If the public option passes, organized labor would have considerable influence over decisions affecting most doctors, nurses and patients
Despite representing only about 7.6 percent of private sector employees, unions are poised to gain significant privileges, authority and financial windfalls from health care reform. Coming at the expense of tax-paying patients and businesses, these specific benefits would do little or nothing to improve our health care system, for example:
- According to research firms, unions are woefully short of funds to pay their retirees' anticipated insurance claims.
- Thus, under the House resolution, union leaders who have mismanaged these plans for their members could receive up to $10 billion in taxpayer-funded bailout money, innocuously referred to as a "reinsurance program."
Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg:
- The House resolution establishes a scenario that would effectively exclude non-union employers from eligibility to work on program-funded contracts.
- It also requires participating health care providers to pay wages and benefits that have been collectively bargained or that union-friendly appointees determine are competitive; this is plainly a move toward coerced unionization.
- With guaranteed seats at the table, unions are poised to control many newly formed oversight posts and/or committees, formed in connection with new employer mandates and cooperative health care associations.
These features all coerce more unionization.
The unions know that under Canada's nationalized system, union membership among all health care workers is 61 percent, compared to just 11 percent in the United States. Increasing membership similarly in this country would swell labor's coffers with as much as another $2 billion in dues.
If our elected representatives are serious about health care reform, they should address the pertinent issues, without slipping in hidden favors for their political supporters...
[Union extortion is never, repeat never, a net-sum gain: the money extorted must be paid by someone - either the consumer, taxpayer or both.
Its never been about health 'care'.]
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