Firefighters union backing Joe Biden opposes Medicare for All

[highplainsdem]

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/29/politics/firefighters-union-against-medicare-for-all/index.html

The International Association of Fire Fighters opposes "Medicare for All," telling Democratic presidential candidates "we would find it difficult to support any candidate" who proposes eliminating employer-sponsored health care.

The union, which endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden days after he entered the 2020 race, made its position clear in a letter sent to each of the Democratic contenders last week.

"The International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), our 317,000 members and millions of others with quality, employer-provided healthcare do not support the concept of abandoning those plans for a government-run single-payer plan," Harold Schaitberger, general president of the IAFF, wrote in the letter. "The elimination of employer-based insurance in favor of a Medicare-for-all or government-run single-payer proposal is a bad idea that punishes working families who have secured quality healthcare."

This position sets the union at odds with Medicare for All backers like Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. The union's stance tracks more closely with Biden, whose plan preserves the current health care system but provides a Medicare-like option for individuals to buy into while keeping private and employer-sponsored insurance.

-snip-

[George II]

1. Proposing to eliminate employer-sponsored healthcare insurance is a major faux pas....

It obviously wasn't very well thought out.

[oasis]

2. ImWithJoe

[Cha]

3. Good on the FireFighters speaking out

against m4a.

Thanks, highplainsdem!

[DaDeacon]

4. Or...

Shame on them for looking past the millions it would help. Not that helping others is a thing fire fighters should be into ... oh wait....lol. “Working families who have secured “ so what does that implicitly imply about the other side of the argument? That they aren’t working to secure things for their families? Hmmm. Oh well good endorsement I guess. #congrats

[highplainsdem]

7. Did you read any more of the article?

In an interview with CNN, Schaitberger said the union has developed and negotiated health care coverage unique to its members that it does not want to see scrapped.
"We've had a record of supporting health care for every American, for everyone, but not at the expense of the plans that we have developed and negotiated over time and again," Schaitberger said. "With our profession and the type of injuries and the type of disease and the level of cancers and the level of behavioral health and post-traumatic stress, we have plans that we depend on that will assure coverage for those occurrences."

[DaDeacon]

10. Yeah I did...

“but not at the expense of the plans that we have developed and negotiated over time and again” is what struck me. We got ours you need to find a way to get yours...or did you just miss that line.

[highplainsdem]

11. He made it clear they support health care for everyone. Did you miss that line?

Firefighters do face special health risks. The sort of health risks that made it necessary for Congress to extend funding for 9/11 first responders. Maybe somewhere out there you could find people to quibble with that if they think the first responders are getting too much, especially compared to other Americans. But some professions are riskier than most.

[emmaverybo]

25. There are other ways than M4A to cover people without employer provided or retirement benefits.

Candidates who act as though only M4A will get us to universal coverage are overlooking other
options and insisting we reinvent the wheel.

[Cha]

31. No.. not "shame on them".. Good for

FireFighters knowing how many Biden's plan will Help.. everyone!

[stonecutter357]

5. let's go Joe !

[Kurt V.]

6. most firefighters are govt employees.

[madville]

8. Makes sense

tens of millions are happy with their employer based coverage, alienating them would be a poor strategy.

[LiberalFighter]

9. Medicare for All needs to consider the various options.

It needs to be considered under the current coverage. Medicare covers 80% of covered costs and your personal or employer insurance covers the 20%.

The coverage one receives under Medicare is also based on whether you have Regular Medicare or Medicare Advantage. Medicare Advantage provides additional coverage and benefits depending on the plan enrolled.

[CTyankee]

12. Whatever happened to "if you like your current coverage, you can keep it"?

[ucrdem]

15. That is Biden's plan.

Also Beto's. I think Pete's too.

[DrToast]

13. There it is. The big MFA secret people try to ignore

Many unions are opposed to single-payer. They passed up higher pay during negotiations in exchange for better benefits. And now they don’t want to lose them.

[ucrdem]

14. That explains a lot.

Very succinct!

[Cha]

18. Ah.. thanks for that Dr Toast.

[emmaverybo]

27. Many retired also have excellent supplemental plans at low or zero cost. Some are former educators

who also took lower pay, but received good benefits.

[ucrdem]

16. Biden wins the primaries on health care,

and Biden wins the general on busing, thanks to my senator from California!

