Some labor unions split with Biden on 'Medicare for All'

[bluewater]

Labor leaders dispute candidates’ claims that single-payer will leave their members worse off.

Joe Biden and other moderate Democratic candidates opposed to “Medicare for All” have cast the plan as anti-labor, arguing that it would leave union members worse off by stripping them of the health care benefits they painstakingly negotiated.

But not all labor unions agree.

Only a few major unions have come out against the single-payer system that would all but eliminate private insurance, while many others remain undecided and some of the biggest labor groups in the country have embraced the plan.
Those supporting Medicare for All — or at least not yet ruling it out — say health care increasingly dominates contract battles, consuming bargaining power that could instead be directed toward raising wages and improving working conditions.

“When we’re able to hang on to the health plan we have, that’s considered a massive win," Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, told POLITICO. “But it’s a huge drag on our bargaining. So our message is: Get it off the table.”

It's true that union workers are wary of giving up hard-won benefits, even when promised a plan that covers more services for less money. That’s why Biden, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Beto O’Rourke, Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and John Delaney, among others, have invoked organized labor in recent debates and candidate forums to argue against mandatory single-payer health insurance.
"I've been listening to a lot of folks in labor who have said to me, 'Look, we negotiated contracts where we've given up wages for these health care benefits, and under the Medicare for All plan we would lose them, or we would be certainly in fear of losing them," Harris said days after the debate at a forum in Nevada hosted by the public sector union AFSCME.

But single-payer backers have hit back, asserting that union members would benefit from a government system that effectively guarantees comprehensive benefits and takes health care out of labor negotiations.

“We will do what every other major country on Earth does — guarantee all of you health care so you can sit down and negotiate decent wage increases,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who wrote the Senate Medicare for All bill and made the policy the centerpiece of his 2016 presidential bid, told the AFSCME forum in Nevada.
It’s an argument that resonates with many labor leaders.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/11/joe-biden-medicare-for-all-unions-1456179

[emulatorloo]

1. More from the article . . . Still seems to be some controversy about it.

But even leaders of unions on the record as supporting Medicare for All have voiced qualms about the sweeping proposal.

“While we would like to see universal health care, we want to make sure that there is a role for employer-bargained plans in that plan,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told reporters after the second Democratic debate. Though the union voted in 2017 on a resolution to "move expeditiously toward a single-payer system, like Medicare for All," Trumka recently endorsed a much narrower coverage expansion plan: lowering Medicare’s eligibility age to 55.

Still others who haven't yet taken a formal position say they're wrestling with who the winners and losers would be under a single-payer plan as the gig economy continues to envelop the workforce.

"There’s a concern that an ill-executed Medicare for All plan could be a step backward for a lot of union members, who sacrificed a lot in negotiations to bolster their own benefits," Lowell Peterson, the executive director at Writers Guild of America East, told POLITICO. “But many of our members work in more precarious gigs where the employer-sponsored benefits aren’t all that great, where people are being forced to pay enormous premiums for crappy high-deductible plans. So we certainly shouldn’t spend any political capital defending that stuff."

————-

(Def sounds like the people in the writers guild (gig based) etc need some kind of federal healthcare)

[bluewater]

2. "unions have been fighting over the question of national health insurance for decades"

“A lot of union members are happy with their health plans, and of course there’s a fear of the unknown,” said Steven Greenhouse, a labor correspondent for The New York Times for nearly 20 years. “They say the devil we know is better than the devil we don’t. But a lot of members aren’t so happy with their health plans. And one of the major reasons for wage stagnation in this country is that so much money has been going to health care.”

Greenhouse, who just published a book on U.S. labor history, says this split in the labor community is nothing new, and that unions have been fighting over the question of national health insurance for decades. While leaders like legendary United Auto Workers President Walter Philip Reuther were calling for government-sponsored coverage back in the 1930s and 1940s, others saw single-payer as a threat to their recruitment efforts that would remove an incentive to join unions.
Nelson of the flight attendants union brushed off such concerns.

“There’s no reason to say unions couldn’t negotiate something over and above whatever floor is established [by Medicare for All] just like they do in other countries and like we do now for retirees under Medicare Advantage,” she told POLITICO. “And there is no shortage of issues people want to address in their workplace. There will always something for unions to fight on.”

[emulatorloo]

4. Yeah, it is a pretty decent article, especially considering it is from The Politico

[CTyankee]

3. This is so sad when you think we could have had single payer after WW2 when Europe

was developing their health care systems and we hadn't been subjected to the "anti-socialist" drumbeat from private providers. The single payer idea has been around a long time. We as a country left our citizenry at the mercy of private health care companies who were in it for the dough.

Is it too late to reverse this awful situation? I hope not. All the more reason to get a progressive Dem in the White House in 2020.

[elocs]

5. Medicare for all is not going to happen anytime soon

and all who support it know it but none will provide a realistic way it will be passed into law.
They hold out hope to people who actually believe that MFA will happen in the next administration of a Democrat. It won't.
Maybe not even under the one after that.
So what that can be done will be done now?
No plan B or is it just MFA or nothing?