How Corrupt Is That?

The AFL-CIO recently posted a health care survey on its web site.

And in the key question (question 21) about the future of the health care system, the AFL gives you a choice.

Health care reform should let people choose to have private insurance or a public health insurance plan.

or:

Health insurance should remain in the hands of private insurance companies.

There is no choice for single payer:

The hundreds of private health insurance companies should be replaced by a single payer.

Single payer is the choice of a majority of individual members of
the AFL, a majority of Americans, a majority of doctors, nurses, health
economists and small businesses.

But the AFL-CIO leaves it out.

Why?

Because the AFL doesn't want to offend the private health insurance
industry, the pharmaceutical industry, President Obama and the
Democratic leadership in the House and Senate - who have taken single
payer off the table.

Or as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it last week:

"Over and over again, we hear single payer, single payer, single payer. Well, it's not going to be a single payer."

Many within the AFL-CIO, including Rose Ann DeMoro, head of the
California Nurses Association, and a key single payer supporter, know
that the AFL is corrupt to the core.

Yet they bite their tongues.

It's either that, or banishment.

Or if they criticize, the criticism is so mild as to go unnoticed.

Andy Coates is an MD and steward in the Public Employees Federation of the AFL.

"Everyone knows that single payer is supported by many within
labor," Coates said yesterday. "Over 500 union organizations, including
39 state AFL-CIO's and 126 Central Labor Councils, have endorsed HR 676
(the House single payer bill) which is co-sponsored by 76 members in
the House of Representatives. Recently, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders,
a friend of labor, introduced SB 703, a single payer bill, in the
Senate."

"Since a large section of unions and union members supports a single
payer solution to the health care crisis, it is unfair to construct a
survey that completely ignores opinions from single payer advocates,"
Coates said.

It's not only unfair, Dr. Coates.

When the majority of your membership wants single payer.

And you don't even put it on the survey.

That's more than unfair.

The only question remaining is:

How corrupt is that?