Labor Unions to get Special Deal On Obamacare to Squash Their Criticism

[hm1996]

Just one more special interest group to get special treatment from this "special" administration. Who is next?

Quote:
White House calling union leaders ahead of vote on ObamaCare resolution

By Kevin Bogardus - 09/11/13 04:44 PM ET



LOS ANGELES — White House officials have been calling union leaders about a resolution critical of ObamaCare that is set to pass on Wednesday at the AFL-CIO convention.

Union leaders have been tight-lipped about the calls coming from Washington, but at least one labor official said he understands that the Obama administration has been watching the resolution’s progress and expressing a desire that it not move forward.

Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, said the White House would rather not have the AFL-CIO pass a resolution that lays out several complaints against the healthcare law.

“My understanding is [the calls are] to encourage that the resolution not to be brought to the floor and allow the administration to address the concerns with a commitment, an attempt to resolve some of the issues,” Schaitberger said. “My understanding is that they would have preferred that no resolution be brought to the floor.”

At an early Wednesday morning meeting, the AFL-CIO Executive Council decided to move the ObamaCare resolution onto the convention floor for a vote, several union officials told The Hill.

Schaitberger said no one from the administration has brought up the resolution with him during the convention, but he is aware of intense interest from the White House and Labor Secretary Tom Perez.

“I know there have been phone calls to several leaders, particularly those directly involved in development of the resolution. I know there have been a number of meetings and discussions with a variety of presidents from various unions and the secretary of Labor,” Schaitberger said.

Other union leaders said they too were aware of the White House calling labor leaders about the resolution.

“I don’t think it’s ‘Don’t do a resolution.’ It’s about setting a resolution that lays out the problems and sets the framework for discussions,” said one union leader about outreach from the administration.

Consideration of the resolution has been delayed throughout the day on Wednesday, the labor confab’s final day in Los Angeles. The measure has been the subject of intense internal debate among AFL-CIO members, with many pushing for a strong rebuke of the law.

A vote on the resolution is now expected after 2 p.m. Pacific Time once debate concludes on the convention floor.

A draft of the resolution, which The Hill described on Tuesday, describes ObamaCare’s positive aspects but also details what labor sees as flaws. Several unions are worried that the law could force members off their insurance plans.

If passed, the resolution would have the nation’s largest labor federation on the record calling for changes to the healthcare law. The AFL-CIO lobbied for ObamaCare’s passage and is one of President Obama’s biggest political backers.

A White House official said the administration has been in regular contact with unions regarding their problems with the healthcare law.

“White House officials are in regular contact with a variety of stakeholders, including unions, as part of our efforts to ensure smooth implementation and to improve the law,” said a White House official.

Valerie Jarrett, one of the president’s closest advisers, and Perez attended the AFL-CIO convention this week. In speeches to union officials, both said the administration wants to work with labor to find a solution.

One union leader said administration officials are working with labor.

“I know they have talked to people who are interested in the resolution,” said another union leader. “They [the administration] are trying to work with people on what they can actually work on.”

Talk of the White House lobbying on the resolution has ruffled some in labor. Several union leaders have pushed for the measure to be debated openly here in Los Angeles.

Schaitberger said he understands the White House has let Democratic lawmakers point out ObamaCare's flaws with constituents, and he believes labor has that same right.

“If it’s good enough for Congress to point out shortcomings, it certainly ought to be good enough for the labor movement to do it without some fear of retribution,” Schaitberger said.

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/hea...n#ixzz2ehd0iGFN


Edit to add:


Quote:

Republicans move to halt ObamaCare 'bailout' for angry unions


President Obama and White House officials reportedly have called union leaders to try and persuade them to tone down their complaints, pledging an accommodation. The AFL-CIO, though, on Wednesday approved a resolution anyway calling the law "highly disruptive" to union plans.

But reports have surfaced on a plan that would give union workers -- and only union workers -- subsidies to help pay for health insurance even if they're covered through their job. The purported "carve-out" could soothe the simmering discontent within Big Labor. The loyal Democratic supporters and early champions of ObamaCare say they have been slighted by the act’s final regulations, which they say is pushing some employees into part-time work and threatens their health insurance plans.

At least three congressional Republicans are trying to stop any effort to give the unions special treatment, which could cost $200 billion over 10 years.


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/09/.../#ixzz2ehgCsvNP

Regards,
hm

 

[jumprightinit]

It seems like to me the more exemptions he passes out the more likely this health care scheme will fail. He's handed out thousands of exemptions so far, the Union one will be a lot of people. So with only a half dozen of us left to pay lets just say screw it and not pay.

