It is riddled with irrational thought, it’s implementation has been a train wreck, it is destroying the economy and the ability of Americans to find full time work, and worst of all it has no chance of success since it never understood and never addressed the underlying causes of our high health care costs. Just remember that the idiocy and failures you have read about Obama Care in the past three days in this blog or the failures from the nine part series we did in August, we still have not covered all of the shortcomings.
1) We have already reported on how hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses, large and small, have had to make their full time workers part time workers in order to survive under the tenets of Obama Care. The latest business to face this depressing situation is Sea World.
Sea World recently announced that it will be cutting the weekly hours of thousands of its employees to total no more than 28 hours a week. This is a result of trying to stay financially solvent under Obama Care’s rules and regulations. Thus, many more Americans will see their take home pay cut for no good reason and probably with no increase in their ability to pay for high health care insurance costs. Pathetic.
2) The Chicago Tribune had in interesting Op-Ed piece in its July 31, 2013 issue. The piece started with the following paragraph:
The Affordable Care Act will give companies — and, surprisingly, their workers — a big incentive to embrace more part-time employment. That isn't necessarily a problem, except when it comes to paying the health-insurance bills for all those part-timers. Looks like that job will fall to you, taxpayers.
I will not go into the math details of what they discovered, you can do so for yourself at the OP-ED piece itself:
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-07-31/opinion/ct-edit-parttime-0728-jm-20130728_1_employers-obamacare-workers
The bottom line is that the Obama Care legislation was written so poorly that it appears that millions of Americans would be better off financially if they actually became part time workers. In these cases, the government, I.e. the American taxpayer, would step in with Obama Care health insurance subsidies that for many Americans would more than offset their take home pay if they had stayed as full time employees.
Think about that for a minute. Millions of Americans will likely fall into an Obama Care niche where working less gets them more money. Great deal for them, lousy deal for the American taxpayer who pays for their lucky break as a result of idiotic legislative writing. You can not make up this type of insanity.
3) Back in mid-July, 2013, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who is responsible for implementing Obama Care, was speaking at the NAACP convention in Orlando when compared the opponents of Obama Care to the segregationist opponents of civil rights:
You showed it in the fight against lynching and the fight for desegregation. You showed it by ensuring inalienable rights are secured in the courtroom and at the ballot box. And you showed it by supporting a health law 100 years in the making. With each step forward, you said to forces of the status quo, “This will work,” “We can’t slow down,” “We can’t wait,” “We won’t turn back.”
This is really getting old from the Obama administration. Anyone that disagrees with its policies must be racist. Since Obama Care was passed, we have tried to fairly present the facts, statistics, the realities of Obama Care and the impact it is having on the nation. We have cited government sources, expert opinions, main stream media outlets, non mainstream media outlets, etc. in making every attempt to see the truth of Obama Care.
We would welcome a sit down discussion with Sebelius or anyone in the Obama administration to go over the points we have made, the observations we have developed and our final conclusion that this is a shoddy piece of legislation. In truth, the administration itself has shut down major components of the law (e.g. CLASS) and has delayed other major portions of the law because of how poorly it was developed and written.
However, in observing these activities of this administration, Sebelius and others like her ignore these realities. Instead, Sebelius is the latest administration hatchet woman to refuse our sit down offer to discuss the stark realities of Obama Care and just rely on racism and racial taunts to attack the law. Pathetic leadership, pathetic way to fix what is wrong in this country.
4) Consider a June, 2013 Associated Press article on how yet another quirk in the Obama Care legislation might actually cause more Americans to lose their healthcare insurance. The title of the article was, “Coverage may be unaffordable for low-wage workers” and it went through the potential scenario of why more Americans might lose their insurance under Obama Care:
- According to the article, “because of a wrinkle in the law, companies can meet their legal obligations by offering policies that would be too expensive for many low-wage workers. For the employee, it's like a mirage — attractive but out of reach.”
- As we have already discussed, companies with 50 or more full-time workers are required to offer coverage that meets certain basic standards and costs no more than 9.5% of an employee's income. Failure to do offer an insurance option means fines for the employer.
- However, for an employee making $21,000 a year, 9.5% of their income could mean premiums as high as $1,995 or almost 10% of their gross income.
- Under Obama Care guidelines, this expensive insurance, relative to an employee’s pay rate, would still be considered affordable.
