Tag: budget

Poll: 70% of Americans want to delay the Obamacare individual mandate.

One, I suspect that many of those polled really think they are asking for a delay of Obamacare entirely, and do not understand that delaying the mandate will do nothing to save their present insurance plan. If Obamacare requires that plan to die, it will die, regardless of when the mandate goes into effect.

Two, this is strong evidence that, when the next budget deadline arrives in a few months, the Republicans should once again demand to either delay, defund, or repeal Obamacare. They should force the Democrats to once again vote for this law. If the Republicans do this, they might actually be in a position to force Democrats to agree to a repeal.

Obamacare might well be imploding.

In other words, the elites in Washington might have signed a corrupt budget deal, but meanwhile the cause of the shutdown, Obamacare, continues to show itself to be an abject failure, justifying the efforts of the more honest Republicans to try to stop it.

The Democrats endorsed this law again during the budget standoff. Had they be willing to even consider minor changes the shutdown could have been averted. Instead, they stood firm as a party, supporting this unworkable law, as it stands.

Finding out what’s in it: A company that employes a large number of temporary workers is now going to have to drop health insurance for all of its employees, because of Obamacare.

Aside from its full-time staff, the company also manages about 400 temporary workers, and is hoping to add another 200 in the next year. Those employees can buy into a separate health insurance program North Georgia Staffing signed up with. Under new ObamaCare rules, many of those “temps” will count toward the Underkoffler’s full-time staff. Larry Underkoffler calculates their full-time employee count will instantly surge from 18 to around 200. They will go from boutique operation to “major employer” overnight.

And that means, under the health care law, they’d have to provide insurance coverage to all, or pay a $2,000-per-worker fine. In the Underkofflers’ case, the fine might be the more affordable option. “We would have to provide the same program for all the employees — including the temps — to everyone employed by us. And we just couldn’t do that,” Larry Underkoffler told Fox News. They argue that providing insurance to all the employees would bankrupt the company. Instead, they’ll eat the cost of the fine, and dump the employees they can’t cover into Georgia’s federally run health insurance exchange.

“It looks like we will have to just pay the penalties,” Debbie Underkoffler told Fox News. Those penalties could add up to $400,000 in just the first year. That comes right off their bottom line. Still, it’s a fraction of what providing health care could cost them. That tab could top $2 million per year. What’s more, because ObamaCare does not allow separate plans for the full-time employees and the temporary workers they manage, their full-timers will lose their current benefits.

The cost of the fines themselves is so high that I expect that they will soon begin destroying business left and right. Get prepared for the arrival of a large underground black market, working illegally under the radar to avoid the unbearable financial burdens of Obamacare.

Meanwhile, the CEO of Aetna insurance moans the complete failure of the Obamacare website to function.

Asked if he would have delayed the launch of the exchange given its earlier problems, Bertolini said, “I would have, if I’d been in their seat.”

But don’t worry, the Democrats have your back! Having Obamacare the law of the land now is so important to them that they are willing to shut down the government, for as long as necessary.