If the current Congressional healthcare reform process results in passage of a final bill which is signed into law by President Obama, this will translate into the biggest change to our health care and health insurance system in our lifetimes. As working people and union members we will have questions about what is in the final bill, what is not in the final bill, and just how the legislation will work. Hard answers will be needed, not predictions or promises.

The U.S. Senate has opened what will be a process of several weeks – at minimum – where Democrats will attempt to produce a final comprehensive bill. As expected, the Republican minority is working feverishly to defend the current broken and over priced health insurance system. Taking their orders from the health insurance companies and the medical conglomerates, their only goal is to stall off any reform – and at all cost. If the Democrats are successful in passing a bill, however, both the Senate and House versions will need to be combined. Our union is following this process closely, not just to discover what will be changed under the new legislation, but to also ponder the various likely ways that employers will exploit the same legislation for their own purposes.

The previous Political Action Update reviewed the conduct of the General Electric Company (GE) in the wake of Congressional passage of the Medicare legislation in 1965. GE was not alone when they immediately scanned the Medicare bill to seek ways to cut their own costs. Corporations large and small read the Medicare text with a self-serving eye. In the end, a full-scale mobilization of millions of working people across the entire labor movement – including UE rank-and-file – successfully pushed-back the corporate attempt to exploit Medicare passage for their own gain.

The post-Medicare attempt by employers to chisel pensioners and survivors of health care benefits came as no shock to UE. This kind of employer behavior did come as a shock to lawmakers, however. As reported in the December 6, 1965, UE News, then-Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives John W. McCormack met with a delegation of UE leaders to discuss corporate conduct in the wake of Medicare passage. UE General President Albert Fitzgerald and District 2 president Paul Seymour met personally with Speaker McCormack at the end of November in his Capitol Hill offices, to explain how corporations were intending to use the Medicare law to try to reduce retiree pension and health benefits both. McCormack expressed “surprise and concern at this development.”

So outraged was the Speaker that he issued a public letter after his meeting with the UE leaders. In part it announced that, “Since the enactment of the 1965 Social Security Amendments (Medicare) it has been brought to my attention that some corporations are reducing the benefits that their employees will receive under their companies’ private pension and insurance programs. By doing so these corporations take for themselves the benefits that Congress intended to go to the employees of the corporations where private plans exist.... the benefits of the recent Social Security laws should not be used to reduce the benefits that an employee will receive under existing private pension and insurance programs.” McCormack went on to trigger an investigation of this employer behavior by the Internal Revenue Service. Most companies eventually backed-off their threat to attack retirees, but only after several years of public battles, strikes, lawsuits, and a full-court press by the entire labor movement.

While the current health care reform legislation and the 1965 Medicare legislation are different, the predictable tendency of employers to find loopholes in the law and then exploit them is not. Commenting on the need to scrutinize the current reform legislation from a union perspective, UE General Secretary Treasurer Bruce Klipple said, “We know that employers in both the private and public sector would like to wash their hands of having to provide the healthcare that they currently are forced to provide. They are forced to provide what they do only because of our union contracts. Every contract negotiation they try to shift the growing health insurance and health care costs onto our backs, and this attack has been unfolding for decades. Some want to stop providing coverage altogether. And, as we have discovered, none of these employers will lift a finger to work for real healthcare reform. They want to walk away, and as cheaply as possible. They may claim otherwise, but the facts show this to be their intent.”

Klipple continued, “Our labor movement had better start reviewing the current health care reform proposals with the probable employer reaction in mind. For instance, if the fines on employers for refusing to provide health insurance are far less than the costs of providing that coverage, we know they will jump at the chance to try to dump the full costs onto the backs of our members. We already pay far too much for too-little healthcare, and we refuse to pay any more. If Democrats think that somehow we are excited about paying more just so they can declare victory, they are mistaken. Are Democrats planning on passing a “Strikers’ Rights” bill so we can prevail in the strikes that will surely come when employers try to cancel our health care? Of course not. I have asked the UE Washington Office to work with other unions to ascertain – as best we can at this point – just how passage of some version of the current reform will impact our current coverages. We are not looking for more reasons to be critical; we are doing our homework. This is too important and too costly an issue to allow for any guesswork. We need to know ahead of time how employers might use the bill for their own purposes. It’s not acceptable to find this out 2 or 3 years from now when it’s too late.”

The 1965 episode provides a cautionary note for our current situation. Employers have historically looked out for their own interests, and not ours. They will use the passage of any healthcare and insurance reform legislation for their own selfish ends, to the extent that they are allowed to do so. It is therefore up to us as union members to urge lawmakers to build-in to the current reform the sorts of components that will prevent employers from doing this. Working people did not remove the proven single-payer reform solution from the health care reform toolbox, Democrats did. It is therefore our obligation to our membership – and all working people – to ensure that whatever reform might eventually pass Congress actually improves our situation, and actually contains real prohibitions on employers who would twist and abuse the law to escape their responsibility to their employees to provide -- and pay for -- healthcare coverage.