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Unions try to confront insurers over health care
By Mark Gruenberg 26 October 2009
| WASHINGTON - More than 600 people, almost all of them unionists, attempted to confront the nation’s health insurance companies on Oct. 22 over the issue of universal affordable health care -- and the insurance companies ducked. |
The protesters, from the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, the Laborers, The Newspaper Guild, the Communications Workers, the Teachers, SEIU, Working America and their allies, marched and chanted outside the Capitol Hilton Hotel in downtown Washington. Inside, representatives of the insurance monopolies were holding a conference, discussing how to kill health care reform.
The protesters backed seven families who came to D.C. from all over the nation. Union-backed Health Care for America Now brought them to tell insurers’ lobby CEO Karen Ignagni how her insurer-members denied care, forced people into bankruptcy and -- in one case -- killed a family member by refusing payment for needed treatments.
A recent Harvard Medical School report, using federal data, found that lack of health insurance produced 44,780 deaths in 2008, up from 18,000 six years before.
But Ignagni, whom speakers noted makes $1.6 million a year as CEO of Americas Health Insurance Plans -- the insurers’ lobby -- ducked meeting the families.
The protest came as closed-door action on health care continued on Capitol Hill. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was trying to stitch together a health care bill from competing versions from two Senate committees. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was still negotiating health care details with three congressional committees there. The insurers have hired 1,796 lobbyists, one speaker told the crowd.
A key cause of the unionists, and the demonstrators, was a strong “public option” in any final health care bill. The public option would be a government-run competitor to the health insurance companies, open to the self-insured and to workers in small businesses, and a competitor to the private insurers.
Only one or two private firms control up to 94% of the insurance market in most states, giving them unlimited freedom to jack up rates and deductibles, cherry-pick members and cut people off when they get sick.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, speaking at a rally before the march to the Hilton, said unionists and the American people would not let the insurers get away with that any more. “This” health care reform legislation “is about making the American people healthy, not about making insurance companies money,” he declared.
And Trumka repeated labor’s other standards for health care reform, including no taxation of workers’ present insurance and forcing all employers, “even Wal-Mart,” to pay their fair share for health care coverage.
Mark Gruenberg writes for Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission. |
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