"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
~ Ronald Reagan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhYJS80MgYA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhYJS80MgYA
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"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
~ Ronald Reagan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhYJS80MgYA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhYJS80MgYA
Duke University: 44% of U.S. firms consider cutting health care to current workers
By Paul Bedard | FEBRUARY 5, 2014 AT 1:07 PM
Adding to a devastating CBO report of how Obamacare could damage the economy, a Duke University survey of top companies found that 44 percent are considering reducing health benefits to current employees due to Obamacare, confirming the fears of millions of American workers. In its December survey of chief financial officers around the country, Duke also found that nearly half are “reluctant to hire full-time employers because of the Affordable Care Act.”
And 40 percent are considering shifting to part-time workers and others will hire fewer workers of fire some to avoid the costs of the program.
What’s more, they said in the study, “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.”
Without the law, the CFOs told Duke that they would hire more full-time workers.
The survey adds to the Congressional Budget Office’s study in raising new questions about the economic impact of Obamacare. Both give Republicans ammunition to continue their efforts to repeal the program that has upset how millions of Americans get health insurance. The survey was initially released in December and re-released Wednesday to provide context to the CBO report.
Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business Professor Campbell R. Harvey said that the school’s survey shows that the economic hit the CBO warned of will be worse. “Our survey shows that the situation is much more serious because employers tell us that they will choose not to hire and may lay people off,” he said. “I doubt the advocates of this legislation anticipated the negative impact on employment. The impact on the real economy is astonishing. Nearly one-third of firms may either terminate employees or hire fewer people in the future as a direct result of ACA.”
His colleague John Graham said in a statement promoting the survey, “An unintended consequence of the Affordable Care Act will be a reduction in full-time employment growth in the United States. Companies plan to increase full-time employment by 1.4 percent in 2014, a rate of growth which is down from last quarter and unlikely to put a dent in the unemployment rate, assuming that the labor force participation rate remains constant. CFOs indicate that full-time employment growth would be stronger in the absence of the ACA.”
http://washingtonexaminer.com/duke-u...rticle/2543506
See the full survey here. http://www.cfosurvey.org/
BREAKING: Admin delays portions of Obamacare for employers w/ 50-99 workers for an additional year
The latest unexpected ACA delay I think fits into the argument in this piece from last week. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...s_biggest.html
Quote:
It's weird the Obama administration keeps delaying their great healthcare law until after elections.
What the CBO Report Tells You About Obamacare
There is nothing more certain than people’s fear of uncertainty.[/B]
By John Dickerson
When you get an envelope from your insurance company, it can contain a variety of surprises. Sometimes a check falls out. The claim was paid quickly—and they covered more than you expected. This is rare. More often you open the envelope and unfurl a multipage form that reads “this is not a check and isn’t likely to be a check any time soon.” That isn’t the literal wording, but it’s the reasonable conclusion you reach after trying to parse the jargon, following the code at the bottom of the page, and reading the grayed out boilerplate on the back of the letter. Or, you get a notice from your insurance company telling you that your coverage is going to change. You don’t know exactly what that means, but you’re pretty sure that it won’t lead to more happy surprises in the future.
These types of experiences have their analogue in the life of the Affordable Care Act. As it has come into being, the legislation has delivered both good and bad surprises. Recently the big surprises have been bad. The website didn’t work, portions of the law had to be delayed, people who were promised they could keep their coverage couldn’t, and there have been headaches for those who have signed up that have continued beyond the website. On Tuesday the administration had to manage another surprise when the Congressional Budget Office predicted the Affordable Care Act would have a “substantially larger” impact on the labor market than it had previously expected: The law would reduce the workforce in 2021 by the equivalent of 2.3 million full-time workers, three times more than the 800,000 originally anticipated.
Debate immediately raged over what that number really meant. It didn’t mean that 2.3 million jobs were being lost, which is how ACA opponents framed the news. The CBO said this explicitly and Republican Budget Chairman Paul Ryan was clear to make this case too at his hearing with the CBO director Wednesday. The law would lead to a reduction in hours, which would come from people choosing not to work.
So one parent in a couple could stop working so hard to get health insurance, replacing those hours spent at the office with time at home with the kids. Older workers who risk their health to keep working to get benefits could stop. But not all of the decisions will be voluntary. People who want to work more won't work because as they earn more, their subsidy will decrease, creating a tax. That is a natural result of any social policy where benefits taper off as wages increase. The news ratified the longstanding claims by opponents of the ACA that the law would change the incentives for work—in this case trading work for a new entitlement.
