Letter from Andrew Stern to Fortune 500 CEOs

[Omaha Steve]

Full story; http://www.changetowin.org/press/SternCEOLetter07172006.html


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Letter from Andrew Stern to Fortune 500 CEOs

July 17, 2006

Dear Fortune 500 Leader,

The American health care system is failing. Costs are exploding, coverage is eroding, and technological advances and quality improvements are happening at far too slow a pace. Skyrocketing health care costs are a threat to the economic future of America and America's families. Our deteriorating health care system undermines the security and well-being of our people, and the burdens it imposes on business threaten our ability to compete in the global marketplace.

We need a uniquely American solution to this problem. And so I'm writing to put before you the unusual proposal that we team up - business, labor, and health experts - to develop a creative and innovative solution to our nation's health care crisis, one that serves working people and American business alike.

We still have 45 million people uninsured in this country - 35 million of whom are working. Every corporation is making painful cuts in benefits or absorbing enormous new costs, and finding it harder to recruit and retain the best and brightest. McKinsey & Co. projects that by 2008, the average Fortune 500 Company will spend as much on health care as they make in profit.

And perhaps the most distressing statistic of all: The U.S. now ranks 24th in the world in life expectancy.

Health care is one of those issues that everyone talks about, but hardly anyone does anything about. Polls show that the American people blame Congress and the White House and have lost confidence in our government's ability to develop a solution. I agree with them. If this problem is allowed to simmer in the politics of Washington, nothing substantial will be done. It's up to us to do this together - that's why I've also made this appeal to the business community in the editorial pages of today's Wall Street Journal, and at a speech to the Brookings Institution in June.