http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/09/14/493910307/employees-are-paying-a-bigger-chunk-of-health-insurance-costs
Labor unions are having problems with the way Obamacare harms their gold-plated health benefits .
August 7, 2013 by
Labor unions are having problems with the way Obamacare harms their gold-plated health benefits 
http://bit.ly/1cG4Zfr The Apothecary, With Avik Roy Forbes. Insights into health care and entitlement reform.
Delay of employer penalties will cost gov’t $10 Billion.
July 30, 2013 by
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration’s surprise decision to delay a key requirement of the health care law for employers will cost the government $10 billion, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.
While that’s a big number, the report from the official budget scorekeeper for Congress also put the administration’s recent move within a wider perspective. Overall, the delay for employers and other changes will raise the cost of the expanding coverage for the uninsured by less than 1 percent over 10 years from the budget agency’s previous estimate in May, CBO said.
The White House announced earlier this month that it would delay a requirement for employers with 50 or more workers to offer affordable coverage, or face fines. Instead of going into effect next year, the provision was put off to 2015. A major concession to business groups, the delay took administration allies and adversaries by surprise.
Opponents of the health care law saw the delay as a sign that the implementation of the measure had run into serious problems, and some labor unions denounced it as a handout to big business. But employers welcomed the unexpected respite from complicated reporting rules that the administration concedes will require more time to work out. The White House says the rest of the law’s provisions will roll out without delay.
Uninsured people without access to coverage at work will be able to start shopping for a health plan Oct. 1. Middle-class people will be able to pick from a range of private insurance plans, with new federal tax credits to help pay their premiums. Low-income people will be steered to an expanded version of Medicaid, in states that accept it. Coverage takes effect Jan. 1.
At the same time, most Americans will face an individual requirement to carry health insurance or pay fines. That’s designed to expand the number of healthy people in the pool, since the law forbids insurers from turning away people with pre-existing health problems.
All told, about 13 million of nearly 50 million uninsured U.S. residents are expected to gain coverage in 2014, according to the latest CBO estimates. That number is expected to gradually increase to between 25 million and 30 million people.
The budget office said fewer than half million people will have to forgo coverage as a consequence of the delay in the so-called employer mandate. The delay “will have only a negligible effect on sources of insurance coverage,” the report said.
The government will lose $10 billion in fines that would have collected from employers in the first year of the requirement, the report said. Other last-minute changes by the administration are estimated to add another $2 billion in costs, for a total increase in the cost of $12 billion over 10 years.
However, the impact on the bottom line does not appear to be major — at least in terms of the federal budget.
CBO estimated that the cost of expanding coverage under the law will rise to $1.375 billion from 2014-2023, an increase of less than 1 percent from the agency’s previous cost estimate of $1.363 billion.
Labor Unions: Obamacare Will ‘Shatter’ Our Health Benefits, Cause ‘Nightmare Scenarios’
July 17, 2013 by
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.
Last Thursday, representatives of three of the nation’s largest unions fired off a letter to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, warning that 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.”
The letter was penned by James P. Hoffa, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters; Joseph Hansen, international president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union; and Donald “D.” Taylor, president of UNITE-HERE, a union representing hotel, airport, food service, gaming, and textile workers.
“When you and the President sought our support for the Affordable Care Act,” they begin, “you pledged that if we liked the health plans we have now, we could keep them. Sadly, that promise is under threat…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.”
‘Unintended consequences’ causing ‘nightmare scenarios’
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.”
What surprises me about this is that union leaders are pretty strategic when it comes to employee benefits. It was obvious in 2009 that Obamacare’s employer mandate would incentivize this shift. Why didn’t labor unions fight it back then?
Regulations will ‘destroy the very health and wellbeing of our members’
The labor bosses are also unhappy, because of the way Obamacare affects multi-employer health plans. Multi-employer plans, also called Taft-Hartley plans, are health insurance benefits typically arranged between a labor union in a particular industry, such as restaurants, and small employers in that industry. About 20 million workers are covered by these plans; 800,000 of Joseph Hansen’s 1.3 million UFCW members are covered this way.
Taft-Hartley plans, they write, “have been built over decades by working men and women,” but unlike plans offered on the ACA exchanges, unionized workers will not be eligible for subsidies, because workers with employer-sponsored coverage don’t qualify.
Obamacare’s regulatory changes to the small-group insurance market will drive up the cost of these plans. For example, the rules requiring plans to cover adult children up to the age of 26, the elimination of limits on annual or lifetime coverage, and the mandates that plans cover a wide range of benefits will drive premiums upward.
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.
So the labor leaders are demanding that their workers with employer-sponsored coverage also gain eligibility for ACA subsidies. Otherwise, their workers will be “relegated to second-class status” despite being “taxed to pay for those subsidies,” a result that will “make non-profit plans like ours unsustainable” and “destroy the very health and wellbeing of our members along with millions of other hardworking Americans.” ‘The law as it stands will hurt millions of Americans’
The leaders conclude by stating that, “on behalf of the millions of working men and women we represent and the families they support, we can no longer stand silent in the face of elements of the Affordable Care Act that will destroy the very health and wellbeing of our members along with millions of other hardworking Americans.”
President Obama, of course, pledged that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” But the labor leaders say that, “unless changes are made…that promise is hollow. We continue to stand behind real health care reform, but the law as it stands will hurt millions of Americans including the members of our respective unions. We are looking to you to make sure these changes are made.”
Avik Roy, Contributor Forbes, July 15, 2013