[PatrickforO]

17. Easy fix. Just reform ACA and put in a public option.

Of course, the health care and big pharma corporations can read the writing on the wall as well as anyone, and they know that if they even allow a public option, people will like it so much that in twenty years and plans like this will be the exception not the rule.

That's why there's literally billions of dollars lined up to fight tooth and nail, line by line, to prevent any sort of public option. And they are getting lots of mileage out of this particular argument, so we can expect to see it time and again. I saw George Will speak nearly a year ago, and he brought up this exact same thing.

Now don't get me wrong here - I'm not saying this is good or bad policy. All I AM saying is that whenever someone, no matter who it is, introduces a policy, it is always a REALLY good idea to play a little game called CUI BONO!

Cui bono, in case you are not familiar with the term, is the simple question, "Who stands to benefit from this? And how?"

So let's do it:
Cui Bono - who wins with no public option?
How does the International Association of Firefighters benefit? IAF is a union. As such, it counts on dues paying members to continue its existence. How does a union attract members? By doing stuff for the workers that it can point to and say, here, you should join because through us, you have this or that. Historically, one of the biggest opponents of single payer has been unions for this reason.

How do rank and file firefighters benefit? Obviously, with excellent healthcare benefits negotiated by the union, which operates in many states and has 300,000 members (and millions of others who enjoy quality healthcare).

How do the shareholders of big pharma and healthcare corporations benefit? Earnings are kept high because without the government being able to negotiate price across the board, the union is in a much weaker position (300K members versus 123 million in US labor force) to negotiate. So, yes, they have to negotiate with the union, but it is better than negotiating with the government and prices are still kept high.

Obviously, the employees of big pharma and healthcare corporations benefit because they still have their jobs.

Cui Plagalis - who loses?
People who now have employer plans they do not like because they have evolved to lower service levels, higher premiums and financially crippling copays.

People who are self employed and have to buy their own insurance.

People who are victims of the new high deductible policies that Republican sabotage let leak back through the cracks.

People who are currently uninsured. This includes the estimated 45,000 Americans who die each year due to lack of health care.

So, there you have it. You can make your own decisions. If I were calling the shots, we'd fix the tax code so corporations pay their fair share, billionaires are made into millionaires, we have fair tax brackets, we have higher capital gains, we have a tax on the trades done by arbitrage 'bots on the Wall Street stock exchanges and other reforms that will increase revenue. I would cut military spending 5% per year over a 15-year period in real dollars, not nominal dollars. I would repeal the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, create a central bank housed in the federal government, and pay off the national debt. And we'd have single payer, such that no one would have to worry - you could make the appointment, go in and get the treatment you need and have a low or no copay.

This gonna happen here in this capitalist utopia called America?

Nope.

So, I'll settle for (and be fighting tooth and nail for, even if I have to get ugly) a public option that can grow (or not) as people opt in (or out).

If Biden is our guy, he'd better come through with that. Any of them had better come through with at least fixing the GOP sabotage to the ACA, forcing the southern states to expand Medicaid, and adding a public option.

And I'm not alone here in feeling this way. Because I have employer provided health insurance and it is a crummy, rationed HMO plan with financially crippling copays. I personally, and my spouse, would be MUCH better off with Medicare, with private supplemental insurance.

[highplainsdem]

19. Biden's plan includes a public option.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/15/politics/joe-biden-health-care-plan-obamacare-public-option/index.html

[PatrickforO]

21. I know. But it is early in the game, and the healthcare lobby is VERY powerful.

I would hate to see him drop it because it becomes politically inexpedient, or worse, be elected and only be a lukewarm champion of it. Biden's a good guy, but he is fairly conservative from a business perspective, and that could happen. Remember 2009 when single payer was taken off the table in favor of the Heritage Foundation plan from the early 90s, which then became the ACA?

[highplainsdem]

23. We didn't have the votes for single payer in 2009. We didn't even have the votes for a public option

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_health_insurance_option

The public option was featured in three bills considered by the United States House of Representatives in 2009: the proposed Affordable Health Care for America Act (H.R. 3962), which was passed by the House in 2009, its predecessor, the proposed America's Affordable Health Choices Act (H.R. 3200), and a third bill, the Public Option Act, also referred to as the "Medicare You Can Buy Into Act", (H.R. 4789). In the first two bills, the public option took the form of a Qualified Health Benefit Plan competing with similar private insurance plans in an internet-based exchange or marketplace, enabling citizens and small businesses to purchase health insurance meeting a minimum federal standard. The Public Option Act, in contrast, would have allowed all citizens and permanent residents to buy into a public option by participating in the public Medicare program. Individuals covered by other employer plans or by state insurance plans such as Medicare would have not been eligible to obtain coverage from the exchange. The federal government's health insurance plan would have been financed entirely by premiums without subsidy from the Federal government,[3] although some plans called for government seed money to get the programs started.[4]

