PDF Some reflections on health care reform, plumbing and plumbers.
There when you need it
First
A friend recently sent me this letter that appeared in the Atlantic City Press earlier this month.
Years ago, I became a member of Local Union 121 Atlantic City Plumbers and Pipefitters Union. At that time, the union membership was devising a health care plan for the membership and their families.
It is absolutely amazing. A bunch of plumbers get together and draw up a health care plan. Now get this: At the regular union meeting, they elect a plumber from the group to administer the health care plan.
The best part of this story is that the health care plan works. I owe my healthy life to my Union Health & Welfare Fund. I am 83 years old and I swim a quarter of a mile every morning at the Crest Haven Swimming Pool. My father was a plumber and he passed away at age 52. He did not have a health care plan and could not afford the medical expenses. The hospital sent him home to die.
To establish a good health care plan, we have to eliminate all of the phony politicians and send a bunch of union plumbers to Washington to get the job done. Single payer health care – everybody in, nobody out.
RICHARD NEILL
Cape May Court House
As someone whose experience with health care was shaped by my own participation in the benefit funds of UA Local 520 in Harrisburg, PA I understand full well what Brother Neill is referring to.
The multi-employer model that he knows is a model for a national health care system. Employers pay while people are working to provide benefits during transitional periods of employment.
Second.
Some years ago when I was working for the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4), I was on a panel of high-powered speakers addressing issues related to health care. The host of the event, noticing that my bio included my membership in the Plumbers Union, introduced my by inquiring what possible connection there could be between plumbing and health care.
Fortunately my predecessor at the dais had left me with a ready answer. He had displayed a graph displaying the increase in life span over several hundred years. The graph had an obvious kink somewhere in the beginning of twentieth century.
I reminded the audience that for most of the time frame on the graph, improvements in life span were related to the widespread introduction of sanitary water and sewer systems – the work of plumbers, the world’s first environmentalists. We turned health care over to the doctors in the twentieth century and that was when the graph line flattened out.
The remark did draw a few chuckles. But it was also a serious reminder that there is more to health than physicians can provide, and that the health of the public is improved when the public takes responsibility for its advancement.
Third
It seems to me that health care should be much like our water and sewer systems – something we should be able to take for granted. When we need it, it is there.
There is no one successful delivery model for water and sewer systems. They reach everyone; but even when the government does not run them, they are facilitated by governments. Even out-houses are regulated by the government as I learned when we sold our pre civil war house in central PA.
Safe water and sewer systems don’t just benefit the recipients, they benefit the communities. That is also the case with health care. I once heard a speaker humorously observe, “We value education as a public good, yet I would rather sit next to someone who is healthy than someone who is smart.”
Health care for all benefits everyone.
Everyone in – nobody out.
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