WASHINGTON (PAI)--Marshaled by the AFL-CIO and Change To Win, unionists by the hundreds of thousands jammed congressional phone lines Nov. 5 to lobby lawmakers for comprehensive, universal and affordable health care.

    The lobbying came as two other influential groups, the American Medical Association and the American Association of Retired Persons, joined labor in favoring HR 3962, the House health care bill.  Lawmakers planned to vote on it on Nov. 7.  The bill was expected to pass on a party-line vote, with all Republicans opposing it. 

    HR 3962 would cover all but a few million of the estimated 46 million uninsured, while curbing insurance company denial of care, cherry-picking of healthy members, and refusal to cover pre-existing conditions, among other things.  The Harvard Medical School reported last month that 44,780 people die yearly due to no health insurance.   

    Using the fed’s toll-free line (1-877-3AFLCIO), unionists told lawmakers that HR 3962 isn’t perfect, but that it is far superior to health care legislation in the Senate.  

    “I think we’ll have health care this year,” Change To Win Chair Anna Burger predicted at a Q-&-A in Washington on Nov. 2.  “Will it be as good as we wanted?  No.  But we can build on it.  And we” in unions “need to help make them (lawmakers) do it.  We need a drum beat to take on the tea-baggers,” she said, referring the anti-health care forces roused to riots by the insurance industry, the GOP and the Radical Right. 

    “HR 3962 meets our priorities for health care reform,” Communications Workers official Annie Hill said in urging her union’s members to hit the phones to Capitol Hill.  “It does not tax our benefits.  Instead, it asks the wealthiest 0.3% -- individuals earning $500,000 or more and families earning $1,000,000 or more annually -- to pay an additional surtax on their incomes.

   “It requires all employers, except most small employers, to provide coverage to their workers or else to pay a penalty of 8% of payroll into a public trust” to cover the uninsured, she continued.  That pay-or-play rule would end the free ride for firms such as Wal-Mart, who don’t provide coverage or -- in the retailer’s case -- price it so high workers can’t afford it and must turn to public health care such as Medicaid and clinics.

    The House bill also “includes protections for retirees, including improvements to Medicare, and a subsidy for employer-provided retiree health plans,” Hill said.  “And it includes a choice of a public plan so everyone will have a choice of an affordable plan, if they don’t otherwise have one, and to provide competition for private insurance.”

    “This is the best legislation we’re likely to get out of this Congress,” Hill admitted.

    “The Senate bill misses on three out of our four priorities.  Of most concern, the Senate bill would impose an excise tax on our health plans,” Hill pointed out. 

    But for the Congressional Progressive Caucus and backers of government-run single-payer national health insurance, HR 3962 falls short.  Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., promised to fight for the strongest possible public option.  

But he’ll vote for HR 3962 if that fails, “because of the reality of the insurance market.”

    Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, saw his single-payer alternative -- letting states establish their own single-payer plans -- dumped from the legislation.  A mass citizens movement for the single-payer bill (HR 676) led to his single-payer win in the House Education and Labor Committee, Kucinich explained in a Nov. 5 floor speech.  That mass movement featured 21 international unions and more than 500 other labor bodies, including locals, state feds and central labor councils.. 

    Single-payer also picked up an endorsement -- as one of several ways to achieve health care reform -- at the AFL-CIO Convention.  But single-payer got no backing from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who stitched the bill together.

    “The (single-payer) amendment was taken out of the bill, and we must try to get it into the conference report,” when congressional negotiators iron out a final version of the health care bill to send to Democratic President Barack Obama, Kucinich said.

       Single-payer, the Ohioan added, “has 87 cosponsors, a significant number, but nowhere near enough to bring the bill to the floor, where it would face certain defeat.  To those who want a stand-alone vote on single-payer now, I want to ask this question: ‘Is this a time to plant or a time to reap?  What fruit will be borne from a tree that has received no light and no water in this Capitol?’“   ###