CWAers Throughout District 1 Dig Into What’s Behind the Rising Costs of Healthcare

The fight to strengthen our healthcare system spans across every single industry and every part of CWA — what we see every day at the bedside with services being cut or threatened with closure and workers pushed to the brink, other CWA members in telecommunications, public service, higher education, and more are seeing their costs for care skyrocket year after year. 

On March 26, CWA hosted an online info session led by Michael Kinnucan, Health Policy Director for the Fiscal Policy Institute, to discuss why costs on healthcare consumers have gone up even while workers like us are continuing to be stretched thin and services closed.

Some big picture items touched on in the info session:

• The U.S. healthcare system is the most expensive in the world — but many Americans still go without coverage, and our health outcomes are worse than comparable countries.
• An increasingly corporatized healthcare system — not utilization — is driving up prices and administrative costs [1]
• Hospital prices are the single largest driver of cost increases, but, as many of us know, are not being invested in patient care [2]

“We’ve been running a fifty-year experiment in whether we need government regulation or if markets can solve this themselves, and the results are really clear,” Michael said during the discussion. “Markets cannot solve this. We’re not going to get healthcare prices and costs that make sense by letting [insurance companies] bargain with a big hospital company every year in secret and letting that be the force that decides who gets paid how much for delivering healthcare. We need government intervention.”

You can watch the full presentation and discussion here.