- Even worse, these steep insurance premiums wouldn't be the only expense for employees. Since for a basic health insurance plan they could also face an annual deductible amounting to $3,000 or so, before insurance starts paying. $3,000 would be about 15% of someone’s gross work pay of $21,000 a year from the example above.
- "If you make $20,000, are you really going to buy that?" asked Tracy Watts, health care reform leader at Mercer, a major benefits consulting firm. Probably not if you are paying up to 10% of your pay for the privilege of paying another $3,000 in an annual deductible before you get any benefit from your insurance policy.
- The best financial scenario but possibly not the best health care scenario is to not take your employer up on this deal and go without health care insurance.
- Under Obama Care, this is perfectly legal for the employer to go this route and use the 9.5% cap as a ceiling and a way to shed employee health care insurance expense. Insanity.
- And to add insult to injury, low-wage workers making more than about $15,900 won't be eligible for the law's Medicaid expansion, shutting down another possibility for getting covered.
So like the other ways that Obama Care actually drives people out of having health care insurance, the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do, this little quirk in the law got by those who wrote and voted for it. Obviously not a lot of those who did so read what they were voting on or these types of idiotic unintended outcomes may not have happened.
The article also cites another potential reason with insanity like this is going down as a result of the law. Remember how Obama and the Democrats rushed this legislation through the Congress? That happened because they were about to lose their 60 seat majority in the Senate when Republican Scot Brown was elected in Massachusetts. They rushed the House version through to approval without any fine tuning, without House/Senate conferencing to iron out stupidity like this. As a result, a law that was supposed to get more people health insurance will actually end up making people lose affordable health insurance.
5) A couple of quick hitters to finish this up. A July 18, 2013 KSAT radio interview in San Antonio of a major restaurant owner, Jim Hasslocher, revealed that he estimated Obama Care will add $1 million to his annual restaurant costs and expenses to cover the insurance needs of his 1,100 employees. One million dollars that will not allow him to give raises, open new eateries to expand the economy, improve his service, etc.
As a result he is faced with a number of choices, none of them very good, to keep his business viable in the face of a potential $1 million added cost: raise prices, close locations, fire employees, reduce the hours of employees, or do the little trick above to force the employees to not take his insurance options because of how poorly the financials line up, particularly in the restaurant worker world.
6) Back in July, 2013, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a survey of their members regarding what their plans are in the face of Obama Care and what it’s regulations, higher taxes, and uncertainty will do to job creation”
- 28% percent of those businesses surveyed said they will cut hours to reduce full time employees
- 24% said they will reduce hiring.
- 23% said the planned to replace full time employees with part-time workers to avoid triggering the Obama Care mandate.
And Obama wonders why the economy continues to just slog along and the only jobs getting created are part time jobs. Certainly out of touch with reality.
7) Back in July, 2013 President Obama issued the following upbeat report on Obama Care results: “In 2012, 13 million rebates went out, in all 50 states. Another 8.5 [million] rebates are being sent out this summer, averaging around 100 bucks each.”
However, about the same time, the Kaiser Family Foundation noted that its research showed that healthcare premiums for the average family cost $15,745 in 2012 – an increase of $1,975 from the $13,770 they cost in 2010, the year President Obama signed the Obama Care into law. I wonder why that little fact did not make it into the Presdeint;s speech.
Yes, I am assuming that he was correct, millions of people got about $100 back as a rebate from their insurance company. I am also assuming that Kaiser is also right that ALL households saw an average increase in their premiums of almost twenty times as much as the rebates that SOME households received. Not a very good trade off in my eyes.
8) Back in mid July, the heads of three major unions including the Teamsters Union, you know, the people that came out swinging in support of Obama Care three years ago, James P. Hoffa, Joseph Hansen and D. Taylor send an open letter to the Obama administration: “Right now, unless you and the Obama Administration enact an equitable fix, the ACA [Obama Care] will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class. We can no longer stand silent in the face of elements of the Affordable Care Act that will destroy the very health and well being of our members along with millions of other hardworking Americans.”
My, how times have changed as people have begun to understand how bad this bill is written. I wonder if Sebelius thinks that all unions are segregationists also?
That will do it for now. I have much more material on how bad Obama Care is but I just cannot do any more bad news, at least in the short term. As major components of Obama Care rollout, I am sure we will be hit with a tsunami of bad news and debilitating impacts on our jobs, our insurance, our lives, and our economy. Hands down, worse piece of legislation ever enacted by the Washington political class.
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