Ford called for a “national solution” to the problem-plagued US health system on Wednesday, saying drug companies were the only ones happy with the current situtation.
A Reuters report said Ford vice chairman Allan Gilmour was the latest US motor industry official to sound the alarm about health care, amid warnings that mushrooming medical costs threaten the very survival of the country’s embattled manufacturing sector.
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“We clearly, in Ford Motor Company, in the auto industry, in big business … have a health care problem. The only people that I can see that are happy are the pharmaceutical companies,” Gilmour reportedly told a Morgan Stanley investment conference in New York.
“We’re going to have to have a national solution,” he said, according to Reuters, adding: “That national solution does not mean, necessarily, national health care but as you look at the American system, where part of it is an employer-based system, part of it is a government-based system, and part of it isn’t any system at all … we’ve got to figure out what in the world to do that makes sense.”
Gilmour reportedly noted that the US government’s Medicare reform legislation had shaved $US1.8 billion off Ford’s health care liabilities last year but Ford spokeswoman Becky Bach told the news agency that total liabilities increased despite that, and the carmaker spent $3.2 billion on health care for its employees, their dependents and surviving spouses in 2003.
By comparison, Ford’s net profit for the year, its first since 2000, totaled $495 million, Reuters noted.
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By GlobalDataGilmour reportedly said Ford was in talks with General Motors, DaimlerChrysler’s Chrysler unit and other companies to discuss ways of easing the burden of health care on US companies.
Under the current system older companies like Ford were being penalised for paying good benefits to an aging work force, while younger companies with young workers were shouldering far less cost, he said, according to Reuters.
“This obviously isn’t going to happen,” he reportedly said, (but) the ideal thing for Ford Motor Company to do is close up, move to new locations, start with new younger people and go back into business. And then, after a while, do the same thing over again.”
