I saw the need for universal healthcare in the US from a very different angle when reading the Times coverage on how the jobless are facing a new challenge: prospective employers are increasingly using credit checks as a basis for selecting their hires.
People who've declared bankruptcy over healthcare bills, should they get well enough to work again, now face a new challenge, if they haven't been able to keep their job. They've become, increasingly, unemployable. And then this quote pulled me up short:
"How do you get out from under it?" asked Matthew W. Finkin, a law professor at the University of Illinois, who fears that the unemployed and debt-ridden could form a luckless class. "You can’t re-establish your credit if you can’t get a job, and you can’t get a job if you’ve got bad credit."
Well, the answer to that question is, you can't. With this latest peril, we become a country with a permanent underclass.
I asked a friend I saw later that day about this, as she'd been laid off in April and looking for work, and she said, "I signed a permission form for a credit check just the other day."
More than 40 percent of employers use credit checks at least sometimes, according to a 2004 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management, up from 25 percent in 1998. The share has almost certainly risen today, say career counselors.
NPR reports it may be as high as 70% of employers.
The NPR link is to a story that dates back to July of 2008, when Elizabeth Warren was, I assume, not aware of the role she'd play within the Obama Administration to come. It features Terry Gross of All Things Considered discovering the truth of her husband's credit rating, and details their struggle to correct it. And that was something they were able to do only with the help of a lawyer, and with both of them employed.
Lately, the stories of the current healthcare system have shocked me, even when I think I know how bad things are. In just the past week, I've been reading about how Ethan Zohn, of the Survivor TV show, has Hodgkins and faces paying for 6 23,000 chemo treatments this year---and this is with insurance. Or a woman, again with insurance, charged 22,000 for the birth of her child, her claim denied because...CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield sold her insurance that didn't cover her labor, delivery or hospital stay. A 'sham policy', to her horror.
We need universal healthcare to secure the safety of our workforce now in an entirely new way, in other words. Beyond the basic inequity built into the situation of American life as it is at this very minute---that we live in a country where a 9-year-old boy has to go on E-Bay to raise money to pay for his cancer surgery---that boy now faces growing up in a country where for any of us, cancer could mean not just working to get over a life-threatening illness, but a possible verdict for life as a member of a new unemployable class should we survive. We must stop this before it becomes any worse for those currently already inside of this hideous double-bind, with work on reforming the healthcare system and health insurance, but also, we need to look once more at how credit ratings are made for people, and how these three card companies are increasingly more powerful than any other force on American life, impacting not just the health of our economy but that of our collective future.