Like a patient ignoring an ominous lump, Washington has spent years hiding from America's healthcare crisis. Now we'll soon learn whether President Bush and Congress will pay attention even if they are hit, so to speak, by a truck.
General Motors Corp. and the United Auto Workers are barreling toward an explosive collision over the company's effort to shift more of its crushing healthcare burden to its unionized workers.
GM is seeking concessions by the end of June, but union officials say they won't change their labor contract before it expires in 2007.
State of the Union -- In a Jan. 29 Washington Outlook column on President Bush's address, and in previous columns, about 46 million Americans were said to lack health insurance. That figure included noncitizens living in the United States.
With many Americans already unnerved by persistent trade deficits, airline pension defaults and GM's recent announcement of 25,000 layoffs, the political and economic consequences could be profound if the GM-union conflict escalates into a strike or lockout. Self-preservation alone might encourage a president and a Congress with sinking approval ratings to confront the underlying healthcare problems fueling this dispute with even a fraction of the concern that they mustered for the treatment of a single Florida woman, Terri Schiavo.
To put it mildly, exploding healthcare costs present a more tangible problem for many more Americans than right-to-die cases. Since 2000, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's authoritative survey, healthcare premiums for family coverage have increased by 59%, six times faster than inflation.
Higher costs, which encourage employers to drop coverage and discourage employees from purchasing it when offered, are swelling the number of uninsured. Meanwhile, managers and workers in companies that still provide coverage are facing no-win disputes over how to split escalating bills.
That tension triggered the bitter four-month grocery strike settled last winter in Southern California. Now, the same fuse is igniting the confrontation between GM and the UAW.
The company's fundamental problem is that it has not designed enough cars that consumers like. But there's no question that unsustainable healthcare bills are compounding its distress.
In 1996, GM spent $3 billion to provide healthcare to 1.2 million workers, retirees and family members. This year, it expects to spend $5.6 billion to cover 1.1 million people. That means GM's per-person expenditures for healthcare have doubled (from $2,500 to nearly $5,100) in less than a decade. GM now spends more than $1,500 on healthcare for each car it produces. That's more than it spends on steel.