 

[Shurshot]

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[Rocky1]

More on this story...

Quote:Labor Leader: Obamacare 'Needs To Be Repealed' If Union Demands Aren't Met

Avik Roy, Contributor | 9/12/2013 @ 11:52AM

This week, in Los Angeles, leaders of the nation’s labor union movement gathered together for the AFL-CIO’s annual convention. Along with the usual sessions on ‘political action,’ ‘solidarity’ and the like, union leaders shared their concerns about the impact of Obamacare on union-sponsored health insurance plans. Terence O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, said, “If the Affordable Care Act is not fixed, and it destroys the health and welfare funds that we have fought for and stand for, then I believe it needs to be repealed.”

“We don’t want it to be repealed,” O’Sullivan continued. “We want it to be fixed,” by allowing union members with employer-sponsored health coverage to take advantage of subsidies intended for the uninsured. “We’ve had our asses kicked on retirement security and we know our health funds are under siege. We ask the president and Congress to do the right thing for the men and women we represent.”

The AFL-CIO, at the convention, passed a resolution calling for Obamacare to be amended so that union-sponsored multiemployer plans, often called Taft-Hartley plans, would be eligible for special government subsidies. “The ACA should be administered in a manner that preserves the high-quality health coverage multi-employer plans have provided to union families for decades and, if this is not possible, we will demand the ACA be amended by Congress.”

Earlier, President Obama had spoken to AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka, asking him to “soften the harshly worded resolutions that several unions planned to push” at the convention, according to the New York Times. Trumka agreed to do so, and “made sure to strip out some proposals that called for repealing the legislation.”

Unions worried about losing their lucrative middleman status

As a reminder, Taft-Hartley multi-employer plans consist of employer-sponsored health insurance that is arranged between a labor union in a particular industry, such as restaurants, and small employers in that sector. According to the National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans, approximately 26 million workers in the United States are covered under such arrangements today.

Last month, I discussed the real reason for unions’ concern about the Obamacare-driven demise of Taft-Hartley multi-employer health plans. One of the major reasons that people pay dues to unions is because unions do a great job negotiating health benefits for their members. If those members instead have the opportunity to shop for their own non-union-granted coverage on the Obamacare exchanges, workers have far less incentive to join unions. “This could be yet another existential threat to the unions,” said Paul Secunda, professor of labor law at Marquette University, to PolitiFact.

In addition, there can be little doubt that union members themselves—after having been asked by their leaders to support Obamacare and Democrats at the polls—are upset. Union leaders, feeling this political pressure, are stepping up their rhetoric. What they are asking for is not a “fix” of an Obamacare glitch; they are instead asking for special treatment so that subsidies, originally intended for the low-income uninsured, would also be available to union members who already have health insurance.

Congress has no plans to go along with union demands

Unfortunately for labor leaders, it doesn’t appear that Congress has any plans to amend Obamacare to allow union members with employer-sponsored coverage to take advantage of ACA subsidies on top of the long-time tax break for employer-sponsored health insurance.

Reps. Dave Camp (R., Mich.) and John Kline (R., Minn.), chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Education and the Workforce Committee, respectively, have sent a letter to the directors of the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation, asking those agencies for an estimate of the cost of awarding Obamacare exchange subsidies to members of Taft-Hartley plans. They point out that the “statutory language of [the health law] clearly prohibits” such subsidies.

“In the more than three years since signing ObamaCare into law, President Obama has unilaterally granted waivers, special deals and delays to unions and other politically-favored friends,” said Rep. Camp in a statement. “This special treatment is unfair to the American families and individuals who are burdened with higher health costs and losing the insurance they have and like as a result of this law.”

Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.) has introduced an amendment called the “Union Bailout Prevention Act” that would explicitly prevent ACA subsidies from being directed to Taft-Hartley enrollees. In theory, such a bill isn’t necessary, given the fact that the ACA already bars this practice, but with the way this White House goes around Congress to change the way the law works, one can never be sure.

