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UE Convention Resolutions
Healthcare for All


The decades-long U.S. experiment with employer-based private health insurance, which promised to contain health insurance costs by directing resources to preventative medicine and public health, has failed. Health insurers continue to enrage the public by denying treatment to those in need. The U.S. continues to spend more on per-capita medical costs – $7,000 annually – than any other country in the world, yet infant mortality remains higher than in all peer countries. In the U.S. today we spend a staggering 15.3 percent of our Gross Domestic Product on healthcare (twice as much as any other industrial nation), yet our system ranks 37th in the world according to the World Health Organization, and we are faced with more than 47 million people who lack health coverage altogether. The U.S. continues to treat healthcare as a commodity distributed according to the ability to pay rather than a fundamental human right provided according to need.

What if K-12 education was provided for in the manner of healthcare? Americans would be required to pay for private education, or else homeschool our children. Illiteracy and poverty would be much worse. The U.S. would quickly become an impoverished and unproductive nation. Thankfully, education is not structured in this way in the U.S., due to the universal provision of access to public education, and its funding by taxation of all residents. However, this is essentially the healthcare system we have allowed to continue in America – a system which causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths annually.

At the bargaining table we are increasingly challenged by incessant employer demands to decrease their health insurance costs by increasing "cost shifting." This prevents progress on other important economic issues. Even those of us lucky enough to have medical insurance live perilously close to financial disaster; one serious illness can easily wipe out a life's savings. Economists estimate that over 60 percent of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are attributable to medical expenses and 80 percent of these are people who have health insurance.

Mergers, acquisitions, pooling and other forms of industry restructuring seek to give hospitals an edge over insurers, or doctors an edge on the hospitals, or employers an edge over everyone. The battle to grab a larger share of the healthcare dollar has driven up costs by diverting money intended for care to marketing and lawyers. Physicians increasingly recognize the inefficiency and inadequacy of the current system and now a full 59 percent of those surveyed support a single-payer system.

Our union continues to engage at all levels in an intensive educational, organizational, contractual and political action campaign to better address the healthcare crisis. This union-wide effort helps to educate rank-and-file workers and community residents about the reality of the current system, encourage local unions to mount more effective responses to employer attacks during contract negotiations, and increase our political activity to build a broad united front in support of single-payer public health insurance.

As the healthcare reform debate has raged during the first nine months of the Obama-Biden administration it is more obvious than ever that single-payer is the only solution capable of eliminating waste and profits from health insurance. Such a sweeping and dramatic legislative remedy is highly improbable given the massive influence of big business upon lawmakers. While progressives comprise a solid 40 percent of House Congressional Democratic members, their counterparts in the Senate number fewer than ten out of one hundred. This frustrating reality has led to, among other things, the origination of the "public option" concept as a possible way to move forward with significant reform given this Congressional situation.

To clarify the debate on public health insurance the UE General Executive Board issued a statement this spring which laid out the minimum standards that must ultimately be included in any "public option" reform proposal in order to be worthy of our support. The final plan must include an authentic public health insurance plan open to all working people. It must be accessible to any provider, affordable, capable of holding down costs, comprehensive in its coverages, and strictly regulated to ensure reliability and quality. The final "public option" will need to be scrutinized to ensure that it does not force working people to purchase overpriced and unaffordable private insurance which is then promoted as reform. The final plan must also be constructed by recognizing the predatory role of the insurance companies, and not be merely another mechanism to supply more profits to this industry at the expense of workers.

The healthcare crisis is more than health insurance and access to healthcare. The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is seriously flawed. It offers no protection for part-time workers, intermittent workers, or workers in small establishments. It grants workers the right to only twelve weeks of unpaid medical leave. Ironically, in many cases, employers are using FMLA in a sleazy attempt to whittle away at our contractually more substantial medical leave provisions. At the most stressful times in our lives – the illness of a family member, the birth or adoption of a new child, or our own sickness – it is unconscionable we are expected to manage without pay. Like universal public health insurance, the U.S. has the worst record of paid leave for workers amongst the industrialized nations. Only California, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island have some form of legislated paid medical leave.

Many states have enacted legislation to curb some of the worst excesses of the health insurance industry. State requirements that women be offered a minimum of two days postpartum care, or that coverage cannot be denied for pre-existing conditions, are among the measures. This type of legislation has resulted in relief for some, but is a band-aid on a malignant tumor.

We hear a relentless drumbeat from industry and their political friends that healthcare "reform" should require workers to buy private health insurance, so-called "individual mandates." Massachusetts is held to be the model for the nation. However, since the Massachusetts plan was adopted three years ago 83,000 people have received exemptions from having insurance, recent immigrants are being cut off from insurance, and costs are increasingly being shifted to workers and consumers.

