Act on healthcare

To the editor:

Ask a teacher or city worker if they want their union/employer to pay for-profit insurance companies to administer their health benefits, or if they want wages that exceed inflation. They can't have both. 

The New York Health Act takes on the powerful forces that are benefiting from the rigged status quo: the health insurance, hospital, pharma and real estate industries.

A jointly-administered, self-funded health plan with Emblem/United as third-party administrators introduces new incentives to deny care to 750,000 members, their families and retirees, and for costs to keep spiking. The opaque projection of $1 billion in “savings” will likely come from denials/delays of care, degraded quality/safety, added red tape for members and rorts like pharmacy benefit managers.

Rank and file union members demand co-opted union officials stop rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and call for the clear solution: The New York Health Act, cutting out the for-profit middlemen and taking healthcare off the bargaining table by implementing a single-payer system for New York. 

Now is the time to supercharge worker power, end wage stagnation and fight authoritarianism with one bill, which would pass if UFT/DC37 placeholders stop obstructing it in Albany.

Damien Archbold

The writer is an anesthesiologist at Elmhurst Hospital and a Doctors Council SEIU delegate.