REMINDER: Watch Peter Jenning's Health Care in Crisis report tonite

[EVDebs]

Since I don't have any health insurance besides what I've managed to save up in the past four years since my COBRA ran out...I'm looking forward to Single Payer coming around once everyone realizes that Big Bidness wants to dump all healthcare (and pension) benefits anyways.

We're on our own and the 'safety net' is GONE. If you end up in freefall it becomes a real 'faith based' system.

[Ravenseye]

1. I'm part of a small business group

I own a small business and am part of a fairly conservative small business organization. It's good for contacts, but they're very very conservative. We were talking in a committee about health care, and these very conservative people (you know..make fun of Murtha for no reason, off topic, types) are all for single payer plans. They're not just afraid of how it's affecting their businesses currently, but what will happen in the future.

Here in Pennsylvania there is talk of a law requiring employers to provide health care for their employees if they have more than 10 people. The cost to the company, because they aren't able to buy into large groups (health insurance in PA is fucked up) they end up having to pay around 1,000 a month per employee. It'll kill business. So of course they're all very pro single payer, or some other alternative, just so that it doesn't come from the business.

[EVDebs]

2. Give them something to read too ! Howzabout this...

Globalization is behind this, and this you have to dig for yourself as I did ...

""Perhaps most important, in the global economy, long-established U.S. companies are competing against younger rivals here and abroad that pay little or nothing toward their workers' retirement, giving the older companies a huge incentive to dump their plans.""
The Benefits Trap
www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_29/b3892001_mz001.htm

...buried in the article. When you realize this, you read David Cay Johnston's book Perfectly Legal: : The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich, and you discover that it's really those corporations and individuals who earn over $3 Million annually, the wealthiest 1 and 1/2 percent and those companies capable of 'globalization' -- offshoring jobs and capital for their own benefit to the detriment of everyone else-- then you understand that changes have to come with THEM understanding that THEY have to sacrifice a little too.

This is hidden from them, since they don't really believe -- in their insulated world, like 'bubble boy' on the cover of Time ! -- that they are slowly destroying this country. Kevin Phillip's book Wealth and Democracy, with the premise that the American economic empire is going the way of the others, Spain, Netherlands, Great Britain...and now US, due to the overconcentration of wealth.

They may complain, but I doubt small businessmen with say under 50 employees per company, are individually pulling in $3 Million / yr each either. The "Super Rich" are the main problem here and everyone thinks its the middle class. Heck, the middle class disappeared !