Posted At The Macomb Daily
BY : Chad Selweski
Sen. Debbie Stabenow said Tuesday that falling wages and rising health care costs threaten to destroy Michigan's middle-class standard of living.
As companies slash worker benefits and manufacturers struggle with the competitive disadvantage of escalating health care expenses, Stabenow said Washington still lacks a sense of urgency about the economic damage taking place.
Speaking to a group of about 100 doctors, nurses and administrators at St. John Macomb Hospital in Warren, Stabenow said the White House and many in Congress see little need to revise the nation's employer-based system of providing health insurance.
"We spend twice as much of our GDP, our gross domestic product, on health care as any other country, but we have 45 million uninsured people. There is something wrong with this picture," said the Lansing Democrat. "I wish we could say we're spending twice as much and getting twice as much health care."
While many in Congress want to cut federal funding for Medicaid or revise Medicare, Stabenow, who faces re-election in 2006, is pushing health care reforms that would trim costs without cutting services.
One bill would invest in greater use of computers and the Internet for hospital record-keeping and day-to-day operations, which would reduce paperwork and save an estimated $300 billion a year in administrative costs.
A second bill would create a national insurance pool to protect employers from high insurance premiums associated with "catastrophic" illnesses suffered by workers. Stabenow said General Motors projected that eliminating its catastrophic cases could lower the automaker's health care costs by 23 percent.
A third piece of legislation, long championed Stabenow, would allow the reimportation of less costly prescription drugs from Canada.
In an interview with The Macomb Daily, Stabenow said health care fixes are part of a broader agenda to revive the nation's manufacturing sector. If the Delphi Corp. bankruptcy sets the course, she said, economic globalization will be the motive cited by many industrial companies for slashing the income that fuels middle class America.
Less jobs, lower wages, fewer benefits and minimal pensions are "a prescription for disaster," said the first-term senator.
"To say it's all about people in our country earning too much -- that's the wrong debate," she said. "We ... are in a fight for our way of life."
The Michigan congressional delegation has pursued a manufacturing agenda that lawmakers say is designed to "level the playing field" for the auto industry and other industrial sectors. That agenda calls for tougher enforcement of trade laws, cracking down on counterfeit goods manufactured overseas, pension reforms and lowering health care costs.
Stabenow said the effort hasn't made sufficient progress because the White House and the Republican leadership in Congress believe market forces must be allowed to work in the manufacturing sector shakeout.
She faulted the Big Three automakers and their suppliers for a lack of lobbying effort.
"There's a very laissez-faire attitude (in Washington) -- whatever happens, happens," she said. "We ... need a loud, unified voice coming from the auto industry."
