This is just one more mess Congress has made when they get their greedy hands in the till and use it as
gift giving to garner votes.
It seems people are forgetting that the rising costs of union
retirees' healthcare was cited as a main reason why these pension funds were/are underfunded for the future, and thus ACA was supposed to address that. Instead, it's gotten worse:
"Unions’ support was critical to the passage of Obamacare in 2010. But unions are continuing to learn, to their apparent surprise, that their members will bear many of the costs of the new health law. Now we learn that some laborers are preparing to strike, if they are forced to absorb the higher health-insurance costs that the Affordable Care Act requires.
“When we first supported the calls for health-care reform, we thought it was going to bring costs down,” a lawyer for the Laborers International Union of North America, or LIUNA, told Kris Maher and Melanie Trottman of the Wall Street Journal. But that’s not what’s happening. Maher and Trottman today discuss several cases where unionized workers and their employers are being forced to absorb higher costs as a result of the law…."
A Labor Union Prepares To Strike, As Obamacare Ups Health Insurance Costs By 5.0-12.5% - Forbes
And then there are the "perverse incentives" the Teamsters and others cited in the law that affect their workers-taxpayers in ways that seriously affect the funding of their pensions, too:
"Time is running out: Congress wrote this law; we voted for you. We have a problem; you need to fix it. The unintended consequences of the ACA are severe. Perverse incentives are already creating nightmare scenarios:
First, the law creates an incentive for employers to keep employees’ work hours below 30 hours a week. Numerous employers have begun to cut workers’ hours to avoid this obligation, and many of them are doing so openly. The impact is two-fold: fewer hours means less pay while also losing our current health benefits….."
Union Letter: Obamacare Will ‘Destroy The Very Health and Wellbeing’ of Workers - Corporate Intelligence - WSJ
TERM LIMITS are needed to force these people out after one 3 or 5 year term so they have to go home and earn and make a living and build a retirement the way the rest of us do. Term limits are good for the presidency, and so they would be good for Congress, too.