Is US Labor propping up Big Insurance...again?

What a sad irony, an "historic mistake", but that's the $64 million question as US Labor opposes any taxation of employment-based health insurance benes in the current health reform debate.

The drive to continue excluding employer-based health insurance from taxes actually subsidizes our current corporate health coverage scheme and empowers Big Insurance profits and a non-system of care that is rationed by employment status. Is this what we really want out of health reform?

While perhaps historically correct, tying health insurance benes to employment may now be, ironically, the nail in the coffin of a real Public Health Plan - something that Labor also says it wants.

Can we have both a strong Public Plan and subsidized employment-based health insurance, or are they logically incompatible? A new Center for Budget and Policy Priorities report says we can, but only under certain conditions. Labor should listen, this time.

If not, we’re all in trouble.

And I mean ALL of us - not just those of us lucky enough to have union jobs . We’ll fail to reform health care in the US if we compromise away a strong universal public plan so that Big Insurance can get more tax-payer windfalls for the dwindling numbers of amply-employed but still painfully underserved by Big Insurance.

This time, the failure may be stamped with the Union Label unless we tax the health care rationers and the employers who feed them. Or we can kiss guaranteed, affordable care for all, goodbye. That appears to be our choice now.

It's time for a full-court press to detach health insurance from employment in the face of a changed economy.

Please consider these Health Econ & Labor History basics before screaming at me for Labor heresy:

1. Our current employment-based system of health insurance is considered by most health and labor economists to be a “historic mistake” – one that is not working for most of us, even those who are insured. It rations care by class, race and income level and offers the poorest quality of care in the industrialized world for those it miraculously "serves", and makes a huge profit for shareholders while doing so.

2. US Labor pushed for employment-based health insurance after WWII , and employers agreed in order to enable a healthy, productive industrialized workforce amidst labor shortages.

3. Our economy is no longer industrial nor is labor in short supply, and it ain’t gonna be any time soon, at least not in poor or diverse states like NM. This is not necessarily a bad thing in a pluralistic society; in fact, it’s considered a good thing by many. Either way, it’s what we got.

4. Insurers and other administrators have driven health care costs uncontrollably high, despite their consistent exclusion from taxation when offered through employment contracts.

5. As a result of the above four points, demand for a Public Health Plan for all of us has finally emerged in the US – the only industrialized country to NOT consider health care a basic human right in this way - to produce affordable, universal access to health care, backed by the government because that's what they're there for and do best. (Just ask your local government Fire Fighter.)

6. A functional and universal Public Health Plan requires demand, among other basics, to regulate costs and access. When Big Insurance is subsidized by being excluded from routine taxation like that of other employment benefits, it will drain demand away from a Public Health Plan and cause it to fail.

7. Spineless ConservaDems in Congress want a Devil’s Deal in health reform to appease their corporate backers, so we may get EITHER continued subsidies for Big Insurance via untaxed employment health benefit rations OR a strong Public Health Plan for all of us.

This health care fight is about our social values, and about making choices for the change we need.

Here’s our first big one…will Labor side with people or corporations in health reform? We can’t have both this time, in this economy and with our people getting expensively, unjustly sicker.

When will we stop making historic mistakes in US health care and finally enact a Public Health Plan that puts Big insurance on the sidelines where they belong... and puts Labor on the side of all workers?