Coalition will not pick health care plan: Stern

By Mark Gruenberg
WASHINGTON (PAI)--A coalition of three influential but divergent groups on Nov. 1 added a powerful fourth member on to its push for putting universal health care on the national agenda, but won't pick a single health care plan to promote, says the sole union leader among the four, Service Employees president Andy Stern.

Instead, he told Press Associates union news service that Divided We Fail will keep pushing principles for universal affordable health care so the issue will be the top domestic priority in next year’s election--and so Congress and the next president must tackle the issue, under political pressure to achieve that goal, and with backing to do so.

Stern spoke after a press conference introducing the new fourth member of the coalition, the National Federation of Independent Business. It joins SEIU, the American Association of Retired Persons and the Business Roundtable.

NFIB has been a key member of the Radical Right that has governed the country since the advent of GOP control of Congress, from 1995-2006 and the anti-worker regime of GOP President George W. Bush. The right, including Bush and NFIB, has had a health care philosophy--as unions and their allies put it--of “you’re on your own.”

But NFIB spokeswoman Stephanie Cathcart said afterwards that her group’s members “have been telling its leaders for 25 years that providing health care was their #1 problem” and urging it to do something positive to help them solve the dilemma. The new president, Todd Stottlemyer, listened, and joined Divided We Fail, she said.

But Divided We Fail has decided, unlike the Democratic presidential hopefuls, not to hammer out a specific plan, Stern said. It would become just a forgotten sheaf of paper, he explained. Most GOP hopefuls have yet to be specific on health care.

What Divided We Fail wants to do--and has started discussing--is push health care to the forefront of the electoral discussion and try to set up a debate on the issue between the Democratic and Republican nominees, once the parties settle on them.

“You would hope by the time we elect someone” next November “there would be a mandate to do something on the #1 domestic issue,” Stern told the press conference.

“We’re coming together. Now the politicians need to come together,” said AARP CEO William Novelli, a GOP operative whose ad agency created the infamous lying “Harry and Louise” ad campaign that helped sink health care reorganization in 1994.

“The objective is universal access to quality health care,” Stottlemyer said, changing NFIB’s previous stand. Stern called it “the big news, since NFIB has historically been the most conservative” on health care issues.

How to get to universal coverage will be left to the future, though, Stern said in the interview.

“We pre-agreed on the principles” of affordable universal quality health care without burdening future generations with high costs, emphasis on wellness efforts and prevention and giving people choices in long-term care, he explained. Other parts of the Divided We Fail platform deal with retirement security and savings incentives.

“But we would get ourselves in trouble if we tried to do specifics, as the AFL-CIO has gotten in trouble,” Stern elaborated. The federation, which SEIU is no longer part of, recently launched its own massive campaign to make affordable universal health care the top domestic issue from now through the election. But it, too, has not chosen a specific plan to back. That will occur afterward, says campaign chair Heather Booth.

But the hopes of both Stern’s group and the AFL-CIO hinge on the outcome of the election, since the Democratic hopefuls have offered specific plans while the GOP by and large has stuck with Bush’s scheme to dump health care costs on workers and their families. Several of the Republicans, however, are beginning to think of health care as a national problem requiring a national solution, Stern pointed out.

“This election has got to be about health care and the war. The Democrats’ starting place and the Republicans’ starting place, on both issues, are very different,” he commented. “Our role in SEIU from now until then will be giving people information on where the candidates stand.”`

But it’s up to the hopefuls--not Divided We Fail--to fill in the blanks, he reiterated.

“They have to come as close to a piece of legislation as possible, so that we won’t wait for a year after they take office--and so that we have a constituency really ready to push it,” Stern concluded.