The Devastation That Is Obama Care, Part 2: Digitizing Health Records, Restaurants Signs Nobody Reads, 30 Hours Makes You Full Time and More

This is a second in a series of very serious discussions regarding the impending Obama Care issues and disasters that are about to descend on the nation and our economy. Yesterday, we reviewed how the Federal government is going to have to set up a massive bureaucracy in just ten months to handle the unexpected rejection by two thirds of the states regarding Obama Care exchanges, the irony of eighteen Democratic Senators hoping to maintain their political careers in the face of their voting for an oppressive medical device tax, and the reality that many American companies are already cutting employees to cope with Obama Care taxes.

The second set of disasters:

1) Consider some Obama Care insanity that was discussed in a December 13, 2012 article on the Western Center For Journalism website:

• One Obama Care requirement, which affects all fast food and grocery stores with more than 20 locations is a requirement to post nutritional labels for every product produced.
• According to Domino’s Pizza, the pizza industry will be hit especially hard since pizza is customizable and theoretically there will have to be a nutrition label for every one of Dominos pizza combinations.
• According to a Domino’s Pizza spokeswoman, they have 34 million potential pizza combinations.
• Dominos estimates the cost to add the multiple signs required under the Obama Care mandate will be $5,000 per store.
• The spokeswoman stated the obvious that this type of expense per store will obviously raise the cost of pizza for every pizza eating American.
• According to a representative of the Food Marketing Institute, grocery stores will be hit hard by Obama Care-related costs.

The Food Marketing Institute used blueberry muffins to illustrate the insanity. If one blueberry is sold, you need a specific nutritional sign or sticker. If a half dozen blueberry muffins are sold, a different sign or sticker is required. If a store sells a dozen of the same blueberry muffins, still another sticker or sign is needed.

Given that grocery stores average 1,500 fresh-made items per store, the Food Marketing Institute estimates the grocery store industry will absorb a $1 billion financial hit from this.

Extra efforts by a business requires extra expenses and costs, expenses and costs that eventually will find their way into the wallets of consumers. Even if this was a good hearted attempt to educate consumers, who actually believes that consumers will actually read these labels? Consumers buy from habit, looks, aromas, etc., they hardly ever buy based what they read off of a sign or sticker in the store.

Thus, the expenses that are probably a total waste. A study by PMC, which is an archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institute of Health's National Library of Medicine, studied this problem a few years ago. The results of which were published in the American Journal of Public Health in May, 2009. The PMC research study involved the following methodology and findings:

• The study followed 4,311 patrons in 8 suburban and urban franchises of McDonald’s, Burger King, Starbucks, and Au Bon Pain.
• Only 6 of the 4,311 study subjects looked at nutritional information, which included calorie content, fat, carbohydrates, and sodium levels.
• One couple out of 1,501 McDonald’s customers looked at the posted nutritional info, while only 3 people eyeballed a nutritional poster at Burger King.
• One woman looked at this information at Au Bon Pain before ordering, and none of the 657 who entered Starbucks seemed to care much about seeking calorie content stats.

Great, don’t these people in Washington ever do the most basic research? It took me about ten minutes to uncover this government associated research which proves that Obama Care’s nutritional signage requirement, no matter how well intentioned, is a wasted idea that will cost Americans billions of dollars with no societal benefit in return.

Signs, no matter how colorful, how prevalent, how educational, how important, are useless if no one reads them.

2) Staying in the food industry, during the December 3, 2012 CBS This Morning episode, Cheesecake Factory CEO David Overton discussed the looming economic impact of Obama Care's implementation, especially on small businesses: "For those businesses that don't cover [for health insurance] their employees, they'll be in for a very expensive situation." Overton also warned that the cost of the law would be passed on to customers.

Again, don’t the Washington people do any research into the consequences of their actions, actions that would be apparent to any educated person with any kind of basic economic theory? Don’t they take five minutes out of their highly paid jobs to ask a few simple questions of subject matter experts?

3) In late November, Pennsylvania's Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) announced that it would slash the teaching and work hours of 400 adjunct instructors, support staff, and part-time instructors to avoid paying for Obama Care penalties and taxes. This slashing was caused because some bureaucrats in the Health and Human Services department took the inane position that under Obama Care, anyone working more than 30 hours a week, not the traditional 40 hours a week, would be considered a full time employee.

As a full time employee, the employer would be required to pay for health care insurance for these full time employees. This 30 hour definition of full time employees would have cost the college $6 million a year, an expense it could not afford. Thus, rather than having a full time job that did not provide health care coverage, 400 Americans now have part time jobs that do not provide health care coverage. Insanity.

"It's kind of a double whammy for us because we are facing a legal requirement [under the new law] to get health care and if the college is reducing our hours, we don't have the money to pay for it," said adjunct biology professor Adam Davis. These 400 employees will now work only 25 hours a week.

Reducing hours and incomes with no benefit, how idiotic is that for a government program.

4) A November 30, 2012 article that appeared on the Judicial Watch website discussed the fact that billions of taxpayer dollars are possibly being wasted on Obama Care’s requirement that the nation’s health care records by digitized and computerized.

Highlights of the article include the following:

• The government agency that oversees Medicare’s payment processes has doled out $3.6 billion to 74,317 medical providers to computerize their customers’ medical records.
• But according to a Federal audit for the computerization effort, the agency doesn’t bother following up to assure the money is appropriately spent or is meeting the required quality goals.
• Inspectors and auditors from the Department of Health and Human warn in their audit report that the electronic records program is vulnerable to abuse.
• They also concluded that immediate efforts should be made to strengthen oversight and prevent tax dollars from being wasted.
• This recommendation is not unreasonable since doctors are receiving up to $44,000 and hospitals are receiving a minimum of $2 million to switch from paper to digital records.
• In October, Congressional lawmakers questioned the costly computerization effort, experiment, claiming the effort is wasting billions of tax dollars and doing little, if anything, to improve medical care.
• In a letter to Obama Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, four Congressmen who chair various committees say the program “appears to be doing more harm than good.”
• Their letter included a mainstream newspaper article that exposed a potential scandal: the move to electronic health records may be contributing to billions of dollars in higher costs for Medicare, private insurers and patients by making it easier for hospitals and physicians to bill more for their services, whether or not they provide additional care or are just fraudulent/criminal activities.

Another typical government program, one that makes an existing situation worse and wastes billions of taxpayer dollars in the process.

Making dining more expensive, making professors earn less, and making it easier to rip off the taxpayers via computerization. It can’t get any worse…until tomorrow’s post.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w