The Chicago Teachers Union strike that ended last week was an important milestone for the labor movement. It resulted in a great victory for students and teachers, but it also showed other unions nationwide that they can fight and win, even against enormous odds.
So when theAi??Chicago Symphony Orchestra was told that their employees would see their health care contributions double in their next contract — from 5 percent to 12 percent — they decided they wouldn’t take it lying down.
CSO declared on Saturday that it would go on strike. Here’s one musician explaining why he’s on strike:
“We were negotiating all day today after having negotiated many times,” said bassist Stephen Lester, chairman of the Orchestra Members Committee. “They were trying to force us into a concessionary contract, reducing our benefits and making it difficult for the orchestra to pay for health care and keep our basic standard of life.”
The CSO strike is evidence that CTU’s strike is inspiring other unions to stand up for themselves and stop attacks on the wages, benefits, and working conditions of their employees.
Fire them all. Why people think they should not have to share the burden of escalating health care costs is beyond my. Last I checked, the bill of rights says nothing about cheap or free health care. If people want to do something about healthcare costs, lets get rid of the beaurocracy behind medicare. by Medicare forcing hospitals into new building because their ceilings are not high enough, they are directly driving up the cost of health care. If that is not enough, people need to stop running to the doctor every time the get a sniffle. They think that is what they have insurance for, but in reality, the multidtude of bills ouring into insurance companies for every little trauma is driving up costs.
If people want low costs, they need to quit abusing the insurance, pay higher deductables or copays. If they are not willing to do any of the above, then you have to expect higher premiums. These same Symphony employees complaining about rising insurance costs being passed on to them by their employer, probably do everything I mentioned above for their automobile policies. The only difference is that they can’t bully their employer into paying that policy.
Dear BKu, The healthcare issue, while complex, has basically two fundamental components which must be solved: costs and access. A large part of the reason that medical care is so very expensive now is because the cost of a medical education is so very high. That education cost is figured into every billing sent by physicians, clinics, hospitals, to insurance and to patients. Most patients are unaware of this factor. The majority of healthcare providers graduate with enormous loads of debt hanging over them like swords of Damocles; they only way they can pay off these immense debts is to figure them into what they charge insurances and patients. If, instead of prospective healers paying for their healthcare training, the government would pay medical schools, nursing programs, residencies and fellowships, based on each program’s number of enrollment, not only would such educational endowment attract more altruistic people into healthcare professions but it would also lower the costs of medical services by eliminating individuals’ debt loads. I do not advocate that beneficiaries of medical education never pay anything back to the government. I suggest they pay in services rendered after attaining their degrees. Say, an individual wanted to become an X-ray technician and his/her training consisted of three years — after graduation that person would work for six years in whatever location the government designated. At the conclusion of those six years, she/he would be free to practice wherever he/she desired. In the case of physicians, training might be four years of undergraduate pre-medicine, four years of medical school, five years of residency, two years of fellowships, and/or other specialty training; so, physicians might owe thirty or more years of service in a community designated by the government before being allowed to choose their practice sites. This system could possibly solve the underserved areas problem in America. Once, an M.D. begins residency training, she/he would be paid like any other doctor for services rendered. Another feature of such a system would be the encouragement of more persons who are poor and/or from minority backgrounds to strive to enter healthcare professions. Many individuals who want to be healers cannot because they simply do not have the funding to pay for their education.
Oh, I realize the A.M.A. and other groups will object that such a system makes healthcare professionals “employees” of the government. From a certain perspective it does, even if they are not “salaried” but compensated for services rendered. But healers should be most interested in serving their communities, not in their personal profit. I believe it would help weed out those people who practice healing arts just for money, as well as quacks. In the event that any individual quit the training before attaining the requisite degree, she/he would then owe the government the cost of the training already received.
The other side for those who are already physicians, nurses, radiologists, anesthetists, etc. and currently practicing, not just those in “critical areas” … they ought to have their debt loads forgiven to lower medical costs.
But other factors also impinge on medical costs. Healthcare industries such as pharmaceutical firms and medical appliance/equipment companies are for-profit businesses which have no ceiling on the per cent of markup they can charge hospitals, clinics, doctors’ offices, etc. Many hospitals operate for profit as well. All the component costs and any inflation these contain are ultimately figured into the billings that insurance and patients receive. Insurance, of course, reflects all this plus their own ever-increasing margins of profit back to patients and/or employers of patients as premiums, creating a spiraling cycle with no termination in view. Competition among insurance companies will never LOWER healthcare costs but it could RAISE them further. Government mandate that every citizen must become insured through selection of a private insurer will ultimately only impoverish most patients further, thus making the recession even worse. Already physicians are planning to “recoup” perceived losses under the Obama plan by soliciting just those patients who choose to go with “high deductible insurance plans” with therapeutic SPECIALS that will fall within the deductible range which the insurance will not have to pay anything on. Medical debt is the number one cause of individual bankruptcies in America right now.
Only through discharge of medical training debt through forgiveness coupled with future medical education funding AND through elimination of private insurance by instituting a one payer plan with standardized payments for therapeutic procedures/treatments AND freezing prices on medical technology/drugs, can medical costs be contained. For a one payer plan, first the government would need to establish and maintain in an ongoing fashion a database of all conditions detrimental to health and all the appropriate therapies for each with a correlated payment amount. This seems like an immense task (and it is) but some of this has already been done by C.M.S., hospitals, university schools of medicine and health consortiums. All their efforts would need to be combined into one cohesive database. Payments to healthcare providers should reflect the seriousness of the condition, the risk/benefit ratio of the therapy, and the efficacy of the outcome to the patient. In other words, a physician prescribing an antibiotic for a respiratory infection would receive less compensation than a physician performing a laparoscopic cholecystectomy who would receive less than one doing a heart transplant. An office visit for a wellness checkup would be compensated less than hospitalization.
ALL healthcare professionals and ALL healthcare institutions would need to be compensated through this government program, not just the physicians, and payments would need to be both standardized and yet reflect the quality of the care given the patient. For instance, better nursing services, more accurate lab tests, better hospital care would need some system of improved rewards tied into better outcomes for patients. Here is a possible example: for a standardized four-day hospitalization of a person with pneumonia, there would be a base amount relative to the condition (pneumonia) and methods of treatment … to that amount could be added extra for the nurses if their care were extremely solicitous and resulted in the patient recovering faster or more completely than predicted. The scale of these payments for healthcare services for providers should be adequate to provide those providers a comfortable living, whether these individuals are physicians or technicians or nurse practitioners or orderlies or clinic clerks or whatever, even though the amounts for each service would vary due to depth of medical involvement. But professions in healthcare should NOT be, as some currently are and many others are not, highways to wealth. People should enter and work in the healing professions because they desire to HEAL, not because they desire to become rich and/or powerful.
So, BKu, it is not the bureaucracy of Medicare or the number of times people receive medical care that is raising costs. It IS the drive for profit and the amount of debt that keeps medical costs skyrocketing.
The musicians have every right to complain about having to bear more of these costs and every right to strike in order to get fairer treatment.