> > Employers will support single payer only when the employer mandates
> > are so stringent that they lose the club against employees and the
> > rationality and costs savings of single payer are more attractive
> > than the wage-cutting discipline of the present system.
>
> -The employer mandates in the current fair share legislations are
> -hardly stringent. As health care costs rise, the mandate to pay at
> -least 8 percent of payroll may eventually sound like a bargain.
>
> The NYC and Suffolk County laws require $3 per hour of work worth of
> benefits, as does the statewide legislation being promoted by Working
> Families Party. So at least understand that groups are already to
> step two,
> expanding the benefit demand, in a number of campaigns.
>
> No one on this list seems to want to really engage the "how do you get
> there" debate. The strategy for the fair share folks is clear-- use
> Wal-Mart as a wedge to establish laws with the principle of employer
> accountability, then start expanding coverage to more employers and
> push for
> tougher benefits standards. And if we push coverage to enough
> employers,
> some of them will then support more comprehensive solutions to get
> out from
> under those tough mandates.
>
> How do the single payer folks on this list expect to win? That's
> what I'm
> not hearing. Zero strategy, zero power analysis.
The Wal-Mart fair share campaign doesn't make any effort to link its demand with single-payer health care. Far from it, it's pitched as a way to reinforce the idea of employment-based health care, even while it is being phased out of practice by corporations and governments. If you win at Wal-Mart but lose at GM, municipal governments, Medicaid, etc., the overall health care burden on corporate America will decline. Talk about zero strategy and zero power analysis.
Moreover, mandating high-turn-over employers like Wal-Mart to devote a slightly higher proportion of labor costs to health care -- which will buy crappier coverage at ever higher costs as time goes by -- hardly benefits even Wal-Mart employees.
The question is whether rank-and-file workers can push unions like the UAW -- i.e., unions that have resources but are plagued by employer demands for constant concessions -- to develop a campaign for single-payer health care or the push will have to come from forces that have much less resources than they.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>