In a major step forward for the health care reform movement, the AFL-CIO is supporting improving and expanding Medicare to cover everyone. The federation’s Executive Council issued the statement on March 6 at its annual meeting. The statement spells out that the best way to acheive health care reform is through progressive, public financing to pay for universal health insurance.
Read the statement at: http://www.aflcio.or…
The AFL-CIO acknowledges the role of state reform efforts at this time, but condemns individual mandates. It commits the AFL-CIO to using its resources to work on a campaign to win Medicare for All-style reform. Hooray!
I suspect that resources for the campaign will largely depend on how health care politics play out in the primaries and the general election next year. Are people prepared to unite around the goal of improving and expanding Medicare to cover everyone?
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The current system provides a financial incentive to hire the young guy instead of the fellow closer to retirement because the younger guy will have cheaper insurance premiums. Yes/no?
That is a huge and well-documented issue in age discrimination.
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There’s also the problem of companies like Wal-Mart outsourcing their healthcare costs to the state while its competitors do not. The fine that our new mandatory healthcare regime imposes was supposed to offset that, but it’s so puny an employer merely needs to spend a minute in the employee lounge digging for change in the sofa.
The employer (or Union, if the health benefit has been off-loaded to the Local) negotiates a group rate–single, family,family +2,+3…) that is not age discriminatory.
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History can wreck the total negotiated premium. But, the rates are age neutral in group plans.
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That is, if one guy gets cancer, in a small employer setting, the premiums for everyone will increase.
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To your point, I guess there’s an argument to be made that employers have an incentive to hire young, healthy people to avoid higher premiums caused by a random, catastrophic claim. I’ve never seen any articles or actual claims to that effect.
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The AFT-CIO is jumping on the universal medicare bandwagon, because they’ve got some real exposure.
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Several years ago, employers figured out that health insurance was rapidly rising. A number of us started off-loading the benefit to Unions. I consulted with a number of employers in collective bargained arrangements whereby the employer would agree pay the Union a fixed amount of money. The Union in turn would fund future health insurance.
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The Unions (the big ones anyway) are in the same boat now as many large employers and are looking to someone for a bail-out. The alternatives: a) government single payer b) cost shifting to the employee.
Hearty congrats & thanks go out to all the rank-and-file union members of AFL-CIO who for years have been growing this movement for affordable and sustainable universal healthcare in the form of Improved Medicare for All.
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Scores of individual AFL-CIO unions have already endorsed the national legislation, H.R. 676, and are part of its national organizing project thru HealthCare-Now in NYC. Way to go AFL-CIO!!
Medicare has the lowest administrative costs of any health plan in the nation. If we want to maximize the money going to care and not getting eaten up by administrative paperwork etc, this is the way to maximize bang for buck. Also consistently Medicare members have high satisfaction with their coverage with the exception of the fiasco Bush foisted upon them with Part D.
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One important point: The Herndon Alliance did a great deal of polling on this concept. Alas, the Medicare Part D did an excellent job of furthering the Republican concept that government is bad and inept – a key agenda for them. So the concept of Medicare for All starts out with a steep hole to climb out of in regards to how people see Medicare, post- Part D. The idea is good but we need to reclaim Medicare as cost-effective and satisfactory.