Please note, not every SEIU healthcare fund*. The specific one doing the abandoning is a New York fund for 1199 SEIU, which parent organization lobbied heavily for Obamacare… let us briefly walk this one through.  SEIU needs more members if it wants to cover its underfunded obligations.  So it went heavily for Obamacare.  Obamacare includes mandates on expanding coverage for dependents to age 26.  Rates went up – the health care provider claims that this is unrelated to the previous sentence, but the union itself is using the dependent coverage situation to explain away the situation – so the fund dropped coverage of minors as being too expensive.  And, as the topping on the cake: this hits lower-income workers the hardest, of course.

The union wants to blame New York state for not increasing its coverage of the union’s obligations, but is taking the time to also insist that it’s NOT BECAUSE OF OBAMACARE.  Megan McArdle would like to know why they’re writing explanation letters otherwise; I’ll just note that if SEIU spent more dues money on helping their members and less money on being a raddled shill for the Democratic party then they would have been able to cover the rate hike.  In fact, they can still do that.

Not that SEIU will.  It’s still barely easier for them to lobby for taking other people’s money.  Besides, nobody at the national administrative level is going to be harmed by this, anyway.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Yet.