Hopes for Universal Care on Ropes ; Health Forum Looks at Options

NEW BRUNSWICK – Advocates of universal health care have to sell the idea as a benefit to big business if they want to see it happen, Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. said Saturday.

The reelection of President Bush, and the Republican majority in Congress, make the prospects of universal health care and a single- payer system “less than ever,” said Pallone, D-Long Branch.

“We’re not winning the battle. Now we have to spin things in a different way,” he said at a forum on health care in America at the Labor Education Center of Rutgers University. About 40 people attended the event sponsored by the grass roots advocacy group, Health Care for All/New Jersey, and several labor union organizations.

Pallone said former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s proposal that the government pay for catastrophic health care for employees was “a very good idea,” because it would enable more employers to pick up other health insurance costs.

Even though the big automakers in Detroit would not say it publicly, “they realized that, if they don’t have to pay for catastrophic health insurance, it makes it cheaper for them to compete” globally with other manufacturers, he said.

Pallone charged that universal health care is currently impossible because of tax cuts, budget restraints, the costs of the Iraq war and “an ideology of privatization” favored by Republicans.

Since there is practically “no chance” of universal health care being passed by a Republican Congress, Democrats should slice the concept into smaller pieces, such as redefining poverty and expanding eligibility for Medicaid – the federal health program for the indigent, he said.

“As far as health care being a right, that idea doesn’t seem to sell,” he said.

The United States needs a single-payer national health insurance program for all cititzens similar to Medicare, the federal program for senior citizens, said Dr. Oliver Fein, president of the Metro New York Chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program.

Medicare spends only 3 cents of each dollar on administrative costs, and the rest on providing health care, compared to private health insurers that spend up to 30 percent of revenues to administer their programs, Fein said.

“We could save $300 billion if we decreased administrative costs” of private insurers, said Fein, a professor of medicine and public health at Weill Medical College of Cornell University.

Assemblywoman Loretta Weinberg, D-Teaneck, said administrative costs are escalating insurance premiums. “We have to look at what the insurance companies are taking out of the medical field, how much is going to the insurance companies as opposed to health providers,” said Weinberg, chairwoman of the Assembly health committee.

Health care benefits were a given for workers when he started at a factory in 1967, said Bill Kane, president of the New Jersey State Industrial Union Council.

But “our generation failed to protect what the generation before us bargained for,” Kane said. Noting that several electrical unions are on strike in New Jersey, Kane said that if workers want better health benefits from big corporations, “go on the picket line, brothers and sisters. That’s where we have to go.”

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