Obama To Labor Unions With Multi-Employer Health Plans: Drop Dead

Forbes ^ | 9/14/2013 | Roy Avik

[xzins]

Well played, Mr. President. Last week, prior to the big AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles, President Obama personally spoke to AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka, asking him to water down several anti-Obamacare resolutions that union leaders were planning to pass there. Trumka obliged, keeping a call to repeal Obamacare out of the official AFL-CIO resolution on the health law. Then, on Friday evening, after the convention was over, the Obama administration revealed that it would be ignoring unions’ demands to offer Obamacare’s subsidies to their members. As a result, some unions fear they will wither away. “I guarantee you by your next convention four years from now, you won’t meet a quarter of this room,” said Joseph Nigro, president of the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Union. “We won’t be here.”

Unions were seeking special treatment under Obamacare

This latest development was first reported by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post. Here’s the issue that was at stake. A number of labor unions participate in multi-employer health plans, also known as Taft-Hartley plans. These plans allow unions to organize all the restaurant workers in a particular county, taking advantage of the economies of scale that come from a larger insurance pool.

The problem is that businesses with less than 50 employees now have an incentive to drop health coverage for their employees and let those workers get coverage on the exchanges. It’s a better deal for those workers, and a better deal for their employers. But it’s a blow to the labor unions who organize the plans, because workers no longer need unions to negotiate their health coverage.

...labor leaders wrote, Obamacare would “shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.”

[Cowboy Bob]

I wonder what his friends call him!?!

[TEXOKIE]

LOL! We all struggle to communicate adequately. I know I have a hard time with it!

Analogies are imperfect things, and sometimes they really do convey a freight of meaning. But other times, they are so vivid that they actually distract from the point!