The big number the press will concentrate on today, from the press conference today launching America’s Future Now and progressive health care campaigns, is $82 million:

Progressive groups are poised to spend more than $82 million to support President Obama’s goal of achieving quality, affordable health care for all this year, according to leaders gathered today at the “America’s Future Now” conference in Washington.

Truth be told, it is a big number. But if you think for one second that the insurance industry or the drug industry couldn’t double or triple that in a push against health care reform if they want to, you’ve got another thing coming. $82 million is chump change to big PhRMA.

The real story today is the fact that progressives are united behind President Obama’s health care plan:

Participants in the effort include the Health Care for America Now campaign; the two main labor federations, the AFL-CIO and Change To Win; as well as MoveOn.org, Democracy for America and mobilization groups representing people of color, women and young people. The various organizations serve different functions, with the bulk of the spending financing advertising and grassroots organizing on- and off-line across the country.

The collective effort involves the more than 1,000 organizations that are part of Health Care for America Now, representing over 30 million members committed to winning a guarantee of quality, affordable health care for all this year. It is the largest national progressive issue campaign in history, one that was lacking when President Clinton’s health care proposals were defeated by the health care industry and conservative groups more than a decade ago.

This is where our strength comes from, and this is why we will win. We can mobilize America, and we have voters on our side.

It is this level of organization and coordination with will move health care reform through Congress and on to the President’s desk. It is our ability to talk to broad swaths of America, to mobilize volunteers to go door-to-door, and to get voters to contact their Members of Congress that will manifest the public pressure we’ll need to pass historic legislation.

And of course, this contrasts pretty strongly with what’s happening on the conservative side of the spectrum. There is a war for the GOP going on between moderates and hard-line conservatives. They’re attention is diverted and unity is hard to find. As has been noted elsewhere, Republicans have been fairly silent on health reform, and a lot of their natural constituencies (big business, the insurance industry) are ostensibly on the side of reform.

There is a reason we have unity over health care – it’s because it is perhaps the most important issue that touches everyone in America every day. Reforming health care will do more for the average person in America than anything that has been passed by progressives in the last 40 years. America knows this, and progressive groups know this. As Dr. Howard Dean said at the press conference today, “This is a center-left country.”

And so, we’re united in working to bring this change to America, change that America wants and needs.

About the Author: Jason Rosenbaum is a writer and musician currently residing in Washington D.C. He is interested in the intersection of politics and culture, media consolidation issues, and making sense out of our foreign policy disasters. He currently works for Health Care for America Now and he is also the webmaster for The Seminal.

This article originally appeared in Health Care for America Now. Reprinted with permission by the author.

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It goes without saying that a healthy worker is a better, more productive worker. Sickness not only cuts into productivity by taking an employee out of the office, but chronic, untreated conditions can sap energy, happiness, and ability, resulting in a less productive environment for both the employee and the employer.

This is why in the 1940s, when businesses were competing for workers but couldn’t raise wages due to wartime wage controls, health insurance was introduced as a benefit. It was a win for both sides. Back then, health care was a non-profit enterprise, and everyone was charged the same premium no matter their age, sex, or pre-existing conditions, so costs were much lower. And employers realized that healthy workers were better for business. Today, this is how most Americans get their health care, as a benefit provided by their employer.

Of course, a lot has changed since then. Today, private insurers of the mostly for-profit type cherry-pick the customers they can make money on while dumping those who actually need to access the care they’ve paid the insurance companies to provide either on their own without insurance or on the rolls of state programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Combined with the rising cost of health care as technology transforms medicine, and you have a system that currently allows insurance companies to rake in sky-high profits while the rest of us are facing sky-high premiums we can’t afford to pay. And even if we can pay them, insurance companies work to deny our claims.

The solution is fairly straightforward. We’ve all got to share the risk. Insurance companies should be forced to take on all patients, and public plans should be forced to do the same. This way, risk is shared fairly.

