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AFL-CIO notes progress on Senate health bill, but still sees flaws
Though it represents progress, the health bill unveiled in the Senate on Wednesday still has major problems with its financing, a top labor union said Thursday.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka chided the Senate bill for having kept an excise tax on high-value health insurance plans (a.k.a. the "Cadillac tax"), and pledged to keep working to remove it.
"We commend Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for bringing forward a health care bill that moves us closer to the historic goal of health care for America," Trumka said in a statement.
"But the bill is not perfect. It retains a version of the excise tax from the Senate Finance Committee bill," the labor leader added. "We continue to believe that a tax on working families' benefits is the wrong way to finance health care and we will work hard to eliminate this provision as the bill heads to the floor."
The Senate bill seeks to carve out some exemptions for health plans likely held by union workers, though, by increasing the monetary value at which a plan is taxed in some states, and by allowing higher value plans for workers in certain higher-risk professions (like coal mining, construction, and soforth).
An AFL-CIO spokesman said that the union views a public option, in tandem with an employer mandate and no taxes on benefits, is the best way to pursue health reform.
The union views healthcare reform as having improved at each stage in the legislative process, though, and was pleased by the Senate bill's inclusion of an increased Medicare tax on the wealthy as part of the financing.
The AFL-CIO, the spokesman said, would continue to work to bring the bill closer to what they think it should resemble during the Senate floor and conference.
(UPDATE, 4:34 p.m.) Teamsters President Jim Hoffa echoed Trumka's concerns in his own statement Thursday afternoon. While he praised the Senate for making progress on a bill Americans "desperately need," he said its reforms come at the "expense of middle-class wage earners."
“This provision is really a massive tax increase on the middle class by calling it a tax on insurers, but it is naive to think that insurers won’t pass this tax directly on to workers," Hoffa said.
“Any claim that it affects only ‘Cadillac’ plans and thus the wealthy is misleading," he added. "The average affected household will pay $7,600 more in taxes between 2013 and 2019, according to a recent analysis of the proposal. The idea that this tax will curtail rising premiums is just dead wrong."
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