Tag: regulation

Obama threatens veto of House bill to limit EPA use of unpublished data

9:57 am

Here we go again: The House is about to vote on a Republican bill to require EPA to use only publicly available data.

The bills, introduced by a mostly Republican cast of sponsors in both the House and the Senate, would require that EPA use only publicly available, reproducible data in writing regulations and seek to remake the membership and procedures of the agency’s science advisory panels. Supporters, including industry groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, argue that the legislation would improve the transparency and soundness of how EPA uses science, making regulations less costly and more effective.

Opponents, however, are calling the bills wolves in sheep’s clothing. “I cannot support legislation that makes it easier for industry to implement their destructive playbook, because risking the health of the American people is not a game that I’m willing to play,” said Representative Paul Tonko (D–NY) at a 25 February committee meeting on the bills.

The White House has issued statements saying Obama will veto the bill. How hard to do you think John Boehner and Mitch McConnell will fight for this legislation?

2 comments

Obamacare causes insurance company to lose money

10:10 am

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.

8 comments

Obamacare taxes hit the poorest the hardest

11:20 am

Finding out what’s in it: An H&R report has found that more than half of the poorest Obamacare enrollees face a tax liability of around $500 at tax time.

The report also found that the Obamacare penalty for not having insurance is now averaging about $172. This number however will go up in future years as the full penalty is phased in.

But isn’t Obamacare the “Affordable Care Act”, as Obama and the Democrats named it? It can’t cost us more. They said so! They promised!

1 comment

Another problem with the Obamacare online system forces further delays and problems

9:25 am

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.

3 comments

Another Obamacare law delay

9:52 pm

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!

2 comments

More Obamacare website problems

9:40 pm

On the final weekend before the deadline to sign up for health insurance, the Obamacare website had a serious technical problem that prevented some people from completing their enrollment.

After you read the description below of the problem, I dare you to tell me you that we are now better off with this law:

Some people trying to get coverage hadn’t been able to get their income information electronically verified. That’s crucial because the amount of financial assistance to help pay premiums is based on people’s income.

The health care law offers health insurance to people who don’t have coverage on the job. More than 8 in 10 of those who apply qualify for help. Without it, most can’t afford the coverage. The IRS handles income verification for the HealthCare.gov website. In a statement, Hill said the problem was due to issues with “external verification sources.”

The glitch seemed to affect people with new applications. People who previously submitted their income details — but hadn’t completed the final step of picking a plan — were still able to do so.

This is a wonderful example of finding out what’s in it. The law makes the process of getting health insurance so difficult and complex, with so many different hands in the process, that it is literally impossible for problems and “glitches” (oh how I hate the bureaucratic word) not to happen. Either something is going to go wrong, or you will have to wait forever to get everyone to agree to the process.

But don’t worry. That it doesn’t work is irrelevant. It was the good intentions of Obama and the Democrats that really matter. Who cares if their ideas are stupid, unworkable, or foolish? They care!

11 comments

Unions discover Obamacare sucks

5:45 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Because of required Obamacare regulations and taxes on their union health plans, the unions representing workers at 29 west coast commercial ports are now threatening to strike and shut the ports down.

Obamacare imposes a 40 percent tax on health benefits deemed too generous by the government. Health benefits exceeding $10,200 a year in value for individuals or $27,500 for families are defined as “Cadillac” plans and are subject to the tax. Health benefits for longshoremen exceed $40,000 per employee, meaning the union would be served an enormous tax bill when the penalty is imposed in 2018. The longshoremen’s contract expired in July, 2014 and contract talks have stalled, in large part, over whether workers or employers will pay the new Obamacare tax.

But hey, these unions voted for and continue to support the Democratic Party without question, even as the Democratic Party continues to block any repeal or changes to Obamacare. To these union leaders, it all must be Bush’s fault!

2 comments

Obama administration stonewalls IRS investigation

11:50 am

Working for the Democratic Party: The Obama administration has denied an entire freedom of information request from the web news outlet The Hill in connection with the IRS scandal and the administration’s harassment of its political opponents.

The Hill asked for 2013 emails and other correspondence between the IRS and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). The request specifically sought emails from former IRS official Lois Lerner and Treasury officials, including Secretary Jack Lew, while the inspector general was working on its explosive May 2013 report that the IRS used “inappropriate criteria” to review the political activities of tax-exempt groups.

TIGTA opted not to release any of the 512 documents covered by the request, citing various exemptions in the law. The Hill recently appealed the FOIA decision, but TIGTA denied the appeal. TIGTA also declined to comment for this article.

This denial is essentially another example of the Obama administration defying the law, as they really don’t have any right to refuse to release these documents. The Freedom of Information law was expressly written to force government agencies to release documents in these kinds of circumstances, not hold them back.

1 comment

Staples cuts hours to avoid Obamacare

12:52 am

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!

0 comments

“The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever.”

9:35 am

Link here.

This is a nicely written review of some of the research that Steven Goddard, Paul Homewood, and others have done to uncover the wholesale and unjustified adjustments to the surface temperature data that have been done by scientists at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies and at NOAA. Essentially, the warming of the past half century has been faked by artificially lowering the recorded temperatures of the past while artificially raising the recorded temperatures of the present.

