Teamsters Beg Congress For Relief from Obamacare, Free Lunch Comes Back to Bite

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Teamsters Beg Congress For Relief from Obamacare

Rick Moran

In a letter to the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate. Teamsters president James Hoffa and two other union chiefs are begging their friends to do something about Obamacare or it will "destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class."

Here are some eye-opening excerpts from the letter, via the Wall Street Journal:

Time is running out: Congress wrote this law; we voted for you. We have a problem; you need to fix it. The unintended consequences of the ACA are severe. Perverse incentives are already creating 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.

Second, millions of Americans are covered by non-profit health insurance plans like the ones in which most of our members participate. These non-profit plans are governed jointly by unions and companies under the Taft-Hartley Act. Our health plans have been built over decades by working men and women. Under the ACA as interpreted by the Administration, our employees will treated differently and not be eligible for subsidies afforded other citizens. As such, many employees will be relegated to second-class status and shut out of the help the law offers to for-profit insurance plans.

And finally, even though non-profit plans like ours won't receive the same subsidies as for-profit plans, they'll be taxed to pay for those subsidies. Taken together, these restrictions will make non-profit plans like ours unsustainable, and will undermine the health-care market of viable alternatives to the big health insurance companies.

Too late, unions are realizing that Obamacare is a destructive and destablizing force that is going to alter the economy in ways that even unions could never have envisioned. Do they really think Obama cares whether his friends are hurt by the implementation of the law? The destruction of non-profit insurance plans is just an afterthought - just one more unintended consequence of Obamacare.

Next year, when the chaos dies down a bit, Democrats are going to start demanding "fixes" for Obamacare to deal with these unintended consequences. But its hard to see how union insurance plans can be saved when the government needs that tax money to keep the costs of the program from going through the roof.

The letter concludes with this warning: Obamacare will "destroy the very health and wellbeing of our members along with millions of other hardworking Americans."

Maybe you should have thought of that before signing your own death warrant by supporting this monstrosity.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013...l#ixzz2ZDXRqhXM