Massachusetts Unions Battle to Retain Full Health Care Bargaining Rights As Stimulus Funds End – State Cannot Continue to Fund Cities Employee Benefit

FromThe Boston Globe: The Massachusetts House Ways and Means Committee in attempting to patch together a FY 2012 budget post Stimulus, has had to make some serious cuts, one of which is aid to municipalities that continues to fund union employee Cadillac health plan. Instead, the Ways and Means committee has proposed giving each town and municipality the right to set co-pays and deductibles in order to make ends meet. The Massachusetts Municipal Association is supportive of the measure, noting in a recent press release, that the legislation is critical to controlling costs and avoiding layoffs.

Revere Mayor Thomas Ambrosino joined the other local and school officials in thanking House Speaker Robert DeLeo and House Ways and Means Chair Brian Dempsey for putting forth “the most critical piece of municipal relief legislation in years.”

“In many communities, like Revere,” he said, “the increase in the single line item for health insurance exceeds what we can raise under Proposition 2 1/2 for the year. After four years of local aid cuts, this is a way for us to finally gain some financial relief.

“We look at this as a job-savings bill,” Ambrosino said. “Without this kind of relief, many communities will be looking at laying off union employees.”

In the overview from the Massachusetts House Budget the language primarily states that “tough choices” need to be made in light of the loss of the Federal Stimulus. There are also proposals in the budget to place a moratorium on all new Mandated Health Benefits in the State until July of 2012, along with some other tough choices not yet brought to light by the press.

The unions have been pressuring Massachustts law makers to stand against the proposal giving towns and municipalities the ability to set co-pays and deductibles on employees medical plans from Salem News: members of employees unions would be given an option to join a plan that is “still better than the private sector”

The Unions declined.

The question is: with Massachusetts taxpayers a dying breed, with the Federal Government essentially broke, where do the unions expect the Commonwealth to find the cash? Raise taxes on the “wealthy” of course. The problem lays in the fact that the wealthy also have left the state, and so have the corporations. In reality it is less about the benefits, and more about the potential loss of control over the legislative process and the employees under their thumb that has left the union representatives and those elected officials opposing the plan (after speaking with the union representatives) without a fiscal brain.

One has to ask, what cuts will be made for FY2013, if the trend of higher gas prices, food and dwindling tax base forces the Commonwealth and the Federal Government to make even tougher choices – although this is the “election season” – without cutting waste (See Report whereby 100 billion dollars in wasteful spending was found, and yet, not addressed.) and restructuring the budget process at the federal level, while continuing to support current and new entitlement pogroms, the buck will come to a screeching halt, and there will simply be no money to pay for anything.

The problem with is that this is an election year therefore: if the Republicans suggest making slight changes to the current social security program (raising the retirement age for those born after 1955, for example) to age 67, they are out to take your grandmothers social security away. If they defund Planned Parenthood, an organization that actually collects from insurance carriers, and has private donors and is capable of being self-sustaining – the Republicans are out to murder women – it is the insanity of the public debate as it applies to appeasing one’s base in elections that one apparently looses site of the fact that – there is no money.

The Unions may have to give up more than they bargained for: should the State (pick one) due to the end of the Stimulus Funds (not a surprise they were only to last 2 years), all those that were hired under this program, will lose their jobs. If the unions are not willing to allow the municipal employees to take a cut in medical program benefits (a cut which, again, would be better than the private sector), they are not dealing with the reality of the huge loss of income from dues that will result in having fewer employee pockets to pick in the end run. Therefore, one has to understand just how serious the conditions are when the Democrats on Beacon Hill in the Bluest State of Massachusetts, start to look at ways to cut entitlements – this is a sign that the end of big government will come as the reality of high corporate taxes sending jobs overseas, the increasing burden on state taxpayers causing them to flee in droves, (to states that have better tax options) leaving the Commonwealth (and similar states) with little more than hope and some pocket change.