ObamaCare Waivers List

UPDATE, December 7, 2010: More Health Waivers

The Obama Administration has quietly granted even more waivers to one provision of the new federal health reform law, doubling the number in just the last three weeks to a new total of 222.

List of Approved Applications for Waiver
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And the list of waivers from the dreaded ObamaCare grows...

It's come a long way since early October.

Read the list of "Approved Applications for Waiver."

From USA Today, October 7, 2010: McDonald's, 29 other firms get health care coverage waivers.

From the New York Post, October 8, 2010: Teachers union gets a pass on ObamaCare rule.

This was only the beginning of the waivers.

Michelle Malkin asks in her November 17, 2010, column, "Dude, Where's My Obamacare Waiver?"

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services website, at least 111 waivers have now been granted to companies, unions and other organizations of all sizes who 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 ultimate goal, of course: precipitating a massive shift from private to government insurance.

McDonald's, Olive Garden, Red Lobster and Jack in the Box are among the large, headline-garnering 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 a total of 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 of its enrollees. SEIU, of course, was one of Obamacare's loudest and biggest spending proponents. The waivers come on top of the massive 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 who won protection from Obamacare:

-- 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 (Maximus)

-- United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1262

-- Musicians Health Fund Local 802

-- Hospitality Benefit Fund Local 17

-- Transport Workers Union

-- United Federation of Teachers Welfare Fund

-- International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (AFL-CIO)

-- Plus two organizations that appear to be chapters of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA)

This is obscene.

On her blog, November 19, 2010, Malkin writes: "The Obamacare Waiver-mania! movement builds."



She concludes her updates on Waiver-mania with this:

"Free every American. Full repeal is the ultimate waiver."

I want my GET OUT OF OBAMACARE card.



Why wasn't there a press release about these waivers?

Why is this information buried on the Health and Human Services website? "It takes SIX separate clicks to find it."

Where's the transparency, Barack?

Barack?