Sick and Getting Sicker

In a labor dispute over who will pay burgeoning health-care costs, Teamsters who have been honoring grocery store union picket lines in Central and Southern California are returning to work in order not to jeopardize their own medical insurance. The strike and lockout are sapping the savings of 70,000 grocery workers, and the labor dispute could cost the Albertsons, Kroger and Safeway grocery chains as much as $1 billion in combined lost sales. The health coverage the workers are fighting to retain will run out in a few days. It is a dispute slathered with irony as well as pain.

The supermarket health-care battle eventually will end, but a larger war looms. The number of working Americans going without health insurance rose in each of the last two years as employers passed along soaring costs, priced health plans beyond employees’ reach or simply dropped coverage. Last year’s 2.4 million increase in non-elderly Americans without medical insurance represented the largest jump since 1987, according to the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.

Suppose the grocery store chains win their increasingly bitter labor dispute and force butchers, bakers and bagboys to absorb an estimated $1 billion in additional health-care costs. It’s true that the plan currently in effect is gold-plated, but when these $13-an-hour workers no longer can afford the premiums and co-pays, they and their children will end up getting paltry health care, often at taxpayer expense. The employers’ sick-day costs will shoot up until that benefit too is canceled.

In terms of overall health care, California is ailing. The governor intends to put the names of eligible children on waiting lists for the low-income Children’s Health Insurance Program. Emergency rooms are already overwhelmed, with insured and uninsured patients alike suffering waits of many hours and worse. Congress has been an ostrich regarding health-care reform, an unflattering and dangerous posture that’s unlikely to change during an election year. Right now, CEOs decide who gets affordable health care and who must make do with an overcrowded emergency room or charity clinic. Many anguish over the decisions but all are forced to respond to market pressures to cut costs. Only some public employees still have the luxury of fully paid health care.

The health-care gap is only going to widen, even as pharmaceutical companies celebrate a profitable new Medicare benefit. Congress must start listening to big employers, workers and even insurers who are clamoring for health-care reforms.