Sen. Bernie Sanders

By Sen. Bernie Sanders
Independent U.S. Senator from Vermont

Let’s be clear. Our health care system is disintegrating. Today, 46 million people have no health insurance and even more are underinsured with high deductibles and co-payments. At a time when 60 million people, including many with insurance, do not have access to a medical home, more than 18,000 Americans die every year from preventable illnesses because they do not get to the doctor when they should. This is six times the number who died at the tragedy of 9/11 - but this occurs every year.

In the midst of this horrendous lack of coverage, the U.S. spends far more per capita on health care than any other nation - and health care costs continue to soar. At $2.4 trillion dollars, and 18 percent of our GDP, the skyrocketing cost of health care in this country is unsustainable both from a personal and macro-economic perspective.

At the individual level, the average American spends about $7,900 per year on health care. Despite that huge outlay, a recent study found that medical problems contributed to 62 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007. From a business perspective, General Motors spends more on health care per automobile than on steel while small business owners are forced to divert hard-earned profits into health coverage for their employees - rather than new business investments. And, because of rising costs, many businesses are cutting back drastically on their level of health care coverage or are doing away with it entirely.

Further, despite the fact that we spend almost twice as much per person on health care as any other country, our health care outcomes lag behind many other nations. We get poor value for what we spend. According to the World Health Organization the United States ranks 37th in terms of health system performance and we are far behind many other countries in terms of such important indices as infant mortality, life expectancy and preventable deaths.

As the health care debate heats up in Washington, we as a nation have to answer two very fundamental questions. First, should all Americans be entitled to health care as a right and not a privilege - which is the way every other major country treats health care and the way we respond to such other basic needs as education, police and fire protection? Second, if we are to provide quality health care to all, how do we accomplish that in the most cost-effective way possible?

I think the answer to the first question is pretty clear, and one of the reasons that Barack Obama was elected president. Most Americans do believe that all of us should have health care coverage, and that nobody should be left out of the system. The real debate is how we accomplish that goal in an affordable and sustainable way. In that regard, I think the evidence is overwhelming that we must end the private insurance company domination of health care in our country and move toward a publicly-funded, single-payer Medicare for All approach.

Our current private health insurance system is the most costly, wasteful, complicated and bureaucratic in the world. Its function is not to provide quality health care for all, but to make huge profits for those who own the companies. With thousands of different health benefit programs designed to maximize profits, private health insurance companies spend an incredible (30 percent) of each health care dollar on administration and billing, exorbitant CEO compensation packages, advertising, lobbying and campaign contributions. Public programs like Medicare, Medicaid and the VA are administered for far less.

In recent years, while we have experienced an acute shortage of primary health care doctors as well as nurses and dentists, we are paying for a huge increase in health care bureaucrats and bill collectors. Over the last three decades, the number of administrative personnel has grown by 25 times the numbers of physicians. Not surprisingly, while health care costs are soaring, so are the profits of private health insurance companies. From 2003 to 2007, the combined profits of the nation’s major health insurance companies increased by 170 percent. And, while more and more Americans are losing their jobs and health insurance, the top executives in the industry are receiving lavish compensation packages. It’s not just William McGuire, the former head of United Health, who several years ago accumulated stock options worth an estimated $1.6 billion or Cigna CEO Edward Hanway who made more than $120 million in the last five years. The reality is that CEO compensation for the top seven health insurance companies now averages $14.2 million.

Moving toward a national health insurance program which provides cost-effective universal, comprehensive and quality health care for all will not be easy. The powerful special interests - the insurance companies, drug companies and medical equipment suppliers - will wage an all-out fight to make sure that we maintain the current system which enables them to make billions of dollars. In recent years they have spent hundreds of millions on lobbying, campaign contributions and advertising and, with unlimited resources, they will continue spending as much as they need.

But, at the end of the day, as difficult as it may be, the fight for a national health care program will prevail. Like the civil rights movement, the struggle for women’s rights and other grass-roots efforts, justice in this country is often delayed - but it will not be denied. We shall overcome!

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U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley

By Jeff Merkley
U.S. Senator, D-Oregon

Over and over again, I hear from Oregonians that we need real health care reform that provides every American with access to quality, affordable care. That is why Congress and President Obama are so focused on this issue.

