Debbie Brasket: Laboring for Basic Health-Care Rights

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By Debbie Brasket

The fight for affordable health care will be won through the public sector, not the private — and reform is long overdue

As we celebrated Labor Day this year, I spent some time reflecting on what we owe to the American labor movement and those who fought so hard for the basic rights and protections that so many take for granted today. Thanks to them, we now have labor laws to protect our children, to keep our workplace safe and healthy, to provide compensation to workers hurt on the job, to limit the workweek to five days and 40 hours, and to provide free public education for our children and Social Security when we retire.

It’s hard to imagine now a life without these hard-fought rights and safeguards. But at the time, the achievement of these reforms was far from certain, requiring amazing courage, sacrifice and resilience in the face of fierce opposition, hatred and fear-mongering.

In so many ways, the fight for basic rights for workers parallels the fight for health-care reform today. Then as now, the opposition consisted of big industrial and corporate heavyweights who saw their stranglehold on American families’ productivity and pocketbooks slipping away. Then as now, loud-mouthed pundits used the bully pulpit to stir up hatred and irrational fears, to distort the facts and to mislead the masses. Then as now, red flags such as “socialism,” “government takeover” and “death panels” were raised in a wild-eyed frenzy to inflame and deceive the public.

Then as now, it was the public sector — good government, not big business — that people finally turned to for badly needed reforms.

Like it or not, basic rights such as affordable health care are won through the public sector, not the private. No for-profit corporation is ever going to announce: “We believe that all people have a basic human right to quality health care, and we’re going to provide that service to all Americans, regardless of their ability to pay for it.” It’s not in their best self-interest to do so. The public sector — good government — was created to do what the private sector can’t or won’t do: provide for the general welfare of all people.

That’s why the people of nearly every democratic, industrialized nation have turned to their governments to provide universal health care for their citizens. That’s why the American people are now turning to our government for legislation to provide health care to those who have been denied it for too long. And that’s why the controversy over the inclusion a public option in our public health-care reform is so silly. Of course a “public option” is essential to provide health care for those who cannot afford it. The “private option” has failed to do so, and real health-care reform will never come from the private sector alone.

It is only with the existence of, essentially, a public insurance company to compete with the private insurance giants that costs can be lowered and efficiency promoted. Medicare, today’s public health plan, operates with about a 3 percent overhead, compared with the greater than 50 percent overheads of the private companies, which include huge salaries for CEOs and big bucks for advertising and cherry-picking clients.

Remember that Social Security and Medicare are both public options that were created because the private sector could not, or would not, provide for its retired and disabled employees. When the Social Security program was first proposed more than 60 years ago, it included a health-care program that, unfortunately for us now, was never implemented.

We’ve waited long enough. The time to provide health care to all Americans is long overdue. In the face of fierce opposition, hatred and fear-mongering, now is the time to look beyond private self-interest and strongly support a public option that will ensure health care to all Americans.

— Deborah Brasket is executive director of the Santa Barbara County Action Network (SB CAN). She can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or 805.722.5094. This commentary originally appeared in the Santa Maria Times.

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