As the first union that endorsed then-candidate Barack Obama, UNITE-HERE has done an about face on Obama’s signature piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act.
In a recently released report, UNITE-HERE points out the flaws that will affect a great many Americans–not just union members.
For the union, however, UNITE-HERE identifies some of its own members who will be hurt, like Angela Portillo, a guest room attendant at Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas, who states: “The Obamacare website says we would have to pay $8,057.04 a year more to keep the great insurance we have now. That’s a $3.87 per hour pay cut. We work hard for our insurance. Why should we have to take a cut in pay for it?”
Here are some of the union report’s highlights:
- Transferring A Trillion Dollars in Wealth: Most of the ACA’s $965 billion in subsidies will go directly to commercial insurance companies, one of the largest transfers of public wealth to private hands ever. Since the ACA passed, the average stock price of the big for-profit health insurers doubled, their top executives were paid more than a half billion dollars in cash and stock options, and in the past 2 years, the top 10 insurers have spent $25 billion on mergers and acquisitions.
- Strangling Fair Competition: Before reform, different types of health plans were regulated under different bodies of law. The Obama Administration has blocked many non-profit health funds from competing for the law’s proposed trillion dollars in subsidies by refusing to set fair regulations for different types of plans. The unbalanced playing field will give employers of people covered by these plans powerful incentives to drop coverage.
- Moving to Part Time Work: The Administration’s experts say employers won’t follow the incentives and drop coverage. But they also told the nation that employers would not cut workers’ hours to get below the 30-hour per week threshold for “full time” work, even as 388 employers announced hours cuts since early 2012.
- Cutting People’s Pay: If employers follow the incentives in the law, they will push families onto the exchanges to buy coverage. This will force low-wage service industry employees to spend $2.00, $3.00 or even $5.00 an hour of their pay to buy similar coverage.
Although the union is late in realizing what many have already pointed out (as far back as 2008), UNITE-HERE seems to have finally figured out the economic realities of ObamaCare’s employer mandate:
- Employer mandate begins. Employers must choose: pay $8,000–$12,000 per employee for coverage, or cut coverage and pay a $2,000 per employee fine. Hospitality industry economics create a strong temptation to dump lower-income employees.
- Employee income declines. For dropped employees, being pushed onto the exchanges will mean a major loss of income or health benefits. Families moving to the exchanges may lose between 4% and 25% of income to maintain equivalent benefits. [Emphasis added.]
Apparently, the union bosses UNITE-HERE did not realize that Americans were never supposed to keep their health care coverage under ObamaCare.
Now that they do, what are they going to do about it?
Here is the full report.
