Waiver Wire: Unions Obtain Nearly 90% of New Obamacare Exemptions
Late Friday afternoon, the Administration again released an updated list of waiver requests granted. The number of waivers of this one provision in Obamacare is rapidly approaching 1,500, and currently stands at 1,471. In all, more than 3.25 million Americans have received exemptions from some – but certainly not all – of the law’s onerous mandates.
But that’s not all. Of the nearly 40,000 individuals who received waivers in the latest update, almost 35,000 of them are members of union plans. Put another way, nearly nine in ten (88.3%) of the individuals receiving waivers in the last month belong to union plans.
The waiver process has proven 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.