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| Sign Up for ObamaCare, Become a Union Member? |
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By Ashton Ellis
Thursday, October 16 2014 |
A federal lawsuit in Texas alleges that an ObamaCare contractor used taxpayer money to sign-up union members in addition to enrolling people in the controversial health insurance program. Cedric Anthony, the plaintiff, alleges that he was initially hired by Southern United Neighborhoods (SUN) to work as an ObamaCare navigator. Navigators are temporary employees who are trained to assist individuals in applying for health insurance on an ObamaCare exchange. Funding for their position comes from grants sent by the federal Department of Health and Human Services to private contractors. Anthony claims that his work for SUN included ObamaCare navigation at community events in the greater Houston area. However, Anthony alleges that his boss also directed him to visit public school cafeterias and attempt to recruit workers to join the United Labor Unions Local 100 (ULU). According to an attorney representing both SUN and ULU, the two entities share office space in five cities: Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Little Rock. In addition, ULU is listed as a subgrantee of SUN under navigator funding data. The amount of money is significant. Public records show that SUN received $1.35 million to navigate people into ObamaCare. If true, Anthony’s allegations reveal a brazen scheme to use federal taxpayer dollars to swell the ranks of a private labor union. It gets worse. Cedric Anthony currently works for Battleground Texas, a group organized in 2013 by liberal activists to help “Turn Texas Blue” by mobilizing large swaths of core constituencies of the Democratic Party. Publicly, Battleground Texas is focused on large-scale voter registration drives, but a Labor Union Report story from November 2013 shows that the group is also sharing data with supposedly non-partisan, pro-ObamaCare enrollment outfits like Enroll America. For example, an organizer with Enroll America’s Texas chapter acknowledges sharing individuals’ health insurance data with Battleground Texas, which then merges it with its own voter registration data. It is this kind of data-sharing that makes mobilization efforts far more effective. At most, voter registration cards reveal only names, addresses and party preferences. But adding other demographic details such as race, age, income, marital status, household size, medical history and the like gives operatives a much richer source of information to mine when putting together a campaign strategy. Summarizing an investigative video by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, the blog highlights how freely liberal activists blur the lines between political recruitment and enrolling people into government programs. A Battleground Texas field director refers to her employer as a “Democratic organization.” Another person says it is a “political action committee.” None of this seems to trouble the Enroll America organizer, who calls the data integration efforts an exercise in “cross-pollination.” Speaking freely among themselves the discussants apparently see nothing wrong with exposing private information given during a health insurance enrollment meeting to political operatives who otherwise would have no way to access it. Lost is any notion of a duty of confidentiality to people who were never told their private health and financial records would be made available to a political action committee. Then again, it’s not clear that Cedric Anthony sees a problem with this cross-pollination arrangement either. His lawsuit is about trying to recover overtime pay for work he did as an ObamaCare navigator and a union recruiter. The irony of all this is that perhaps none of this renewed focus on Battleground Texas’ improper dealings would have come to light if the organizations responsible for paying Cedric Anthony for his work had simply followed normal wage-and-hour laws. But this is precisely the point. Organizations that refuse to police themselves can’t be trusted to protect others. |
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