Colorado’s lawmakers should work to increase health care coverage in the state, says Andrew Stern, head of the 1.6 million-member Service Employees International Union.
Stern, whose membership includes more health care workers than any other union in North America, said during a meeting with The Denver Post editorial board that state lawmakers throughout the country should be thinking of ways to increase coverage for their constituents.
Several states, including Massachusetts and Vermont, have recently enacted plans to extend health coverage to all their residents. And California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has unveiled a plan for mandated insurance coverage for all state residents.
Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter has said he wants to provide health care coverage for all Coloradans by 2010.
Colorado lawmakers should “really think about how we can cover Coloradans and look at what has happened in other states,” Stern said during his meeting at The Post on Friday.
The climate in the country has changed since 1994, when a plan by the Clinton administration to provide universal health care met fierce resistance from the insurance industry and others, he said.
Galloping health care costs have led both business leaders and the insurance industry to call for a change in the system, he said.
“This is a very different moment. There is a movement afoot. (Lawmakers) should really think about how we can cover Coloradans and look at what happened in other states.”
It was important for states like Massachusetts to develop their own plans, though he wouldn’t recommend those plans to other states, he said.
“It was very important that someone show that it could be done, and it is very important that other states show it can be done differently, and then it is very important that we all watch what they do and see that the books balance, what worked and what didn’t work, and learn from them.”
Tom Clark, executive vice president of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp., said the state can play a part in solving the health care dilemma.
But lawmakers shouldn’t take up the issue until there have been discussions involving all segments of the community, he said. “Ultimately, a lot of health care solutions are going to occur from local and state government, not from the feds,” he said.
Stern’s SEIU, a union of public-sector, health care and janitorial workers, left the AFL-CIO and in 2005 formed a new labor federation, the Change To Win, with six other unions. The labor movement had “become rather male, pale and stale,” said Stern.
Unions have to adapt and form partnerships with businesses if they are going to grow, he said. “The premise of our union was, when you are walking down the road and all the sign posts are pretty clear – you have one in three people in unions, you are down to one in 12 in the private sector – you should get off the road and walk in a different direction.”
The SEIU has 5,000 members in Colorado.
Staff writer Tom McGhee can be reached at 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com.
