Sen Sanders: Thank you to the @AFLCIO for your resolution in support of Medicare for All.

[Donkees]

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Excerpt:

CONVENTION RESOLUTION | HEALTH CARE

Resolution 6: Making Health Care For All A Reality

October 24, 2017

Submitted by the Executive Council

The United States is at a health care crossroads. We either move forward toward making health care a basic right for everyone, or fall backward, with coverage and care increasingly out of reach as politicians actively take it away, employers cut back and higher prices make it ever harder to afford.

Making Health Care a Right

Having the health care we need, no matter who we are and regardless of our circumstances in life, is fundamental to our well-being as individuals and as a nation. That is why the American labor movement has fought for more than a century to make quality health care a basic right in the United States. Our longstanding goal for achieving this is to move expeditiously toward a single-payer system, like Medicare for All, that provides universal coverage using a social insurance model, while retaining a role for workers’ health plans. Any such system must guarantee everyone can get the health services they need without exclusions or financial barriers to care, and with access to high-quality doctors, hospitals and other health care providers; not diminish the hard-fought benefits union members have won for themselves and all working people; include long-term care for all; retain the Department of Veterans Affairs health care system as the primary direct provider of fully integrated care to veterans; provide multiemployer and other worker health plans the opportunity to administer core health benefits and to provide supplemental benefits, each on a fully tax-advantaged basis; and keep a strong federal role without shifting costs to states.

We will support legislation that guarantees health care as a human right through an improved Medicare for All, which we will judge according to our core values. We look forward to working with the sponsors of single-payer plans to ensure the needs and concerns of working people and their unions are met.

To transition to an improved Medicare for all system, we should begin taking steps toward creating a single-payer system by lowering Medicare’s eligibility age from 65 to at least 55. This would extend health care provided on a single-payer basis to millions more Americans. Further, this could help preserve coverage for pre-65 retirees, whose current health benefits earned through work are increasingly at risk. We also should create a public health insurance option that builds on Medicare or Medicaid as an alternative to for-profit insurance companies.

https://aflcio.org/resolutions/resolution-6-making-health-care-all-reality