INVESTORS’ NOTE: Obamacare’s employer mandate, and the related union complaints, have significant ramifications for sectors of the economy that employ hourly-wage workers, such as restaurant chains McDonald’s (MCD); Burger King (BKW); Dunkin Brands Group (DNKN); Yum! Brands (YUM), owners of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC; and Darden Restaurants (DRI), owners of Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and Capital Grille, among others.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecar...ands-arent-met/

 

[Rocky1]

Quote:Labor Unions' Latest Problem: Obamacare's 'Cadillac Tax' Harms Their Gold-Plated Health Insurance Plans


Avik Roy, Contributor | 8/06/2013 @ 1:05AM


Last month, we discussed the stunning turnabout from leaders of prominent labor unions, who stated that “unintended consequences” from Obamacare were “causing nightmare scenarios” that 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.” But those were the complaints from private-sector unions. Now, we learn that public-sector unions, representing government employees, are hopping mad about a different aspect of our health law: its steep excise tax on costly health insurance plans, also known as the “Cadillac tax.”

Economists of all stripes have long argued that the original sin of the U.S. health-care system was a World War II decision to exempt health benefits from wartime wage controls. That exemption was later incorporated into the tax code, whereby health benefits did not count as taxable income. A dollar in normal wages might turn into 50 cents after you take out federal income taxes, local income taxes, and payroll taxes. But a dollar in health benefits is still a dollar, giving workers a huge incentive to get health insurance from their employers, but making them insensitive to the cost of that coverage, since they don’t shop for it themselves.

Obamacare’s Cadillac tax is a clumsy attempt to address this problem. And it’s clumsy for one principal reason: labor unions were adamantly hostile to it.

For decades, labor unions’ main selling point is that they did a great job negotiating gold-plated health benefits for their members. Because of the tax subsidies associated with health benefits, employers were more willing to offer more generous health benefits than higher wages.

When Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, first outlined his vision for Obamacare in 2008, capping the employer tax exclusion for health insurance was a big part of how he planned to achieve a coverage expansion for the poor. “In 2007, the total value in foregone revenue for health tax benefits was more than $300 billion,” he noted in his 98-page white paper, Call to Action: Health Reform 2009.

“One option for reform is to cap the amount of health care premiums that can be excluded from employee wages for income and payroll tax purposes,” said Baucus, echoing the reform suggested by George W. Bush the prior year. “Alternatively, the exclusion could be available on a sliding scale based on income: people with low wages could be allowed to exclude 100 percent of the premiums offered through their employers, with the percent allowed phasing down or out with income.”

Eventually, this evolved into Obamacare’s “Cadillac tax,” which imposes a 40 percent excise tax on premiums above a certain threshold: in 2018, $10,200 for individual coverage and $27,500 for family coverage.

Unions carved out exemptions from the Cadillac tax

But it turned out that the employer tax exclusion didn’t only benefit wealthy bankers and lawyers, whose high salaries—and high tax brackets—amplified the benefit from gold-plated insurance plans. The exclusion also benefited labor unions and their members.

So unions went to work watering down Baucus’ Cadillac tax. First, they insisted that the tax be delayed, to 2018, unlike most of the other taxes in the law. They claimed that a postponement gave them time to adjust multi-year collective bargaining contracts; cynics believed that unions would use a delay to attempt to quash the tax altogether.

Unions then carved out all sorts of exceptions to the tax, establishing a higher tax threshold for “law enforcement officers…employees in fire protection activities…individuals who provide out-of-hospital emergency medical care (including emergency medical technicians, paramedics, and first-responders), individuals whose primary work is longshore work…and indviduals engaged in the construction, mining, agriculture (not including food processing), forestry and fishing industries.” Coincidentally, workers in these areas tend to be heavily unionized.

All these carve-outs and delays forced Democrats to raise taxes in myriad other ways in order to bring Obamacare closer to deficit neutrality. So if there’s a tax you don’t like in Obamacare, there’s a good chance that it’s in there because unions delayed the Cadillac tax.

Public-employee health plans are ‘going to be hit…steeply’

The thresholds that trigger the Cadillac tax grow slowly—at the rate of general inflation, not health inflation. As a result, they will ensnare more and more people over time. If the tax stays in place, unions will eventually face their bite. Hence Monday’s piece by Kate Taylor of the New York Times reporting that municipal governments are asking their employees’ unions to let them renegotiate their health benefits.

The impressively-named Caswell F. Holloway IV, New York City’s deputy mayor of operations, has projected that if current city employee health benefits remain in place, Gotham will pay more than a half-billion dollars in Cadillac taxes in 2022. “We know that, on the current trajectory, we’re going to be hit with that tax and it would increase very steeply,” he wrote in a letter to Harry Nespoli, chairman of the city’s Municipal Labor Committee.

Nespoli was nonplussed, to say the least. “We’re not going to turn around and do a $7 billion contract that affects our members for the next 10 years out without looking at it very carefully,” he told the Times.

