The White House has reached a tentative agreement with labor leaders to tax high-cost health insurance policies, sources said Thursday. The agreement clears one of the last major obstacles on the path to final passage of comprehensive health care legislation.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said health care negotiators are “very, very close” to an overall deal and hope to have resolved most of their differences by day’s end. But White House officials privately cautioned that their optimism does not mean that a final health care deal will be formally announced Thursday.
Four labor negotiators briefed lawmakers on the parameters of the deal at a luncheon at the Capitol. Lawmakers said the agreement would raise the cost of unusually generous health policies and ignore secondary coverage, such as vision and dental plans. Health plans negotiated as part of collective-bargaining agreements would be exempt for two years after the 2013 effective date, giving labor leaders time to negotiate new contracts.
Forget reform. The special interests are carving up their pieces of this pie before it’s even out of the oven. The average person is going to be stuck with higher taxes and penalties for not buying insurance they cannot afford.
So much for openness and transparency.
A tax is to be applied, or not, based upon [i]UNION[/i] membership?
I suspect this puppy will have some serious 14th Amendment problems, especially if interpreted in view of Bolling v. Sharpe (1954), which extended that amendment to the federal government as well as the states. This is precisely the sort of special treatment addressed by the 14th Amendment, though at the time the presenting issue was race.
From what I have heard on the news, once the White House finally and reluctantly released their visitor logs, Obama’s most frequent visitor is Andy Stern, president of SEIU. Unions apparently have paramount influence in his administration.
Does this mean that Labor Union Bosses are writing President Obama’s health care plan?
Nebraska here, labor unions there, next will be the implementation of liberty, fraternity and equality. Except for the arguments over what is truly liberating, whether or not fraternity is sexist, and who is more equal than others, of course. Guillotines cannot be far behind, can they?
What is posted here doesn’t match the article. Perhaps the article was re-written after this was posted. The exemption mentioned in the article is for five years after 2013.