Why The Republicans Need To Repeal ObamaCare

Hot Air posted an article yesterday reporting that according to the Congressional Budget Office, ObamaCare will cost about $50,000 per person.

The article reports:

If you want to read the report yourself, it’s tucked away back in Appendix B of the document. (.pdf format) The total bill over ten years is closing in on the two trillion mark, and the various taxes and fees imposed under Obamacare are only going to make up for $643B of it. So I guess we really did have to pass the bill to find out what was in it.

The article concludes:

The plan is covering 27 million people with estimates of that growing by 25% over the next decade. A mid-range quality health care plan through most employers – including the employer contribution – can be had for roughly $5,400 per year. That works out to a little less than 150 billion dollars to just buy all of those people a health plan under the old system and the insurers would have been thrilled. The crippled, complicated government web site could have been stripped down to just ask how much you make each year and, based on that, issue you a voucher for a health insurance plan from a company that covers your area. We wouldn’t have liked it, but it would have come in at one heck of a cheaper rate and the debate would be over.

Rather than an exit question, we’ll just close with an observation. You were lied to. Again.

At some point, we need to elect a Congress that understands that the private sector does things better. It would have been much cheaper and easier to set up a system of tax refunds for health care premiums run by the private sector. The plan could easily have included insurance for children in college, portability across state lines, tort reform, and other ways to insure the previously uninsured. Unfortunately, Congress had a better idea–which wasn’t.

 

Adding To The Confusion Of ObamaCare

CNN posted an article today about how the subsidies paid to ObamaCare subscribers are going to impact their taxes. No one told them this was going to be taxable!

The article reports:

Obamacare enrollees who received subsidies to help pay for coverage will soon have to reconcile how much they actually earned in 2014 with how much they estimated when they applied many, many months ago.

This will likely lead to some very unhappy Americans. Those who underestimated their income either will receive smaller tax refunds or will owe the IRS money.

That’s because subsidies are actually tax credits and are based on annual income, but folks got their 2014 subsidy before knowing exactly what they’d make in 2014. So you’ll have to reconcile the two with the IRS during the upcoming tax filing season.

Filing taxes has never been any fun–ObamaCare just made it worse.

Subsidies were what kept the cost of ObamaCare down for subscribers:

We’re not talking chump change. Those who applied through the federal exchange received an average monthly subsidy of $264, according to the most recent figures reported by the Obama administration. They only had to pay $82 a month, on average, for coverage, Roughly 85% of total enrollees received help with insurance premiums. The administration last month said 2014 enrollment was 6.7 million.

Those who underestimated their earnings could owe thousands of dollars, though there is a $2,500 cap for those who remain eligible for subsidies. The threshold for eligibility is based on income – $45,900 for an individual and $94,200 for a family in 2014.

In June, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether or not subsidies can be given in states that did not create healthcare exchanges. If the ruling says no, we can expect total chaos in the healthcare sector of the economy while everyone regroups. Meanwhile, the taxman cometh!

Some Goods News From The Government Accountability Office

The Washington Examiner posted an article today about the Obama Administration’s plan to bail out insurance companies in case of losses due to ObamaCare (see rightwinggranny.com).

The article reports:

The Department of Health and Human Services cannot legally bail out the insurance industry for excessive losses through President Obama’s health care law unless the U.S. Congress approves language allowing the administration to do so, according to a legal opinion released on Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office.

The ruling could end up provoking a showdown between the White House and Congressional Republicans over Obamacare that has the potential to affect health insurance premiums.

The part of ObamaCare that is impacted by this decision is the “risk corridors” program. This is the program that was set up because ObamaCare chose to ignore the concept of the actuary tables that insurance companies use to determine risk and calculate insurance premiums. Under ObamaCare insurers are required to offer coverage to those with pre-existing conditions and limited in how much they can charge older and sicker patients. Like it or not, insurance is a business. Insurance companies need a reasonable profit margin in order to stay in business. When the government skews the actuary tables and fixes rates, the companies cannot exist without government subsidies. Either the subsidies will be paid or America will quickly morph into government health care (we saw how well that worked with the VA).

The article concludes:

In practice, this ruling may not make much of a difference. There’s no guarantee that Republicans will invite a confrontation with Obama over this, fearing that it would allow Democrats to shift blame to the GOP for any premium spikes that would result. The GAO opinion is not legally binding, and the Obama administration could simply choose to ignore it. It’s also possible that this won’t be an issue at all if — as the administration has insisted — payments collected from the program will be sufficient to cover any insurer losses. But the GAO opinion does provide more fuel to the argument of Republicans such as Sessions and Upton that the ultimate authority for covering any excess insurer losses rests with Congress.

