First Employers Sent Your Job Overseas. Guess What? You’re Next medical

Omaha Steve

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Wed Sep-13-06 10:44 AM
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First Employers Sent Your Job Overseas. Guess What? You’re Next medical

http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/09/13/first-employers-sent-your-job-overseas-guess-what-you%e2%80%99re-next/

Corporate Greed

Sep 13

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First Employers Sent Your Job Overseas. Guess What? You’re Next.

Everyone—employees and employers—admit health care costs are skyrocketing and that something must be done. But shipping an employee overseas for medical care?

That’s what the manufacturing company Blue Ridge Paper in Canton, N.C., aimed to do when it made plans to send Carl Garrett, a paper mill technician, to India for gall bladder and shoulder surgery.

That is, until Garrett’s union, the United Steelworkers (USW), heard about it.

Says Stan Johnson, an assistant USW district director, who led negotiations with Blue Ridge:

I about fell off my chair when I heard this. I was appalled. The whole thing is insane. People are not looking at the slippery slope this could lead to. We’ve watched our jobs go offshore. Now we’re exporting patients. This is a flash point for the real issue—the need for universal health care.

After persistent objections by the union, management agreed to back off the plan. Both sides agreed to work together to find an alternative within the United States for Garrett, who had volunteered to undergo surgery in India in return for a 25 percent share of the savings.

Dubbed “medical tourism” by the media, the idea of outsourcing medical care to lower-cost countries is finding its way into corporate agendas as a way to cut health care costs.

Since 2000, employers’ health insurance premiums have risen 73 percent, and average employee contributions have risen 143 percent, according to the National Coalition on Health Care.

Working families are being hit hard by the rising costs as well. A huge majority (97 percent) of respondents in the AFL-CIO’s 2006 Ask a Working Woman survey said affordable health care was their top concern.

In a letter to members of Congress, USW President Leo Gerard says “medical tourism” shows the need for national health care reform:

Our members, along with thousands of unrepresented workers, are now being confronted with proposals to literally export themselves to have certain “expensive” medical procedures provided in India.

With companies now proposing to send their own American employees abroad for less expensive health care services, there can be no doubt that the U.S. health system is in immediate need of massive reform.

The right to safe, secure and dependable health care in one’s own country should not be surrendered for any reason, certainly not to fatten the profit margins of corporate investors.

Exporting medical care also exposes U.S. citizens to the whims of a foreign country’s medical and legal systems, says Johnson.

When you’re there, you give up your legal rights that you have here. You can’t sue if there’s malpractice. Who would send their 7-year-old child or their 80-year-old grandmother to a foreign country for surgery and you couldn’t do anything if something goes wrong?

The union movement is fighting to make quality health care less expensive and more available. The AFL-CIO has called for legislation to require employers to pay their fair share of medical coverage costs and for programs that expand coverage to the nearly 47 million Americans who do not have medical coverage.

FULL story at link above.