These skyrocketing costs hit businesses hard. As Amber Sparks from UFCW explains, health care costs are now so high, they threaten companies and their employees:

Every time UFCW members go to the bargaining table to negotiate a new contract, health care is the five hundred pound gorilla in the room. It’s the same fight that we face in every contract negotiation these days, that battle for quality, affordable health care for all of our members.

As the costs of health care continue to march up an infinite incline, everyone suffers–employers are no exception. And employers respond by trying to cut their health care costs when negotiating a new contract, forcing us to spend all our energy and resources to preserve the quality of health care and keep workers’ costs down, too.

So, let’s review. Healthy workers are productive workers, so businesses want to offer health benefits to their employees to stay competitive. Yet, because private insurance has blocked fair risk sharing, skyrocketing costs are borne by businesses in the form of higher premiums to insure their workers, and these costs are either passed along to the worker in the form of rising health care contributions, or health benefits are scaled back or cut altogether. In short, our health care system is sapping our productivity and putting a huge burden on our businesses. It goes without saying that this isn’t good for the economy.

At it’s heart, health care is an economic issue, and that’s something that gets the attention of everyone in America, both progressives and conservatives.

So, workers, business owners, and labor activists need to be talking about health care. And to a large extent, most people get it. There is a reason every labor union has health care reform as one of their top political priorities. Now we’ve just got to get the rest of the country on board.

About the Author: Jason Rosenbaum is a writer and musician currently residing in Washington D.C. He is interested in the intersection of politics and culture, media consolidation issues, and making sense out of our foreign policy disasters. He currently works for Health Care for America Now and he is also the webmaster for The Seminal.

Got Plans for Sunday? On Sunday, September 14th, people will gather at over 300 house parties around the country to watch the new film Diagnosis: Now!, a new documentary by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, which tells the saga of our failing health care system. If you attend a house party in your area, you can be part of this historical effort to win quality, affordable health care for all in 2009.

Want to check out the trailer for the film? Click here to watch the trailer and find a house party in your area!

If you don’t find a house party in your area, or would rather participate online, Firedoglake.com will be hosting a virtual house party on September 14th at 7pm EST, with special guests Rep. Pete Stark of CA, Jim Gilliam, whose story is featured in the film, and Roger Hickey of Campaign for America’s Future.

Click here to sign up for the virtual house party!

Across America on September 14th, not only will Americans watch this new documentary, but they will mobilize together for change. Be part of this historical effort to win quality, affordable health care for all in 2009!

This post cross-posted at the NOW! blog.

For this week’s installment of our Take Back Labor Day project, we had ten new posts representing the incredible quality and diversity that exists among those who think and write about workplace issues. With a wide variety of topics, including domestic workers, CEO pay, and workplace flexibility, and the representation of powerhouse organizations such as the Center for American Progress, the new Health Care for America Now coalition, and Women Employed, Week 2 was another stellar week.

Kicking off the week, on Monday, September 8, were Dr. David Madland and Karla Walter of the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Mark Harbeke of Winning Workplaces.

Madland and Walter, of the Center for American Progress’s American Worker Project, point out the abysmal record of the current administration when it comes to having the Department of Labor simply do its job of protecting workers.  What’s the solution (besides voting, of course)?  Passing the Employee Free Choice Act, which the next administration should have the opportunity to do.

Winning Workplaces helps small and midsize organizations create great workplaces, and often it’s Mark Harbeke bringing some of the very best workplace practices and hottest workplace trends to our attention.  This post was no exception, as Mark found three different studies that all make it crystal clear that employers have to engage their employees, if they want them to be productive and satisfied with their work.  If you’re too busy to read the handwriting on the wall, just read Mark on a regular basis at the Winning Workplace blog.

Continuing on Tuesday, September 8, were workplace columnist Bob Rosner and Anne Ladky of Women Employed, respectively tackling the hot topics of CEO pay and paid sick leave.