8 comments

The government as thief

4:43 pm

How civil forfeiture is used by government agencies to steal cash and property from innocent Americans.

More here, including this juicy story:

To the casual observer it appears that Virginia is run by violent psychopaths. That’s the takeaway from the recent report of an anti-poker SWAT team raid in Fairfax County, in which eight assault rifle-sporting police officers moved against ten card-playing civilians. The police possibly seized more than $200,000 from the game, of which 40 percent they eventually kept.

There was no indication that any of the players was armed. As a matter of fact, it appears that a gambler is more likely to be shot without provocation by the Fairfax Police than the other way around. The heavy firepower at the Fairfax raid was apparently motivated by the fact that “at times, illegal weapons are present” at such poker games, and that “Asian gangs” have allegedly targeted such events in the past. This is, then, a novel approach to law enforcement: as a matter of policy, Fairfax police now attempt to rob and steal from people before street gangs get around to doing it.

As the article notes, gambling is not against the law in Virginia, merely regulated. It appears that this regulation was used as a very flimsy excuse by the Virginia state government to rob these citizens and pocket the cash.

1 comment

Obamacare website allows commercial companies access to personal data

10:12 am

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.

0 comments

Obamacare tax mess

2:02 pm

Finding out what’s in it: The Obama administration is considering issuing more waivers to Obamacare in order to avoid a backlash for enforcing the law.

Timothy S. Jost, an expert on health law at the Washington and Lee University School of Law who supports the Affordable Care Act, said: “It will be very easy to find people who are unhappy with the new tax obligations — people who have to pay a penalty, who have to wait forever to get through to somebody at the I.R.S. or have to pay back a lot of money because of overpayments of premium tax credits.”

That the Obama administration has no legal authority to simply waive portions of the law is a fact that seems to escape the notice of the administration, the experts quoted in the article, and the reporter himself. Who cares if the law is abandoned if they can back up this unlawful President in his effort to save himself and his Democratic Party from the disaster they forced upon us all?

1 comment

Small businesses dump health insurance

9:57 am

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.

3 comments

Obamacare requirements to employers arrive in 2015

8:21 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Beginning in 2015 employers of more than fifty employees will begin to pay penalties if they do not provide healthcare in precisely the amount and quality as required by Obamacare.

I challenge anyone who reads the article above to tell me exactly what those Obamacare requirements are. They are so complicated and obtuse that no one can easily decipher them. In other words, employers are going to be under increasing pressure — pressure they have already been under for the past four years — to reduce their workforce below 50 to avoid Obamacare.

Should do wonders for the economy, eh?

3 comments

The benefits of fewer New York police arrests

10:28 pm

Link here. The author nails it, noting that many of the arrests the cops have stopped doing were probably nothing more than the harassment of citizens and did nothing to improve the city’s quality of life. The cops were doing it under orders of the government, which they are now defying.

The sad part is the police are not defying these orders because they object to the policies, but because they object to the mayor.

0 comments

New Years resolutions for climate scientists

10:31 pm

Link here.

It is frightening that 6 of the 8 resolutions begin with the words “Stop lying…” while the other two begin “Stop tampering…” and “Stop making up…” In fact, the last is probably the most disgusting, as the data shown at the link demonstrates the fraud in the climate field in as clear-cut a manner as possible.

2 comments

Penalties in Obamacare to rise in 2015

9:44 am

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?

1 comment

Shock! A Democrat actually pays attention to cost

11:47 am

Pigs fly: Vermont’s very leftwing Democratic Governor actually canceled his attempt to take over the state’s healthcare system when his experts told him how expensive it was.

Mr. Shumlin ran in 2010 on an explicit single-payer platform in the most liberal state east of California, and the plan was conceived as a model for other states. … Under the Vermont plan, all 625,000 state residents were to be automatically enrolled in the government plan, with the same benefits for all. As with Medicare, employers would be subject to a payroll tax that would reduce wages, and workers would pay a premium based on a sliding income scale.

… The state accountants estimated that his plan required an 11.5% tax on worker payroll, with no exceptions. Individuals, meanwhile, would have paid as much as 9.5% of earnings, which would have applied to everyone making more than four times the poverty level, or $102,220 for a family of four—hardly the 1%. The full $2.59 billion in necessary funding would roughly double current state revenues (about $2.85 billion today).

…His ideological comrades are rarely dissuaded by the prospect of economic damage, as ObamaCare proves. But Mr. Shumlin has succeeded in making Vermont a national model: By admitting that single payer will make health care both more expensive and less efficient, he has shown other states what not to do. [emphasis mine]

As the highlighted text notes, Democrats routinely ignore what experts tell them about the cost of their proposals, being gladly willing to bankrupt everyone else in order to impose their ideological fantasies on us. (I exclude them because the costs of their proposals are never born by them but by others.)

Governor Shumlin’s decision to abandon his plan thus makes him a rare exception that proves the rule. If only more Democrats had this much contact with reality.

0 comments
1 … 45 46 47 48 49 … 105