In honor of Steve Rattner’s revelation that Rahm Emanuel wandered around during the auto bailout saying “fuck the UAW,” I’ve renamed the “Cadillac tax” the “Fuck the UAW” tax.

In Klein’s attempt to defend the bill, he points to five cost controls. Only two seem to show some promise. Two others are dubious, with little evidence to back up the belief that they will bring down prices and one “cost control” is not even in the bill at all, just a vague hope for a better tomorrow.

The Change to Win labor federation has unsurprisingly backed the health care bill, even with the increased excise tax on middle class health care plans. Later, the AFL-CIO’s Executive Committee also decided to endorse the bill.

This is frankly rather amazing in that totally-saw-it-coming way. We’ve been waiting for days to see the CBO score to see how much the final health care bill will cost, with the goals being to both reduce the deficit and to fit under the arbitrary $900 billion cap posed by Obama.

It seems they’ve been unable to do so, as Ben Smith now reports that AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is on his way to the White House to discuss plans by Democrats to actually raise the tax on middle class health care plans in order to pay for the bill.

Senate Democrats don’t care if the Teacher Tax doesn’t translate into higher wages. They get their increased revenues even if American workers don’t get higher wages.

If unions take this deal, it’s a sell-out of epic proportions. I’m hard pressed to think of a deal unions could cut in health care that would cause more long-term damage to not just the credibility of the labor movement, but the middle class.

The so called “Cadillac” tax is, in reality, a teacher tax. It taxes plans based on their cost, but not their generosity. As anyone who has bought health insurance will tell you, the biggest factor in determining the cost of insurance is not how generous the coverage is, but the sex, age, and health status of the buyer. As a result professions that tend to employer older, less healthy females–like teaching–will bare the brunt of this excise tax, regardless of how generous or bare bones the policies.

There has been a fair amount of misinformation and disinformation about what has been said by Marcy Wheeler on this blog about Jonathan Gruber, including by Paul Krugman; there was also no foundation for it.

In the dysfunctional health insurance market, high-cost does not equal high-value; and it is not comprehensiveness of coverage that is the primary predictor of who will be affected by the excise tax, rather it is the size of the firm they work for or the age of their co-workers. The fact that Chevy plans are about as likely to be taxed as Cadillac plans is one reason to be cautious about relying on such a tax.

Ben Smith’s latest on Jonathan Gruber’s disclosure problems makes a very salient point – while disclosure would be expected in cases of traditional media mentions of Gruber, in the case of the New England Journal of Medicine, they have a formal process for disclosure