Unions, Liberals and Drug Entitlement Programs

Here are a couple of stories that I found interesting at the Heritage Foundation - more nonsense and stupid stuff from big labor and the Democrats.

A Christmas present for big labor

The federal government has for the past several years been cracking down on corrupt union officials. The program has revealed a whole host of crimes by union officials against the workers they claim to represent.

“In the past month alone,” Heritage’s Rob Bluey reports, “a former financial secretary for the United Mine Workers in Wheeling, W.Va., was sentenced to a year in prison for embezzling more than $70,000 in union funds, an office secretary for the Plasterers in Denver pleaded guilty to embezzling $28,480 in union money, and the former president of National Treasury Employees Union in Detroit pleaded guilty to one count of bank robbery.”
But liberals Congress managed to force through a big cut to the enforcement agency’s budget. And at the urging of their big-labor allies, they had even tried to block the collection of reports that would “disclose possible conflicts between personal interests and the officer’s or employee’s duty to the union and its members.”

The unions, Bluey concludes, “are doing what they can to shut down the one agency in the federal government that looks out for union workers.”

Heritage’s unfortunately accurate prediction

The New Medicare Drug Plan

In 2003, Heritage Foundation experts were working furiously to expose the dangers hidden in the new Medicare prescription drug entitlement plan. Heritage’s Derek Hunter, for example, warned about “the problem of senior dumping —which will occur when former employers drop current retirees into the proposed new government entitlement.”

And exactly this has come to pass. Under a new federal rule, “retiree health benefits can be ‘altered, reduced or eliminated’ when a retiree becomes eligible for Medicare,” according to the New York Times.

The government, to the consternation of groups like the AARP, used exactly the reasoning Heritage warned about: “Lawyers for the [Equal Opportunity Employment Commission] said the new Medicare drug benefit, now nearing the end of its second year, had strengthened the case for the regulation because it guaranteed that retirees 65 and older would have access to drug coverage.”


This raises two interesting questions. Why are many of the same groups that lobbied hard for a Medicare prescription drug benefit now complaining when employers take advantage of it and discard private coverage? Perhaps because they realize that government-run health programs like Medicare compare unfavorably with private-sector care. And second, why should taxpayers have to pay to cover retirees who already have insurance? There’s no good answer.