In an announcement last week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to end a 2014 Obama-era rule permitting states to collect union dues from Medicaid payments for home caregivers serving the disabled or elderly. For years, states like Vermont, California, and Washington have enabled unions to siphon hundreds of millions from the paychecks of thousands of caregivers without their choice. While good for big labor unions, this policy hurts care providers, patients, and is an abuse of taxpayer dollars. We applaud President Trump and CMS for standing up for families by ending this bad practice.
Eleven states across the country have enacted laws or executive orders reclassifying in-home health care providers as “state workers” in order to subject them to union rules and dues. As a result, state governments automatically deduct union dues or agency fees from Medicaid checks sent to people who care for Medicaid patients. The money earned by hard-working caregivers is involuntarily being used to fund organizations that engage in political activity and lobbying.
For each dollar that state governments divert to unions, like the powerful Service Employees International Union, that is one less dollar available to aid those in need. Medicaid was designed to serve the most vulnerable in society, not to serve the interests of big labor.
I blogged about the issue earlier this year and noted the strong need for change to this broken system:
“Ensuring Medicaid dollars are spent in a responsible manner and not to advance political motives should be common sense. But most importantly, this is an issue about protecting caregivers looking after their handicapped loved ones. Everyone should agree that hard working caregivers who make unbelievable sacrifices deserve to have a full paycheck.”
Medicaid patients deserve the best care possible, but they will continue to be hurt so long as unions take this money set aside for care and use it to finance their own political objectives. National Taxpayers Union looks forward to submitting comments to CMS in strong support of this rule before the August 13th deadline.