The Congressional Budget Office did not try to parse out exactly how many of the fewer hours will be a choice people will be happy about and how many will be a choice forced on them. As the report says, “The CBO’s estimate of the ACA’s impact on labor markets is subject to substantial uncertainty, which arises in part because many of the ACA’s provisions have never been implemented on such a broad scale and in part because available estimates of many key responses vary considerably.” In other words: Big surprises are coming. Regardless of where you come down on the specifics of the report—will it mean job losses or greater flexibility—the report was a reminder that when you unleash a law that affects this much of the economy, it creates a lot of uncertainty.
In this specific instance, the CBO says the uncertainty described in its report will fall on a lot of lower-income people who might very well be happy they have insurance for the first time in their lives. They may also be healthier people—the report is predicting behavior several years from now—since these people will have been covered for a few years and perhaps taken advantage of preventive care. So as a political matter, the people directly affected by the policy may reward the politicians who brought it to them.
But what about the people not necessarily affected by the law but worried about the uncertainty? This group involves those with high incomes who won't receive subsidies or who already have policies. They won't be affected by the subsidies that play the largest role in the changes the CBO is predicting, but that may not reduce their political nervousness. These voters are a problem today for the reason they always have been: They see the ACA not as an engine of great new benefits but as an unpredictable force that could disrupt the coverage that they have. The CBO report—and the reaction to it—reanimates their underlying fear about the law: When the government initiates huge changes, it creates tremors that may affect me even though I was promised they wouldn't.
This is the fix for Democrats running for re-election during the Affordable Care Act rollout. They can find information in the CBO report that helps their case, like the fact that the law has led to no increase in part-time work as detractors have prophesied or that the provision Republicans bash as an "insurance company bailout” actually brings in money, but they also have to address every new round of jitters, which cannot simply be dismissed as the creation of partisan Republicans.
One sensible approach might be to wait until the law is implemented and stop jumping at the smallest hints about what the future might hold. Or we could at least wait for insurance companies to publish their new premium costs in May. Then we'll know if the law is causing prices to increase. Or we could wait until the fall to see how many more people are now insured. Then we can use that data to make a claim about whether the whole thing was worth it.
That case for patience is one that administration advisers are making, but they are on shaky ground since they have been projecting their own sense of false certainty about the future, too. After a string of bad ACA surprises, administration officials started touting a good surprise: Health care costs have been declining because of the law, they say. A check may not have fallen out of your last envelope, but the check is in the mail … really.
The problem with this nice surprise is that it requires a mix of optimism and creative thinking. It’s clear that health care expenditures have slowed, but a 2013 Kaiser study said the majority of the reduction in health spending came from the recession, not the ACA. Medicare actuaries reached the same conclusion: “There is no discernible impact of the [ACA] legislation on aggregate health spending trends.” The administration’s case, which can be found here, relies on a different way of measuring health care costs.
If the administration is going to make a case about the future of health care costs based on evanescent evidence, then it can’t complain about people who see doom in these new CBO numbers. The best the administration can argue is that we don’t know what the future holds, but that’s not likely to calm people’s jitters about what might appear in tomorrow’s envelope.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BgJI1H-CQAApfsw.jpg
This is our government at work. These are all the lies that were told. The news media supported it 100% without investigating the bill itself; and now we are finally learning the truth. How sad!
A montage of the lies that were told to sell Obamacare (Powerful Video)
By Steve Straub On February 12, 2014
http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/o...powerful-video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ql3SXU82WyY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=ql3SXU82WyY
Do you think the electorate will pay the Democratic party back for the lies that were told to sell Obamacare and for the disastrous and incompetent roll-out?
Oh yeah, about covering pre-existing conditions under ObamaCare, um…not so much.
People with serious pre-existing diseases, precisely those the president aimed to help with ObamaCare, could find themselves paying for expensive drug treatments with no help from the health care exchanges.
Those with expensive diseases such as lupus or multiple sclerosis face something called a “closed drug formulary.”
Dr. Scott Gottlieb of the American Enterprise Institute explains, “if the medicine that you need isn’t on that list, it’s not covered at all. You have to pay completely out of pocket to get that medicine, and the money you spend doesn’t count against your deductible, and it doesn’t count against your out of pocket limits, so you’re basically on your own.”
The plan had claimed it would rescue those with serious pre-existing conditions.
“So it could be that a MS patient could be expected to pay $62,000 just for one medication,” says Dr. Daniel Kantor, who treats MS patients and others with neurological conditions near Jacksonville, Florida. “That’s a possibility under the new ObamaCare going on right now.”
http://liberallogic101.com/?p=7417
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014...xpensive-drug/
When are they going to do the right thing and scrap this junk. Oh yeah, they won't. They are making too much $$$$
Me
Colorado Health-Exchange Director Indicted for Fraud, Theft
By Jillian Kay Melchior February 13, 2014 11:55 AM
The director of Colorado’s health exchange has been placed on administrative leave after the state discovered she had been indicted for stealing from a non-profit, the Denver Post reports: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_25...#ixzz2tDjBaB1k
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner...n-kay-melchiorQuote:
[Christa Ann] McClure, 51, pleaded not guilty Feb. 6 in federal District Court in Montana to eight counts of theft and fraud from a nonprofit housing agency in Billings.
