Health care 'discussion' within AFL-CIO executive council?

Mark Gruenberg

03 Aug 2009

Press Associates, Inc.

Stories vary, but apparently there was a prolonged and sometimes testy discussion about health care within the AFL-CIO Executive Council, behind its closed doors, on July 28.  And it ended, one member said later, with the possibility of a big change in what the federation stands for, come September.

    The discussion, several members said, featured California Nurses Association Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee, California State Employees Association representative Clyde Rivers and, briefly, Sheet Metal Workers President Michael J. Sullivan.

    At issue was whether the AFL-CIO should continue to support and push for the hybrid public-private health care revision legislation now moving through Congress, or abandon that and go with the rising sentiment within the labor movement for single-payer government-run universal health care.  Some 552 labor bodies, including 21 international unions, now back single-payer, which would abolish the private insurers. 

    The latest union to vote for single-payer was the Theatrical and Stage Employees, on July 29.  President Matthew Loeb called it “the right thing to do.”

    Within the council, the Californians, who twice pushed a state-level single-payer plan through their legislature, only to see GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger veto it, argued strongly for movement-wide endorsement of single-payer. 

    McEntee, whose union is mobilizing for the public-private plan -- conditioned on creation within it of a strong government-run competitor to the insurance companies -- and running ads for it, favored keeping to that course for now.

    And Sullivan said his union’s campaign finance committee, which distributed $2.4 million to candidates in the 2007-08 election cycle, will give politicians nothing this cycle.  Instead SMWIA would plow its money into a campaign for real health care reform.

    “We should stop supporting the lapdogs among the Democrats unless they do real health care reform and a real Employee Free Choice Act,” Sullivan said.
 
    “From my perspective” the congressional health care plan “looks like the Clintons’ plans years ago,” DeMoro, quoting her own speech within the council, told reporters afterwards.   Her union is one of the fastest-growing nurses’ unions in the U.S.

    “The point is that labor isn’t a special interest, but we represent the working people, and our expectation is the Democratic Congress would do so, too,” she added. 

    Then, quoting polls and unionists who show majority support for single-payer, DeMoro warned: “We don’t want to get whipsawed again.”  If the Democrats sell out on health care, she said, union support for them would drop dramatically, as it did after the Clinton plan collapsed in 1994.  The GOP won Congress that year, and held it 12 years.

    “Where’s the constituency for this boondoggle plan?”  DeMoro asked of the measures moving through key congressional panels.  “We have to have single-payer.  What we have is an incomprehensible approach to health care reform.”

    McEntee was more cautious.  “We have to see what they” -- congressional committees -- “come out with” before the AFL-CIO decides its next moves, he said.  But he also pointed out the committees’ health care bills “are only the first step” in a long process.  Federation Legislative Director Bill Samuel added later the final product would be hammered out in bargaining between lawmakers and the Obama administration.

    Meanwhile a new issue has arisen in how to pay for health care, with a proposal floated by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., to tax the health insurance companies, and bar them from passing on the taxes to their policyholders.  The tax would help pay the 10-year $1 trillion bill needed to cover the uninsured and extend health care to all.

    Democratic President Barack Obama wants to know more about Kerry’s plan.    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was enthusiastic about it.  “They have immoral profits,” she told The News Hour With Jim Lehrer.  “They’re making billions of dollars while cutting off people who are entitled to care.”

    AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney doubted another idea floated to fill the $1 trillion hole.  “The AFL-CIO has real concerns about the proposal to tax high-cost health plans currently under consideration in the Senate Finance Committee.  How it is defined will have a significant effect on which plans are taxed and at what level,” he said. 

    “The Goldman-Sachs Cadillac plan for executives may be the target of this proposal, but it could well end up hitting benefits for working families and retirees already reeling from health care costs if lawmakers rely on this as a way to curb federal spending rather than enact real cost containment,” he added in a July 29 statement.
          
    CSEA’s Rivers predicts the upshot of all this will be an AFL-CIO reversal at the convention in Pittsburgh, to throw its support behind single-payer. 
      
    “It is the council’s belief that single-payer is the way to go and the only question is of timing,” he told Press Associates after speaking for single-payer at a July 30 Capitol Hill rally.  This issue “is like anything else: The politics work as much behind-the-scenes just as much as they do out front.  I expect to see it come up in Pittsburgh.”