EFCA: Canada Rejects It, We Embrace It

It's funny--and illustrative--that Democrats in the U.S. have always ached for the liberalism of our northern neighbor, which is one reason why I've been warning on these pages that health care reform, Demo-style, is nothing but a Trojan Horse for socialized medicine a la Canada.

However, on one crucial issue, our U.S. liberals are not watching northern affairs closely enough. Canada once had card-check union authorization on the books in all ten of its provinces. After disastrous results, the law has been rescinded in six provinces, including Saskatchewan, birthplace of and home to Canada's communist party, and the most liberal province of all.

Jason Clemens explains this more fully in his article on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

Meanwhile, the EFCA, as estimated by the Heritage Foundation, could end up unionizing more than 4 million small businesses since the exemption for small businesses has not been increased since 1959 and stands at gross receipts of $50,000 a year. There are very few small businesses today that could survive on that meager amount of revenue.

The AFL-CIO's Stewart Acuff denies unions will be targeting small businesses, but what's to stop any group of employees from unionizing once they see how easy it is?

Health Care Reform: Ending Hospital Readmissions

You have to really dig hard to find out what the government is doing to make health care "affordable," one of the goals everyone from Barack Obama on down cites in undertaking health care reform.

But I bet you didn't know that Medicare wants to end hospital readmissions, especially in the 30 days after the first hospitalization. CMS, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is looking at various carrots and sticks to bring down the 18-percent average rate of readmissions in the first 30 days. Lowering readmissions by 75 percent would save $12 billion a year, CMS claims.

Carrots include paying bonuses to hospitals that cut their readmission rates, and sticks include reducing or denying payment for certain readmissions deemed to be the hospital's fault.

Now, all this gets scary if you read my posting from yesterday about how hospitals in Great Britain removed wheels from gurneys so they could call them hospital beds and avoid looking like their emergency rooms were clogged and inefficient.

I'm trying to think of clever ways hospitals here could bring down the readmissions rate. One doctor I read even suggested just keeping everyone in the hospital for 30 days.

Perhaps hospitals could create a readmissions clinic and call being there something other than an admission. I've got it--put patients in gurneys in the ER so you don't have to say they've been "admitted" or "readmitted" to the hospital! What was Britain's curse could be our hospitals' savior.

Anyway, on a more serious note, hospitals have had some success by assigning coaches to each patient leaving the hospital. Coaches keep in touch with the patients--and even visit them at home--to make sure they take their medications properly and follow all parts of the regimen assigned them, including diet, rest and exercise.

With my cynical mind, however, I can still see hospitals coming up with some way around the rule, just like their cohorts in Great Britain did.

Health Care Reform: How Gurneys Become Beds

To be frank, I share neither the euphoria nor the enthusiasm that seem to surround the rush to "reform" health care. Of course, the optimistic aura surrounding Obama's push for reform is largely media induced, leaving us little hope that we'll see or read anything to detract from what's going on.

My position is that there is no reform of health care going on; there's just a push to get government more involved with an eye toward eventually creating "Medicare for all," for lack of an easier description. Once that happens, then the real, intended reform can take place--bureaucrats will dictate to doctors and hospitals what they can and can't do based on cost effectiveness. In other words, if it's expensive, don't expect to get it once Obamacare takes full effect--unless you want to take a medical vacation to India and pay for it yourself.

Consider this example from Great Britain, which I actually found in a real, live American newspaper (but appearing below and inferior to a more "positive," pro-reform article):

In Britain, for example, politicians were getting pressure from constituents because hospital emergency rooms were so crowded that patients were left on gurneys in hallways awaiting care, sometimes for days. Politicians told the hospitals this had to stop and that they had to admit patients faster.

The response of some hospital administrators: Take the wheels off the gurneys because they then fit the definition of a 'hospital bed.' The patients were no better off, but the statistics looked better to the politicians.

The article was written by someone named Grace-Marie Turner, whom the Atlanta Journal-Constitution quickly described as president and founder of the Galen Institute, which is funded in part by the pharmaceutical and medical industries (my emphasis).

At least the AJC let the article see the light of print before quickly disavowing and discrediting it.

So you see what I mean about how hard it is to find and read the truth.

China: Laboratory for EFCA-Style Unionization

Can't blame 'em. Business owners in China's manufacturing belt, their businesses up in smoke in the worldwide recession, are fleeing the country and leaving their workers high and dry--and yuan-less--rather than cope with China's restrictive labor laws.

Of course, you can also call them rats for absconding with their companies' loot while leaving their workforce with no money to survive on. China's recent Labor Contract Law supposedly protects workers from unannounced factory closings and loss of pay, but many owners have been doing an end run and disappearing.

To date, some 20 million migrant workers, who relocate from the provinces to work in factory-rich Guangdong Province and send money home to their families, are now unemployed.

Since all workers are unionized in China (but have no right to strike), the national union is fighting back, and so is the government.

"We will use all labor-related laws to help migrant workers keep their jobs in this difficult time," Zhang Mingqi, vice-chairman of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions said at the start of the National People's Congress (NPC) session.

Some owners were also hopeful that the government would not enforce the Labor Contract Law and other provisions, but that's not going to happen, evidently.

Xin Chunying, the deputy director of the legislative affairs commission of the NPC Standing Committee, said the Labor Contract Law will not be amended because of the current global economic downturn.

"The crisis has nothing to do with the law. We won't amend the law because of the downturn," she told a press conference of the ongoing NPC session Monday.

Anyway, all this looks eerily like what will happen in the United States if the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA--see yesterday's posting) passes. In a word, chaos. In two words, disappearing companies.

Personnel Concepts' White Paper Predicts Future

Well, not quite, but Personnel Concepts--the labor law poster pioneers--has added a white papers section to its home page, and one of the featured papers looks at labor law changes coming under Barack Obama.

Prominent among the anticipated pieces of legislation is something called the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has christened "Armageddon"--the end of free enterprise in America.

EFCA, also derisively called "card check" because it enables employees to unionize simply by signing unionization cards and shunning any secret ballots, looked to be a shoe-in at the start of the Obama administration, but recently speculation has surfaced that some previous supporters are having second thoughts.

The bill is reportedly going to be introduced in the House of Representatives today. Passage in the House, which is wildly stacked in favor of the Democrats, is almost a sure thing, but the Senate--with its 60-vote cloture rule--is more iffy, and that's where the reported defections have taken place.

We'll just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, I'm sure Personnel Concepts will keep us posted.