New York is not alone. “The tax is going to be a hit, and, if you’re not expecting it, it’s going to be very shocking,” said Boston’s chief financial officer, Meredith Weenick. “In the end, it’s the taxpayer that’s going to bear that burden,” said Jim Finley, executive director of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities.

Obamacare hitting union benefits harder than Scott Walker did

Remember the near-riots that broke out in Wisconsin when Gov. Scott Walker (R.) made modest reforms to state employees’ health benefits? Walker has got nothing on Obamacare. In dollar terms, Obamacare’s Cadillac tax is a far bigger whack to public union benefits than anything Walker did.

That’s why state and local governments all over the country are rapidly discovering the value of dumping workers’ health coverage onto Obamacare’s exchanges. Detroit is hoping to use its bankruptcy proceedings to offload retiree health benefits onto the exchanges, saving $27 to $40 million a year in the process.

Unions had almost nothing to gain from Obamacare, given that their members usually enjoy gold-plated health coverage already. Nonetheless, unions were good team players, fighting hard for the law’s passage, and for the Democratic electoral victories that made it possible. It’ll be interesting to see how much the rank-and-file union members hold their leaders accountable for what they’re experiencing.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecar...nsurance-plans/

 

[Rocky1]

And, this one, although old news, is just entirely to cool to leave behind. Seems the IRS, who will be administering this cluster [beeep], is a wee bit concerned about being required to enroll.


Quote: IRS Employees Union Is 'Very Concerned' About Being Required To Enroll In Obamacare's Health Insurance Exchanges

Avik Roy, Contributor | 7/26/2013 @ 10:55AM


In the private sector, many workers are concerned about losing their employer-sponsored health insurance coverage, and being dumped into Obamacare’s subsidized insurance exchanges. Two weeks ago, representatives of three large labor unions fired off a harsh letter to Democratic leaders in Congress, complaining that Obamacare would “shatter…our hard-earned health benefits” and create “nightmare scenarios” for their members. Today, we learn that the National Treasury Employees Union—the union that includes employees of the Internal Revenue Service—is asking its members to write letters to their Congressmen, stating that they are “very concerned” about legislative efforts requiring IRS and Treasury employees to enroll in the Obamacare exchanges.

“I am a federal employee and one of your constituents,” the letter begins. “I am very concerned about legislation that has been introduced by Congressman Dave Camp to push federal employees out of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) and into the insurance exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).”

Rep. Dave Camp (R., Mich.), the representative referred to in the letter, is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the committee in the House that is responsible for tax legislation. (Obamacare’s insurance subsidies are technically tax credits.) In April, Camp introduced legislation to put all federal employees on the exchanges, in response to reports that members of Congress and their staff were seeking an exemption from the provision in Obamacare that requires them to enroll in the exchanges.

“If the ObamaCare exchanges are good enough for the hardworking Americans and small businesses the law claims to help, then they should be good enough for the president, vice president, Congress, and federal employees,” said Camp’s spokeswoman in a statement at the time.

There is one legitimate issue regarding members of Congress and their staff enrolling in the exchanges. Today, federal employees are offered subsidies, or vouchers, which they can use to shop for insurance on the popular federal employees’ exchange, called the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program. Because Obamacare was drafted so hastily, it’s not clear whether the law allows similar subsidies to flow to federal employees on the Obamacare exchanges.

We’re still awaiting a ruling from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management on that front. For inexplicable reasons, OPM has not clarified whether or not the government will be allowed to funnel subsidies through the Obamacare exchanges.

Nonetheless, it would be a very good thing for some federal employees to eat their own cooking, especially those who work for Congress, the IRS and the Department of Health and Human Services. They’re the ones who are writing the Obamacare regulations; they’re the ones who, in many cases, wrote the law itself. The IRS enforces Obamacare’s individual mandate and eligibility for the exchange subsidies, among other provisions.

They should be required to enroll in the same Obamacare exchanges that tens of millions of private citizens will have to. They should have to experience the same premium increases and limited flexibility that other Americans will endure there. Maybe then, we’ll start to build a constituency for market-based reform.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecar...ance-exchanges/

 

[OldTurtle]

Wonder if any of them ever heard the phrase, "What's Good for the Goose, is Good for the Gander"...But then many of them were raised in the Public School system by NEA teachers...I would imagine that some even went to Liberal bastions of education covered with Ivy in the Northeast...Where Marxism is taught like the Midwest used to teach the Bible...