David Hoppe

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:: Kickstart the economy

Get health care off our backs

By David Hoppe

High gas prices, falling home values, the ever-more expensive cost of groceries - and nothing in the bank. It's no wonder our country's economic downturn has elbowed the war in Iraq out of the limelight during this presidential campaign. As debt collectors start lining up, a lot of us are finding that the American Dream of easy credit and low down payments is really just a dreamland.

This has been particularly true in Indiana, with its high rate of foreclosure and loss of manufacturing jobs. We need some relief, the sooner the better. And, by the way, that $600 check that's supposed to be in the mail, courtesy of King George and his enablers in the supposedly Democratic congress, won't come close to cutting it.

We need Medicare for everybody - and we need it now.

The first and best thing we can do to help a large majority of households out of this economy's downward spiral is not just "to make health care affordable," whatever that means, but to relieve everyone from ever having to worry about it again. Unless we do this, nothing our spit and polished representatives in Washington, D.C. think up by way of carrots and sticks for their corporate backers will make much of a difference.

Here's why:

As Louis Uchitelle recently pointed out in the New York Times , the $20 hourly wage "is on its way to extinction." Uchitelle writes that, in the middle of the last century, $20 an hour became a benchmark, the wage that enabled large numbers of workers to enter the middle class with little more than a high school education. It became a union standard in the auto industry in 1948 and was used for bragging rights in the Cold War when it seemed important to show the world the high standard of living American workers had compared to workers behind the Iron Curtain. Before long, many nonunion employers also paid their people 20 bucks, which spread middle class incomes through the service sector. The high point of the $20 an hour era came in the late 1970s. In 1979, 23 percent of all hourly workers made at least $20 for every hour they worked.

It's been downhill ever since.

In manufacturing, 1.9 million workers are still at the $20 rate - a decline of 60 percent since 1979. Nowadays, companies trying to reduce costs have taken to buying out older workers and getting unions to abandon previous contracts in favor of new agreements that allow for the hiring of "second tier" workers whose wages are not allowed to ever reach the $20 level. Employers have also been relying more on temporary workers and off-shore workers - or simply asking workers to accept wage cuts.

People who are paid by the hour account for 52 percent of all American workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They include managers, professionals, factory and construction workers, technicians, educators and sales people. Although the numbers aren't as readily available, it appears that many salaried jobs are also paying less than they once did.

The kicker is that at the same time that many people are earning less, the cost of health care is going up. A recent Boston College study shows that medical expenses have increased 43 percent in the last five years and are projected to increase at an even higher rate compared to overall consumer spending. Health care now accounts for 20 percent of all personal spending, or double what it was in 1970 - those days when almost a quarter of all hourly workers made $20 an hour, and probably had first rate employer-backed health insurance to boot.

It seems our health care and insurance industries have been living on a different planet from the rest of us - a planet where wages and salaries and the cost of doing business still operates like it did 30 years ago. Except it's not the '70s anymore. The downward pressure on wages and salaries caused by global competition isn't going away. Given the fact that most of us are making less, this means that it's time for government to negotiate health care on behalf of all of us. It's the best way to boost the income and savings for the largest number of American households. If you think we can't afford to do this, check your bank account and ask yourself: can we afford not to?