Labor Unions on Health Care: Their True Motives - HUMAN EVENTS

Labor Unions on Health Care: Their True Motives - HUMAN EVENTS

Unions across the country are campaigning hard for Obamacare over Labor Day weekend. The AFL-CIO has made creating a government run “public plan” their top priority. Yet polls show that most Americans strongly oppose this. So why have the self-proclaimed advocates for America’s workers made government-run health care their top priority?

Union leaders say they are fighting to win “win secure, high-quality health care for all” against greedy and self-interested corporate defenders of the status quo. Many union activists sincerely believe this. But altruism does not explain why the labor movement is spending tens of millions of dollars on this campaign.

Organized labor is campaigning for government-run health care for the same reason that the private insurance industry is campaigning against it -- it is very much in their self interest. The union movement will gain billions of dollars if Obamacare passes.

The most obvious payout is the taxpayer bailout for union health plans. Many union-negotiated retiree health plans cannot pay their scheduled benefits. Rather than reducing benefits, the bill passes those costs onto taxpayers to the tune of $10 billion. But that is small potatoes compared to what the bill will do for union membership.