Can somebody explain this to me ...

[JH19059]

From the Chicago Tribune ....

Emanuel to shift retired city workers to Obamacare


E. JASON WAMBSGANS, CHICAGO TRIBUNE


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By Hal Dardick, Clout Street
12:47 pm, May 15, 2013
Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to start reducing health insurance coverage next year for more than 30,000 retired city workers and begin shifting them to President Barack Obama’s new federal system.


http://my.chicagotribune.com/#section/544/article/p2p-75927993/

How can a person switch their insurance to "Obamacare" when it's not a health insurance ? Am I missing something?

[freshwest]

1. Medicare and Medicare as funded by the ACA? Creeping socialist UHC around the corner...

From your link:

Once the phase-out is complete, those retired workers would have to pay for their own health insurance or get subsidizes under the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. The city-subsidized coverage is particularly important to retired workers who aren’t yet eligible for Medicare, as opposed to those 65 or older who use the subsidies for Medicare supplemental insurance.

The Obama administration made changes for younger workers to retire through SSA, on disability. Age is taken into consideration, in that at age 55, a person is unlikely to find work that they can do. I'm sorry that I don't have time to get you all the links to this, which came from attorneys. Also, taking younger people to the SSA office, they used age as a factor in granting disability so these workers may use that to get full retirement there.

But they should protest anything changing what they had, since they had a contract. What may now be considered to be a new, pro-active, pragmatic change for Chicago or other cities is not what they worked for all these years. Rahm may he trying to avoid a Detroit meltdown.

None of these fiscal disasters were the fault of the public workers, who are suffering from decades of being lied about in the media. I'm sick of these people being shortchanged. I don't know how Chicago is doing financially or with operations, but there has been an attack on the teachers.

Unions have not been getting a fair voice in media against the wealthy propagandists who trash them and public schools. They convinced too many people that privatization is the answer to social problems the schools have tried hard to work on and defunding.

It's evil.

[Egalitarian Thug]

2. Sure, the former investment banker that made at least $14,000,000 stealing pension benefits

and throwing the voiceless into the so-called welfare system, is going to steal more the city worker's money and give it to his cronies. Then, he is going to dump those aging workers onto the taxpayer funded corporate welfare program until they die, which will be much sooner since they will be lumped in with all the rest of those that are beneath his consideration.

IOW, he's pulling a Walton.