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We Must Start Treating Health Care as a Right

By Randy Bayne
The Bayne of Blog's California Notes

In the second Presidential debate Senator John McCain said that employers want to provide health insurance coverage to their employees. Of course, anyone who has had to negotiate with an employer over wages and benefits knows that just ain’t even close to true. The few who do want to provide health benefits only do it because they themselves will benefit from a group policy. Believe me, most don’t do it because they think of employees first. Give them an out and they will take it.

That’s what is happening in the Central Valley town of Atwater. What I’m sure is one of the towns largest employers, Atwater Elementary School District, is threatening to take away health insurance benefits for part-time employees.

Why would they do this since, according to McCain, they want to provide the benefit to employees? Because it seems that Atwater regards some employees as more valuable than others. Atwater pays $11,106 for health insurance per employee per year — just a bit more than the $5,000 McCain thinks health care cost. For Atwater’s teachers it is considered a part of their salary and reflects this in their contract. Not so for classified employees who get the benefit, but not as salary. Because it is part of teachers’ compensation the district has to pay an additional $333,000 each year to the California State Teachers Retirement System for pension payments.

So the district’s plan is to cover the cost of these favored and higher salaried employees (teachers) by hacking the benefits of the less favored, lower paid employees. The Atwater district estimates it will save $355,392 by cutting off part-time employees. What a deal. Not only does this cover the CalSTRS payment, but the district pockets $22,392.

Meanwhile, “taking away benefits will have immediate and drastic effects in this economic downturn like bankruptcy, foreclosure and an increased likelihood of medical conditions remaining untreated until they are life-threatening,” said Chris Niehaus, an organizer for the California School Employees Association who represents Atwater’s classified employees.

“Some of the people going to be put out are uninsurable because of chronic conditions,” noted Shirley Frice, a librarian and 20-year employee with the district.

This would all be moot if we treated health care as a “right,” like Barack Obama wants to do, rather than a “responsibility” as McCain called it in the second debate. If we treated health care as a right universal health care would be a reality in the U.S. and employers wouldn’t be ducking their “responsibility” for making sure their employees are covered.

Randy Bayne is Chair of the Amador County Democratic Party. This article originally appeared in The Bayne of Blogs and is published with the permission of the author.

Posted on October 08, 2008

Comments

I think it must be noted that neither Senator McCain nor Senator Obama have put forth a truly universal health plan. Senator McCain's plan whil result in more people having no health insurance as those with pre-existing conditions and chornic illnesses will be unable to buy their own insurance. When I was working on passing the mental health parity law in California(this just became the national law), I learned a lot about adverse selection. For example, if you make maternity coverage optional, it will be too expensive for the insureres as only people planning on having a baby will buy it. While Senator McCain's plan may increase the number of healthy 18-34 years olds (who are cheap to insure ) buy and pay for insurance, it will not solve the real problem. The real problem is that the insurance companies are not in the business to help people get health care. They are in the business to make money. This is what we must stop by having a single payer health plan and we already have one in palce called Medicare. It waws originally designed to be phased in to cover all Americans and it will be cost effectvie because CEOs and shareholders won't be invovled.

Posted by: Lori Holman at October 8, 2008 09:50 PM

Are you joking, with Medicare the HMO makes bucks. Have you ever heard of Secure Horzions?
The Rich get to have any doctor they want with the Supplemental Insurance the poor get Medi-Cal and Joe lunch box has to go on a HMO where the medical group controls his healthcare.

Posted by: Jeff at October 8, 2008 10:40 PM

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