Opinion: Will workers face depressed wages after the massive Aetna-CVS merger?

To the editor: In your Dec. 11 editorial, “CVS and Aetna say their massive merger is needed to keep prices down. That remains to be seen,” you rightly question whether the combined company will “help consumers or squeeze more dollars out of them.” My research suggests that we need to focus on the companies’ workers as well.

Wages of workers employed as medical technicians and health aides and assistants are already under pressure in outpatient care facilities, where they have stagnated or declined since 2005 despite more education and high demand.

Higher prices are not the only danger of market concentration; consolidation may also increase a firm’s ability to hold down wages. In the case of large employers with a national reach, there may be downward pressure on wages throughout the industry — the so-called Wal-Mart effect.

Will the rapid expansion of employment in retail health lead to depressed wages for healthcare workers in retail clinics and the industry more generally?

Eileen Appelbaum, Washington

The writer is senior economist for the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

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To the editor: The buyout of health insurer Aetna by retail and pharmacy chain CVS begins the endgame of the failed healthcare plan put forth by Bill Clinton in 1993, a giveaway to the largest healthcare providers with consolidation.

Unwittingly, that is the system we now have: Consolidation with the profit schema has wedged us into a corporate structure and reduced us all to computer integers. Oh, the inhumanity!

But the vertical approach can work in the final step of consolidation: a complete single-payer system with price controls from the top will prevent the relentless and unsustainable costs we now face. If we do not heed the latest buyout, we will be closer to insolvency and shun the moral imperative that healthcare is a human right.

Jerome P. Helman, MD, Venice

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To the editor: An earlier Times article contained the following: “Aetna’s chief executive, Mark Bertolini, said the deal was ‘the next step in our journey, positioning the combined company to dramatically further empower consumers.’”

Another “only in America” moment: When we are dying of cancer or suffering from other conditions, we are not “patients,” we’re “consumers.” In other words, our tragedies serve as profit-making opportunities for entrepreneurial investors.

We have nearly reached the pinnacle of attaching a price tag to every aspect of our lives. Soon we will be billed for the oxygen we inhale.

For-profit healthcare must end if we are ever to evolve into a civilized, caring society.

Candida Pugh, Oakland

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