President Barack Obama promoted the idea of the public option while running for election in 2008.[5] Following his election, Obama downplayed the need for a public health insurance option, including calling it a "sliver" of health care reform,[6] but still campaigned for the option up until the health care reform was passed.[7]

Ultimately, the public option was removed from the final bill. While the United States House of Representatives passed a public option in their version of the bill, the public option was voted down in the Senate Finance Committee[8] and the public option was never included in the final Senate bill, instead opting for state-directed health insurance exchanges.[9] Critics of the removal of the public option accused President Obama of making an agreement to drop the public option from the final plan,[10] but the record showed that the agreement was based on vote counts rather than backroom deals, as substantiated by the final vote in the Senate.[11]

I believe Biden will fight for a public option. I can't guarantee he would get his health care plan through, but I think it has a better chance of becoming law than MFA has.

[PatrickforO]

29. Oh, clearly. Biden's plan has a much better chance than MFA. No argument here.

I just want to make sure he DOES fight for it. Because if the Dems sweep in 2020 as I believe they will, and they begin working on improving healthcare, that's when the real battle will begin with every pharma and healthcare lobbyist there is crawling out of the woodwork, with all their allies, to prevent a public option from being part of the healthcare reform.

You know this will happen.

I'm merely pointing out that I, and likely many other progressives, will take it most unkindly of those in the Administration and Congress fail in this one little thing. And, I'll get ugly about it. So will others. That's all I'm saying. So, if you are a staffer, please note this. I'm not the only one who feels like this at all. We simply MUST make forward progress on healthcare, climate change, college affordability, infrastructure and other things such as expanded Social Security which at my age looms larger each month.

[Cha]

30. Joe Biden is a Fighter.. he helped Obama

get ACA through.. that wasn' easy in that climate.

And, if you think highplainsdem might be "a staffer".. she isn't.

She's a concerned, activist, Citizen like the rest of us.. and I Thank her for all she does on DU.

[ucrdem]

20. MFA would need to somehow commandeer the current healthcare infrastructure

or rebuild it, in either case, requiring untold expense. The public option they (current insurers) will probably administer. Who else is set up to? So I'm not seeing a battle royale to defeat the public option plan (Biden's).

[PatrickforO]

22. Like any change, people either will support it, and so work without guile for its

success, or will not support it, and will work with guile to ensure that it fails through sabotage.

As long as profits are on the table, and we elect people who care more about them than the welfare of people, we will have millions of uninsured, and a system that ensures high profit by passing more and more of the cost onto consumers. That's what is happening now.

As to insurance companies administering the public option, if the neoliberals get their way, that will surely be the case, because they believe in privatization whenever and wherever possible without regard to the welfare of the consumer, the worker or the environment. That's just the way it is. We live in a world of shareholder primacy.

That said, I would hope that the government would run it because in my experience, the private sector can seldom provide a service that is a public good better, faster or cheaper, simply because of the inherent conflict of interest. Consider the concentration camps. We taxpayers are paying $750/detainee/day on no-bid contracts to companies like GEO, who cram people into stinking cages without showers, and withhold food, toiletries, medicines and medical treatment because to cut costs is to increase profits. Unconscionable.

Same thing with medical providers and big pharma. Profit is everything, and one of the ways they maximize it is to cut, reduce or deny needed services to patients.

Until we have the political courage to remove profit from the equation with healthcare, we will continue to have these horror stories - people dying, being denied service, being given substandard service, being misdiagnosed...

[ucrdem]

24. Most private health insurers started as non-profits.

Most of the big ones still are. Some super-mergers of multi-state BC/BS plans were allowed to re-configure themselves as for-profit corporations and that is indeed a problem. But it seems like a separate problem, with a separate solution (revoking that permission). For the most part though, big health plans pay salaries and expenses, but don't have share-holders and don't pay dividends. But, alas, some do. This is based on some digging I did a few months ago.

