Just Work: CA's Healthcare Plan, a Good Choice for Working Families

This year -- just like every year for the past four years -- I had to choose between taking a significant pay cut or losing my family's health insurance. It's an impossible choice. How do you choose between putting food on the family table and having the peace of mind that you won't go bankrupt if your child breaks a leg?

Thankfully, this week the California State Assembly approved the first phase of a state health care package that will help millions of people like me avoid that awful choice. The California health care solution will provide public assistance and tax breaks to those of us who work hard but still can't cover today's astronomical health insurance rates.

More than 30 million Californians will be covered under the agreement, including my family

I am a doorman at Russian Hill, a luxury apartment building that sits high on a hill in San Francisco. I love my job. I have a healthy, happy family. I own my own home. My oldest son is just entering college.

I make a good living at $17.48/ hour, one of the highest rates of our local doorman union, but I don't have to do the math to convince you that there simply isn't much money left over to cover costly co-pays and high deductions. And that's exactly what 2,000 of my colleagues and I have been forced to do every time our contract expires. Our Kaiser health insurance co-pays rose 25 percent last year, but our employers wouldn't cover the costs. This year I took a pay cut of $0.40/hour to maintain my family's benefits. That's almost a thousand dollars a year -- money that could have gone into our children's college funds or paid the mortgage.

My parents back in Pakistan sacrificed everything to put me on a plane to the United States so that I could leave a life fixed by chance and began a new one determined by choice. In America, chance may determine where you begin, but you get to choose where you work, the God you pray to, the community you join, and the people you share your life with.

In America, one should not have to choose between health care and basic necessities.

For me, California's new health care plan will restore the blessing of having good choices. My union president said the other day, "The longer we wait, the worse it gets." I could not agree more. The State Senate needs to pass this health care plan to help families like mine hold on to our American Dream.

Eric Emmanuel is a doorman in San Francisco and an elected leader of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1877. Since immigrating to the U.S. from Pakistan as a young boy, Emmanuel has been able to fulfill most all of his dreams and is very proud to be an American citizen. In the coming years, he looks forward to working with his union and state representatives to help pass California's landmark universal healthcare bill, ABX-1.

Just Work is a series presented by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to give a voice to working people to discuss their daily struggles to balance work, afford life and participate in a more just society. SEIU welcomes submissions to Just Work! Please send your story (800 words or less) to [e-mail].

About SEIU
The 1.9 million-member SEIU is the fastest-growing union in North America. SEIU members are winning better wages, health care, and more secure jobs for our communities, while uniting their strength with their counterparts around the world to help ensure that workers, not just corporations and CEOs, benefit from today's global economy.

Comments

[praxis00]

Things have gotten so bad with health care in this country that it's time we try anything. I'm ready to radically reinvent the system if it means that we can see transparency, accountability and universality introduced into the system.

AVIS can tell me more about my car rental history in less time than my doctor can about my medical visits. 47 million people in this country have no insurance, and far more have crappy insurance. You can mandate auto insurance, but you're uncomfortable mandating health insurance? Yet real.

Yeah - I want single payer as well -- I'm just not willing to wait another 10 years for the system to totally collapse. If you believe that single-payer is even an option at this point, you haven't been paying attention. And if you aren't working full-time trying to make the reforms look the way you'd like them, what business do you have complaining?

[humanbeinghuman]

i think that the only system that will work for everyone will be universal health care (not insurance) ala kucinich.
i have friends who are paying $1000. a month for insurance and are afraid to use it. i, on the other hand, have decided to save all of my sicknesses up and just die a few weeks early.

[curiousasheck]

A heartwarming story that sheds light on the astounding dysfunction of our health care system:

UnitedHealth's McGuire Keeps $800 Million in Options

Dec. 7 (Bloomberg) -- UnitedHealth Group Inc.'s former Chief Executive Officer William W. McGuire will keep more than $800 million in stock options after repaying over $600 million because of a backdating scandal.

Other past and present officers have relinquished about $300 million, including $190 million that current CEO Stephen J. Hemsley gave up voluntarily a year ago, UnitedHealth said. The company announced the repayments yesterday in connection with the settlement of a lawsuit filed by pension funds and other investors on behalf of the company.

[avergejoe]

I applaud you, but plan imposes economic penalties on those who dont buy healthcare - totally unacceptable!

[realitytrumpsbull]

Healthscare's the Next Big Scandal, I think,
too much money wrapped up in it, ripe for
fraud and exploitation...care about your OWN
health, save millions. When it gets to the point
where a doctor visit for a general checkup is
300 bucks, something's screwy...I hope all
those people drive nice cars...

[Merlin7]

You are being had, my friend. There's a good chance your insurance company would refuse to pay most of the costs of a serious illness in your family. In supporting that bait-and-switch family plan, you are merely helping the insurance industry rip off the public on a massive scale.

Single-payer health care -- with no insurance company involved -- is the only serious way to improve our health care system.

[Merg]

I sympathize with your struggle, but this plan is still a giveaway to the Insurance Industry at the expense of the consumer, and yes that means the members of SEIU also. What you are being shown is not what you would get. You still are better off negotiat ing thru your union now than you would be under that proposed plan.