That sound you may hear drifting faintly on the breeze is coming from the world’s tiniest violin. The Big Labor gang that love ObamaCare enough to lobby for it and foist it on the American people against the majority’s will are now facing reality: It’s a stupid and hideously expensive law.
Labor unions enthusiastically backed the Obama administration’s health-care overhaul when it was up for debate. Now that the law is rolling out, some are turning sour.
Union leaders say many of the law’s requirements will drive up the costs for their health-care plans and make unionized workers less competitive. Among other things, the law eliminates the caps on medical benefits and prescription drugs used as cost-containment measures in many health-care plans. It also allows children to stay on their parents’ plans until they turn 26.
To offset that, the nation’s largest labor groups want their lower-paid members to be able to get federal insurance subsidies while remaining on their plans. In the law, these subsidies were designed only for low-income workers without employer coverage as a way to help them buy private insurance.
Notice that last part. Now that they got what they want and find that it’s problematic to their own bottom line, they want YOU and ME to pay even more to prop themselves up. These union thugs have absolutely no shame at all. What about our bottom lines?
In early talks, the Obama administration dismissed the idea of applying the subsidies to people in union-sponsored plans, according to officials from the trade group, the National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans, that represents these insurance plans.
The unions involved in these talks include the big ones: the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters, among others. They’re threatening to drop coverage due to the cost. Prediction: Big Labor will get the subsidies. Granting them will not only please the president’s leftist base, it will move us that much closer to what he really wants, single payer, government-run health care.
This present balking may be part of the plan.
– illegals. We don’t need no stinkin’ unionized workers.
Just for the record, the AFL-CIO, American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations, is not a union, it is a federation of unions that doesn’t itself bargain with employers. It is generally the education, lobbying, and political action organization of a federation of unions and also functions as a governing body, though since membership is voluntary, if a union doesn’t accept the governance, it can just withdraw. The Teamsters were expelled from the AFL-CIO during most of George Meany’s tenure as head of the AFL-CIO, but were allowed back in as they had ostensibly eliminated their mob ties. They then left along with SEIU, UCFW, and UFA because the AFL wasn’t political enough to suit them.
Now, didn’t we hear in 2011 that labor unions were the largest part in the thousands of ‘waivers’ from Obamacare granted by Kathleen Sibelius? What additional payoffs do they want?
Gosh, you mean that all those warnings about Obameecare causing 95%+ employees to lose their employer health insurance because the total cost of premiums would double or triple fell on deaf ears?
Good luck shopping in those exchanges for individual rates that will at minimum equal your current monthly rent or mortgage payment.
Five years from now when liberals propose single payer as the solution to six month waits for routine appointments, because everyone’s paying the Pelosi tax due to the fact nobody can afford actual health insurance, wake me up so i know when to say “I told you so.”
They’ll get whatever it takes to keep their trusts. They’re called Taft-Hartley Trusts from the provision that authorizes them in the 1948 Taft-Hartley Amendments to the National Labor Relations Act. They are ostensibly jointly run by the union and the employer or consortiums of unions and employers. Often all the unionized employers in an industry will be contributors to a union’s health and welfare trust. In some cases all the unions in an industry will band together to form a trust with all the employers employing members of those unions, e.g., statewide or regional construction industry unions and employers.
It is often a great deal of money and can be used to muscle banks and healthcare providers. It also doesn’t have the legal restrictions on its use that dues money has, so unions love to use their “trust” funds to do all sorts of extracurricular activities, said activities often taking place at luxurious hotels in Palm Springs or Honolulu.
I would suggest the stupid party run through a bill in congress thar rescinds any authority for granting waivers to anyone.
Only way to reach some folks now is going to be to give them the full brunt of obamacare….good and hard.
Let them then go on tv and explain why they don’t want to live under the same law the rest of us has to.
Same law should apply equally to all!