The idea that single payer is the first step to "government taking over our lives" and giving up our "freedom" is right-wing fantasy and fanaticism. Providing a fundamental human right through more equitable taxation publicly and without profits is good public policy. Medicare, 44 years old, hasn't taken away our freedom. The Veterans Administration was created by Congress in 1776 and built its first medical facility in 1811 – it hasn't taken away our freedom. State-level public insurance programs haven’t taken away our freedoms.

A single-payer public health insurance program is reasonable, feasible, and popular. What stands between us achieving single-payer is corporate and insurance company opposition, weak or corrupt politicians unwilling to stand up to the insurance industry, and the lack of an effective mass movement capable of petitioning for single-payer health insurance. Recent antics by anti-reform forces and anti-Obama bigots during Congressional town halls are evidence that the enemies of reform will say and do just about anything in order to stall reform. No matter the lies and distortions, and in spite of the help lent to them by the corporate media, the healthcare system is collapsing under the weight of insurance company profiteering. Let us mobilize our members and allies to achieve what has to date been denied us, and claim this basic human right to healthcare for all residents in this nation.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 71st UE CONVENTION:

  1. Calls on the U.S. Congress to create a single-payer system and support enactment of the U.S. National Health Insurance Act – Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, (HR 676, introduced by Rep. John Conyers) and American Health Security Act of 2009 (SB 703, introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders) and until we achieve single-payer insurance, calls on Congress to provide sufficient resources to hospitals, nursing homes, and other healthcare providers to ensure quality care for those who need it;
  2. Work with all advocates of public health insurance to build a united front that demands healthcare as a basic human right; that any legislation by Congress must include a robust public, not-for-profit plan, open to everyone, at similar costs and reimbursement rates as Medicare, that is structured to provide comprehensive quality healthcare at the lowest possible cost;
  3. Calls on Congress and the President to ensure that any ultimate "public option" legislation meet the minimum standards as defined in the UE General Executive Board Statement On Healthcare Reform issued on May 15, 2009 and available on the UE web page at www.ueunion.org and encourages UE members to make maximum use of this useful tool to measure the final reform legislation;
  4. Calls on Congress and the President to direct the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to cost out the effects single-payer health insurance will have on the U.S. budget and economy, and to use that as the benchmark to measure all other health care reform bills, and provide the same level of representation to single-payer advocates as proponents of the “public option” and private health insurance;
  5. Opposes any and all efforts to deny or restrict healthcare or health insurance based on employment status, economic status, or immigration status;
  6. Calls on the Union at all levels to intensify our efforts to pass single-payer legislation through public actions, education, and rank-and-file lobbying;
  7. Encourages the union at all levels to participate in coalitions working for single-payer healthcare, and to continue our work with allies such as the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Healthcare, Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Healthcare, Physicians for a National Healthcare Program, and Healthcare NOW!;
  8. Encourages locals to up the ante in the public debate on single-payer universal healthcare by supporting workplace actions, mass mobilizations and civil disobedience, as well as supporting calls for the imposition of additional taxes or penalties on insurance companies, healthcare providers, medical device manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies which make excessive profits off of our healthcare needs;
  9. Urges locals to join with groups working to curtail the abuses ingrained in managed care and a private insurance system;
  10. Calls on labor, community, social, civil rights, women’s, and faith-based organizations to seriously discuss and consider the calling of a national workplace stoppage to enable all people to express our determination to secure our right to healthcare and public health insurance;
  11. Urges the union at all levels to withhold support from any candidate in any race who refuses to endorse and actively campaign on a platform that prioritizes the need for a state-based and national single-payer universal healthcare systems;
  12. Urges locals to contact the local Veterans' Administration to learn what medical benefits are available to veterans, and to lobby for restoration of fully funded medical benefits for veterans and their families and preventive testing and screening of all veterans potentially exposed to depleted uranium;
  13. Directs locals to continue to fight for the best possible employer-paid healthcare plan, including the following protections:
    1. No changes in plan design, provider groups, and no new exclusions or limitations – unless mutually agreed;
    2. A grievance procedure with provisions for union representation;
    3. Medical care providers, not insurance bureaucrats, to determine what treatments are medically necessary;
    4. No pre-existing limitations or exclusion clauses;
    5. Choice of primary care physicians, specialists, and hospitals to cover your group, with an option to go outside the network with no co-pays;
    6. The highest level of protection for all accidents and emergencies;
    7. Fast turn around time (ten days or less) for all bills in dispute, and the members not to be responsible for bills in dispute;
    8. Extended coverage for specialists who may charge more than usual and customary charges;
    9. No paperwork, easy to follow plan documents and a confidential member services hotline;
    10. Urges locals to tread carefully and take proper precautions when considering "Consumer-Driven Healthcare" scams such as Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), Health Reimbursement Accounts (HRAs), and other devices that are designed to financially penalize those who need healthcare;
    11. Encourages the Union at all levels to oppose and prevent cost shifting onto workers.
 
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