Of course there are folks in the insurance and hospital industries, from the medical profession, and both political parties who will have different ideas about how to achieve our goal. But I was shocked when I read a memo from Republican strategist Dr. Frank Luntz laying out plans to dismantle any effort to give all Americans access to quality health care. Dr. Luntz, the man who developed language designed to promote preemptive war in Iraq and distract from the severity of global warming, is at it again — this time with a messaging strategy designed to sink our historic opportunity for health care reform.

Let’s be clear: this is not a strategy to push certain ideas about health reform. It is a strategy intended solely to kill reform efforts altogether. In his own words, Dr. Luntz has stated, “You’re not going to get what you want, but you can kill what they’re trying to do.”

Not surprisingly, since the American public is strongly in favor of fixing the broken health care system, the Luntz strategy is predicated on deception.

In his memo, Dr. Luntz lays out multiple ways that opponents of health care reform can trick and manipulate the American public. One strategy that stood out to me is to call efforts to reform our broken health care system a “bailout for the insurance industry.” This is ridiculous. This statement is developed to serve the same interests who stopped at nothing to derail health care reform in the 90’s, who blocked health care coverage for low-income children, and whose top Medicare priority for 15 years has been transferring money from seniors and taxpayers to the insurance industry.

When support for a prescription drug benefit in Medicare became too powerful to ignore, President Bush and his allies created the convoluted system we now have. Rather than simply add a prescription drug benefit to the tried, true, and popular Medicare program as Democrats wanted, they devised a giveaway for insurance companies. For years Dr. Luntz’s clients have virtually abdicated health care policy making to the insurance industry; the last thing it needs is a bailout.

Today though, even the insurance industry is engaged in constructive negotiations about how to repair the health care system. Unfortunately for the vast majority of Americans who support reform, however, Dr. Luntz’s new game plan to stop change is being embraced by leaders in the Republican Party. In a briefing where Dr. Luntz presented his strategy to Republican House members, Rep. Mike Pence from Indiana, the chairman of the House Republican Conference, made it official by saying, “Frank is back.”

So expect a massive misinformation campaign coming to a health care debate near you. Opponents using Dr. Luntz’s doublespeak will argue for a “balanced, common sense approach” to health care but what they really want is to keep the system the way it is. They’ll say that a public plan will not be “patient centered,” but their real goal is to block accessible health care for every American. They’ll say reform will deny Americans “choice” even when every American will be allowed to keep their health insurance and their doctor. They’ll claim that the “quality of care will go down,” while callously ignoring the fact that millions of Americans have no health care at all and millions more are denied the medications and procedures they need.

What we are seeing, yet again, is that while Dr. Luntz and his clients may have excellent polling data, they are utterly clueless about what the American people want.

But, I have to give Dr. Luntz credit on one front: he points out that Republicans need to appear to be on the “right side of reform” or they lose the health care argument. The problem is that you can’t fake support for reform. You’re either for improving the quality and affordability of health care or you’re against it. You’re either for expanding coverage to every American or you’re against it. At the end of the day, no matter what talking points they use, each member of Congress is going to have to vote for or against improving our broken health care system.

With small businesses and families being buried by rising costs, with 47 million uninsured, millions more underinsured and American companies losing ground against their global competitors, it is evident to anyone that our health care system is broken. There are Republicans and Democrats, insurance executives and patient advocates, physicians and hospital representatives all working to meet one of America’s most pressing challenges. We certainly do not all agree on what a reformed health system should look like or how to get there, but there are people on all sides who are negotiating in good faith. The country deserves that debate on the merits, not poll-tested attack lines intended to prolong the broken system we have today.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

In 1941, car manufacturer Willys-Overland demonstrated the strength and sturdiness of its new Army scout vehicle – the Jeep — to Congress by driving it up the U.S. Capitol steps.

Invented and manufactured in the USA, the Jeep would become an icon of American ingenuity, durability and mechanical ability. Soldiers loved the lithe little vehicle for its uncanny capacity to go anywhere. The New York Museum of Modern Art would exhibit it in 2002 and describe it as a masterpiece of functional design. Now it’s 68 and constructed by United Auto Workers for Chrysler in Toledo, Ohio.

Disregarding Jeep’s help in securing this country against fascists, conservatives like former Republican Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney are calling for its execution. Romney and his conservative compatriots want Congress to deny Chrysler, GM and Ford federal loans so that the Big Three go bankrupt. Using false wage information, these conservatives have persuaded the public that auto workers are overpaid. That has resulted in polls showing 61 percent of Americans oppose aid to the Big Three. And now Senate Majority Leader Harry Reed is saying he fears he can’t muster the votes necessary for a loan.

