Momentum Growing For Health Reform in ’08

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.

Groups like the National Coalition on Health Care — CWA is a member — long have been fighting for universal coverage and real reform, working through a broad coalition of unions, religious and community organizations, primary care provider groups and small and large businesses. Now, growing numbers of employers and business groups are signing on to the fight for real reform, motivated by the realization that America will lose its place in the global economy if it doesn't get a handle on a $2 trillion a year health care bill.

The U.S. currently spends 16 percent of our gross domestic product every year on health care, with huge costs levied on business, workers and government alike. That's more than double the rate of countries that provide universal coverage to their citizens.

Employers that still offer quality benefits to workers and their families today are at a huge disadvantage compared to competitors, often non-union, who provide little or no health care benefits. Employers that do provide quality health care to workers, spouses and families, including many CWA employers, actually are subsidizing the health care costs of their own competition. Today, 21 million workers get their health care coverage from an employer other than their own, a system that just isn't sustainable in the long term.

U.S. employers are competing with Canadian, European and Asian firms in countries where health care is considered a public good and a public benefit. That's causing U.S. companies to fall behind and an important reason why employers have signed on to real reform this time.

A new report by the Better Health Care Together Coalition found that by 2012, if nothing changes, the cost business pays for health benefits will increase by 55 percent, while the number of uninsured will rise by another 7 million.

Initiatives by individual states to provide and expand health care for all are bumping up against declining state revenues and the need for the federal government to play a critical role in real reform. States are facing increasing costs for Medicaid, because they have opted to pick up health insurance coverage for growing numbers of lower-income families who lost coverage because they lost their jobs or their employers cut health care, according to the National Coalition on Health Care and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. 

"No one state is capable of addressing the dual problems of rapid health care inflation and the rising number of people who lose or are forced to go without health coverage due to the high costs of employment-based insurance," the Coalition noted.