Posted on 06/20/2005 8:46:40 AM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
Like a patient ignoring an ominous lump, Washington has spent years hiding from America's healthcare crisis. Now we'll soon learn whether President Bush and Congress will pay attention even if they are hit, so to speak, by a truck.
General Motors Corp. and the United Auto Workers are barreling toward an explosive collision over the company's effort to shift more of its crushing healthcare burden to its unionized workers.
GM is seeking concessions by the end of June, but union officials say they won't change their labor contract before it expires in 2007.
With many Americans already unnerved by persistent trade deficits, airline pension defaults and GM's recent announcement of 25,000 layoffs, the political and economic consequences could be profound if the GM-union conflict escalates into a strike or lockout. Self-preservation alone might encourage a president and a Congress with sinking approval ratings to confront the underlying healthcare problems fueling this dispute with even a fraction of the concern that they mustered for the treatment of a single Florida woman, Terri Schiavo.
To put it mildly, exploding healthcare costs present a more tangible problem for many more Americans than right-to-die cases. Since 2000, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's authoritative survey, healthcare premiums for family coverage have increased by 59%, six times faster than inflation.
Higher costs, which encourage employers to drop coverage and discourage employees from purchasing it when offered, are swelling the number of uninsured. Meanwhile, managers and workers in companies that still provide coverage are facing no-win disputes over how to split escalating bills.
That tension triggered the bitter four-month grocery strike settled last winter in Southern California. Now, the same fuse is igniting the confrontation between GM and the UAW.
The company's fundamental problem is that it has not designed enough cars that consumers like...
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
trying to mold public opinion into hillarycare. beware these types of articles.
If you want medical insurance, you pay for it out of your pocket, just like you pay for homeowners insurance and car insurance.
This would also help older people get jobs - employers would not have to look at the potential medical expense involved with hiring someone in their fifties or sixties, all they would have to worry about is if the person could do the job.
As a person in his fifties, I worry about this all the time.
Health care became a problem when the responsibility moved from the individual to the Government or an Insurance provider.
It cannot be fixed. The healthcare system in America will have to blow up first.
Ever since the federal government institutionalized risk back in the 1930s, the number of entitlement programs has grown...and now they are just too big to control.
Health care has to get back to the wallet - yours and mine - not the government's.
When a liberal says "confront", they mean "pay for".
Yep, extremely one-sided. The union hacks pay ZERO for caviar grade healthcare with no out of pockets at all. Nobody outside the rust belt assembly lines has that kind of coverage anymore. If they ran that story, you would see support for the "poor oppressed" workers fall to nuthin'.
What we have is a crises of expectation. Everyone expects that at the first sign of illness all the powers of science will come to bear on the problem and fix it at no cost. But like most things there is an economy of medicine.
Why doesn't General Motors also supply its employees with food ?
No, the real solution is to decouple paying customers from non-paying customers. Right now, paying customers pay more than they should for med care, because the hospitals have to accept medicare, medicaide, and illegals , and outsourced unemployed people with no health insurance.
Medical expenses would be just a fraction of what they are today if hospitals did not have to spead out the costs and bills of non paying/under paying people.
I wouldnt worry about GM, after they replace all of their american workers with chinese who have no benefits, and after they go bankrupt and wont have to pay anything to retirees, then GM will do just fine.
If people were paying for insurance directly out of their pockets instead of indirectly (they are paying now, but they just don't know it) they would pay a lot more attention and this would take care of itself.
Well, I know a way to have plummeting health care costs.... In The American Spectator a while back, there was an article that said over a couple of years BOTH LASIK eye surgery, AND plastic surgery had dropped in price, due to health insurance companies not paying for it. So, a reasonable idea would be that since people had to look for the cheapest one, the providers were doing it for less and less, so competition ensued. SOunds like a good idea.
Before ww2, that was SOP. Most people who had health insurance, bought it privately, bought the exact plan they wanted, with the doctor that they wanted, and did not buy stuff they didnt need. It wasnt until after ww2 that people wanted med insurance to be shifted to the employer instead.
We already tried "privately purchased health insurance", and nobody wanted it.
I want the United States Government to STOP PLAYING NANNY!
They have no business in health care, no business telling people to wear seat-belts, no business telling people what they can/can not ingest, no business providing a living for the laziest among us, no business supporting illegals in this Country.
Our Government is out of Control. They are removong the Rights of the People.
This is an utterly disingenuous argument, for it doesn't account for the fact that more Toyotas are produced in the U.S. than ever before -- and only something like 5 out of 17 major Toyota plants are located in Japan.
Since 2000, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's authoritative survey, healthcare premiums for family coverage have increased by 59%, six times faster than inflation.
The first step in addressing this "problem" is to use the proper terms when discussing it. The phrase "Healthcare premiums" is meaningless, because it doesn't accurately describe what is being discussed here. The issue is medical insurance premiums, and the crux of the so-called "crisis" is not the quality medical care, administrative costs, competition, etc. -- it's the fact that any financial transaction involving a third party (an insurance company, for example) is bound to be inefficient, costly, poorly-executed, etc. The normal relationships between supply, demand, and price do not apply in a transaction where the buyer and seller don't deal with each other directly.
All of the proposed solutions to this "crisis" are really nothing more than window dressing.
UAW expects the taxpayers to pay as punishment for buying Japanese cars. As far as high insurance costs driving up uninsured, in Maryland we have :1) a tax on each hospital bill to pay for people on welfare , 2) a tax HMO premiums to pay for malpractice settlements. MD Democrats put these on (over a veto)to destroy the current system so we cry for socialized medicine.
Actually, it was during WWII that medical insurance began to be included as an employment benefit, as a direct result of the Roosevelt/Keynes price and wage freeze intended to stifle inflationary pressures due to wartime scarcities.
For some oddball reason, the Roosevelt/Keynesian economic policy did not treat medical insurance as part of an employees paycheck. Because companies were not allowed to compete for good employees by offering them more money, they competed by offering exempt perquisites like medical insurance.
By the time WWII was over, medical benefits were a defacto part of the standard compensation package.
Yep. And Bush Jr., with his "free" pill vote-buying scam for greedy geezers, has accellerated the process by dumping another trillion dollars of debt on the backs of the American taxpayers.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.