Economics Magazine

Unions Loved Obamacare..... Until They Found Out What It Costs

Posted on the 31 January 2013 by Susanduclos @SusanDuclos

By Susan Duclos
Oh that Nancy Pelosi quote on passing obamacare just keeps on giving.... to conservatives.
Remember, "We Have to Pass the Bill So That You Can Find Out What Is In It." (Video, here, for those that forgot)
One of the major things in the Obamacare bill was the outright lie that it would lower healthcare costs and Unions, who help push that monster through, back it and Obama the whole way, are now whining about the costs.

Labor unions enthusiastically backed the Obama administration’s health-care overhaul when it was up for debate. Now that the law is rolling out, some are turning sour.
Union leaders say many of the law’s requirements will drive up the costs for their health-care plans and make unionized workers less competitive. Among other things, the law eliminates the caps on medical benefits and prescription drugs used as cost-containment measures in many health-care plans. It also allows children to stay on their parents’ plans until they turn 26.
To offset that, the nation’s largest labor groups want their lower-paid members to be able to get federal insurance subsidies while remaining on their plans. In the law, these subsidies were designed only for low-income workers without employer coverage as a way to help them buy private insurance.
In early talks, the Obama administration dismissed the idea of applying the subsidies to people in union-sponsored plans, according to officials from the trade group, the National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans, that represents these insurance plans.

There was a reason conservatives refused to sign on to the Obamacare bill, it was a bad bill, with 21 new taxes included into it and areas that simply couldn't work to bring down healthcare costs.
Yet another example of that was in the news on Wednesday.
Headline: "Some families to be priced out of health overhaul ."
Some families could get priced out of health insurance due to what's being called a glitch in President Barack Obama's overhaul law. IRS regulations issued Wednesday failed to fix the problem as liberal backers of the president's plan had hoped.
As a result, some families that can't afford the employer coverage that they are offered on the job will not be able to get financial assistance from the government to buy private health insurance on their own. How many people will be affected is unclear.

The irony is that Obamacare was passed by Democrats who at the time controlled both the Senate and House, against the opposition to the bill as a whole by Americans in every poll conducted before, during and after, without any Republican support and signed by Barack obama, a Democrat, yet it is not his fault, accoring to the Obama administration.
 The Obama administration says its hands were tied by the way Congress wrote the law.
 Somehow, being the one to sign this badly written mammoth of a bill into law, is not Obama's fault. Then again, to Obama, nothing every is.
Quote and exit question of the day goes to Erika Johnson over at Hot Air:
Nutshell version: Big Labor worked tirelessly to help President Obama get his ACA passed, and then helped him get reelected, and they’re finally figuring out that they’re stuck with his notoriously ill-thought-out plan. The heart bleeds.
Exit quotation: “If you like your plan, you can keep it.”

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