Tag: obamacare

Finding out what’s in it: A survey of businesses has found that employers have reduced employee work hours significantly to avoid Obamacare.

A new survey by the Society of Human Resource Management released Tuesday found about 14 percent of businesses have reduced part-time hours and another 6 percent plan to do so. Employers are reducing hours to avoid Obamacare’s employer mandate, which requires companies to provide health insurance to all workers that work 30 or more hours a week. In addition, 5 percent of companies already reduced or plan to reduce the total number of employees.

Believe me, this is only the start. Essentially, Obamacare makes it difficult if not impossible to make a profit.

Finding out what’s in it: For the first time in 15 years, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of North Carolina will lose money in 2015 due to Obamacare.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the state’s largest health insurer, said Friday that it posted its first financial loss in 15 years as a result of insuring high numbers of older and sicker people under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The Chapel Hill organization signed up 257,704 people under the federal health care law, which requires insurers to provide coverage regardless of a customer’s health condition. New enrollees last year swelled Blue Cross’s covered membership to 3.91 million people, and boosted revenue by 25 percent to an all-time high of $8 billion.

But steep medical claims – for hip and knee replacements, heart procedures, specialty drugs and other costs – drove up medical claims from $5 billion in 2013 to $6.4 billion in 2014. Blue Cross also paid $156 million in ACA-related fees, a new cost for the company.

Federal subsidies under Obamacare are supposed to cover these loses, but then we must ask where is the bankrupt federal government going to get this money? In the end, someone is going to go bankrupt and we will all be worse off.

The glitches keep coming! Because almost a million taxpayers were provided incorrect information by the Obamacare online system the Obama administration has announced that there will be delays in sending them their tax refunds, with many being forced to resubmit their tax returns.

The truth is that these kinds of screw-ups should be and will be routine in any system as complex and Rube Goldberg-like as Obamacare is.

Bur just keep reminding yourself: The Democrats continue to support this law in every way, refusing to consider any change under any condition.

The law is for little people: The Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it will delay for five months enforcing a part of Obamacare pertaining to small businesses.

It seems that under Obamacare businesses are no longer allowed to offer employees spending accounts which can be used cover a portion of the cost of buying individual health plans. (Another example of not being allowed to keep your plan, even if you like it. Period.) If they continue to offer these accounts they could get fined $100 per day per employee. If they don’t, their employees might find themselves without health insurance.

So, the Obama administration is not going to enforce another Obamacare provision for five more months, even though this law was Obama’s gift to the nation and was so perfect it wasn’t necessary to discuss its passage with anyone outside the Democratic Party. In fact, it was so perfect the Democrats themselves didn’t need to read the law before they voted for it!

Finding out what’s in it: Staples has implemented a strict policy that requires its workers to work less than 25 hours per week or be fired in order to avoid Obamacare.

The company claims this policy has been in place for years, but I suspect this is not quite true. What is true is that Obamacare has significantly crippled American industry by imposing such oppressive costs and regulations on growing businesses that businesses have been forced to stop growing in order to survive.

But don’t worry. Just days ago the Democrats in Congress stood firm and once again voted in unison in favor of keeping Obamacare the law of the land. No repeals of any kind if they have they way!

Finding out what’s in it: The Obamacare website allows the personal data of users to be gathered by commercial advertising companies like Google, Twitter, and Yahoo.

I should add that this is only a minor invasion of privacy. Much worse is the federal government’s insistence that your actual medical record, required on Obamacare to be digitized, shall be made available to scientists for research purposes, without asking your permission.

Finding out what’s in it: A new study has found that small businesses are increasingly not offering health insurance to their employees since Obamacare went into effect.

The survey, conducted by Assistant Professor of Economics Leslie Muller, focused on companies that have fewer than 50 employees. Companies of that size are not mandated by the ACA to offer insurance to employees. “Small firms have faced, traditionally faced, higher costs so they’ve been strapped for a while. That doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the ACA it just has to do with the fact that health care costs have been raising it’s been particularly hard on the small firms,” Muller said.

The Survey found that of small businesses that offered health insurance over the past two years, only 40 percent plan to offer insurance in 2015 and only 28 percent in 2016.

Finding out what’s in it: Based on how the law was written, the Obamacare penalties for not having insurance will jump significantly in the next two years, going from trivial to serious.

The fines for the 2014 year were relatively modest — $95 per person or 1 percent of household income (above the threshold for filing taxes), whichever is more. But insurance scofflaws face a sharp increase if they don’t get covered soon. The fine will jump in 2015 to $325 or 2 percent of income, whichever is higher. By 2016, the average fine will be about $1,100, based on government figures.

But don’t worry, that’s not all. The law is also going to impact small businesses badly in 2015.

So, explain to me again why you voted for the Democrats who created this law?

Link here. The quote below illustrates nicely the madness of asking the government to run healthcare, or any other complicated aspect of life:

With the state-run exchanges coming down the pike I realized that, at least in the first year, I would be able to purchase health insurance at a reasonable price. So I left my employer in July 2013 and launched my consulting firm. In November 2013, I duly filled out my application to purchase insurance on the D.C. health exchange. After that, nothing happened: The only further communication I received from the exchange was a flurry of letters and emails informing me I had the right to have my communications from the D.C. exchange sent to me in any of 20 different languages, including Irish and Navajo.

After a number of ignored emails and phone calls, I contacted a health insurance “facilitator” to see if she could help me. No dice. She did manage to make the D.C. government verify that the information I had sent them—copies of passports, utility bills, and tax statements—showed that my family did exist and resided in the District, but we still weren’t able to buy insurance going into 2014.

The D.C. exchange assured me that they would straighten things out by mid-January and allow me to buy insurance retroactive to January 1. But it wasn’t until mid-March that we managed to buy insurance. And actually paying for insurance did not end our travails: The exchange mistakenly applied my payments for March and April to January and February instead, which led to our insurance being canceled on April 1, necessitating another flurry of calls and letters. A few months later we received a letter again threatening us with immediate cancellation unless I delivered copies of our passports. Resolving this one was trickier because, upon calling the exchange, the people there denied such a notice was sent until I forwarded a copy to them.

One statistic from my enrollment efforts: In four consecutive months, I spent over 500 minutes on the phone with either the D.C. health exchange or the health insurance company we selected.

Recently, with premium increases for 2015 presumably about to be announced, I thought it might make sense to go on the exchange’s website and see if they had updated prices for competing plans. After 20 minutes of trying to log in without success, I gave up, vowing never to get on the site again.

Even if he could have logged on, he would have had problems finding out the prices for the 2015 plans. Obama did not want those prices revealed prior to the election. While a private business’s only concern would be providing service to its customers so they were willing to buy its product, a government-run operation always has to deal with the political concerns of politicians, which warps its ability to serve its customers.