I found the MSM accounts of the deeper cuts at General Motors (5,000 more workers to lose their jobs on top of the 25,000 UAW members who already faced the axe) pretty woeful, primarily because the stories typically refer only in passing to the role health care costs play in the demise of GM and other large companies. Sure, there are the issues of poor management and poor engineering; I’m not dismissing those as important factors (and, as an aside, it is annoying that The New York Times waits until virtually the end of its long front-page story to quote UAW President Ron Gettelfinger).

But, staring you right in the face are the billions of dollars in health care costs that GM carries on its balance sheets. It is still startling to me that companies like GM, looking straight into the financial abyss, can’t shake off an ideological straight-jacket that prevents it from shouting loudly, “we need to extend Medicare to every person in America.”

As I’ve argued here many times and most recently in a TomPaine.com column, the issue of universal health care–EXTEND MEDICARE TO ALL–is not just a moral question but one that is deeply about economic competitiveness. Even with the rise of the multi-national corporation, which care not a bit about national identity, most corporations still have a home-base of operations. And where that home base provides health insurance as a matter of national right, those companies have a competitive advantage over their counterparts…well. mostly their American counterparts because we seem to be the only significant economic player on the planet that can’t shuck off the nonsense about the “free-market” and solve our health care crisis in the only way it can be solved: EXTEND MEDICARE TO ALL.

Over at The Wall Street Journal, its piece predicts that “GM’s announcement positions Mr. Wagoner and the UAW for a tough round of bargaining in 2007, when the UAW’s contract with GM expires.” I think that’s right. I think it will be a nasty fight but, though I have no idea where the negotiations will go, I will say this: however the deal gets done, to make sure UAW members and others don’t get caught in this vise again, a piece of the deal has got to be a requirement that GM lead the fight for Medicare For All within a very specific, short time frame.