Why is somebody’s healthcare tied to his job on an assembly line?

Calvin Trillin: I think there’s been so much demagoguery on healthcare. And that’s another way we’re falling behind, in fact. I mean if you look at the, say, American automobile manufacturers, their cost . . . I mean why is somebody’s healthcare tied to his job on the assembly line? I mean it’s absurd. But if you do something else, the talk is socialized medicine. But there is, you know, 46 million people I think I read last week, who have no insurance – no coverage at all – and actually don’t go to a hospital. Or as the President said, they can go to an emergency room. It would be interesting for him to try that one of these days – go into one of these emergency rooms late at night when your kid’s sick. So I think that in those sort of things I think that should be a big issue, but I’m not sure that it will be. Everybody’s been burnt on it I think.

Recorded on: 9/5/07