State-level unions demand ObamaCare fix, as Obama meets labor leaders

President Obama plans to meet face-to-face with labor leaders Friday to try and quell their opposition to Obamacare, as Republicans warn that the administration might offer a sweetheart deal to give their workers extra health care subsidies.

But while labor leaders hear out the White House, state-level union bosses are on their way back from the national conference of the AFL-CIO, and they’ve got a message for state lawmakers and Congress:

“We want changes to Obamacare.”

At this week’s national conference of the AFL-CIO, an umbrella group for dozens of labor unions, union leaders approved a resolution formally calling for changes to the Affordable Care Act. The AFL-CIO said it’s concerned about the affordability and accessibility of health insurance under Obamacare, and also worries that workers’ hours may be cut back as an unintended consequence of the law.

In short, the AFL-CIO shares many of the same concerns opponents of the health care law have been raising for a long time.

But the AFL-CIO is not a group of tea party Republicans determined to defund the law. The group was among the biggest advocates for the ACA when it passed Congress in March 2010.

Things haven’t gone according to plan since then.

“I haven’t heard from anyone who thinks this is moving smoothly,” said Jon Hendry, president of the New Mexico Federation of Labor/AFL-CIO. “We support the ACA but it has to be fixed.”

Hendry was on his way back to the Land of Enchantment on Thursday, when he told Watchdog.org he supported the resolution approved in Los Angeles and wants to see changes to the health care law.

Part of that fix, Hendry said, could include a radical move toward a single-payer health care system. That’s what the AFL-CIO has favored all along, he said.

Through it all, unions continue to say they support the goal behind Obamacare: to provide insurance for millions of working class Americans who do not receive employer-based health insurance and are too poor (or just unwilling) to purchase health insurance on their own.

But like anything else, the devil is in the details.

On the whole, unions’ biggest complaint with the ACA is that the federal government would recognize so-called “multi-employer plans” as employer-based health plans. Those types of plans were legalized by the Taft-Hartley Act and are widely used by labor unions as a way to pool insurance costs between unions and management.

Since the Treasury Department says it will view multi-employer plans the same way as other employer-based health coverage, so individuals enrolled in those plans will not be eligible for government subsidies.

“Federal agencies administering the ACA have interpreted the Act in ways that are threatening the ability of workers to keep health care coverage through some collectively bargained, non-profit health care funds,” the AFL-CIO resolution reads, in part.

Unions argue the multi-employer plans operate as nonprofits, and therefore shouldn’t be treated the same way as other employer-based coverage options, which are usually for-profit. Some other not-for-profit insurance plans will be eligible for those subsidies.