Congress cannot let the Jeep die in bankruptcy. Congress must not fail the U.S. auto industry. Doing so would be abandoning the core of the American economy – manufacturing. America is not built on Wall Street’s credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations.  Its wealth and culture are built on and built by middle class workers who construct actual products like steel beams, tires and Jeeps, who operate and repair machines that pull oil and coal out of the ground, who log trees and man the mills that convert them into paper.

Just after the end of World War II, when the Jeep first became a civilian vehicle, 35 percent of workers belonged to labor unions. That’s significant because union members earn 30 percent higher wages than non-union workers and are 59 percent more likely to have health insurance. Those better wages and benefits helped create the great middle class in America. Workers earned enough money to buy refrigerators and homes and cars and, later, college educations for their children. The money they earned and spent churned through the economy and kept it humming.

But over the next half century, union membership declined. So it is only about 12 percent now. Business and industry groups intent on the extinction of unions can claim credit for a good part of that. These are the same organizations that are today misleading the public about auto worker wages, claiming they make $70 an hour when it’s really $28. They’re the same ones advocating auto company bankruptcy because it would allow the Big Three to renege on their contractual promises to workers and to retirees. They criticize auto workers for making a decent living, $28 an hour plus health benefits and a pension. And they denigrate the companies for being decent corporate citizens and fulfilling their health care and pension promises to retirees.

Over the past half century, multinational corporations have shipped a significant number of those good-paying union jobs overseas. With the help of wrong-headed federal policy that encouraged it, the U.S. lost an average of 12,000 manufacturing jobs per month since 1980. Since May this year, the average has been nearly 60,000. Multinational corporations sought cheap labor and lax environmental regulations in places like China and Indonesia, in what has become an international wage race to the bottom. Americans supposedly benefit from the import of cheap goods. But unemployed workers can’t afford to buy them.

Along with the decline in jobs and union membership came a reduction in the rate of personal savings and an increase in household debt. The financial situation of the typical American family became increasingly precarious even as, over the past 25 years, the very richest one tenth of one percent accrued more and more wealth. These were the kind of guys involved in short-selling – a practice through which a person owns nothing but makes money by betting that a stock will lose value – and by selling sub-prime mortgage-backed securities. These were the kind of know-it-all Wall Street risk takers who gave themselves $30 billion in bonuses last Christmas.

You know what happened next. Three months after those bonuses the initial investment bank fell. Bear Stearns got the first big federal bailout in March. Then other financial institutions and a gigantic insurance company involved in the subprime speculation toppled: AIG, Washington Mutual, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Lehman Brothers. Congress quickly offered up $700 billion to save financial institutions, and giant Citigroup took $25 billion of that in October and another $20 billion in November trying to stave off bankruptcy.

Congress used taxpayer dollars – working people’s money – to save those year-end-bonus awardees on Wall Street. Then it stiffed the working stiff. So far, there’s been talk, but no actual help for millions facing foreclosure. And while unemployment is rising, Congress is dithering over the Big Three’s request for a loan that could save millions of auto worker and support industry jobs.

Unemployment increased to 6.7 percent in November, after 533,000 people got thrown out of work in just those 30 days. Over the past 12 months, 2.7 million people lost their jobs. And finally, what every one of them already knew was officially declared earlier this week - the country has been in a recession for a year.

This nation clearly can’t survive on what is produced by Wall Street – reckless speculation. That took America down.

This country should not be spending all of its financial resources salvaging those who destroyed the economy. America needs to invest in what works – its people. Congress must provide mortgage relief. But, most urgently, it’s crucial that we re-invigorate our manufacturing base. America must be able to actually produce products. Swapping paper is not enough to sustain a strong and stable middle class that will save money and buy cars and homes.

The Jeep helped us win World War II. What has Wall Street actually done for you? Saving the Jeep – and Chrysler, GM and Ford – would be a symbol that America understands manufacturing is key to a strong economy and financially brawny workers.

Jeep owners should let Congress know they’re prepared to drive up the Capitol steps to support loans for the Big Three and investment in American manufacturing.

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Protestors disrupted a convention of mortgage financers in San Francisco this week, storming the stage as former Bush advisor Karl Rove spoke, heckling bankers with bullhorns, and badgering a panel with demands for a foreclosure moratorium.

