Did you know that people that signed up for Obamacare were also issued housing assistance, food stamp cards, and many were signed up for welfare? Did you know that people that signed up for Obamacare were also registered to vote? More truthiness of what Obamacare was really designed for: A permanent democrat majority. Some more reality about Obamacare you won’t hear on the liberal MSM.
GOP foolish to think ObamaCare is fixable
By Betsy McCaughey April 30, 2014
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the No. 4 House Republican, is walking back comments attributed to her that ObamaCare can’t be repealed. But she’s not the only one suggesting Congress merely make changes within the framework of the health law. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says the goal is to get the law “fixed.” It seems many GOP lawmakers still haven’t read the law, or they’d know the framework is corrupt.
Even Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) speculated Friday that repeal is unlikely because it will be “difficult to turn the clock back.”
Nonsense. Even by the most inflated administration claims, some 8 million people have signed up for exchange plans, out of a nation of 318 million. ObamaCare is repealable, and should be replaced with a plan to cover the uninsured and reduce costs.
ObamaCare’s authors paid lip service to these goals but had an ulterior motive: forging a permanent Democratic majority. The law creates a huge infrastructure for enrolling millions of people not just in insurance but also for food stamps, housing assistance and other welfare programs — and registering them to vote.
Here are the pillars of this corrupt scheme. None of the minor fixes Republicans are discussing comes even close to sweeping away this corruption.
Navigators and assisters: Instead of government employees promoting ObamaCare and enrolling the uninsured, the law (Sec. 1311) reserves these jobs for community activists, unions, community health centers and other not-for-profits. Players include the NAACP, Planned Parenthood and Service Employees International Union. Hiring these groups is a way to fund the Democratic Party’s shadow army between elections.
Assisters sign up the uninsured for non-health benefits and register them to vote. The National Association of Community Health Centers identifies voter registration as a key part of its mission.
The whole scheme recalls the days of Tammany Hall, when local ward bosses got the poor and newly arrived whatever they needed, in exchange for their votes. ObamaCare institutionalizes this corrupt model and pays for it with your premiums.
Bailouts for insurers: ObamaCare rules make it impossible for insurers to offer “affordable” plans and still cover their costs. The premiums have to cover a long list of mandatory benefits as well as $100 billion in taxes on insurers over the decade. Insurers also have to cover seriously ill people for the same price as healthy people. Every state that tried this “community rating” scheme has seen premiums soar, as the healthy stop buying the plans.
To make ObamaCare seem affordable, the law includes a bailout (Sec. 1342). It encourages insurers to price plans below cost, with the assurance that taxpayer money will make them whole for most losses at year’s end. In short, John Q. Public is paying to make a law look affordable that isn’t. Worse, in January, the Obama administration sweetened the bailout terms, though only Congress has the legal authority to do so.
The big lie is that this law is paid for. Reductions in future Medicare spending pay for over half the law, including a staggering 27 percent cut in payments to Medicare Advantage plans. That’s on paper. But the administration is postponing the Medicare Advantage cuts to dodge angry seniors.
Also postponed is the employer mandate, which requires workplaces with 50 or more full-time employees to provide a costly package of benefits. In anticipation of that mandate, employers are holding their workforces below 50 or cutting hours below the law’s zany 30-hour-a-week definition of full-time. In the first seven months of 2013, an astounding 77 percent of hires were part-time.
With the employer mandate, the economy cannot recover. Without it, millions more will need taxpayer-funded coverage and ObamaCare collapses.
So much for the false sales pitch that ObamaCare is paid for and repealing it would increase the deficit.
Attention, Republicans: Repeal this “stinkburger” and replace it with a health-insurance safety net built on compassion, not lies.
http://nypost.com/2014/04/30/gop-foolish-to-think-obamacare-is-fixable/
Free shit and government dependence for 16 million more people, at taxpayer expense, what Obama calls a “victory”
Accelerate the collapse – let it all burn down from its own corruption. Let the democrats secure for themselves a permanent sheeple majority in the worst parts of the rust belt and NY-DC corridor, while the rest of the country gives DC a collective FUCK YOU and goes its separate way.
