battles between business and workers in recent memory have centered around healthcare. It’s back—as California grocery chains try to cut off benefits for their low-paid employees, and those employees try to protect themselves. The grocery store owners say they’re worried about competitors like CostCo; well then, why aren’t they fighting for single-payer?
Non-union small business also struggle with the skyrocketing health insurance premiums, as this opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle describes.
{The author’s husband} is paying $3,400 each month for insurance just for his three employees. (He gets his own health insurance through me.) This costs him $41,000 per year, about what he would pay to hire another person. Even at this rate, his employees still have co-pays for all doctor's services, and must shoulder 10 to 30 percent of the cost of medical procedures and hospitalizations. The insurance companies give no reason for the increase.
My husband's choices are to keep the same plan and somehow swallow a 15 percent increase to $48,000 per year, or decrease the business's cost by shifting more of the cost to his employees, one of whom has a wife with multiple sclerosis. "Isn't there something else I can do?" he asks. "At this rate, I might have to let go of one employee just to keep health insurance for the other two."
What’s he going to do? Advocate for single-payer while hoping to not go bankrupt? Well, that’s what he’s doing. In the meantime, if the insurance companies do force him into bankruptcy, we have four jobs lost and three families without healthcare.
As I mentioned yesterday, a new Connecticut commission found that if the state moved to a single-payer system, employers would save $590 million dollars—IN JUST THE FIRST YEAR. They’re turning down free money!
An article from In These Times a couple years ago shows GM Canada laughing all the way to the bank while GM US is being bankrupted by its antiquated healthcare system:
"The Canadian plan has been a significant advantage for investing in Canada," says GM Canada spokesman David Patterson, noting that in the United States, GM spends $1,400 per car on health benefits. Indeed, with the provinces sharing 75 percent of the cost of Canadian healthcare, it’s no surprise that GM, Ford and Chrysler have all been shifting car production across the border at such a rate that the name "Motor City" should belong to Windsor, not Detroit.
And Morton Mintz in the Nation in 2004 laid out all the reasons American businesses would profit from single-payer healthcare, concluding:
By resisting the merger of practicality with morality that universal health care embodies, Corporate America is blowing a supreme opportunity to do well by doing good. Enlightened self-interest this is not.
There's a reason every single other developed country in the world enjoys a single-payer health system: it's good for everybody. Are American businesspeople unable to see this becuase of ideology, fear, ignorance, lack of imagination, or something else? I don't know. But here’s my crusade today—if you’re a businessperson advocating single-payer health insurance, contact me: spreston@calnurses.org. Let’s work together. The nation needs you, and so does your business.
Oh and about those half-hearted reform plans that foolish businesses are supporting in states around the country? Matthew Yglesias in the American Prospect eviscerates them today, calling for us to start expanding Medicare as soon as we can, as part of a strategy of,
"the step-by-step defunding of the health-industrial complex that does so much to provide financial support for reactionary politics in America. The alternative -- sticking progressive necks out for the opportunity to direct customers to an insurance industry that hates us -- doesn't make sense."
If you want to join the fight for single-payer healthcare, sign up with SinglePayer.com, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee. You can share your story about surviving the healthcare industry here, and start contacting media here.