Minnesota Rally Highlights Dire State of U.S. Health Care

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/05/30/minnesota-rally-highlights-dire-state-of-us-health-care/

Minnesota Rally Highlights Dire State of U.S. Health Care

by Mike Hall, May 30, 2007

Yesterday, shareholders of UnitedHealth Group Inc. heard from company executives that the firm was in tip-top-health. In 2006, United Health saw a 37 percent increase in earnings, a 54 percent increase in revenue and a 60 percent jump in cash flow.



If the stockholders and top execs had poked their heads outside of their Minneapolis Convention Center annual meeting, they would have heard a far less rosy diagnosis about the nation’s health care system from members of the community/union activist coalition Universal Health Care Action Network-Minnesota (UHCAN-MN) who rallied outside the meeting.

Pointing to the massive profits of insurers such as United Health and to the nearly 50 million Americans without health coverage, plus the millions more who are paying increasingly higher costs for less care, participants, including Minnesota AFL-CIO union members, called for quality, affordable health care.

UHCAN-MN member Stefanie Levi tells Workday Minnesota editor Barb Kucera:

Right now, we have a market-based system that’s been proven unsustainable. People are dying as a result of our broken health system.

Click here to read the full coverage of the rally: http://www.workdayminnesota.org/index.php?news_6_3106

[Selatius]

1. In America, we worship the wealthy. We elevate them to the level of gods.

Of course we're not going to take their market away from them by instituting single-payer universal health care. Instead, we're going to let them continue to make profits while people die because that's the American Way.

:sarcasm:

[dflprincess]

2. I still have some shares of UHG

(in an old 401K). There were two proposals in the booklet sent to shareholders from labor unions regarding executive compensation, both of which the board recommended no votes on so, naturally, I voted for them. According to the article in today's Star Tribune both of those proposals only received 41% of the vote (which is probably more than they would have gotton in past years.)

I was thinking of writing to both unions that next year they should offer proposals limiting executive compensation to something like 20 times the average employee salary and that their severence packages more closely resemble those given to the average grunt during one of UHG's periodic layoffs...not that either idea would pass but it might just be fun to torment the board with proposals like that and perhaps remind them that people are watching.