In a bit of workplace Freakonomics, who figured out that CEO performance has an inverse relationship with their house size? No, it wasn’t Bob Rosner, but he tells us about the study that figured out that the larger the CEO’s house, the more likely that shareholders will pay for the CEO’s poor performance. Pay close attention to Bob — you’ll be seeing a lot more of him soon around these parts!

Anne Ladky of Women Employed provides us a great way to track our progress between this Labor Day and next:  have we passed a federal paid sick leave bill?  If not, we’re not done ensuring fairness in the workplace, while a benefit considered standard by most professionals—paid sick time—is unavailable to millions of lower-paid workers, including 22 million women.

Wednesday, September 10 featured two titans among lawyers who represent workers:  Paul Tobias and Ellen Simon.

Paul Tobias, who can count founding Workplace Fairness and the National Employment Lawyers Association among his myriad of career accomplishments, uses Labor Day to identify a number of necessary changes we need to our employment laws for workers to get a fair shake.  As he remarks, we all hope that the presidential candidates will take note of these needed changes and actually fix them during the next administration.

Ellen Simon, one of the foremost employment and civil rights lawyers in the United States, tells us about a recent surprisingly positive Supreme Court decision (Sprint v. Mendelsohn), which gives us a slight bit of hope that the Court — not especially known for its friendliness to workers — will actually enforce the long-standing rules of evidence, even when to do so might benefit workers.

Thursday, September 11, was a somber day of remembrance for many of us.  Blogger Jason Gooljar looked back to the very origins of the Labor Day holiday, while Chai Feldblum and Katie Corrigan looked to the not-too-distant future of the flexible workplace.

Jason Gooljar, blogger Working Families Party Man, points out what even the most worker-friendly among us might not know about Labor Day: that it was proposed as a September holiday to prevent the celebration of what was considered a much more radical observance:  May Day.  While we may now observe a watered-down holiday, we don’t have to have a watered-down global labor movement, and Jason tells us why that’s important.

Chai Feldblum and Katie Corrigan, who co-direct the Workplace Flexibility 2010 campaign at Georgetown Law, talk about how many workers have extreme difficulty juggling the competing demands of work, family, and community involvement.  Workplace flexibility (including telecommuting, phased retirement, and flexible work arrangements) is a solution which can ultimately bring about more effective business, a stronger workforce, and healthier families — if enough businesses choose to embrace flexibility principles and practices.

Week 2 wrapped up on Friday, September 12, but we didn’t slack off at the end of the week, with Melvina Ford and Jason Rosenbaum tackling two urgent workplace problems:  the lack of sufficient legal protections for domestic workers, and the lack of adequate health care for many, if not most, American workers.

Melvina Ford, Executive Director of the DC Employment Justice Center, identifies a problem hardly confined to the DC metro area:  the exploitation of domestic workers who cook, clean, and take care of children and seniors at home.  She correctly notes that many current laws weren’t written with domestic workers in mind, and either exempt them entirely or do not adequately protect them.  Some recently enacted laws show promise in educating oft-exploited workers about their rights, but we need to do even more to ensure that domestic workers are fairly compensated for their often back-breaking work.

Jason Rosenbaum, writing for the recently formed Health Care for America Now! coalition, makes a relatively obvious but incredibly overlooked connection:  a healthy worker is a better, more productive worker, and sick workers who lack adequate insurance sap productivity.  Yet both businesses and employees face skyrocketing health care costs as a result of insurance company intervention.  Yes, health care is an economic issue — and a vitally important one that we are forced to address in the days ahead.

Whew:  health care, CEO pay, domestic pay, the Supreme Court, the Department of Labor:  you name it, we covered it in week 2, if it’s important in today’s workplace.  And next week continues the fine tradition we’ve established this month:  with at least five guest bloggers continuing the quality posts you’ve seen all month.  Stay tuned!