Labor & Employment Law

House Health Care Reform Plan a ?Crucial Roadmap?

By Mike Hall

With thousands of union, health care and community activists set to descend on Capitol Hill tomorrow in what could be the largest ever rally for health care reform, the AFL-CIO is telling House committees this week that comprehensive reform must lower costs, improve quality and cover everyone.

Last week, House Democrats introduced a health care reform plan that AFL-CIO President John Sweeney calls:

a crucial roadmap for what health care reform should look like. Working families are desperate for an American solution that encourages choice, competition and opportunity for all Americans to choose the health care that works for them.

This week, the three House committees that developed the health care reform roadmap?Education and Labor, Energy and Commerce, and Ways and Means?are holding a series of hearings on the plan. In testimony for all three panels, Gerald Shea, AFL-CIO assistant to the president, says reform must build upon what works.

For the majority of Americans, what works in our current health care system is employer-based coverage?the backbone of health care coverage and financing in America. Over 160 million people under age 65 have health benefits tied to the workplace.

The House plan, says Shea, “outlines a reasonable and effective” pay-or-play requirement for employers. In pay or play, employers must provide coverage for their workers or pay into a fund.  Shea says the public health insurance option in the House draft will:

inject competition into the health care system and lower costs for employers and workers alike.

He outlines three other areas the AFL-CIO says must remain in the committees’ health care reform proposal to stabilize and build upon the employer-provided coverage system.

• Special assistance for firms that maintain coverage for pre-Medicare retirees, which will prevent further deterioration of the employer-based system;
• Health care delivery reforms to get better value from our system and containment of long-term costs; and
• Insurance market reforms, individual subsidies, Medicaid expansion and improvements to Medicare, which will help make affordable coverage available to everyone.

The public health insurance option, improving and making more efficient the way health care is delivered, and a pay-or-play option will generate significant savings and revenue to help finance health care reform. But, especially in the short run, other revenue will be needed. Shea says the AFL-CIO supports President Obama’s funding plans, including

savings in Medicare and Medicaid, limiting the itemized deductions for households in the top two tax brackets and other modifications to reduce the tax gap, as well as making the tax system fairer and more progressive.

However, adds Shea, the proposal to finance health care reform through a tax on employer-provided health coverage:

is an extraordinarily bad idea that would undermine efforts to stabilize the employer-provided health care system. Employers would likely respond by increasing employee cost-sharing to a level at which benefits would become unaffordable for low-wage workers, or by eliminating benefits altogether.

Taxing health care benefits would not bring down health care costs, either. It would just shift more of those costs onto workers.

If you are in Washington, D.C., tomorrow, join us on Capitol Hill and tell Congress loud and clear, “Health care reform can’t wait.”

Click here for information on the rally.  Click here to find out what 23,000-plus people said about the nation’s broken health care system in the AFL-CIO’s 2009 Health Care for America Survey.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on June 24, 2009 (boomark / email).