“We aren’t going to accept a bad bill just to get an agreement,” AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka said on Jan. 11 of the Senate’s health care revision bill.

Sorry, Mr. President, you just did.

After a week of intense negotiations between union leaders and Democratic President Barack Obama – and his top staffers — over taxing workers’ health insurance benefits, above certain minimums, to help pay for almost-universal health care coverage, the unionists finally yielded on the issue.

They won some changes from the Senate bill: Higher minimums – $8,900 for an individual and $24,000 for a family – below which the value of health care plans would not be taxed.  And the minimums would rise with inflation.  They didn’t in the original Senate bill.

Plans with large numbers of women and/or older workers would have even higher minimums than those numbers, though how much higher was not specified.  Same thing for plans covering workers in high-risk professions, such as fire fighting.

And the $24,000 minimum is actually more like $26,000, the AFL-CIO fact sheet said, because dental and vision coverage wouldn’t be counted.  Dentistry is expensive.

But the fact remains that, starting in 2018, union workers’ health care plans will be taxed.

There is no public option to compete with the insurance companies, their high co-pays and deductibles, their denial of care, their ejection of policyholders right when people need insurance when they get sick, and the insurers-caused 44,780 annual deaths due to lack of coverage.   There is no option for establishing single-payer government-run alternatives to the insurers, not even state by state.

There is no strong requirement that companies cover their workers.  Wal-Mart can still get away with not doing so, maybe just paying a small per-worker fine.

And there is still the Stupak amendment and its virtual ban on insurance coverage of abortion –  either with federal funds or your own – to overcome.

Put this together and it spells the “bad bill” Trumka denounced.

One union blogger reacting to the health care tax agreement, on the AFL-CIO website, wrote a list of what unions had demanded and retreated from in health care, ending each position with the words “Scratch that!”  At the close, the blogger predicted union leaders would ask members to campaign for the Democrats again this fall, and responded “SCRATCH THAT!!!!!”

In his speech, Trumka said: “In 1992, workers voted for Democrats who promised action on jobs, who talked about reining in corporate greed and who promised health care reform.

“Instead, we got NAFTA, an emboldened Wall Street and not much more.  We swallowed our disappointment and worked to preserve a Democratic majority in 1994 because we knew what the alternative was.  But there was no way to persuade enough working Americans to go to the polls when they couldn’t tell the difference between the two parties.  Politicians who think working Americans have it too good…are inviting a repeat of 1994,” when the GOP swept Congress.

Politicians and union leaders “are inviting a repeat of 1994” this fall. By taxing workers’ health care benefits, they’ll get it.