White House Recruits SEIU to Help 'Educate' Americans On Obamacare

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) announced Tuesday it will assist with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama's major health care overhaul.

SEIU members will knock on doors, patrol neighborhoods, and host "community events,” as the Washington Examiner’s Steve Contorno puts it, to help educate people on the law‘s complexities.

The union hopes to accomplish all of this before the law goes into full effect on October 1. After that date, uninsured persons will be required to sign onto exchanges to purchase health insurance.

“Let there be no doubt, the new healthcare law is working for working people,” said SEIU President Mary Kay Henry.

The SEIU is yet another in a long line of groups (and individuals) that have signed on to help the White House “educate” American’s on Obamacare.

“We are not seeing the long-predicted ‘rate shock’ but we are seeing ‘Republican shock’ as extremists fail in attempts to repeal or obstruct the Affordable Care Act and its landmark protections and benefits for working Americans," she added.

The SEIU plans to target the 14 states with high rates of uninsured people.

“It’s our moment to build power for working people by empowering them with the facts about the new healthcare law,” Henry said.

Support from the SEIU, the nation's largest healthcare workers union, is notable considering it comes on the heels of several public sector unions complaining loudly that new healthcare law may cause trouble for their members.

A handful of union leaders sent President Obama a letter complaining that the law has incentivized employers to cut staff hours to just below the 30 hours per-week required for businesses to provide health insurance.

They also complained the “subsidies in Obamacare aren't extended to nonprofit insurance plans used by many unions,” Contorno notes.

Obamacare will “destroy the very health and well-being of our members along with millions of other hardworking Americans," the union letter to the president reads.

The president has since met with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka to go over the details of Obamacare’s implementation.

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Featured image Getty Images

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