The OTHER big reason why we won't get Single Payer Healthcare anytime soon:

[Tyler Durden]

The first reason, the OBVIOUS one, is of course the profits of the Insurance companies and for-profit hospitals. That's a no brainer and everyone "gets" that one.

The OTHER reason is not so obvious, and much more insidious and dark.

Here's the scam:

You have a job, the pay is shit, the benefits suck, BUT...you have health insurance (kind of, but some sort of coverage).
There's a recession on, OR, since St. Ronnie the Reagan, you can count on "competitiveness" being the god worshiped by industry, so you ain't got too many new prospects.
Plus, half the states are "right to work" (LOVE that one. Not.) States, where you also have the "right to be fired for no God Damned reason at all.

So...you're stuck. So Single Payer Health Care would be a "good thing," right?

If you're the poor schmuck stuck in that job, this is the answer to your hopes (ooooo. LOVE that one too), dreams, and prayers. Plus, your asthmatic kid will finally get the good care they need, and those ruinous deductables and copays will go away. Joy unconfined! Where do we sign up?

Wellllll.......There's a catch.

Employers, for all their pissing and moaning about paying for health care insurance get a HUGE bennie from it: a work force that is TIED to them to keep their health care; really a relatively cheap way to get a captive work force without COLA, raises, bonuses, or even having to guarantee any sort of job security. AND, they can't vote with their feet.

SHIT. What a Good Deal.

Now not a single employer will admit this, but you do the math: retraining costs are estimated at more than half of an employee's yearly pay. The most expensive health care package I've ever seen an employer pay cost them less than 25% of an employee's yearly pay.

Another thing, what keeps very small entrepreneurs from shooting their shot and attempting a new venture or benefit is...you guessed it...Health Care for the family. Also, how do you go back to college or a trade school and improve your situation without health care for your family? Wellll...you DON'T.

You keep "flipping the burgers."

[Tesha]

1. Absolutely.

If this were not the absolute truth, you'd be seeing all
of those companies that claim "health care costs are
*KILLING* us!" crying for, well, health care! But you
don't.

Tesha

[Tyler Durden]

3. The only Companies screaming for it?

Companies with a large retiree pool to be given health care under Union contract.

[sentelle]

22. i have heard employers complain

My boss for example: the way he structures his plan, the longer you are with the company, the more the company picks up the premium, up to a maximum of all of it (after 5 years).

The problem though is that the average increase in price on the true cost of the plan (actual dollars paid) has risen, on average, 20% a year, every year since I have been there. So as I have been there, the plan has gotten worse. Its a small business, in that its maybe 40 people in 2 offices.

My boss complains, sure he does. He pays the bills, and he's on the same insurance as everyone else. Lately, its been a choice between raises or medical.

[Donk Yore]

2. Things used to be hoped for

in the good old days. Things were going to get better.

Now, just hope it doesn't get too much worse.

I've seen the future; it is murder.

[dmosh42]

4. Another reason for candidates not to be specific....

The insurance cos wrote their plans. Edwards had been trying to get people to understand that!

[Tyler Durden]

5. HARD to fight against the Insurance Cos. and Pharma when they help you run your campaign.

...as is happening with both front runners.

Foxes in charge of the henhouse.

[acmavm]

6. Yep. And I pay 300.00/month for my son and myself. That's not

counting dental or life.

Insurance is killing me.

[lonestarnot]

8. And any chance they can grab more they never miss.

[acmavm]

11. No kidding. The insurance is crap. But at least it's a foot in the

door to a hospital if something catastrophic happens.

[Tyler Durden]

13. That's cheap.

I used to pay almost $400 for the same thing. Add in the Dental and vision, it was well over $500/month.

[acmavm]

19. No Tyler, $300 a month is not cheap. Not when you make only 13.00 an hour.

And not when the insurance is crap.

Plus I pay dental, life, ad&d, and whatever the hell the shit is thay pays me so much a month if I get hurt or sick for a long time.

[Tyler Durden]

20. Oh no, I didn't mean it was cheap for YOU.

I just meant that some people pay twice to three times that much.

Expensive is relative, and when you make $13.00 an hour, Ground Round vs Hamburger is expensive.

Sorry that seemed insensitive.

[JNelson6563]

7. Excellent point!

America, the gateway to servitude.

Julie

[Tyler Durden]

9. Why do you think Bushites LOVE the "Guest Worker" plan?

You don't honestly think THEY get any health care, do you?

[baldguy]

10. We are all corporate serfs.

[KitSileya]

12. Anyone who haven't realized the US is a the last feudal kingdom

just haven't been paying attention. The corporations are Americans' feudal lords, and the lack of worker's rights is the chains. One such right is health care rights, rather than benefits. Benefits are something you are given, and for which you depend on someone's generosity. Rights, as we all know, are inherent.

