Members tell Obama: Don’t just tinker with a broken health system

A number of CWA members have accepted the invitation of the Obama health team to express their ideas and concerns about health reform. We urge you to keep speaking up, either sending a message using our form or signing up for a houseparty.

And let us know when you respond. We'll be printing some of the responses here.

This is the first, a letter to the Obama team from Mark Gruenberg, a member of the executive council of Local 32035, the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild in Washington, D.C. Mark is also a small employer, running a union news service.

I am very encouraged by your receptiveness to the opinions of citizens on the issue of reforming health care.

The Newspaper Guild/CWA, my union, has asked us to remind you that while you consider heath care reform options, please keep two concerns in mind:

(1) No employer should be able to free load off the rest of us, even if another company covers one of their workers through a spouse or a partner. The law must force EACH employer to provide insurance for their employees or pay into a public plan for un- and under-insured Americans. If any employee is covered by another person's plan, the firm has to pay into the public fund anyway. It is time to end Wal-Mart's freeloading off the public trough -- and they're only the worst of many bad apples.

(2) Pay special attention to people between the ages of 55 and 64 (I'm 55). We're too young for Medicare. Many of my colleagues cannot afford health insurance plans because of their age and health status.

Employers with older workforces and employers who offer retiree health insurance tend to have much higher health costs than employers with younger workers or don't offer health coverage to retirees. Please make sure these people are not left out in the cold and the employers who shoulder the cost burden are offered relief.

I have some experience with this, which I will detail below.

But those moves are what I call tinkering with the broken health care system. Here's what I really want, and -- according to non-skewed opinion polls -- so does most of the country: BLOW IT UP.

Health care takes one-sixth of our GDP, a proportion scheduled to rise to a quarter of it within 10 years unless something drastic is done to control costs.

And what are the cost drivers that make health care unaffordable? Insurance company overhead (30% of total costs) and expensive, often unnecessary treatments pushed by the pharmaceutical manufacturers and the medical equipment makers. Big Pharma is the most-profitable industry in the U.S., and the insurers are close behind. Guess why.

It doesn't help that all this spending does not produce excellent outcomes. We are middle of the pack among developed nations in a whole host of measures of health care quality, except in cost. There, we're first, double the next most-expensive.

The solution is to junk the present system. Pollster Celinda Lake will tell you citizens don't want that, but her polls are skewed. A huge majority prefers a single-payer GOVERNMENT-RUN system, like Medicare, but covering everyone. And Medicare, for all its faults, has only 3% overhead.

Finally, my experience: I run a small news service for union media. We have two workers. We also have health insurance. Because of our size, there IS NO COMPETITION FOR OUR BUSINESS, despite what your plan envisions (much less the opposition's "you're on your own" schemes). It's either Blue Cross or individual coverage.

Five years ago, for three straight years, BCBS hit us with -- I am not kidding -- 30% annual rate hikes.

We had to cut literally just about everything else to pay for them: Rent, business-related insurance, outside expenses, you name it. The only thing not cut was my co-worker's pay....so I had to cut mine, by two-thirds. Thanks to BCBS, I qualified for EITC. Two years ago our local government (DC) cracked down on such exploitation: Rates were frozen for one year and rose 8% last year.

I do not want to be at the mercy of that monster again. The way to end it is to abolish private insurance, throw all its execs onto the jobless line (along with its bean-counters) and enact single-payer Medicare for all.

Thank you for your consideration of my concerns.

Sincerely,

Mark Gruenberg
Press Associates Union News Service