Big Labor Propagandists Keep Repeating the Same Falsehoods
Actual experience has resoundingly falsified the prediction made by union-label Sooner state Sen. Gene Stipe (D-McAlester) and his cohorts that employees would lose their health insurance if Oklahoma adopted a Right to Work law. Today Big Labor apologists stubbornly ignore this history as they make the same groundless prediction regarding Right to Work passage in Kentucky. Image: Tulsa (Okla.) World file photo.
Just before Kentucky became the fifth state within the past five years to ban forced union dues and fees on January 7, the editors of the Daily Oklahoman furnished an instructive reminder regarding how bitterly Big Labor and its puppet politicians fought to stop the Sooner State’s Right to Work law before it was ultimately adopted in September 2001. (See the link below to read the whole thing.)
Anti-Right to Work politicians, recalls the editorial, predicted an array of catastrophes if union bosses’ privilege to get employees fired for refusal to join or bankroll a union was taken away. One AFL-CIO-financed ad actually claimed that, if Right to Work was adopted, 100,000 Oklahomans would lose their health insurance!
The non-partisan Center for Health Policy Research (CHPR) in Tulsa dismissed union propagandists’ claim as “misleading and immaterial and not even supported by their own study.”  And subsequent history has shown that, if anything, the CHPR understated just how preposterous Big Labor’s health-insurance canard was.
From 2008 (the first year for which comparable data are available) through 2015, for example, U.S. Census Bureau statistics show the number of people with private-sector health-insurance coverage in Right to Work Oklahoma grew by a healthy 8.6% and in Right to Work states collectively by 7.6% , even as private health-insurance coverage fell by 0.1% in forced-unionism states as a group.
Given how ridiculously wide of the mark Big Labor’s prediction regarding the Oklahoma Right to Work law’s impact on health-insurance access turned out to be, one might expect today’s union propagandists would refrain from making the same wild claim in Kentucky.
However, in an op-ed that was recently published in newspapers across the Bluegrass State, Jason Bailey of a union-boss front organization known as the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy is insisting once again, despite the documented record, that Right to Work laws “reduce access to employer-provided health insurance.”
If union propagandists have nothing to offer but repetition of long-discredited falsehoods as they strive desperately to block passage of more state Right to Work laws, they shouldn’t be surprised if ordinary freedom-loving citizens refused to take them seriously.