The Trump administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is poised to undo an administrative rule created by the Obama administration in 2014. As you might expect, the response from public employee unions has been vociferous.

The change makes good sense, however.

Currently state governments, including Oregon’s, can deduct Service Employees’ International Union dues from paychecks from home-care workers, whose checks come from Medicaid. The workers, by the way, are not state employees, according to the Department of Human Services, though their paychecks are handled by the state.

Home-care workers provide the services that allow many disabled or elderly Oregonians to stay in their homes. Some live in a client’s home, others work full time or part time or come in only occasionally.

Until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year, home-care workers either belonged to SEIU or were required to make payments to the union to support its wage negotiation activities. Collectively, they pay SEIU some $6.6 million annually.

In June the court, on a 5-4 vote, sided with Janus in its Janus vs. AFSCME ruling that nonunion employees could not be required to make the so-called fair share payments because doing so violates their free speech rights.

CMS argues it’s just following the law, which, it says, requires workers to be paid directly, without having pay diverted to third parties, though there are some exceptions. The rule change will not prevent workers from either joining or leaving the union. Rather, it will mean that whose who belong to the union will have to pay their dues directly, without the state acting as middle man.

That’s as it should be. Union membership, even by public employees, is a private decision. In Oregon, a majority of home-care workers belong to SEIU, and the rule change would have no effect on that. The unions are worried, however, that the perceived hassle of having to write a check to the union would be so great that some workers would opt out completely.

That may be. If so, it says more about how much the dropouts value the union.