Bashing unions is no prescription for health reform

DR. HARRIS A. Berman ("A barrier to healthcare reform," letter, Aug. 28) is quick to describe his long experience as a physician and healthcare administrator, but his attack on supporters of hospital unionization is strikingly one-dimensional.

He argues that unions raise costs and that higher costs could ``sabotage" the state's new universal healthcare initiative.

Whoever thought that our new health plan would be used as a club to beat up labor unions? What seems to be emerging, week after week, as the new plan is rolled out is a program where employers and large health institutions are protected and where health consumers and healthcare workers are neglected.

How could this be happening? Perhaps we should ask the folks at the right-wing Heritage Foundation from whose tender ministrations the universal healthcare plan, in part, emerged.

HARVEY BOULAY
Norfolk

I WAS very disappointed to read Dr. Berman's letter opposing the unionization of healthcare service staff , in which he cites the potential harm to healthcare reform as the basis of his argument.

The purpose of healthcare reform is to fix the problem of uninsured people who have no access to care, something that good union jobs would help correct.

With the access issue solved, we can then tackle the real problem, which is the high cost of care with our current delivery system.

Asking janitors to wait for a living wage while we diddle around trying to figure out how to rein in drug company profits, excessive testing, medical errors, complicated payment systems, and the rest of the healthcare puzzle seems particularly unfair.

MARY POULIN
Waltham