Your ♡bamaCare!!! Fail of the Day

Or maybe we should chalk up the US Chamber of Commerce defending union interests as a win. Sean Hackbarth explains:

Jim Ray, a lawyer representing the Laborers International Union of North America, told the newspaper, “When we first supported the calls for health-care reform, we thought it was going to bring costs down,” he said. Instead, the story reports that construction-industry health plans’ have seen 5% – 10% cost increases that have “already resulted in lower wages for some laborers.”

The cost increases have been due to the health care law’s mandates and rules that have affected union-run health plans. For example:

One pressure point is the higher costs of new mandates, especially the requirement that health plans expand coverage for dependents. For Unite Here, adding that coverage for 14,000 dependents raised costs in the health-care fund run by the union’s Las Vegas local by $26 million since 2011, said union spokeswoman Bethany Khan.

Fears over Obamacare have simmered among union leaders for years.

It’s not so much that the modern Democrat party no longer defends union interests, it’s that private sector unions just don’t have the clout or the muscle they once enjoyed. The real action is with public sector unions, which are even more politicized — and don’t carry the risk of putting their employers out of business.

So the private sector unions took one on the chin for their former allies in government. There’s an opportunity here for the GOP, but as I realized reading this post yesterday, what the GOP lacks is imagination. They’re still trying to put the Reagan coalition back by repeating Reagan’s promises, but things have changed significantly since the late ’70s.