Biden Bails Out the Teamsters: The $36 billion he delivered to the union’s pensions this week was sold as Covid ‘relief.’; Is This Right? Watch Where Pandemic Aid Ended Up, and other C-Virus related stories

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Biden Bails Out the Teamsters:

The $36 billion he delivered to the union’s pensions this week was sold as Covid ‘relief.’

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky this week pleaded with Congress for more money for Covid. How about asking the Teamsters to share some of their $36 billion pension bailout that President Biden announced Thursday?

Democrats sold their $1.9 trillion spending bill in 2021 as Covid “relief,” but it included some $86 billion to shore up more than 200 ailing union multi-employer pension plans. The $36 billion for the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund is the largest tranche awarded so far, but Mr. Biden assured his labor friends on Thursday that more is on the way.

Multi-employer pensions were common after World War II in trucking, construction and manufacturing. They let employers with a common union like the Teamsters offer collective plans that are jointly administered and collectively bargained by unions and management. They operate much like state plans for teachers and local government workers.

High labor costs have driven many unionized companies bankrupt, however, forcing surviving employers in the plans to pick up more of the cost of the generous benefits. Yet contributions negotiated by unions haven’t been enough to fund benefits, especially as more workers retire. Teamsters in the Central States plan can retire at age 57. --->READ MORE HERE

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Is This Right? Watch Where Pandemic Aid Ended Up:

Profitable and wealthy hospitals received a larger share of pandemic aid than it may have needed while hospitals that struggled financially were forced to reduce staff and scale back services, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis and healthcare experts.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) chose to disperse the first few rounds of the roughly $175 billion in relief funding based on hospitals’ revenue, believing this would be a proper signal of a hospital’s size and therefore need. However, many wealthy or profitable hospitals received funding it did not necessarily need, while hospitals in more dire straits often didn’t receive the aid necessary to maintain key services or even stay afloat, according to the WSJ analysis of federal financial disclosure reports.

“Congress delegated extraordinary discretion to HHS to allocate $178 billion in provider relief. The previous administration felt urgency to get money out the door, and doling-out funds as a percent of historical revenues was one way to do this. But this means that some of the richest providers captured a large share of that relief,” Jason Buxbaum, a Harvard University doctoral candidate in health policy and previous policy analyst at the National Academy for State Health Policy, told the DCNF. --->READ MORE HERE

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