Fear and frustration compelled ordinary citizens to harangue the green-visor set at their normally-staid annual meeting. Middle class Americans are losing their jobs and their homes and their hope while watching Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson spend their tax dollars to bail out the infinitely-wealthy on Wall Street whose reprehensible risk-taking caused the country’s financial crisis. The middle class want their piece of the American pie.

Congress is trying to dish it out in the form of a second stimulus package that would extend unemployment insurance and food stamps and create jobs through programs such as highway construction projects.

Republican candidates John McCain and Sarah Palin oppose it. They’re running around the country with caricatures of Joe the Plumber and Joe Sixpack, pretending the GOP ticket represents the best interests of the working class and small business owners. It’s all false rhetoric and no real action. McCain and Palin object to intervention for anyone other than the wealthy, for whom they plan to enshrine tax cuts; for overfed CEOs, for whom they believe the $700 billion bailout was justified, and for themselves, for whom they believe the Republican National Committee appropriately opened its purse to purchase haute couture wardrobes, hair stylists and makeup artists.

McCain wants to brand a socialist S on Barack Obama although both voted for the bailout plan under which the U.S. government is nationalizing banks.

Unlike McCain, however, Obama is a man of the people and believes not in socialism but in the religious concept of everyone serving as their brothers’ keepers.  This is how he explained it in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention:

“What — what is that American promise? It’s a promise that says each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have obligations to treat each other with dignity and respect.
It’s a promise that says the market should reward drive and innovation and generate growth, but that businesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, to look out for American workers, and play by the rules of the road.
Ours — ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools, and new roads, and science, and technology.
Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who’s willing to work.
That’s the promise of America, the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation, the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper.
That’s the promise we need to keep. That’s the change we need right now.”

That philosophy has great appeal with unemployment at a five-year high of 6.1 percent, with the poverty rate rising to 12.5 percent in what is supposed to be the richest country in the world; with 47 million without health insurance; with 1 million homes lost to foreclosure in the past two years and another 1.5 million in the process, and with the chronically ill across American skipping medications because they can’t afford them, as the NYT reported this week.

Because this philosophy is popular, Palin and McCain are trying to channel it, to steal it just as they did the “change” slogan, to try to make Americans believe that they would best serve the middle class. The problem is that everything they do belies their claims.

Sarah “Sixpack” Palin definitely has an elitist eye for clothing, hair styling and makeup. She spent $150,000 of Republican National Committee money on designer duds for herself and her family since accepting the nomination on Sept. 3. That’s three times the annual income for a typical American family. If she doesn’t shell out another dime, she’ll have spent $2,400 a day on clothing between the convention and the election. The vice presidential candidate’s taste includes a $2,500 Valentino Garavani jacket from Saks Fifth Avenue that she wore to the convention.

In addition, she and McCain decided their most important advisor, the one they would reward with the highest salary in the first two weeks of October as the stock market crashed, was Sarah Palin’s makeup artist. Her earnings for proper Palin powdering were $22,800 for two weeks, nearly twice the salary McCain and Palin gave their second highest paid staffer – their chief foreign policy advisor. They paid him $12,500, just $2,500 more than the $10,000 they ponied up for Palin’s hair stylist, whose compensation was fourth highest. The total for Palin’s hair and makeup in two weeks: $32,800.

While you’re scrimping and saving and shopping at Costco to prevent foreclosure of your home, just remember what Palin told CNN reporter Drew Griffin about providing a stimulus package to help the middle class: “But now that we’re hearing that the Democrats want an additional stimulus package or bailout package for what, hundreds of billions of dollars more, this is not a time to use the economic crisis as an excuse for reckless spending and for greater, bigger government and to move the private sector to the back burner and let government be assumed to be the be all, end all solution to the economic challenges that we have.”

So, for Palin, great big government is okay to bail out Wall Street fat cats, but not to help the middle class. Palin’s knee-jerk Republican “let-the-private-sector-solve-it” attitude shocks the consciousness after the indiscretion of the private sector just landed this country in financial crisis. We’re not inclined to trust them, frankly, Ms. Palin.

McCain said the same, backing the bailout for the reckless on Wall Street, and damning attempts by Democrats to help those on Main Street – of course, all the while dragging up the image of Joe the Plumber and contending he’s the guy’s advocate.

