Waiver Wire: Over 500,000 More Union Members Get Obamacare Exemption
In yet another Friday afternoon news dump, the Administration released an updated list of waiver requests granted. The number of waivers of this one provision in Obamacare now stands at 1,722. (One report this afternoon claims the number of waiver recipients is “only” about 1,200, but this metric excludes the 491 Health Reimbursement Arrangements that have also received waivers.) In all, more than 4 million Americans have now received exemptions from some – but certainly not all – of Obamacare’s onerous mandates, an increase of nearly 700,000 from the last HHS update.
The four million individuals receiving waivers include more than 2.2 million participants in union plans exempted from Obamacare’s mandates – more than half of all waiver recipients. Of the nearly 700,000 individuals who received waivers in the latest update, more than 560,000 of them are members of union plans. Put another way, nearly five in six (82.9%) of the individuals receiving waivers in the latest tranche belong to union plans. That suggests a strong push by unions during the fall to “get in under the wire” and obtain an Obamacare waiver before the Administration’s September 2011 deadline for submitting waiver applications.
The Administration claims that this is the “final” list of waivers, but in reality, all the 4 million individuals receiving waivers will continue to be exempted from the law through 2014. Unfortunately however, new businesses, or those who (unlike union plans) did not know how to apply for a waiver, will NOT receive relief from Obamacare’s onerous regulations.
As The Hill notes, the waiver process has sparked a “political firestorm,” by proving how damaging and disruptive Obamacare’s onerous mandates have been to individuals’ health insurance coverage, even before most of the law’s major provisions take effect. What has been less clear is why Democrats’ Big Labor allies have been so eager to exempt themselves from a law they worked so hard to pass.