Opinion

Dude, where’s my ObamaCare waiver?

More than one million Americans have es caped the clutches of the Democrats’ destructive federal health-care law. Lucky them. Their employers and labor representatives wisely applied for ObamaCare waivers earlier this fall. Now, it’s time for Congress to create a permanent escape hatch for the rest of us. Repeal is the ultimate waiver.

President Obama promised repeatedly that if Americans liked their health insurance, they could keep it. “Nobody is talking about taking that away from you,” he assured. What he failed to communicate to low-wage and part-time workers is that they could keep their plans only if their companies begged hard enough for exemptions from ObamaCare’s private-insurance-killing regulations.

The US Health and Human Services Department Web site lists at least 111 waivers granted to companies, unions and other organizations that offer affordable health-insurance or prescription-drug coverage with limited benefits. ObamaCare architects sought to eliminate those low-cost plans under the guise of controlling insurer spending on executive salaries and marketing.

It’s all about control. If central planners can’t dictate what health benefits qualify as “good,” what plans qualify as “affordable” and how health-care dollars are best spent, then nobody can. The goal, of course: precipitating a huge shift from private to government insurance.

McDonald’s, Olive Garden, Red Lobster and Jack in the Box are among the large employers who received the temporary waivers. But perhaps the most politically noteworthy beneficiaries of the HHS waiver program: Big Labor.

The Service Employees Benefit Fund, which insures 12,000 SEIU health-care workers in upstate New York, secured its ObamaCare exemption in October. The Local 25 SEIU Welfare Fund in Chicago also nabbed a waiver for 31,000 enrollees. The SEIU was one of ObamaCare’s loudest proponents. The waivers come on top of the sweetheart deal that SEIU and other unions cut with the Obama administration to exempt them from the health-care mandate’s onerous “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health-care plans until 2018.

Other unions that won waivers:

* United Food and Commercial Workers Allied Trade Health and Welfare Trust Fund.

* International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union No. 915.

* Asbestos Workers Local 53 Welfare Fund.

* Employees Security Fund.

* Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 123 Welfare Fund

* United Food and Commercial Workers Local 227.

* United Food and Commercial Workers Local 455.

* United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1262.

* Musicians Health Fund Local 802.

* United Federation of Teachers Welfare Fund.

* International Union of Painters and Allied Trades.

Jay Blumenthal, financial vice president of the Local 802 Musicians Health Fund in New York, explained to me: “We got grandfathered in” (his description for getting a pass) because “things were moving so fast” and “we need time now to prepare for the law.”

Chris Rodriguez, director of human resources at Fowler Packing Company in California, says Fowler pursued an HHS waiver because its low-wage agricultural workers would’ve lost the basic coverage the company has voluntarily offered for years.

Indeed, some government officials who lobbied hardest for ObamaCare are now also seeking waivers — including Sen. Ron Wyden, who has been pushing for an individual-mandate exemption for his state of Oregon, and Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who is pushing to waive ObamaCare’s burdensome 1099 reporting requirements for small businesses.

Many business owners who obtained waivers refused to talk to me on the record. One said tersely: “We did what we had to do to survive.”

A new House GOP majority now has the chance to protect the rest of America from this regulatory monstrosity. We want out.

malkinblog@gmail.com