Reply #8: We ALREADY pay for universal health care: we just aren't getting it!

[Hekate]

That's the thing most people don't understand yet. Health care is run as a for-profit industry all along the line, and whether you are a worker or an employer, you pay and pay and pay, with the biggest profits going to the insurers. I feel guilty saying this, but I think the truth is that it really has finally ended up being too much for many employers to afford. What I don't get about the recent grocery workers' strike is this: if Von's and Ralph's et al. were finding health insurance burdensome, why didn't THEY form a union and use their considerable clout to go after the health industry instead of squeezing their workers? Woulda made more sense.

It's crazy that a nurse wouldn't have health insurance of her own, but it's easy to see how that could happen. Same as in other jobs: the bosses construct the job so that the worker is less-than-full-time, and make health benes contingent on being employed full-time. Outsource that category of worker to a temp agency, and of course temp workers don't get health benes. Nurses can end up being freeway flyers like a lot of college teachers: doing part-time work in several places in order to make a living, and not building anything toward retirement either.

Maybe we'll get a humane and workable system going before the oil's gone and the sea rises...

Hekate