“Union employees don’t pay health insurance premiums”

July 7th, 2008 | by Brian T. Schwartz |

An article from the Rocky Mountain News last week suggests why unions support employer-sponsored insurance:

Qwest Communications and its largest union start new contract talks Tuesday, negotiations especially critical given the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Denver.  … The Communications Workers of America represents roughly 21,000 employees, or about 55 percent of Qwest’s work force. … Currently, union employees don’t pay health insurance premiums, but they do have co-pays and other costs, such as shared premiums for family members.

I suspect that union officials negotiated this arrangment with Qwest, and that their ability to do this gives employees more incentive to join the union.  Employer-sponsored insurance exists largly because the tax code makes it tax exempt, so it’s likely that unions support this policy as a method of increasing their negotiating power and attractiveness to employees.  If unions had their way, I wonder if they’d push for a tax policy that favors employer-sponsored auto-insurance, too.

As I’ve written before, employer-sponsored insurance offers few choices in plans, locks people to their jobs, and reduces insurer’s incentive to please customers because of the job lock.

Share These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • Digg it
  • del.icio.us
  • Technorati
  • Google
  • StumbleUpon
  • TwitThis
  • SphereIt
  • Reddit
tags: ,

You might also like:

Post a Comment

*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the answer to the math equation shown in the picture. Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the equation.
Click to hear an audio file of the anti-spam equation