I’ve discovered another suspicious element inside the Build Back Better Act, just as the proposal could be voted on as early as next week. If passed, this bill would steer money to labor unions, driving up the cost of goods and services and potentially monopolize industries that will directly impact Americans. I spoke with Rachel Greszler of the Heritage Foundation to get some answers about what this means for our country if this legislation is passed.
The Democrats defined “better” as increasing union influence in almost every sector of the economy, did they not?
It's really troubling when you look through these various components of the bill. Whether it's home healthcare or the production and purchase of cars, they're directly giving taxpayer money to union pockets. In the area of Medicaid, they’re trying to evade a Supreme Court decision that said that home health care providers who receive federal money for Medicaid services cannot be forced to join a union. Instead of having those individuals receive those payments from the federal government, they will give the states extra money to get the providers to join a union or buy them out if they bring a middleman into the situation. To get the extra money, the states hire a company to be their pseudo-employer.
When you look at the track record in a number of these states where this has happened, what you find is not such a pretty picture at all, right?
No, not at all. In Washington state the Family Crisis Intervention Unit has increased unionization among home health care workers, and so the state has experienced a 15% cost increase every two years. Some of that's because of higher wages going to the workers, but a lot of it is just these ancillary programs that are not helping workers and not helping the patients. The state is just requiring a union to receive more money from the federal government. It doesn't help the patient or the home health care worker to have a middleman between them. They need to be able to work directly with one another.
It seems that the state is put in a position with the lure of federal money to create a monopoly. They could choose one company that everybody's going to work for or they sub-out relative to these services. Am I correct in that?
That's absolutely the goal here, to just get one company to be managed by the FCIU, so that the only way you can provide home health care services in that state is if you work for that one company. It’s not specified in the bill, but that is what’s happening. This is happening in childcare as well. It's sold as more options for parents and that it's going to cost less, but it's actually doing the opposite. It's driving out the current providers of these services that actually have to be responsive to parents' needs, driving out healthcare providers that have to be responsive to their patients' needs, because everything now goes through the middleman.