I may not know you personally, but I can bet you’re concerned about health care.
We all are. Especially the 46 million who have no health insurance coverage and face impossible choices every day about how to keep their families healthy.
But the rest of us are troubled, too. Look at what’s happening to costs: The average annual health care premium we pay for family coverage increased by 67 percent between 2000 and 2005, from $1,620 to $2,712—and meanwhile our wages and income have stagnated. Employers are dropping health insurance coverage for workers left and right. And if your employer still provides insurance, you probably haven’t gotten much of a raise lately because health care is costing your employer more and that’s where the extra money is going.
On Jan. 31, when President Bush gives his State of the Union address, he’s going to tell us how he plans to fix America’s health care crisis. Don’t expect anything new, or anything that will actually work. After all, the president’s plan will be coming from the same people who engineered the incredible Medicare Part D disaster, which has some two dozen states declaring public health emergencies and scrambling to get prescription drugs to millions of sick, elderly and desperate Americans.
The president once again will trot out the “you’re on your own” approach to health care, pushing health savings accounts so individuals bear the soaring costs and risks of private health coverage. Take the burden off employers. Keep cutting budgets for Americans’ health care, shrinking government and creating government-sponsored crises like Medicare Part D. Lower health care spending by making health care unaffordable for people who need it—they can’t spend what they don’t have.
We all know this is not an answer—it’s abdication. It’s tossing America’s health to the wolves.
The answer is universal health care. But this administration and its congressional allies refuse to face that fact.
So, until we have a new administration and a new Congress that give a damn about the people of this country, we’re taking the fight for guaranteed health care to the states.
Maryland’s legislature just overrode a governor’s veto to enact Fair Share Health Care requiring the largest corporations—such as Wal-Mart—to spend at least 8 percent—a tiny fraction—of payroll costs on workers’ health care. And at least 32 other states are climbing on the AFL-CIO’s Fair Share Health Care bandwagon, tired of footing the bill for rich companies that abandon workers’ health.
Fair Share Health Care is a great start—and if this administration and congressional leaders won’t give us a fair health plan that will cover all families in all 50 states, we’ll give them hell in all 50 states.
This doesn’t mean that we won’t work with the administration, members of Congress, employers and health plans where we can for short-term and long-term solutions. In fact, we’ve aggressively participated in public-private partnerships to improve health care quality and provide public information that consumers and purchasers can use to make important care decisions. And we will continue to do so.
But if the needs of America’s working families don’t get the attention of the president and his congressional allies, millions of us demanding a real response to our health care crisis in a congressional election year should make a difference.