I just had to take 2 sick days this week - no worries, as I have 24 to use in a 12-month period. And if I am seriously ill, I can just go to the doctor and get a doctor's leave, which don't count towards these 24 days (which can be taken up to 8 in a row) which is good, as I was out 4 weeks this Fall after ankle surgery. Of course, I didn't have to take any of my vacation days - that's unheard of.

My fairytale land? Norway. Where the working class realized that Ben Franklin was right and decided they would hang together in the battle for adequate living conditions etc. Too bad Americans are too brainwashed to realize that for themselves.

[McCamy Taylor]

14. Health insurance costs employers big $$$ now. THEY are screaming for Nat'l Health.

It is the combined pressure of all the big companies that are paying $1500/month/per family for health insurance for their skilled union workers (without whom they can not operate their factories) but charging the union workers so much less that will get us national health insurance.

The medical industrial complex is HUGE (15% of the GNP) but everybody else (including GE) is HUGER.

[Tyler Durden]

15. Not where I work.

These people would rather drink sewage than have what they call "Socialized Medicine."

[Tesha]

23. Soon, they may have that first option. :-( (NT)

[warren pease]

16. Medical insurance as social control mechanism...

Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) has an article on their website entitled:

MARKET DRIVEN HEALTH CARE AND SOCIAL CONTROL

Here's a couple of snips:

THE EFFECTS OF MARKET-DRIVEN CARE

What are the results of market-driven health care? First, market-driven health care makes people feel insecure about their prospects for receiving health care when they need it. Second, it destroys the trust that patients once had in their doctors by making doctors "gatekeepers'' whose role is often to block access to care. Third, by making health care a commodity to be bought and sold like any other, it expands the growing economic inequality in the United States to include health inequality. Fourth, it pits health professionals against each other in competing physician groups and hospitals. These are four classic methods of social control: make people feel too insecure to challenge those in power, destroy people's trust in one another, make them more unequal, pit them against each other.

Even before the rise of market-driven health care, corporations relied on the insecurity of health care to control workers. For decades, large employers have preferred to link health benefits to employment, knowing it gave them more control over their employees. According to a New York Times/CBS poll in 1991, 32 percent of workers did not quit jobs they disliked because they were afraid of losing their health benefits.<13> In June, 1998 General Motors threatened to deny medical benefits to striking workers in Flint, Michigan in order to pressure them back to work. <14> Raytheon actually did cancel health insurance for striking workers in Massachusetts in August 2000, to force them back to work.

Corporate leaders abandoned the old method of social control embodied in the New Deal and the Great Society and began relying instead on a fundamentally different, "get tough," strategy designed to strengthen corporate power over people by making them less secure. This new strategy motivates corporate leaders' new enthusiasm for the "discipline" of the free market, which they use to justify not only market-driven health care but downsizing and attacks on the social safety net.

Market-driven health care is part of a pattern of government and corporate policy initiatives over the last several decades which have one thing in common: they strengthen corporate power over people by lowering people's expectations in life, and by reducing their economic, social, and emotional security. These policies include corporate downsizing and the "temping" of jobs; the elimination of the "family wage," so that now both parents have to work full-time and have less time with their children; drastic cuts in the social safety net of welfare and related assistance; the introduction of pension plans based on individualized investments that leave each older person to his or her own fate; and the use of high stakes tests in public elementary and secondary schools to subject children to the same stress and insecurity that their parents face on the job. In the workplace, employers have adopted anti-worker tactics that had not been used since the early 1930s, most notably firing striking workers and hiring permanent replacements, as President Reagan did during the air traffic controllers' strike. All these policies put people on the defensive and pressure them to worry more about personal survival than working together for social change.

Thanks for bringing this up. I read this analysis years ago and had forgotten all about it.


wp

[Tyler Durden]

17. Any way they can run their scam on us.

I was following the torture debate. There's a flikr slide show from TUOL SLENG prison in Phnom Penh, including their waterboard apparatus. We have become the monsters the just shall abhor in the future. We neglect our own, and torture the innocent.

What have we done?

?v=0

[minerva50]

18. Similar to why the US encourages home ownership

You're stuck with a big mortgage, you're reluctant to risk job or location changes. They have a more stable workforce.

[Dulcinea]

21. The only way universal health care will ever happen...

...is if & when corporate America demands it. I'm sure the US automakers, for example, would LOVE to dump their retiree health costs on the government.

But you have a good point! I know a LOT of people who would quit their jobs in a heartbeat if they didn't have to worry about health insurance.