The NYT article on the United Auto Workers' negotiations with GM, Ford, and Chrysler included a quote from a history professor, comparing the problem of paying for retiree health care benefits with the problem of Social Security: too few workers and too many retirees.
Fire that professor. This is not the story with either. The problem with paying for health care is the explosion of health care costs over the last three decades. No one anticipated that health care costs could run $15,000 to $20,000 per year per retiree thirty years ago. That's the reason that there is no equivalent to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation for health care benefits -- health care costs were not a big deal 35 years ago when the PBGC was established.
We can cover the cost of an increase in the ratio of retirees to workers in both the auto industry and Social Security (we've been living with a rising ratio for 7 decades). We can't cover the cost of a broken health care system.
A second Trump administration will cement a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court for a generation, and put our collective future in the hands of someone who will be virtually unchecked by our institutions. The country has shifted rightward, and the reverberations will ensue for potentially the next few decades. In this climate, a robust independent media ecosystem will be more important than ever. We're committed to bringing you the latest news on how Trump's agenda will actually affect the American people, shining a light on the stories corporate media overlooks and keeping the public informed about how power really works in this country.
Quality journalism is expensive to produce, and we don't have corporate backers to rely on to fund what we do. Everything we do is thanks to our incredible community of readers, who chip in a few dollars at a time to make our work possible. Any amount you give today will help us continue reporting on what matters to our democracy.