Under Obamacare, the risk corridors program is scheduled to be operational for the 2014 through 2016 calendar years.

Unless we elect a Congress with the guts to stand up against this raiding of taxpayer money to support a plan that will not work, we will continue to see government spending grow out of control and government take more and more control of our lives. Your vote counts in November. Think about who and what you choose to support.

A Federal Appeals Court Rules On Subsidies

NBC News is reporting today that a Federal Appeals Court in Washington, D. C., has ruled that  that the Patient Protection and  Affordable Care Act, (ObamaCare), as written, only allows insurance subsidies in states that have set up their own exchanges. This ruling invalidated an Internal Revenue Service regulation that allowed subsidies in all 50 states. Thirty-six states did not set up the exchanges required by ObamaCare, so the federal government set up exchanges in those states. The court ruled that the federal government may not pay subsidies for insurance plans in those states.

The article reports:

Today’s decision reaffirms that the administration cannot rewrite the health law that was passed and it stops the Internal Revenue Service from doing the same,” said Andrew Kloster of the conservative Heritage Foundation. “The statute is clear in the Affordable Care Act that the subsidies are to be directed only to states that elected to set up insurance exchanges.”

This is actually the problem with the law–it has been rewritten as we go along. Mandates have been postponed, the stay-in-your-home provision for the elderly has been dropped altogether, and exemptions have been handed out left and right. It will be interesting to see if another Executive Order promptly makes its appearance.

One of the effects of ObamaCare (intended or otherwise) is the redistribution of wealth–it takes affordable healthcare away from those who already had insurance–some rates have gone up as much as $7,000 or $8,000 per year for people not eligible for subsidies, and provides subsidies for people with lower incomes (without demanding income verification). In one state, people whose incomes were well above the poverty level were eligible for subsidies, but one wonders if those subsidies will decrease after ObamaCare is fully operational.

It will be interesting to see if this decision stands–it will wind up in the Supreme Court.

 

Something To Consider

Be forewarned–this is going to be a controversial article, but it is definitely something to think about.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. A website called The Bunker quotes off the record remarks he made at the time:

”These Negroes, they‘re getting pretty uppity these days and that‘s a problem for us since they‘ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we‘ve got to do something about this, we‘ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.” ~Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat)

President Lyndon Baines Johnson, And is “Great Society” to help the Negro… was recorded on a White House taped (and saved) conversation claiming, “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.”

In a January 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal, Walter Williams stated:

Even in the antebellum era, when slaves often weren’t permitted to wed, most black children lived with a biological mother and father. During Reconstruction and up until the 1940s, 75% to 85% of black children lived in two-parent families. Today, more than 70% of black children are born to single women. “The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn’t do, what Jim Crow couldn’t do, what the harshest racism couldn’t do,” Mr. Williams says. “And that is to destroy the black family.”

Cliven Bundy recently stated (as reported by CNN):

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” Bundy said, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids – and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch – they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” Bundy continued. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

Mr. Bundy has been accused of racism on the basis of that statement. My question is simple, “Is that statement racist, or is that statement honest?”

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

The Law Should Be The Same For Everyone

The Daily Caller posted an article today that reminds us why opposition to ObamaCare is somewhat muted in much of Washington, D.C. ObamaCare does not impact federal employees. Members of Congress and Congressional staffers will receive large taxpayer-funded subsidies for their health insurance. Those of us who do not work for the federal government or Congress will be greatly impacted by the implementation of ObamaCare.

The article reports on a proposal made by Rand Paul:

Paul’s proposal — outlawing any special exemptions for government employees — would mean all federal workers would have to purchase health insurance on the new Obamacare exchanges instead of getting taxpayer-funded subsidies. Some critics say those subsidies amount to special treatment. The Obamacare health insurance exchange opens Oct 1.

…Paul’s constitutional amendment says no federal employees should get special exemptions from laws. The senator also plans to push a proposal requiring that Congress and all federal employees rely on Obamacare for their insurance.

His proposal comes after outrage from conservatives about a so-called “exemption” for members of Congress and their staff from Obamacare.

If ObamaCare is such a wonderful thing, why do Congress and Congressional staffers need taxpayer-funded subsidies in order to participate in ObamaCare?

