Chairman Stark and Members of the Subcommittee on Health, Committee on Ways and Means:

We would like to thank you for the opportunity to provide this written testimony on behalf of the 59 member organizations of Cleveland Jobs with Justice.  For over 16 years, we have been the unified voice of faith, labor and community organizations working together to promote workers’ rights and social justice throughout Northeast Ohio.     

We are providing this testimony today to voice our concerns with regard to the faulty, inequitable and unjust health care system and offer our alternative solution for comprehensive health care reform in the United States.   The overwhelming statistic of over 47 million uninsured Americans clearly illustrates the efforts and energy needed to resolve the problem of the uninsured and/or underinsured extends well beyond our local communities and state-wide efforts.  We need reform on a national level.  We need you, our elected representatives, to take initiative towards a national single payer system, such as the one outlined in H.R. 676. 

Cleveland Jobs with Justice believes access to health care should be viewed as a basic human right eliminating all barriers, especially those encountered by low income people and minorities. 

Health care should be available to every American regardless of age, ethnicity, marital status, income, employment status, residency, pre-existing conditions or any other potential barrier currently thrown in the way of access.  As long as our access to health care continues to be dictated by the insurance companies’ bottom lines, we can rest assured the decisions about a person’s wellbeing will continue to depend solely upon increasing profits.

The scope and impact of our broken health care system expands well beyond the sphere of citizens’ health and is bearing negative effects on our country’s already increasingly vulnerable workforce. The high costs paid by American businesses to provide health care to their employees is making it more and more difficult for American companies to compete in a global marketplace. In 2006, employer health insurance premiums increased by 7.7% - two times the rate of inflation. Employers are reacting to these dramatically rising health care costs by shifting  increases to their employees, decreasing coverage, eliminating coverage all together or moving their operations to other nations where health care is less expensive.  Retirees’ benefits are constantly threatened or taken away, leaving them with employment related illnesses but no health insurance coverage.  Many labor strikes are caused by an employer’s attempt to reduce or eliminate health care benefits.  Labor contract negotiations are often stalled over health care benefits. All of this is sending a clear and loud message that our health care system is in crisis and immediate, substantial reform is needed.

In addressing the faults and consequences of our health care system, Cleveland Jobs with Justice researched our current system and a variety of proposed reform models, finding faults in nearly all plans:

• Our current health insurance approach to coverage makes health care a commodity, not a right. HMOs and health insurance companies have a fiduciary duty to their stockholders to provide them with the highest profits possible.  This means maximizing income while limiting expenditures.  Of course, this is a significant conflict of interest with the fiduciary duties of health care providers to their patients, as well as in conflict with the patient’s self-interest.  Any new system must resolve this conflict and bring integrity to a process that frequently violates the Hippocratic Oath of “Do no harm.”

• Plans that propose an expansion of programs such as Medicaid as a cornerstone for providing coverage to “all” are not acceptable.  We liken them to building a structure on a sand dune.  You know the sands are going to shift every budget cycle, depending upon how the political winds are blowing. Eventually that structure will collapse.  What may be fully funded one budget cycle may be gutted the next. We certainly do not want to have to fight every budget for needed health care dollars.  Just consider the recent battle over SCHIP.  We should not have to rely upon a faulty funding structure for a reliable health care system.

• Personal mandates will result in people being moved from the list of “uninsured” to that of the “underinsured”.  Please remember, there is a significant difference between having “health insurance” and having access to “health care”.  Many people, even with “subsidies” are still only going to be able to purchase a bare bones insurance policy or may not be able to afford one at all. This results in a faulty system where people will still fall through the cracks.  This predicament is best exemplified by the situation in Massachusetts where many people unable to afford the requirement under the State’s personal mandate have been exempted from coverage. This entirely defeats the purpose of a personal mandate system as a strategy to expand affordable, accessible health care or in other words, universal health care.

Our explorations into proposed plans led us to the conclusion that the solution to health care in America is a truly universal plan, a single payer system.

The only real answer to providing health care to every American is a single payer model, as outlined in the U.S. National Health Insurance Act, H.R. 676, introduced by Congressman John Conyers.   Not only is this act fiscally responsible, it guarantees access to health care to each and every American.  By removing for-profit insurance companies, we eliminate:

·          Excessive administrative costs

·          Widespread underinsurance and bankruptcy

·          Interference in physician decision making

·          Lack of coordination, budgeting and planning

·          Excessive complexity

·          Regressive financing

·          Continuously rising costs

We are not alone in supporting a single payer health care delivery system. H.R. 676 has been endorsed by 447 union organizations in 48 states including 110 Central Labor Councils and Area Labor Federations and 36 State AFL-CIO’s. This list of union endorsers is continuously expanding.  It is with great confidence that we hope you consider the support of the millions of members represented by these labor organizations far more substantial than the billions of dollars spent by health insurance lobbyists and pharmaceutical companies to deny Americans of their health and well being.  

In closing, we ask you Chairman Stark and members of the committee, to act in the best interest of all Americans, not insurance companies, and support the only true solution to the problem of health care in America, the U.S. National Health Insurance Act, H.R. 676.