The AFL-CIO and the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO have repeatedly confirmed their support for defending Medicare, expanding its benefits, and making quality healthcare a basic right in the United States by means of a single-payer system like Medicare for All. Healthcare in the United States has the highest costs in the world, leaving over 40 million people who are insured, including many recently unemployed workers, unable to get the care they need due to unaffordable deductibles and copays. Half a million people are pushed into bankruptcy each year due to medical bills, even though most of them were insured when they became sick or injured. 

 The high costs of health care have helped to sustain a climate of concessionary bargaining, pushing down wages, causing bitter strikes and lockouts, triggering attacks on all workers and retirees and shifting more and more of the costs onto the backs of workers, while employer-based health care plans put American employers at a competitive disadvantage against rival businesses in other countries that have national health care systems.

While we will continue to fight to defend and improve the ACA, Medicaid, and Medicare, the only commonsense approach to reform the U.S. healthcare system and achieve health justice is to provide access to affordable, comprehensive health care to all U.S. residents and to provide benefits that include physician, Advanced Registered Nurse Practitioners (ARNPs) and Physician Assistants (PAs) and hospital care, outpatient care, including Home Health, Hospice, and Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), dental, vision, and hearing services, rehabilitation, long-term care, behavioral health care, and prescription drugs to all individuals residing in the United States.

Please join us as we take on hard questions about healthcare and our national priorities.  We want to ask you, do you have a healthcare story to share? We'd like to hear from you at the Healthcare not Warfare Townhall on April, 25th, 2024 at 5:30 222 Columbia St NW 1st floor in Olympia, Washington.  Email  treasurer@tlmlabor.org for more information or to let us know that you'd like to share your story. You can also contact us at  treasurer@tlmlabor.org if you can't make it, but would like to share your story via a video.