02-06-06,10:03am

President Bush’s State of the Union address was promoted as a major statement on health care, but the brief portion that focused on health care was a call for more bad legislation that will hurt working families while enriching corporations and the wealthy. After five years, we’ve had more of that than we can stand—but we’re going to keep getting anti-worker legislation until working families have the same power on Capitol Hill as big companies and their well-paid lobbyists.

The president’s answer to America’s health care crisis is a non-answer founded on non-insurance. He proposes high-deductible, no-security Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) that will discourage all but the wealthy from getting regular medical care, increase costs for workers who remain in more comprehensive coverage and encourage even more employers to stop providing health insurance for workers. The banking industry, though, is salivating over the HSA proposal. Last month, the American Bankers Association and the American Bankers Insurance Association formed the HSA Council to lobby Congress and the Bush administration for HSAs. Just like Wall Street firms banded together to push for Social Security privatization when they saw billions in money management fees up for grabs.

Working families banded together, too, though, and we stopped Social Security privatization—the bold initiative of President Bush’s 2005 State of the Union address. Now we have to stop HSAs as well and convince our elected leaders instead to get down to the people’s business of creating a health care system that will enable every one of us to get the care we need at prices we can afford. That means national health insurance.

Right now, though, there are just too many corporate lobbyists with too much influence and too much at stake blocking the way to meaningful, large-scale change. Look what happened to the good idea of providing prescription drug coverage for seniors under Medicare—it was turned into a disaster for the people it should serve and instead is serving drug companies and insurers really well.

There’s a great deal of hand-wringing going on these days about corruption on Capitol Hill. Everyone seems to have a proposal to limit free lunches for members of Congress from lobbyists. Congress should not be—or be perceived as—up for sale to the lobbyists with the biggest expense accounts or nicest corporate jets. But if taking senators or representatives out to lunch is potentially corrupting, how about flooding them with corporate campaign contributions? Companies spend 50 times more than working people on lobbying and their Political Action Committees spend 24 times more than labor unions on political campaigns.

So while we are demanding real lobbying reform that includes public financing of political campaigns, we’re going to have to work 50 times harder than the corporate lobbyists to win real health reform, real economic reform and real attention from Washington, D.C. And we will.