◼ Teamsters president James Hoffa, UFCW president Joseph Hanson, and UNITE-HERE president D. Taylor have written a joint letter to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi complaining about the damage that Obamacare is going to do to their union group health care plans. - via The Kitchen Cabinet on Facebook
"Like millions of other Americans, our members are front-line workers in the American economy. We have been strong supporters of the notion that all Americans should have access to quality, affordable health care. We have also been strong supporters of you. In campaign after campaign we have put boots on the ground, gone door-to-door to get out the vote, run phone banks and raised money to secure this vision.
Now this vision has come back to haunt us.
[E]ven though non-profit plans like ours won’t receive the same subsidies as for-profit plans, they’ll be taxed to pay for those subsidies. Taken together, these restrictions will make non-profit plans like ours unsustainable, and will undermine the health-care market of viable alternatives to the big health insurance companies."
These union leaders were A-OK with company group plans being taxed to help cover the cost of the subsidized ones... but now that they've figured out that "their" group plans face the same fate they just can't believe it. Surely Obama, Pelosi and Reid wouldn't have done that to them?
"“Our persuasive arguments have been disregarded and met with a stone wall by the White House and the pertinent agencies. This is especially stinging because other stakeholders have repeatedly received successful interpretation for their respective grievances,” such as the employer mandate delay.
“We have a problem, you need to fix it. The unintended consequences of the ACA are severe.”
“Perverse incentives are already creating nightmare scenarios.""
◼ Morning Bell: Even Unions Are Turning on Obamacare - Amy Payne and Chris Jacobs/Heritage
It’s not every day that union bosses sound like policy experts at The Heritage Foundation.
But the beginning of the Obamacare letter from the heads of three major unions—the Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and UNITE-HERE—to Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is eerily similar to our experts’ writings.
The unions, of course, were heavy supporters of Obamacare, but even they can’t deny its effects now.
“When you and the President sought our support for the Affordable Care Act, you pledged that if we liked the health plans we have now, we could keep them,” they wrote. “Sadly, that promise is under threat.”
It gets worse...