She was indicted Jan. 16 and notified her current Denver employer, the state-sponsored health exchange, on Monday, a few days after the story broke in Montana media, Connect for Health spokesman Ben Davis said in a telephone interview.
Connect for Health performed a criminal background check and checked references before hiring McClure in March, Davis said.
“She was completely clean,” he said. Her position as executive director of Housing Montana of Billings, he said, made her well-qualified for her post as Connect for Health’s director of partner engagement — she was liaison with state and federal partners, such as Medicaid officials. The job pays $130,000 a year.
… McClure, who has not been convicted of any charges, should have informed Connect for Health much earlier of the accusations she was facing, Davis said.
McClure was released pending trial, now scheduled for June. Each of the counts in the indictment against her carry potential penalties of five, 10 or 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
The 12-page indictment alleges that, while serving as executive director of the federally funded Housing Montana, McClure, between 2008 and 2010, paid herself “significant sums” for consulting services, although she was already on the payroll as a full-time employee.
She also made payments to her family and used federal money for personal travel, to pay family bills and to buy consulting services, the indictment alleges.
She also is accused of charging homeowners for a $750 warranty that did not exist, converting a laptop for personal use, inflating the hours she was to be compensated and writing herself a $21,000 check to which she was not entitled.
The indictment did not specify the total amount she allegedly embezzled.
COLORADO AFA EXCHANGE DIRECTOR A FRAUD (Made a cool $130K per year!) Now indicted for fraud, theft, for stealing from a non-profit
What's hilarious is the CONGRESS who perpetrated this fraud called Obamacare and Obama himself still walk free. The irony! The hypocrisy, the epic FAIL!! (Imagine that! No background checks were done by the HHS!)
This is not The Onion; the White House actually slated "National Youth Enrollment Day" for Obamacare the same day that the website would be offline. SHARE if you can't believe that the White House is that incompetent!
http://bzfd.it/1cz6Lwz
https://scontent-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hpho...94046075_n.jpg
Youth Obamacare Enrollment Groups Surprised To Learn Obamacare Website Won’t Work On National Youth Enrollment Day
“Obviously, it’s unfortunate,” says one youth enrollment leader.
The Obama administration is giving applicants who save applications on Feb. 15 extra time to work around downtime on the site.
posted on February 12, 2014 at 3:13pm EST
WASHINGTON — Saturday is National Youth Enrollment Day for Obamacare, a day designed to help make up for youth recruitment time lost while HealthCare.gov was down last year. It will be marked by a broad array of events, from Head Start information sessions to pub crawls.
The day will also feature a HealthCare.gov outage that came as a surprise to the White House allies who have been planning Feb. 15 enrollment activities for weeks.
“We just found that out,” said Aaron Smith, co-founder of the recruitment group Young Invincibles. “Obviously it’s unfortunate.”
“It’s not ideal,” another Obamacare ally said.
With the website’s enrollment system down, the administration is extending the Feb. 15 enrollment deadline for coverage by March 1, the official said, to Feb. 18.
“For those who are unable to finish signing up on Saturday but still want coverage starting March 1, [the Center for Medicaid Services] is allowing people to save their applications and finish enrolling on Feb. 18 and still have their coverage start on March 1,” the official said. “Usually you have to finish by the 15th of a month to have your coverage start at the beginning of the next month.”
Smith and other advocates participating in National Youth Enrollment Day said they found out about the scheduled HealthCare.gov outage — caused by maintenance to Social Security data verification services over the long President’s Day weekend — when everyone else did, in a Monday release from the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Obamacare website outage begins at 3 p.m. ET and carries on through Tuesday at 5 a.m. ET. While the Social Security system is down for maintenance, HealthCare.gov users will not be able to formally send in an application for health insurance, though they will be able to browse plans and, the enrollment groups say, calculate what insurance will cost for their family.
A functioning website has always been pitched by the administration and its allies as key to securing youth enrollment in health care. It’s not the most important thing, they say — affordability information is the key to getting youth enrollment. But a working website is a key piece to the puzzle.
The timing of the outage and the services that will remain functional on Healthcare.gov means the website downtime, though a clear optics problem for an enrollment team trying to tell young people the broken website they’ve heard so much about actually works, won’t have much of an impact on National Enrollment Day, Smith and other advocates said.
