I was hanging out with my buddy who is in a union. He said the ACA had caused his union health care contributions to triple.
So we discussed this. Everyone in the union contributes to the health care fund $7 per hour worked. Then they all get coverage till a catastrophic event occurs and then they cap out at $250,000. He had stories of guys whose wives had breast cancer that went broke with the old system. But now that everyone with kids up to the age of 26 were covered, the union can't cover the costs without raising the contributions.
Basically, up till now that was his best option. The union insurance was lousy, but it was all he had, and they had fought for it. The ACA made the crappy union insurance bear the same burden that the professional insurance companies had to, and he's feeling the hurt. Their risk pool was too small.
So we talked about risk pools. Neither one of us is an insurance actuary and we both have old houses with leaking roofs, so we dumbed it down.
I said, "Imagine if we formed a cooperative for roof repair." We'd all contribute to a fund for the eventual roof replacement or repair we know we'll need. Who would sign up?
He raised his hand, "Me."
I raised my hand."Me." But we'd all need to contribute like $1000 pretty regularly to be able to cover the repairs if both our roofs needed to be replaced at the same time."
He said, "We should get some people with new houses to join, you know, with good roofs." He laughed, thinking we'd need a few suckers.
"Yes!" I said, "We need to get everyone to chip in, even people with new roofs, and the cost would go down to, like, $10 each. Even someone with a new roof can have a tree fall on it, right?"
"So," he said, "What does that have to do with my union?"
Your union is a group of like 100 home owners. If the town instituted this program and mandated that all residents participated and that was available also, wouldn't you choose that group with the larger pool of contributions and the lower cost?
He's not sure the union is looking at it that way. The loss of union insurance seemed like a loss of something they had gained. "There are some guys doing really well because of that fund, I'm just sayin'," he joked.
So, I said, "If we lived in a country with government supplied health insurance, and that was assumed, and you started a union in that country, would you advocate for union health insurance?"
He thought for a second, "No, that wouldn't make any sense."
"That's where we are."
He thanked me and said, "I'll bring this up at the next union meeting."
8:25 PM PT: Thanks for putting this in the community spotlight. I don't know much about union health care, but it seemed like a relevant topic to the DKos community. I appreciate all the comments and reccs. I haven't written many diaries, (It took me a day to figure out how to post this update with the "thank you.") but this is encouraging!