CWA 1180 - News

Hands off our health benefits
By Bill Henning
November 2003

CWA members at Verizon successfully staved off that company’s demands to force them to pay for health insurance premiums. The UAW appears to have resisted automakers’ attempts to trim their health benefits. Last year, TWU Local 100 preserved its level of health benefits in negotiations with the MTA.

For those of us in the public sector, the specter of health care givebacks looms over our bargaining tables. Forget that we know that our employers pay for our health insurance out of money that would otherwise go into our pockets as wages. No one thinks twice about the autoworker’s health insurance costs being folded into the price of a new car. But our employers get the money to fund our healthcare from taxpayers.

So when public workers get premiere health insurance, howls of protest erupt. That’s because we are seen as enjoying benefits not widely available in the largely non-union private workplaces. And those benefits are expensive. That stems from our market system of healthcare, where we spend 13-15 percent just deciding how to spend the available dollars. Insurers determine who is eligible for what care, and then providers wind up spending a big chunk on advertising to compete for the best (paying) customers.

Despite what we may think of our respective plans, compared to the general populace, we have extremely good benefits. That is why the business community constantly demands that government cut our benefits or shift more of the cost burden on to our shoulders. We set a “bad example” for their employees and so they even try to enlist those employees in opposing our seemingly generous benefits.

The notion that our healthcare system is private is largely a myth though. When you total up the amount of money spent by all payers, you quickly realize that the public sector plays a major role in funding healthcare. Adding up Medicare, Medicaid (and its variants), and government employees’ health insurance will bring you quickly to the conclusion that much of healthcare is financed by public dollars. So if it is driven by these public dollars, why don’t we have a more equitable system? Why are nearly 70 million Americans going to have some gap in coverage this year?

Surely, we must resist any attempt to cut our benefits. But in order to protect our health benefits at the bargaining table, we need to do a few things away from that table. We need to take an active part in the fight against Medicare and Medicaid cuts. We must join together with coalitions of patients and other unions to fight for real universal coverage with fair public financing, and get away from employment-based benefits. We also need to talk with our colleagues in the labor movement about this need, and to fashion a plan that organized labor can embrace. There will be no universal system in this country until and unless labor buys into it.

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