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Stern urges new health care system

(International Labor Communications Association)

By PAI Staff Writer Mark Gruenberg

WASHINGTON (PAI) – The head of the nation’s largest health care workers union, Service Employees President Andrew Stern, has trashed the present U.S. health care system, and says business should join with labor in creating a new one.

But in a June 16 symposium on the future of employer-sponsored health care, sponsored by the Brookings Institution – a noted D.C. think tank – Stern also dismissed one proposed alternative, a single-payer government-run system built on Medicare.

Other than offering general principles for health care reform, Stern was not specific about what system would replace the present health care system, which now consumes $2 trillion of the annual U.S. gross national product.

And the panelists who followed Stern to the podium disagreed with him to some extent on whether trashing the current employer-based system was a wise idea.

Stern, whose union represents 1 million health care workers out of its total estimated membership of 1.8 million, said that “we don’t have a problem, but a crisis” in health care in the U.S. “Americans are sick of it. Politicians’ words don’t mean anything and businesses have fine words, but nothing happens,” he added.

The result is individuals and families bankrupted by health care costs, people dying because they can’t pay for care, and hospitals concerned not just with the uninsured, but with how insured customers will pay for treatments, among other ills.

“With health care costs estimated to reach $17,522 per worker per year in 2010, we can’t figure out how employers will compete in a global economy” while shouldering that, he added. “GM is a health care company masquerading as a car company.”

Stern explained that it would be in employers’ best interests to campaign for health care system reform – which he said they were silent on when President Clinton proposed his health care plan in 1993. Business groups loudly opposed Clinton.

“We have to make fundamental changes, not by policy – we have commissions and committees to do that – but by politics and leadership,” Stern stated. But few employers have gotten out front on the health care issue to prod politicians, he added.  

“Polls blame Congress and the White House” for inaction on health care, Stern. “But my question for employers is: ‘Where are you?’”

 Meanwhile, unions are split between those like the Steelworkers who advocate a single-payer, government-run health care system – which would sharply reduce insurance and other overhead costs – and those who want to change and improve the present employer-based system. All unions and their members are hit with the rising health care costs, especially at the bargaining table.

Stern did not spell out a solution, or side with the latter group, but he did say the U.S. is “going to build our own system, not import Canada’s or anybody else’s, and it’s not going to be built on the back of the government.” He predicted “there will be multiple payers, not a single payer,” for health care.

“Single-payer is a stalking horse for I’m not sure what,” Stern said. And he pointed out single-payer advocates face a five-letter word as a problem: “Taxes.”

But Stern later admitted “the easiest thing to do” might be to “expand the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan,” which covers lawmakers and federal workers and gives them a choice of doctors and has much lower premium costs.

Alternatively, you could have the federal government “set national standards” for insurance coverage and have it give states lump sums to pay for health care “and let states construct a system,” he suggested.  He cited Oregon’s system, crafted by former Gov. John Kitzhaber (D), as a model.

Advocates of single-payer health care, including the Steelworkers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, differ with that stand. Many have rallied around HR 676, legislation by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), which would basically, with some tweaking, extend Medicare’s universal coverage to the entire population, including letting patients choose their own doctors and its cost controls and principles.  

But no health care system change will occur, Stern said, “unless employers and unions come together to make policy” and “unless and until the business community comes together and says there’s a need to change.” Though he did not say so, about the only thing unions – including SEIU – and business agree on is a “Cover The Uninsured Week” ad campaign once a year. But they can’t agree on how to do so.

One immediate problem Stern spotlighted is that government pays at least half of health care costs through Medicare and Medicaid, the child health insurance program and by tax deductions for health care costs.

But “those biggest purchasers, the government entities, don’t demand an answer” to one key part of the health care system’s problems, escalating costs, Stern said. “If they do, they have a lot of power” to force change and controls, he added.