And Health Care is Going, Going, Almost Gone for Millions of Americans.
Another 9.0 quake rattled America's health care crisis to the core last week, but coming amidst the wreckage to the U.S. economy from nearly eight painful years of bad policy by this administration, many people mistook it for just another shockwave coming from a lame duck White House. It wasn't.
When the New York Times (among others) reported on GM's dramatic cuts in personnel and costs to stay alive economically, the 28th paragraph in the story was the Richter scale that recorded the seismic event: "Other cost-cutting components of the plan included delaying $1.7 billion in payments to a health care trust for retired hourly workers..."
The health care trust, which was supposed to be the next great idea in providing guaranteed health care coverage to workers, and take some of the economic burden off a company that faces global competition, is going to be delayed in getting the $1.7 billion it was promised. But workers don't have the luxury of postponing illness, accident, surgery, mental health care and a host of other health care needs that cannot wait until some indefinite future date when a private trust fund is supposed to have the financial resources to fulfill its mission.
How can an American worker have confidence in a system that misses a major milestone? Blame GM? No. Blame the myth that American companies can be expected or required to provide health care to employees in a 21st Century economy. This is not 1950 when the private sector could shoulder a social responsibility at a time when the U.S. was the lone super-economy in a world that we virtually monopolized economically.
Like gasoline, which averaged 27 cents a gallon in 1950, the times have changed. And either we change with the times or deny Americans a fundamental right by continuing to worship at the false altar of privatized social responsibility.
This week, I met with Washington labor leaders in my Seattle office. Their message, like medical internists, working people, union leaders across the country, physician organizations and others, was that we need an American universal health care system now.
It should be the top domestic priority for the next administration and we should start developing an American health care plan now to present to President Obama next January. Have no doubt that the special interests are moving quickly to co-op any process, forming organizations with names that sound like they are interested in the American people when their only interest is self-interest. For too long they have lobbied to keep greed ahead of need, and the American people have suffered because of it.
There is a famous saying: As GM goes, so goes America. Today, it is not going well for GM or America economically. While GM may be on the road to financial health, America continues down the same old road of health care going, going, gone for millions of Americans. Americans deserve a health care system that won't endanger their financial health when they use it. We deserve what every other industrialized nation already has- affordable health care coverage.
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Posted July 23, 2008 | 02:56 PM (EST)