Dem health care would mean a bonanza for unions
Buried within the thousands of pages of proposed health care insurance reform proposals by the Democrats are provisions that would greatly expand forced unionism in America, give Big Labor $10 billion of the taxpayers' money, and pay for it all by taxing non-union workers.
The most outrageous aspect of the whole scheme is the plan to tax American workers' existing health care benefits. If that isn't enough, the plan would exempt unionized workers from this new tax.
If the government takes over all or part of the health insurance industry, it will put union bureaucrats in charge of the health care of millions of Americans.
The forced-unionism scheme is built deep into the very details of the mechanism for the public option, employer mandates and cooperative health care associations.
A handful of (union-label) bureaucrats would be making health care decisions for all of us. The cost of health care would really skyrocket when Big Labor bigwigs pad payrolls with more and more layers of support staff and medical bureaucracy -- all at taxpayer expense.
Union-negotiated health benefit packages would be exempt from all the new requirements that federal law would place on every other health benefit package in the country.
Those requirements are estimated at near $20,000 per employee -- even for full-time employees making the minimum wage. So the only way to stay in business and escape the $20,000-plus per-employee costs is through forced unionization and monopoly bargaining.
One of the less publicized Democratic proposals makes it illegal to purchase private health insurance and transitions everyone to government care within five years. It increases the taxes on businesses and individuals who are "rich," resulting in a top tax rate for California that will be one of the highest in the industrialized world.
California has already begun to impose forced unionism on home health care workers by re-classifying them as public employees for the purpose of collective bargaining, forcing them to join unions and pay dues, under the false pretext of making sure they are compensated fairly.
The proposal also has a section creating a grant program to recruit and educate nurses requiring that any participating health care employer provides wages and benefits to its nurses who have been collectively bargained with a labor organization.
AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney tipped his hand at a health care forum held by Kaiser Permanente on July 24, declaring that his goal is to impose Kaiser's unionized health care model, innocuously named integrated care, on the entire American health care system. The goal of union officials is to force doctors and other medical professionals to work under Big Labor supervision.
The vast majority of union health plans are facing economic calamity due to their having promised benefits far in excess of what they are able to support. The Democratic proposals have the taxpayers picking up the tab for them.
Health care insurance reform is needed, but the Democratic plan is horrible. The Republicans have proposed a reasonable plan for true health care insurance reform that is simple, honest, individual based, free-market oriented and NOT another inefficient government/union morass.
Ken Mettler is president of the California Republican Assembly.