[PatrickforO]

26. Indeed. I myself have an HMO that is nonprofit. That does not mean I like it, or

that I'm able to get the services I really need through it. Nonprofits don't have profits - they have retained earnings, and in the case of my own HMO, they have used these retained earnings gotten from boosting premiums at double digits annually for years and then the big bump from ACA, to expand - building more offices and treatment centers.

They did not pass any of the retained earnings back to their patients.

I was in our HMO's inconvenient downtown facility with my wife, and while she was in the lab getting her blood drawn, I noticed a sign with this HMO's values. You know what the number one value is?

Cutting costs.

For what?

So they can retain more earnings, expand, hire more people, buy more machinery and ultimately collect more earnings to retain from patients.

Same thing.

[ucrdem]

28. LOL, yeah depressing isn't it.

On the other hand, what would happen to all those expanded facilities under M4A? Even if the US govt bought them, it would need personnel to run them. So one way or another we're looking at private sector participation. The other model is VA hospitals and from what I've seen and heard that's not an attractive alternative.

[PatrickforO]

32. You know, I've wondered that. I think the model we could look at is

the National Health Service in Great Britain.

You know what the irony is, here? In its descent from the Raj, where the sun never set on the British Empire, the UK lost over 1.1 million people. The Somme, the Marne, Ypres, Verdun, Gallipoli, Dunkirk, Singapore, Normandy, North Africa, Italy.

When those people got back after the second war, they looked around and said, "No, we bled for this country. No more going bankrupt for lack of health care. We want a national health service!"

Churchill didn't want to do it. The British Empire was broke, and Churchill wanted to bring it back to life. The rank and file Brits wanted healthcare.

Guess who won?

How did they pay? They found a way to do it. Maybe if we in the US didn't spend nearly 3/4 trillion a year on 'defense', we could afford it. Maybe if we truly consolidated the national security apparatus - the FBI, ATF, DEA, DHS, CBP, ICE, CIA and who knows what else they have that we don't know about?

See, my question has always been this: I pay a lot of taxes. I don't mind this, but I want my tax dollars to be used by my government, which is ostensibly 'of, by and for' the people, for programs that actually benefit me. Not for forever wars, boondoggles like the F-35 and the M1A1 Abrams tanks (did you know there's actually a parking lot in NV where hundreds of these $1.4 million behemoths are parked, gathering dust?). The military doesn't need them, but Congress kept earmarking money to keep those plants going.

I say, we need a NEW congress and a NEW president who aren't beholden to these big lobbies - big oil, big pharma, Wall Street - and who think about the needs of the people instead of corporate shareholders. Warren introduced legislation in August 2018 that would expand the fiduciary responsibility of CEOs and other officers of publicly held corporations to include workers, consumers and the environment, as well as shareholders. Do that, and we'd solve a hell of a lot of problems.

Because we are in the situation we're in, in this very thread, arguing about the political impracticality of MFA just because of the primacy of the shareholders. That is it. According to those who are saying the words 'practicality' and 'realistic', we can't have this service that everyone needs and Dems have said is a 'basic human right.'

This whole argument is over how to preserve profits, when we need to rethink the whole concept of profit. Consider fracking. I live in Colorado where we have a wild and wooly oil industry 'playing' the Niobrara Shale Formation. What that looks like on the ground is they drill down, then across. Then, they mix around five million gallons of water with a bunch of toxic chemicals and inject it at pressure into the earth to squeeze oil out of the shale.

I'm not saying get rid of oil and gas right now, but I am saying that for the sake of shareholder profits, big oil has hired 'consulting firms' on K Street to produce faux reports for the sole purpose of casting doubt on the veracity of human caused climate change due to carbon emissions.

But why, UCRdem are we so illogical? We've allowed our quest for profits to become more important than our very lives, our very earth. It has to stop, or else we will end up extinct. We really will. Capitalism is literally suffocating this planet. If we passed Warren's Accountable Capitalism Act, then we would have a strongly regulated market economy, but not capitalism per se. A great start!

Because in the end, I care far more about doing what is right, about making a difference, that I do about letting some Wall Street corporate-head beancounter tell me I have to die because I cannot afford some treatment I need.

Well, I'll end this little rant with the words of Agent Zed to Agent J in Men in Black: "Sucks, doesn't it?"

And a last thought: If the human species, Homo Sapiens, became extinct, ALL other life on this planet would be better off. That is quite troubling when you think about it.

[Vegas Roller]

34. Britain is a tiny country with a homogenous population

You cannot compare it with America.

