A Troubling Trend In Congressional Hearings

The source of this story is an article in today’s Washington Examiner written by Byron York.  Representative Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, has asked some of the nation’s top corporate executives to appear before his committee on April 21 to explain their statements that the new healthcare reform bill will cost their companies hundreds of millions of dollars in healthcare expenses. 

According to the article: 

“Waxman’s demands for documents are far-reaching. “To assist the Committee with its preparation for the hearing,” he wrote to Stephenson, “we request that you provide the following documents from January 1, 2009, through the present:

“(1) any analyses related to the projected impact of health care reform on AT&T; and (2) any documents, including e-mail messages, sent to or prepared or reviewed by senior company officials related to the projected impact of health care reform on AT&T. We also request an explanation of the accounting methods used by AT&T since 2003 to estimate the financial impact on your company of the 28 percent subsidy for retiree drug coverage and its deductibility or nondeductibility, including the accounting methods used in preparing the cost impact statement released by AT&T this week.”

This is a further attempt by the Democrats in Congress to intimidate corporate leaders who are speaking out about the negative effect of the healthcare reform bill on their businesses.  These documents are considered confidential within a company, but if the executives refuse to provide them, they risk subpoenas and threats from Chairman Waxman. 

The problem that the corporations are experiencing is due to the repeal of the provision in the 2003 Medicare prescription bill that provided a tax break to corporations that continued providing prescription drug covereage to their retirees, keeping the retirees out of the Medicare system–thus saving the government money.  Now that the healthcare reform bill ends that tax break, it will be more expensive for corporations to provide that coverage.  It is quite possible that private companies will stop providing that benefit, thus forcing more people into Medicare at a time when the bill also cuts Medicare spending.

The bottom line here is that people will lose jobs or not be hired because the cost of doing business for these (and other) corporations will go up.  If the healthcare reform law stands (and is not repealed and replaced), we can expect unemployment to remain in the 10 percent range.  That is not the way America does business.