The ticket clearly lacks both introspection and economic expertise. McCain said it himself last year – that he was no authority on the economy.  By contrast, a person with some degree of economic proficiency, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, this week endorsed additional fiscal stimulus, saying it was appropriate now because the economy is likely to be weak for several quarters. In addition, economic expert and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman said this week that additional government spending now – for a stimulus package – is appropriate, particularly for infrastructure improvement, which would provide real value and create jobs.

Though McCain and Palin clearly don’t understand, it’s time for everyday Americans to share in the American pie. At a rally in Florida this week, Obama talked about how the policies of the Bush administration have shrunk the pie and permitted the wealthy to grab the few remaining crumbs. He told he crowd he has no desire to reapportion the pie, as McCain keeps accusing him wanting to do – as a socialist, you know. Also, Obama objects to the McCain-Palin policy of continuing to feed the rich all of the crumbs, which is particularly evident in the GOP tax plan.

Obama told the group his goal is to expand the pie to ensure that all Americans get a piece. The crowd responded with a spontaneous chant of, “We want pie!”

That’s what is going on in America. That’s why protestors accosted mortgage bankers at their California convention. The middle class won’t stand for the rich wolfing down all of the pie anymore.

By Holly Hart
USW Legislative Director

Presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, on his 72^nd birthday, announced a selection that revealed the depths of his cynicism and the shallowness of his judgment – and his disregard for women’s intelligence.

After looking into a pool of vice president candidates deep with qualification, he plucked out the least experienced person.

This follows four months in which he and his surrogates continually blathered that Democratic nominee Barack Obama was unqualified. Former New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani just got done giving that GOP talking point to TV commentators during the Democratic Convention, contending repeatedly that Sen. Obama’s credentials made him unfit to be commander-in-chief – an accusation Sen. Obama effectively refuted in his nomination acceptance speech Thursday night.

That speech was so effective, the McCain campaign had to do something – anything – to steal the spotlight away from a defining moment in American history.

The very next day the McCain campaign played their trump card - McCain announced that he’d selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate.

Although a dedicated public servant, wife and mother, here’s the sum total of Palin’s experience: not quite two years as governor; two terms as mayor of the Alaskan town of Wasilla, population, 8,000; two terms on Wasilla city council; chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission; TV sports reporter; small business owner for three years; mother of five; bachelor of arts degree in journalism from the University of Idaho, and Miss Alaska runner-up.

If McCain, who has suffered melanoma, were elected, Palin would be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Palin’s competition for the VP slot included Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Sen. Joe Lieberman, former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Every one of them has at least one advanced degree; Romney has two, both from Harvard. Every one has substantially more years of experience in governing than Palin.

The least experienced might be Pawlenty. But even he has, in addition to that city council experience, a dozen years in the state legislature. And he’s serving his second term as governor, not his second year.

With Palin at his side, McCain now is open for the same ridicule he’s heaped on Obama. And the reason he opened himself up for that mock-fest is clear: He believes women are stupid.

Put a woman on the ticket, he cynically figured, and he’d garner disgruntled supporters of unsuccessful Democratic candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton.

The strategy of selecting Palin shows he believes women, who supported Sen. Clinton, an abortion rights advocate, are so Stepfordesque that they’ll just follow the Republican ticket now that there’s a woman attached to it.

Palin, unlike Sen. Clinton, is anti-choice. She is a member of an anti-abortion group called Feminists for Life. In 2002, when she ran for lieutenant governor in Alaska, she sent an e-mail to the anti-abortion Alaska Right to Life Board saying she has “adamantly supported our cause since I first understood, as a child, the atrocity of abortion.”

She’s a member of the National Rifle Association and backs drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (McCain picked her, though he does not support drilling there.)

But McCain doesn’t think Clinton’s supporters will notice any of that.  He figures they’ll blindly accept any female – whether she has a strong record on the issues that affect working families or not.  There is no doubt that Palin’s a successful woman.  But what we know of her record does not qualify her to be one heartbeat away from the Presidency.  McCain has so little respect for women’s intelligence that he thinks we will make a choice based solely on gender.

When Obama was in the process of vetting vice presidential candidates, he told reporters he couldn’t make a hasty decision. The reason, he said, was the selection of a running mate was “the most important decision that I will make before I am president.”

In choosing Palin, McCain has clearly shown he lacks the judgment to be president. In this most important decision, he made his choice based on cynicism and politics instead of choosing a leader qualified to govern this country should something dreadful befall the president.