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Premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance have risen faster than incomes in every state in the nation, according to a report released Thursday.

After more than two years of contract negotiations, crisis looms as Hyatt threatens to strip health insurance from 1500 Chicago workers and their families unless they give up their fight and abandon their boycotts.

Last week, the 34-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation (OECD) released the results of its most recent study of the health care systems in its member countries, including the U.S., plus six others, for a total of 40. And those results are illuminating.

When Wal-Mart, the country’s largest private employer, announced the other day that it’s cutting back on health coverage for workers, it wasn’t just the latest sign that our healthcare system is out of reach for a growing number of people.

Employers picked up most of the cost, but workers continued to struggle to keep up with the growth in their share, which has far outpaced any growth in earnings.

Some 2,500 nurses and other medical workers walked off the job at Kaiser Permanente facilities in southern California on Wednesday in a three-day planned strike protesting benefit cuts sought by the nonprofit healthcare giant.

U.S. workers whose wages stagnated over the last decade also saw their health insurance degrade, even as medical costs gobbled up a growing share of their income, two new studies show.

You’d think that after announcing profits of over $1.5 billion for just the first half of this year, Kaiser Permanente wouldn’t have the nerve to ask for millions of dollars in rate hikes from school employees and health and pension takeaways from all Kaiser healthcare workers. But that’s exactly what Kaiser is doing.

Raising the slogan of “Health Care for All, not health cuts at NYNEX!” these workers electrified a labor movement that was just beginning to wake up to the concerted corporate assault on negotiated benefits.

AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker declared the Federation’s support for companion single-payer bills submitted by Senator Sanders and Congressman McDermott.