Why isn't American industry in the forefront of pushing for national health?

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

If these are costs they bear that make them non-competitive vs European and Japanese automakers, and Chinese everythingelsemakers why haven't they stepped forward and pushed for domestic healthcare change?

[fascisthunter]

1. Because of Ideology

they fear any "form" of socialism, because they know when it comes to human services, it works. They don't want the public knowing that, that's why Republicans and conservatives alike, demonize it the way they do. If it really didn't threaten them, they wouldn't care...

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

2. Theory:

The insurance industry wants single-payer or universal health care, as well as controls on malpractice premiums, about as much as any of us want our genitalia stapled to a wolverine. They are likely laying in a lot of leather and threats and FUD with industry. Also, corporate finance departments tend to manage investments in a lot of diverse industries. You can be sure that insurance companies and big parma figure into those investments and they would get heavily affected.

[TygrBright]

3. Because some of the largest industries include insurance, pharmaceuticals...

...medical technology, and for-profit healthcare, all of whom play the "end of the world as we know it" card among their peers whenever it's mentioned. ALSO...

Until recently, being able to offer decent health care benefits gave gigantic companies a competitive edge for the most educated, best-qualified, and desirable workers, in spite of shitty working conditions and pay. And gigantic companies didn't want to give up that edge.

It's the small and medium size businesses that get superlatively hosed from both sides in the current economy (although it's nothing new... they always get the fuzzy side of the lollipop.) And unfortunately, they believe their gigantic colleagues about what is, and isn't "good for business". At least, they did until recently.

helpfully,
Bright

[Hekate]

4. The more the auto industry bellyached that health care was killing them,the more I wondered the same

... thing. Logic (if not humanity) would lead you to this conclusion, so why didn't they?

If ideology was/is preventing them from taking this step, then their ideology makes neither humane sense, nor common sense, nor economic sense.

Hekate

[European Socialist]

5. Also have wondered the same for many years.

I think the ruling classes don't want any boats rocked because their boat might be next.

[bobbolink]

6. corporations stick together......

Unlike Dems, they don't break rank.

[warren pease]

7. Employer-provided medical insurance keeps the peasants scared and tethered to the wheel...

Here's an interesting take on the use by corporations of health benefits as a control mechanism to increase employee insecurity and therefore keep them working in the kind of useless, soul-shriveling jobs that, if they lived in a country with a national health care program and other elements of a real social safety net, they'd quit before the sun set on another miserable day of frustration, boredom and hopelessness.

Here's an excerpt from the above-linked article:

THE EFFECTS OF MARKET-DRIVEN CARE

The real effects of market-driven health care on people's lives suggest that the primary corporate motive for imposing this type of health care system is to allow employers to have more control over their labor force.

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 (and some regressive labor unions) 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. In June, 1998 General Motors threatened to deny medical benefits to striking workers in Flint, Michigan in order to pressure them back to work. Raytheon actually did cancel health insurance for striking workers in Massachusetts in August 2000, to force them back to work.

Additionally, making health benefits depend on independent agreements between employer and employees in thousands of different companies gives employers the upper hand by preventing employees from acting as a single nation-wide block. This is why American corporations don't want the situation in Europe, where wages and benefits such as health care, vacation, and maternity benefits are negotiated on a country-wide basis between representatives of labor, the government and corporations.

In other words, a scared employee -- thrown to the wolves as an overwhelmed individual rather than as a member of a union or some other organized counter-weight to full corporate totalitarianism -- is the perfect wage/debt slave and will do whatever he/she is told to avoid increasing their already suffocating levels of uncertainty and insecurity.

Just one more way the American dream works to enrich the usual piggies, control the (disappearing) middle class, exploit the working classes and continue to insulate the elites from their richly deserved day of reckoning, going face to face with the people they've screwed to the wall for centuries.


wp

[exboyfil]

8. Recent convert to Universal Single Payer

The explanation I have heard, which fits into your theory, is that businesses use employer based health care as a recruiting tool. If you look at the collorary of that statement, then it is a control mechanism for current workers.

Lack of portability for both pensions and health care are drags on economic mobility. The Germans have universal care with 15% of their income, and I would like to see a study on why we can't achieve that level as well (we are currently running at approximately 24% of our income when private and public expenditures are included). I am a relatively highly compensated worker with my employer (I an an engineer with two masters and 20+ years work experience), and they tell me my insurance costs 14% of my salary (that 14% includes historic high bonuses that will be going away as this recession takes off so the revised amount could be up to 16%)). A comparable federal plan (high deductible etc.) is within $2K in price. The union gets much better insurance than I do, and I have to think their plans must cost over 20% of their salary.

Ideally, if we could match the Germans performance, all employers could go to a withholding type system at 15% of our salary. For that we could relieve the 45% already spent in the public sector (ie tax reductions or deficit reductions) and have a single payer system. The transition for an employer like mine will be easy since it appears they already spend at least that amount already. They should be jumping up and down for the opportunity. For me to go into the Federal plan that is like mine (ie the same insurance that the Senators get) and have complete portability and security that the premiums would be paid in the event I was laid off would be golden.

The key is figuring out how the Germans do it and adopting their practices in our health care system. Some immediate suggestions I would make would be monoposy negotiation with the drug companies for the absolute lowest prices available, tort reforms that eliminate jack pot settlements for malpractice, single payer negotiation with medical suppliers for the lowest prices (ie reflecting the same prices paid in Germany for comparable services). Of course each of these may have down sides (potential freezing of drug development, reduced compensation for medical malpractice, layoffs in drug and insurance companies, reduced compensation for health care providers, and availability of health care providers - both from providers exiting due to lowered compensation as well as additional demands on the system).

We need more domestically produced GPs and nurses to handle the additional demands of universal health care so many of the individuals from the impacted industries could be retrained??

[krispos42]

9. Because American Industry is now located in Asia...

...and is mooching off of China's health-care system.