Since there are many seniors on TBP, I wonder how many know the Medicare cuts that are coming down the road (after the elections, of course) because of Obamacare…..
[img
[/img]
AWD,
Here in Massachusetts for anyone who could not get through on the health connector were automatically signed up for the Mass version of Medicaid and automatically signed up for food stamps. What a racket, I wonder why I bother to work and pay full tuition, room and board for my kids college. It would be much easier just to be poor, and a lot less expensive.
Bob.
This isn’t about benefiting one political party or the other. It’s about keeping both democrats and republicans in office by making many citizens financially dependent on government plus flooding our country with those who want to be dependent on government and therefore remain loyal to democrats, republicans, and the corrupt political establishment.
Many care only about getting their monthly government subsidy/benefit or if they are working, their weekly or bi-monthly paycheck. But if they don’t care about lack of growth of good paying jobs, increasing debt, and the need to completely reform government to save our economy and country then they only set themselves and their kids up for economic disaster.
Voters who remain loyal to our two big political parties and the big money special interests who control them seal their fate.
Bob
Obama has built the FSA into a majority voting block, and hasn’t slowed down handing out the free shit. There are 60 million more people getting money from the government than have jobs.
Seniors are going to get slaughtered with Medicare cuts. I guess old geezers vote republican. Obama has figured all the angles.
“This isn’t about benefiting one political party or the other”
What a stupid fucking comment. Not one republican voted for Obamacare. Republicans passed many “repeal Obamacare” laws than were killed by democrats. Republicans have been fighting Obamacare for years, and are only now throwing in the towel.
ss in information and reality challenged.
Thanks to Obamacare, more companies are likely to dump health benefits
By Rick Newman The Exchange
Get ready for a trip back to the 1950s.
Back then, fast-growing companies began to offer health insurance as a fringe benefit to help recruit workers. It helped that the government had passed a few tax breaks making it affordable for corporations. So it was basically by accident that employer-provided health insurance became the norm in the United States, even though the government came to oversee healthcare in most other developed nations.
We may soon go back to a model in which employers provide healthcare more as a perk than as a routine benefit, requiring workers to get insurance from other sources. That could save big companies up to $700 billion by 2025, according to a new report from S&P Capital IQ. It’s hard to think of any other single change that could save companies that much money, indicating how powerful the Affordable Care Act (ACA) could become once it has fully impacted the U.S. healthcare system.
S&P predicts that companies will do the math and find it irresistible to move more and more of their workers off company-run plans and into the exchanges established under Obamacare, as the ACA is known. Companies with more than 50 workers will have to pay a penalty if they don’t offer insurance, but it could still be cheaper when factoring in the savings on healthcare; that’s because insurance costs have skyrocketed during the last 20 years, making healthcare one of the costs companies find most difficult to control.
The rising and unpredictable nature of healthcare costs led AOL CEO Tim Armstrong to make his unfortunate comment about “distressed babies” earlier this year. Armstrong took a lot of heat and later apologized, but many CEOs expresss similar frustrations (usually privately).
Health Benefits Phased Out
The migration away from employer-based coverage would probably occur in phases. Companies might start by moving part-timers and new hires off their plans, since they tend to get paid less than other workers and would be more likely to qualify for subsidies under the exchanges. Established employees might be the last to lose employer-based coverage, and companies would still be free to offer healthcare benefits as they choose.
Such moves would probably be controversial at first, given that just about everything related to Obamacare is controversial. And most companies will probably be reluctant to make big changes likely to produce negative headlines. “However, once a few notable companies start to depart from their traditional approach to health care benefits, it’s likely that a substantial number of firms could quickly follow suit,” S&P Capital predicts.
