Labor Unions: Obamacare Will 'Shatter' Our Health Benefits, Cause 'Nightmare Scenarios'
Labor unions are among the key institutions responsible for the passage of Obamacare. They spent tons of money electing Democrats to Congress in 2006 and 2008, and fought hard to push the health law through the legislature in 2009 and 2010. But now, unions are waking up to the fact that Obamacare is heavily disruptive to the health benefits of their members.
The union leaders are concerned that Obamacare’s employer mandate incentivizes smaller companies to shift their workers to part-time status, because employers are not required to provide health coverage to part-time workers. “We have a problem,” they write, and “you need to fix it.”
“The unintended consequences of the ACA are severe,” they continue. “Perverse incentives are causing nightmare scenarios. First, the law creates an incentive for employers to keep employees’ work hours below 30 hours a week. Numerous employers have begun to cut workers’ hours to avoid this obligation, and many of them are doing so openly. The impact is two-fold: fewer hours means less pay while also losing our current health benefits.”
But the key problem is that the Taft-Hartley plans already provide generous and costly coverage; small employers now have a more financially attractive alternative, which is to drop coverage and put people on the exchanges, once the existing collective bargaining agreements are up.
That gives workers less reason to join a union; a big part of why working people pay union dues is because unions play a big role in negotiating health benefits.
What a lot of people may not realize is that for much of our history, labor unions opposed universal coverage. “Unions…derive some advantage of good will, power, or profit from serving as a financial intermediary in health care,” writes Paul Starr in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the American health-care system, The Social Transformation of American Medicine.
Labor unions opposed FDR’s half-hearted attempt at universal coverage, and split on Truman’s related proposal. Unions were fine with Medicare and Medicaid, because health benefits for retirees and poor people weren’t as relevant to their interests. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the goals of progressives and labor unions became closely aligned on national health care.