As I was listening to various bits and pieces about the UAW negotiations with GM last week, I knew for a certainty that a strike was going to happen. Why? Because in contract negotiations, GM was trying to get the UAW to take over responsibility for managing the health insurance of union members and GM retirees:

General Motors Corp. had been pushing hard in the negotiations for the health care trust — known as a Voluntary Employees Beneficiary Association, or VEBA — so it could move $51 billion in unfunded retiree health costs off its books. GM has nearly 339,000 retirees and surviving spouses.

As soon as I heard GM’s plan, I knew that a strike was a done deal. Why? Because the union leadership did the math. GM management was offering a lowball number to assist the union in making the transition. Probably more to the point, though, is that the union crunched the numbers and did some projections out into the future, 10 or 20 years. The domestic U.S. workforce at GM is graying fast, healthcare costs are skyrocketing, and it just didn’t make economic sense to the union.

More importantly, union members told their leadership that they weren’t comfortable with the UAW managing the health plan. I don’t blame them. No doubt that GM’s current plan is neither the best (or the best administered) or the the worst of the lot available to members of various unions around the company. But - and this is important - it’s a known entity. Change is hard.

That’s why working toward any semblance of universal healthcare in the U.S. is going to be difficult, if not impossible. The system is broken, but there is no national will to fix the problem. Everyone is in it for themselves, and there are so many competing corporate and governmental interests that finding a solution that even partially deals with the situation isn’t going to happen, at least in my lifetime.

Hell, politicians (never mind unions) can’t even agree that all children should be covered by some type of universal coverage. George Bush has been threatening for a week to veto the CHIP bill that is awaiting a vote in the Senate. He’s threatening to veto it, even though there are probably enough votes for an override.

Atrios and Digby both feel that GM management (and that of other big companies) should be getting onboard the universal healthcare train. The thing is, it’s not going to happen. The medical and pharmaceutical industrial complex simply won’t let it happen, because there’s so much profit (and so many stock options for the execs) at stake.