Obamacare helps entitlement crowd hurts middle America, High premiums and deductibles hurt working families, Many lose affordable policies, 2010 Wyatt Emmerich study welfare pays
“millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.”…NBC News October 29, 2013
“…and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They [socialists] always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them.”…Margaret Thatcher
“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed
–if all records told the same tale–then the lie passed into
history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the
Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present
controls the past.”…George Orwell, “1984″
When I wrote “Obamacare helps entitlement crowd” I meant only in the short term monetary sense because ultimately it will hurt all Americans and their healthcare.
A 2010 study analysis by Wyatt Emmerich concluded that welfare pays.
He found that a part time worker receiving a wide range of entitlement benefits could fare better that a family earning $ 60,000 per year.
From Zero hedge November 22, 2010.
“In Entitlement America, The Head Of A Household Of Four Making Minimum Wage Has More Disposable Income Than A Family Making $60,000 A Year”
“Tonight’s stunning financial piece de resistance comes from Wyatt Emerich of The Cleveland Current. In what is sure to inspire some serious ire among all those who once believed Ronald Reagan that it was the USSR that was the “Evil Empire”, Emmerich analyzes disposable income and economic benefits among several key income classes and comes to the stunning (and verifiable) conclusion that “a one-parent family of three making $14,500 a year (minimum wage) has more disposable income than a family making $60,000 a year.” And that excludes benefits from Supplemental Security Income disability checks. America is now a country which punishes those middle-class people who not only try to work hard, but avoid scamming the system. Not surprisingly, it is not only the richest and most audacious thieves that prosper – it is also the penny scammers at the very bottom of the economic ladder that rip off the middle class each and every day, courtesy of the world’s most generous entitlement system. Perhaps if Reagan were alive today, he would wish to modify the object of his once legendary remark.
From Emmerich:
You can do as well working one week a month at minimum wage as you can working $60,000-a-year, full-time, high-stress job.
My chart tells the story. It is pretty much self-explanatory.
Read more:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/entitlement-america-head-household-four-making-minimum-wage-has-more-disposable-income-famil
This analysis was pre Obamacare.
The unfairness is even worse now.
From the LA Times October 26, 2013.
“Many middle-class Californians with individual health plans are surprised they need policies that cover more — and cost more.”
“Thousands of Californians are discovering what Obamacarewill cost them — and many don’t like what they see.
These middle-class consumers are staring at hefty increases on their insurance bills as the overhaul remakes the healthcare market. Their rates are rising in large part to help offset the higher costs of covering sicker, poorer people who have been shut out of the system for years.”
”
Fullerton resident Jennifer Harris thought she had a great deal, paying $98 a month for an individual plan throughHealth Net Inc. She got a rude surprise this month when the company said it would cancel her policy at the end of this year. Her current plan does not conform with the new federal rules, which require more generous levels of coverage.
Now Harris, a self-employed lawyer, must shop for replacement insurance. The cheapest plan she has found will cost her $238 a month. She and her husband don’t qualify for federal premium subsidies because they earn too much money, about $80,000 a year combined.
“It doesn’t seem right to make the middle class pay so much more in order to give health insurance to everybody else,” said Harris, who is three months pregnant. “This increase is simply not affordable.””
Read more:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-health-sticker-shock-20131027,0,2756077.story#axzz2jD0EDmJP
Here is a copy of an original Wyatt Emmerich from the Wayback Machine archives.
“With welfare it makes sense to work less”
Remember when Mississippi used to have new manufacturing plants popping up weekly? What happened?
If you ask the business leaders, the problem is a lack of skilled labor. People don’t want to work. Especially in the Delta, people just won’t show up on time and often fail drug tests.
“How can this be?” you may ask. You have to work to eat. Well, that’s really not true anymore. In fact, our welfare state rewards not working. You can do as well working one week a month at minimum wage as you can working a $60,000-a-year, full-time, high-stress job.
My chart tells the story. It is pretty much self-explanatory.
It is quite easy to check my numbers, thanks to the Internet. In fact, it only took me a couple of hours on the net to gather this data. Almost all welfare programs have Web sites where you can call up “benefits calculators.” Just plug in your income and family size and, presto, your benefits are automatically calculated.
Just to double-check, I looked at what our country spends on welfare at a national level. Backing out Social Security, the U.S. spends about $750 billion a year on welfare. The U.S. has about 120 million households. If 25 million get welfare (20 percent), that comes to about $30,000 per family. This figure pretty much backs up my analysis.
The chart is quite revealing. A one-parent family of three making $14,500 a year (minimum wage) has more disposable income than a family making $60,000 a year.
If the family provider works only one week a month at minimum wage, he or she makes 92 percent as much as a provider grossing $60,000 a year.
First of all, working only one week a month saves big-time on child care. But the real big-ticket item is Medicaid, which has minimal deductibles and copays.
By working only one week a month at a minimum-wage job, a provider is able to get total medical coverage for next to nothing.
Compare this to the family provider making $60,000 a year. A typical Mississippi family coverage would cost around $12,000, adding deductibles and co-pays adds an additional $4,500 or so to the bill. That’s a huge hit.
The full-time $60,000-a-year job is going to be much more demanding than working one week a month at minimum wage. Presumably, the low-income parent will have more energy to attend to the various stresses of managing a household.
If the one-week-a-month worker maintains an unreported cash-only job on the side, the deal gets better than a regular $60,000-a-year job.
In this scenario, you maintain a reportable, payroll-deductible, low-income job for federal tax purposes. This allows you to easily establish your qualification for all these welfare programs. Then your black-market side job gives you additional cash without interfering with your benefits. Some economists estimate there is one trillion in unreported income each year in the United States.
My analysis only includes the better-known welfare programs. One Web site I used, GovBenefits.org, gave me a list of dozens of additional programs and private grants available to low-income family providers.
This really got me thinking. Just how much money could I get if I set out to deliberately scam the system? I soon realized that getting a low-paying minimum wage job would set the stage for far more welfare benefits than you could earn in a real job, if you were willing to cheat.
Even if you didn’t cheat, you could do almost as well working one week a month at minimum wage than busting a gut at a $60,000-a-year job.
I have left out the mother of all welfare programs – Supplemental Security Income (SSI). SSI pays $8,088 per year for each “disabled” family member. A person can be deemed “disabled” if they are totally lacking in the cultural and educational skills needed to be employable in the workforce.
If you add $24,262 a year for three disability checks, the lowest paid welfare family would now have far more take-home income than the $60,000-a-year family.
Ironically, most private workplaces require drug testing, but there is no drug testing required to get welfare checks.
Granted, some of these welfare programs have restrictions to prevent double dipping. No doubt our efficient federal bureaucracy does a bang-up job of preventing such fraud.
I hope I have helped answer the question concerning why Mississippi doesn’t get many new industries. The welfare system in communist China is far stingier. Those people have to work to eat.”
http://web.archive.org/web/20110117224502/http://www.northsidesun.com/view/full_story/9915498/article-With-welfare-it-makes-sense-to-work-less
Citizen WElls 