Contract negotiations are stalled for
thousands of workers at casinos on the Strip and in downtown Las Vegas
to the point where they may go on strike — and the sticking point is
Obamacare.
On Feb. 20, thousands of housekeepers,
porters, cooks, cocktail servers, and others represented by Nevada’s
largest union, the Culinary Union Local 226, voted to end a contract
extension the workers agreed to last summer. The union wants to maintain
its current benefits — including health care coverage at no cost to
workers, pensions, and guaranteed 40-hour workweeks.
Rising health care costs due to provisions in the Affordable Care Act could put those benefits in jeopardy, the union says.
“The biggest hurdle to reaching
settlements in Vegas is the new costs imposed on our health plan by
Obamacare,” Donald “D” Taylor, president of Unite Here, the parent union
of CU Local 226, told BuzzFeed in a statement. “Even though the
president and Congress promised we could keep our health plan, the
reality is, unless the law is fixed, that won’t be true.”
But hey, at least the law is getting insurance to the uninsured, right? Eh, yeah, about that…
The new health insurance marketplaces
appear to be making little headway so far in signing up Americans who
lack health insurance, the Affordable Care Act’s central goal.
A pair of surveys released on Thursday
suggest that just one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private
health plans through the new marketplace have signed up for one — and
that about half of uninsured adults has looked for information on the
online exchanges or plans to look…
One of the surveys, by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co.,
shows that, of people who had signed up for coverage through the
marketplaces by last month, just one-fourth described themselves as
having been without insurance for most of the past year.
The survey also attempted to gauge what has
been another fuzzy matter: how many of the people actually have the
insurance for which they signed up. Under federal rules, coverage begins
only if someone has started to pay their monthly insurance premiums.
And, the survey show, that just over half
of uninsured people said they had started to pay, compared with nearly
nine in 10 of those signing up on the exchanges who said they were
simply switching from one health plan to another.
Although several parts of the Affordable
Care Act have yet to be implemented, 23% of Americans say the healthcare
law has hurt them or their families, while 10% say it has helped them
so far. Still, the majority of Americans (63%) feel the law has had no
impact on them or their families.
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