Miners’ Bill a Small but Right Step

Congress, moving at a sickeningly slow place, is again giving serious consideration to a weak, stop-gap proposal to improve America’s inadequate health care system.

With just a little more courage, Congress could also help at least 120,000 coal miners who will be bashed particularly hard by runaway medical costs if nothing is done for them. A proposal to help them has been introduced in Congress by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.).

The basic stop-gap proposal already in the hopper was endorsed last week by the AFL-CIO convention in Detroit, in concert with an unusual coalition of business and consumer advocacy groups, as a better-than-nothing compromise.

That proposal is designed only to limit some of the more outrageous health care cost increases and mandate minimal coverage for about 37 million workers who don’t have health insurance.

We will still need a comprehensive national health insurance system, with tough cost-containment provisions, to cover everyone.

But the timid Democratic majority in Congress isn’t about to do that, and if it does, by some miracle, President Bush would slap it down with a veto, damning it as “socialized medicine.”

However, “Veto George” should let Congress take one other small step, in addition to the little one under consideration: It would be a bill to protect the pioneering health care and retirement plan won by 400,000 desperate miners after a strike in 1946.

The miners struck after mine owners ignored their plea for a health care and retirement system in an industry that was infamous for black lung disease and other illnesses and for the many deaths caused by brutal working conditions.

The strike was long and bitter. President Harry Truman was battling post-World War II economic problems. He had decided that the country’s economy could no longer tolerate the strike by the unionized miners, who were then producing more than 80% of the nation’s coal.

Truman ordered government seizure of the mines despite furious labor protests. Interior Secretary Julius Krug quickly negotiated a settlement with John L. Lewis, legendary leader of the United Mine Workers of America.

Truman, you may recall, strongly supported national health insurance. His sensible goal, the one we still need, was stymied by the American Medical Assn. The AMA killed it with a vicious, multimillion-dollar advertising campaign labeling it as--guess what--”socialized medicine.”

So Truman was delighted with the strike settlement, because it contained a health insurance plan that would help at least a few hundred thousand miners and their spouses. And it spurred other unions to seek health insurance.

When the mines were returned to private ownership a year later, the owners reluctantly accepted the agreement reached by the miners and the government.

Under the miners’ plan, if they were hurt or got sick, even after retirement, all of their medical expenses and those of their spouses would be paid for the rest of their lives out of the industry fund financed by contributions from each company.

Medical care for miners improved dramatically. It also improved health care in the entire Appalachia coal mining region because doctors had to be recruited and hospitals built for miners throughout the rural area where such care was almost nonexistent. Then those services became available to non-miners.

That victory, promoted by a liberal President, came when the miners and their union were in their heyday.

But the effective plan gradually ran into more and more trouble caused by such problems as union-busting coal companies and the shrinking size of the industry.

The trouble created a new category of miner known as “orphans.” They are workers employed by companies that either go out of business or break the union in their mines.

Such companies stopped making contributions to the industry fund, leaving relatively few unionized companies to pay for the guaranteed lifetime benefits of their retirees and those orphans too.

The courts legalized the crazy idea in recent years. They ruled that companies that remained under the union contract must foot the bill--not only for their own retirees but also for the bills of orphans dumped on the industry fund by defunct or de-unionized coal firms.

A law that supposes such perverse positions, as the court said it did, then “the law is a ass, a idiot,” as Mr. Bumble observed in Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist.”

The decisions didn’t take into account the fact that 75% of retired miners are now orphans from non-union or defunct companies that don’t pay into the industry health and retirement fund.

Like so many other court rulings these days, it is up to Congress to straighten out the miners’ mess. If it does not, the unionized companies might understandably try to disown responsibility for the orphans when the union-industry contract expires.

The union, now led by an articulate, militant president, Richard Trumka, who is also a lawyer, would have a moral obligation to try to protect the orphans by striking. That situation can be avoided under legislation being introduced today in Congress by Rockefeller.

His proposal would require all companies--including those that have broken the union in their mines--to take responsibility for the health care costs of their own current retirees and their spouses. It would also require all companies to pay a small fee for retirees of defunct companies, just as they all must help pay for reclaiming land laid waste by mining practices of companies that have gone out of business. If Congress passes the Rockefeller bill, the original health care agreement won by miners might be adapted to other industries. And more important, it and the stop-gap measure under consideration may move us further toward a meaningful national health insurance for everyone.