“The maintenance starts at 3 p.m., which is fortunate because most of our enrollment events start in the morning,” said Smith. “The night events are more about education and information.”
There are hundreds of events scheduled for National Youth Enrollment Day across the country aimed at reaching a very broad population of the young and uninsured. In Austin, Texas, events on National Youth Enrollment day include an event at an African-American Heritage Festival, an enrollment event at a Baptist church, a neighborhood health care fair, and an “ACA pub crawl” starting at a bar called The Liberty.
The Obamacare recruitment groups say they’ll have paper applications ready for those who can’t use the website to apply and will direct potential enrollees to Navigators during the outage.
For its part, the Obama administration says everything’s going ahead as planned with National Youth Enrollment Day, despite the inconvenient outage to HealthCare.gov.
“National Youth Enrollment day is still happening,” an administration official said. “This is one of many on-the-ground efforts to help young adults enroll in coverage by March 31, the end of open enrollment.”
The deadline extension from Feb. 15 to 18 will help, say the White House allies. But the real source of their confidence is the experience they’ve already had trying to get young people to enroll in Obamacare while the website is down.
“Given that we worked around the website being down for two months we’ll be able to work around it,” one White House ally said of this weekend’s outage.
Smith said his recruiters are battle-hardened when it comes to convincing people health care is working while the health care website is not.
“You got to remember we went through a first month where folks were saying the website’s never going to work,” said Smith. “We roll with the punches. This is really not a big deal for us.”
Update (2/12/14):
An HHS official sought to clarify Wednesday the enrollment downtime on Healthcare.gov and rejected the term “outage” to describe the loss of functionality at HealthCare.gov. Applicants who “filled out the application, got their eligibility determination before 3 p.m., they can still shop and choose a plan and finishing enrolling anytime even after 3 p.m. ET,” the official said in an email. Would-be enrollees who begin the process of enrollment on National Youth Enrollment Day and do not receive their eligibility determination by 3 p.m. ET — or don’t begin the signup process until after 3 p.m. ET — will not be able to sign up for health insurance through the website until the enrollment system comes back online.
Update (2/12/14 7:27 p.m.):
The Department of Health and Human Services said Wednesday that the extra time to sign up is not an extension of the deadline.
“The deadline isn’t being ‘extended,’” an HHS official said in an email. “If you have saved your application and wanted to complete your application on the 15th, but couldn’t, you can contact our call center starting on the 18th to request a March 1 start date.”
In the email Wednesday, HHS clarified that new enrollees would need to save an application by the end of the day on Feb. 15 to qualify for the additional application time. “An individual needs to call the call center and explain that they started on the 15th after 3 p.m. and could not finish,” an official said. “We will check against our information in our system.”
http://www.buzzfeed.com/evanmcsan/yo...-learn-obamaca
https://scontent-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hpho...51086803_n.jpg
ObamaCare is causing financial stress for many Americans.
Tell us how ObamaCare impacting you.
Share your story here: http://bit.ly/1mhiM3q
More Lies from Obama Regarding Obamacare Enrollment Numbers
February 13, 2014 By Jennifer Burke
Barack Obama has worked tirelessly to spin the numbers related to Obamacare in order to prop up his failed signature legislation. Americans were told ‘if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep your health insurance plan”. They learned the hard way that is not true. They were told that Obamacare would lower the costs for every American family by at least $2500. Once again, Americans learned the hard way that is not true.
Now, the numbers provided by Barack Obama and his HHS regarding the number of enrollees in Obamacare have come under fire as false. Those leveling the charges are in the insurance industry who state that the number of enrollees are inflated. Ed Henry, of FOX News, reports.
The Obama administration’s latest rosy scenario about 3.3 million consumers signing up for health care plans is facing skepticism from top insurance industry officials, who estimate that somewhere in the range of 10 to 25 percent of those “enrollees” actually have not yet paid their premiums and are not fully enrolled.
http://www.tpnn.com/2014/02/13/more-....BNmID1Uk.dpufQuote:
“The numbers are not as high as 3.3 million — it’s lower,” one senior insurance industry source told FOX News. “Those numbers are inflated. The question is how much.”
Industry officials tell Fox that some insurance companies have privately reported up to 30 percent of enrollees have not paid up, while other companies believe a higher percentage of customers have taken care of their premiums. The senior insurance industry source suggested it averages out to roughly 10 to 25 percent of enrollees not yet paying into the system, and thus those individuals do not really have insurance.
Scenarios for not paying include people who went through the struggles of logging on to HealthCare.gov and eventually decided it was not worth it to go through the final steps of payment, and others who may simply not be able to afford the premiums. Industry officials believe others have gone through the process of choosing a plan and simply have not gotten around to writing a check, but eventually may make the payment to complete the process and wind up being a success story.