The Crumbling State of Healthcare

As America's Union Movement shares on its website, "Some 47 million U.S. residents have no health insurance, and the numbers keep growing. Because employers increasingly are moving in the direction of providing Wal-Mart-style health coverage by shifting health care costs to employees, America’s workers struggle to pay higher premiums, deductibles and co-payments—if they can afford such coverage at all. Of the 47 million Americans without health insurance, 8.7 million are children."

As one of the wealthiest nations with the highest standard of living, we should all be concerned about this. In addition to the dire straights of health insurance, "Working families are experiencing double-digit increases in the costs of health insurance, more out-of-pocket costs for doctor visits and skyrocketing prices for prescriptions, forcing many to delay getting needed medical care or worse—to decline coverage for themselves or their families because of cost. Health care costs are rising at five times the rate of inflation. According to the Center for Studying Health System Change, health care spending rose 10 percent in 2002 and that followed a slightly more than 10 percent increase in 2001—the largest jump in more than a decade. In the first six months of 2003, health spending rose another 8.5 percent. Premiums for employer-sponsored coverage increased nearly 13 percent in 2002. As employers refuse to pay their fair share, this trend may result in millions of workers losing their employer-based coverage."