Obamacare nightmare unaffordable, Higher premiums and deductibles, Job losses part time jobs, School closes, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber lack of transparency and stupidity of American voter allowed Obamacare to be passed
“If you’ve got health insurance we’re going to work with you to lower your premiums by $2,500 per family per year.”…Barack Obama
“Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Mexico has requested rate increases averaging 51 percent for its 33,000 members. The proposal elicited tart online comments from consumers.”
““Our enrollees generated 24 percent more claims than we thought they would when we set our 2014 rates,” said Nathan T. Johns, the chief financial officer of Arches Health Plan, which covers about one-fourth of the people who bought insurance through the federal exchange in Utah. As a result, the company said, it collected premiums of $39.7 million and had claims of $56.3 million in 2014. It has requested rate increases averaging 45 percent for 2016.”…NY Times July 3, 2015
“Nearly half of U.S. companies are reluctant to hire full-time employees because of the ACA. One in five firms indicates they are likely to hire fewer employees, and another one in 10 may lay off current employees in response to the law.
Other firms will shift toward part-time workers. More than 40 percent of CFOs say their companies will consider switching some jobs to less than 30 hours per week or targeting part-time workers for future employment.”…Duke University Fuqua School of Business December 11, 2013
“We are being lied to on a scale unimaginable by George Orwell.”…Citizen Wells
Obamacare sticker shock.
Well there should have been.
First clues?
The biggest liar ever to occupy the White House was pushing it and the IRS is involved.
For 2016 there will be a penalty up to $ 695 per uninsured household member.
But that may be the good news.
In June of 2015 MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, a paid Obama consultant, explained out Obamacare was passed.
“lack of transparency”
“the stupidity of the American voter”
Obamacare reality shock.
Citizen Wells has been reporting about the rising premiums and impact on jobs from Obama care.
From Citizen Wells August 8, 2015.
“Blue Cross now seeking 34.6% rate hike in NC for ACA plans
Insurer is scrapping June request for 25.7% increase
Blames Affordable Care Act for driving up costs”
From Citizen Wells March 10, 2015.
“‘Over the last six months, of the net job creation, 97 percent of that is part-time work,’ said Keith Hall, a senior researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. ‘That is really remarkable.’”Hall is no ordinary academic. He ran the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that puts out the monthly jobs report, from 2008 to 2012. Over the past six months, he said, the Household Survey shows 963,000 more people reporting that they were employed, and 936,000 of them reported they’re in part-time jobs.” ‘That is a really high number for a six-month period,’ Hall said. ‘I’m not sure that has ever happened over six months before.’ “”
“How, then, to explain what’s happened since January? Back to the McClatchy article and Hall, the former BLS chief:
“Hall speculated that the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, shorthanded as Obamacare, might be resulting in employers shifting workers to part-time status to avoid coming health care obligations.”
From Zero Hedge October 26, 2015.
“What was supposed to be affordable remains painfully unaffordable for the lowest rung of the employment pyramid.
Here is the actual math as experienced by both the abovementioned Mr. Sewell of Golden Corral restaurants, and his mostly minimum-wage employees.
He employs 1,800 people at the 26 Golden Corral franchises he owns in six Southern and Midwestern states, and previously offered insurance only to his salaried management staff. In January, when the employer mandate took effect, he made the same insurance plan, with a bigger employer contribution, available to all employees working an average of 30 or more hours a week.
Running the math on his plan — a typical one for the restaurant industry — illustrates why a number of low-wage workers are falling through gaps in the Affordable Care Act.
The annual premium for individual coverage through the Golden Corral Blue Cross Blue Shield plan is $4,800. Mr. Sewell pays 65 percent for service workers, leaving them with a monthly cost of $140.
The health care law defines affordable employer-sponsored insurance as that priced at 9.5 percent or less of an employee’s annual household income for individual coverage. (Because employers do not know how much money their workers’ relatives make, there are several “safe harbors” they can use for compliance, including basing their calculation on only their own employees’ wages.) Mr. Sewell’s insurance meets the test, but $65 per biweekly paycheck is more than most of his workers are willing — or able — to pay for insurance that still carries steep out-of-pocket costs, including a $2,500 deductible.
And this is where Obamacare’s employee mandate fails for a vast majority of US workers.”
Read more:
From the Times Free Press October 14, 2015.
“Tennessee county closes schools, cites Obamacare as reason
Classes in a small, financially struggling school district in northern Tennessee have been canceled until officials can find a way to generate more revenue.
Clay County Director of Schools Jerry Strong said the school board made the decision Thursday night after struggling with budget concerns for three years. He said the district doesn’t have enough money to pay for partially unfunded government mandates.
“Clay County’s inability to generate the revenue to offset the mandates is what’s caused this to come to a head,” he said. “The straw that broke the camel’s back was really the Affordable Care Act for us and it has made it very difficult for us to have our employees properly covered and meet the mandates of the law.”
Read more:
From the Washington Post July 3, 2014.
“We are seeing more part-time jobs because employers can’t afford to pay the Obamacare premiums for employees who work more than 30 hours a week. How many Americans will leave the workforce for good? How much lower will the labor force participation rate drop? In other words, how much more dependency will the Obama presidency create?”
Read more:
From Zero Hedge June 26, 2015.
“America’s Obamacare Nightmare Is Just Beginning”
“So, the debate will intensify over the primary issue: costs. In every state, the fundamental components of state health-care costs—the demographics, the underlying costs of care delivery and the competitiveness of the markets—are juiced up by expensive federal benefit mandates and individual and group insurance rules and regulations. These all drive costs skyward. As my Heritage colleagues have demonstrated, this regulatory regime forces young people to pay up to 44 percent more in premiums. Washington’s subsidies simply try to hide the true costs of the law; they don’t control them.
The law remains unworkable. The complicated insurance subsidy program itself has been a mess. H&R Block reported that about two thirds of subsidy recipients had to repay money back to the government because they got bigger than allowable subsidies. With the individual mandate, the administration has been granting lots of exemptions to insulate most of the uninsured from any penalty. That’s rather predictable; after all, even candidate Barack Obama argued that an individual mandate was unfair and unenforceable.
As for the employer mandate—another fractured cornerstone of Obamacare—the administration has delayed it for one year. Even liberal supporters now want to repeal it, fearing damage to the labor markets.
And what about those big “savings” from the Medicare payment reductions? They were earmarked to help cover the costs of the insurance subsidies. Yet the Medicare Actuary and the CBO have both routinely dismissed the massive Medicare payment cuts as either unrealistic or unsustainable.”
Read more:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-26/guest-post-americas-obamacare-nightmare-just-beginning
If I were the new president, the first thing I would do is immediately disconnect the IRS from our healthcare system and then begin methodically to dismantle Obamacare concurrently with providing basic healthcare services for lower income Americans.
Of course not requiring employers to provide health care combined with a real job creating environment would go a long way to fixing our jobs and economy crisis.
Citizen WElls 