[ucrdem]

36. And they're racing back to the dark ages faster than we are.

[PatrickforO]

37. Not so. It is a bit less diverse and has nearly 70 million people.

Here are the demographics: white 87.2%, black/African/Caribbean/black British 3%, Asian/Asian British: Indian 2.3%, Asian/Asian British: Pakistani 1.9%, mixed 2%, other 3.7% (2011 est.).

Bottom line with this entire conversation: we're on here arguing about why we cannot have a single payer healthcare system - but what we're actually arguing about is keeping shareholder profits coming in to big pharma and big healthcare, device manufacturing and so on, because we've made the decision as a society that profits are more important than people. So we're making all these genteel arguments on this thread, but profits over people has always been what this discussion is about.

And, you know, I feel uncomfortable knowing that over 28 million Americans don't have healthcare coverage at all, and 45,000 die each year because they cannot pay for treatment.

I'm a people over profit kind of guy, I guess.

[ucrdem]

35. Yeah fracking is probably another environmental catastrophe we're passing along to future gens.

What happens when all that toxic injection settles into the water table? Then we'll need more energy to filter any water we want to use for any normal purpose. And the great war ended 65 years ago and we're still arming for it, yeah that's crazy. But it's a living for the various suppliers involved so there's that. The trick is rethinking the whole enchilada and that's what it seemed to me Barack was working on during his second term. TPP was part of that, so were the climate and energy policies currently reposing in the WH compost heap. If nothing else Biden can sell policies so whatever we're going to get accomplished, he's the one most likely to pull it off. He's also got a policy blueprint ready to go from the last time he was in the WH. So as far as improving health care, I think he's the best bet.

[PatrickforO]

38. Wow. This is an interesting discussion point!

I remember being pretty against the TPP because of the secrecy in which it was developed and the ISDS provisions, which Warren and Sanders both attacked.

But I do see that free trade as it has been implemented really is in the process of creating a global middle class. It is. And you can't fault that, I know you can't. That said, there are credible estimates that NAFTA, for instance, cost the US around 800,000 jobs, so the creation of this global middle class hasn't come without a cost.

Again we come back to the continual consolidation of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, and the primacy of the shareholder, which has acted as a corrosive acid on our moral, social and economic fabric over decades. If you know your history you can see our decline as a civilization parallels the rise of the billionaire class. FDR's New Deal created a respite for ordinary people and created a strong middle class, but the effects of that are now nearly gone - dead from the corporate-Republican thousand cuts approach - attacked 24/7/365 through multiple channels; ALEC, the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity and all the rest.

As to the latter part of your post, I share your hope. I have disagreed with numerous things Biden has done in the past, an example being his support of the 2005 bankruptcy laws, but I do concede that he might have changed is views in some fundamental ways.

My biggest concern with both he and Bernie is that they are older white men who are going to run against another (evil) old white (orange) man. When Obama was president, I was so proud of this country, but his very presence - the fact he had the temerity to be a better-than-good, possibly great president while being black brought all the racists out of the woodwork. Fox and AM hate-radio ginned up the white nationalists, kluxers, neonazis and nazis and a demagogue (Trump) arose, giving them permission to crawl out from under their rocks and march down our streets with their filthy swastikas and white hoods.

Trump is, in effect, a white racist backlash. And I know I'm not telling you anything new.

I am supporting Warren, who is white, but she is female. I support her because I'm an economist and she has such good policies that would do so many so much good it isn't even funny. Warren is great that way - she really gets it. But I also very much like Harris (provided she surrounds herself with people strong in areas where she's weak - but all presidents ought to do that). I also like Booker and Castro.

In fact, ornery as I am, I'd like to see us elect a minority woman in response to Trump. Perhaps all those racist heads would then literally explode like the disgusting swollen pustules they are.

Biden? Well - he's not my number one candidate, but I will support him if he's the nominee. The only troubling thing is that I'm 60 now and would have real difficulty taking on that job - my mind is generally still very sharp, and professionally I'm at the top of my game - most of the time. Sometimes though, my mind gets foggy and my body just doesn't want to do it - whatever 'it' might be. I don't know if my constitution would allow me to do the job of president.

Biden is in his late 70s. For me, just because I know what it is like to be on the far side of 60, that is a concern, and I believe it is a legitimate one.

[Vegas Roller]

33. MFA is political suicide nt