S&P likens this change to the evolution away from defined-benefit pension plans toward employee-managed 401(k) plans and IRAs. It would put more burden on individuals to choose a plan from among dozens that might be offered. Out-of-pocket costs could rise, since employers today essentially subsidize premiums at many companies. Companies could offer stipends meant to cover some or all of the premium for workers who buy coverage on an exchange, just as many companies make contributions to workers’ 401(k) plans. Still, some people undoubtedly would go without insurance, just as many workers who ought to save for retirement don’t.
There’s sure to be an uproar over such changes, since workers tend to resist any disruption to the status quo. But the whole model of employer-based healthcare has become a fragile, outdated mess that unduly burdens employers and workers both. American firms often face cost disadvantages because they must bear healthcare expenses that foreign competitors don’t.
Most workers view healthcare coverage as an important benefit, without realizing that it is at least partly responsible for stagnant pay. Since healthcare costs have been rising far more than overall inflation, many firms have continued to offer coverage in lieu of raises. In 2000, health insurance accounted for just 5.9% of average total compensation, according to the Labor Department; it now accounts for 8.5%. Wages and salaries, by contrast, have fallen from 72.6% of total compensation to 69% during the same time span. So removing health insurance from compensation packages could allow companies to offer more generous raises — and give workers a rationale to ask for them.
There are other potential benefits to workers. People wouldn’t lose healthcare coverage when they leave an employer, making their coverage portable and more stable, thus allowing workers to stick with preferred doctors and other caregivers no matter what their work situation. That could give some people more flexibility to find work that suits them best instead of taking a job just because they need insurance, a factor the Congressional Budget Office cited in February when it said 2 million Americans could decide not to work or work less because of Obamacare. (Of course, that became “Obamcare kills jobs” for ACA’s opponents, but it isn’t what the CBO actually said.)
If employers do begin to push workers onto exchanges, it could intensify pressures to push healthcare costs lower. The Affordable Care Act includes some provisions for tackling rising costs, but that was never the primary focus of the law — despite its name. As more individuals feel the direct sting of rising costs—without an employer to absorb part of the blow—the price of care could become an even more volatile political issue than it is now. The battles over Obamacare may have only begun.
AWD,
From Denninger,
“Hmmm…. spending went up almost twice as fast as income? Yuck, especially considering that inflation-adjusted PCE was up 0.7%, while DPI was up 0.3%. That’s more than double.
Where did the changes come from?
The big one was Medicaid — it was good for an increase of $19.3, $11.4 and $6.5 billion; note that these are cumulative as they are changes over the previous month, so we have ($19.3 x 3) + (11.4 x 2) + 6.5 = $87.2 billion in deficit-busting additions over three months on Medicaid expansion alone! Hello Obamacare, and by the way that impact will persist in coming months, so this looks to me to be a roughly $400 billion addition to the federal deficit each and every year on a forward basis, and that assumes that there are no further additions.
**** us all dead, especially considering that the offset – that is, personal current taxes, look to be increasing at about a $110 billion annualized run rate for a net deficit impact of roughly $300 billion annually.
I’m sure we can sustain this level of deficit spending forever.
Bob.
Giving free healthcare to 16 million more people is only going cost taxpayers $400 billion a year? Wow, what a deal.
[img
[/img]
[img]http://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/public/?a=Files.Serve&File_id=c79d6c53-f7e4-45a1-a336-04d052dc53bf[/img]
Obama said 8 million signed up for Obamacare, but only 67% bothered to pay. So, only 5.4 million have actually signed up. Wonder why I haven’t heard Obama or the MSM mention this…
Many Obamacare enrollees haven’t paid their premiums yet – why not?
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said as much herself: “You are not fully enrolled [in Obamacare] until you pay your premium.” Yet data collected by the Republican-led House Energy and Commerce Committee shows that as of April 15, just 67 percent of enrollees in the federally-run Obamacare marketplace had paid their first month’s premiums.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/33-of-obamacare-enrollees-havent-paid-their-premiums-yet-why-not/