LiUNA! Laborers International Union of North America - www.liuna.org

The Need for National Health Care Reform

LIUNA supports comprehensive health care system reform that guarantees access to affordable, quality health care for all Americans and eliminates unfair cost-shifting to LIUNA's health and welfare funds and the hundreds of thousands of workers and families they serve. Our support for President-Elect Obama has been based in large measure on his call for comprehensive, national health care reform.

Good health care should be a birthright for all Americans, as in most other industrialized societies. But today in America, 47 million people do not have health care coverage.

• Even more Americans are likely to lose coverage due to the current global economic crisis.
• Health care reform is vital to our nation's economic recovery and progress. Reform must:
  • Provide quality health care coverage to everyone.
  • Control costs.
  • Fairly distribute the costs.
• Reform must not impose new health benefits taxes on workers or their health and welfare funds, or penalize workers whose health coverage is better than average.

The typical LIUNA member loses 60 percent of increases won at the bargaining table to escalating health care costs and as much as a third of total compensation goes to health care. The current system gives non-union employers an unfair competitive advantage over union Laborers and their employers.

• Non-union employers do not provide health insurance for their employees because they are not required to and save on labor costs.
• Uninsured non-union workers and their dependents receive care at hospitals which pass the cost on to the insured patients, including union workers. Unionized laborers are forced to pay for their competition's health care.

We need national reform, rather than state-by-state experimentation and fixes.

• Reform must not impede national and multi-state health and welfare funds, impose unnecessary costs and regulations or restrict the ability of health and welfare funds to provide the benefits their participants want on a cost-effective basis.
• More than a thousand different state laws saddle insurance plans with mandated benefits and unwanted costs.