The Labor Campaign for Single Payer Healthcare

On December 9 Senator Bernie Sanders (I., VT) introduced legislation in the U.S. Senate to provide healthcare to everyone in America through a single-payer, Medicare-for-All system.

“The United States is the only major nation in the industrialized world that does not guarantee healthcare as a right to its people,” Sanders said. “It is time that we bring about a fundamental transformation of the American health care system. It is time for us to end private, for-profit participation in delivering basic coverage.”

The Bill, S. 1782, The American Health Security Act of 2013, would cover “every individual who is a resident of the United States” in a state-administered health security program. The programs would provide comprehensive “womb to tomb” coverage and coverage would be seamlessly transferrable between states. The programs would be publicly financed through an equitable system of progressive taxation, payroll taxes and re-allocation of current dedicated healthcare expenditures by the federal, state and local governments.

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Our Briefing Paper, 10 Things Unions Need to Look Out for When Bargaining Under Obamacare has just been released. The paper examines ten threats to union-negotiated health benefits under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It elaborates on the concerns expressed in Resolution 54 passed at this year’s AFL-CIO Convention.

While rejecting calls for an outright repeal of Obamacare as divisive and demoralizing, the paper asserts that the complex provisions of the ACA undermine the “solidarity model” of healthcare coverage embraced by unions. It argues that the ACA will ultimately replace this model with a “consumer-driven” model where each worker is on his or her own to navigate a complex, for-profit system with limited resources.

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Calling on the labor movement to “Finish the job! Make healthcare a human right!,” activists from the Labor Campaign for Single Payer, Labor United for Universal Healthcare and the Campaign for Healthy California were all over last week’s AFL-CIO Convention. They distributed copies of the Open Letter to the AFL-CIO, signed by over 600 union leaders and activists and attended workshops and spoke from the convention floor.

Leslie Lashinsky (AFM), Tom Newman (IATSE) and Betty Madden (IATSE) at the AFL-CIO Convention

Delegates to the Convention overwhelmingly re-affirmed their support for a single-payer, Medicare-for-All healthcare system. One resolution called for Protecting and Expanding Medicare Benefits. It declared the Federation’s “ironclad opposition to any and all proposals to cut Medicare benefits or shift costs to beneficiaries.” “Instead of looking for ways to destroy Medicare,” the resolution concluded, “…we must build on its experience as a single-payer program, demonstrating that single payer is the most cost-effective and equitable way to provide quality health care.”

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