News

Anxiety and worry about health care is no longer limited to those who don't have insurance.

Even people with good health care benefits — like those of us in CWA — worry what will happen when they retire, or what happens in the next round of bargaining if their company goes bankrupt.

Our health care situation is bad. In fact, it's become so serious and so damaging to our nation and our place in the global economy that there is a new political will to tackle this problem. Elected officials, employers, doctors and unions are demanding a solution — now.

The fate of retiree benefits is the "canary in the coal mine," as one policy analyst put it recently, for what everyone else needs to worry about as America's health care crisis deepens.

Understaffing combined with patients' fears that they won't be treated — or won't be able to pay — create health care crises daily in hospitals across the nation. So say nurses represented by CWA in New York, New Jersey and Iowa.

Americans spend more money on health care — lots more — and Canadians, sometimes, have to wait longer for non-urgent treatment.