Enhanced by Zemanta

About That College Thing

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line posted an article yesterday about President Obama’s speech detailing his plan for higher education. The goal of the plan is to make college more affordable, tackle rising costs, and improve the value of college for students and their families. That sounds really good until you realize that federal subsidies are largely responsible for the exponential increases in college tuition in recent years. Included in the President’s plan for colleges is a federal rating system.

Mr. Mirengoff points out:

The federal rating system is unnecessary. Plenty of private outfits — most famously, U.S. News and World Report — rate colleges on a broad array of criteria. Relevant information about colleges is easy to come by, and from sources more trustworthy than ideologically-driven federal bureaucrats.

While the first elements of Obama’s plan is merely unnecessary, the second element — tying federal assistance to the federal rating system — strikes me as pernicious. First, I doubt the federal government’s ability to rate colleges with sufficient accuracy to justify attaching monetary consequences to its ratings.

Second, Obama’s plan will increase the federal government’s ability to coerce colleges into embracing even more fully a left-wing agenda — e.g., discriminating against whites in admissions and hiring, unfairly disciplining male students based on flimsy allegations of sexual harassment, and so forth.

Third, even if the federal government were able to come up with a reasonable and unbiased rating system, it would still have no business discriminating financially against the families of students who decide to attend colleges they (and the families) believe are better suited to their particular purposes.

The federal bureaucracy is already out of control. We really do not need to make it worse. The plan offered by the President does not reduce federal subsidies to colleges–it simply redistributes them. This seems to be another opportunity for the government to pick winners and losers. The government has already meddled unsuccessfully in the auto industry and in the energy industry. We don’t need to let them meddle unsuccessfully into higher education.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Is The Government Really That Naive?

Yesterday National Review posted an article about one aspect of the delay in putting the employer mandate in place that has not received a lot of attention. Since the paperwork involved in the employer mandate was to be used in determining the eligibility for government subsidies to employees in ObamaCare, there is now no way of confirming a person’s eligibility.

The article reports:

Many if not all of the state exchanges, and presumably also the federally-run exchanges, were planning to use the required employer reports to facilitate the eligibility reconciliation that you have to do at tax filing time when people receive advanceable tax credits like those set to be offered in the exchanges. If employers weren’t required to provide reports for 2014, the process of confirming eligibility (that is, confirming that people receiving subsidies had in fact not been offered affordable insurance coverage at work) would become more difficult to pull off, since it’s not really clear what other data sources the exchanges would have, and the exchange subsidy system would therefore become that much more difficult to manage.

The article explains the government’s solution to the lack of confirmation which will result from the delay in the employer mandate:

In 2014, applicants can more or less be deemed eligible for subsidies in the state-run exchanges if they say they are eligible. If it has no external sources of information regarding what insurance employers offer, the rule states, “the exchange may accept the applicant’s attestation regarding enrollment in an eligible employer-sponsored plan and eligibility for qualifying coverage in an employer-sponsored plan for the benefit year for which coverage is requested without further verification.” In fact, the exchanges are not only released from the obligation to verify whether applicants are eligible for employer coverage, they are also released from the obligation to confirm applicants’ statements regarding their household incomes before providing them with what is supposed to be an income-based benefit.

So is this actually about? In order to work at all, ObamaCare needs Americans to enroll in their state’s healthcare exchanges–this is the government-run healthcare program. If the penalties for employers for not providing health insurance are dropped, theoretically employers will begin to drop health insurance as a benefit. This forces people to seek health insurance elsewhere (as the personal mandate to carry health insurance is still in place). If the exchanges are set up with built-in subsidies based on income and you don’t have to verify your income, getting your health insurance through the exchanges while claiming an income within the range of subsidies is like free money.

It is my hope that Americans would not lie about their income in order to save money, but that is a hope–I’m not that naive. However, the government is.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Picking Winners And Losers With The Tax Code

One of the things that would be really good about passing Paul Ryan’s budget plan (it won’t happen–but it would be really good) would be that the government would lose its power to pick winners and losers in the American economy. That’s one of the reasons Paul Ryan’s budget will never pass–Congress and the President do not want to give up the power to control people through the tax code. However, every now and then, someone in the Senate actually does something smart in terms of taxes. The Senate (in a 51-47 vote)  has nixed the President’s plan to raise taxes on oil companies (which of course would raise the price of gasoline at the pump).

The New American posted a few thoughts on the Senate vote today:

“This bill is pretty simple: we end wasteful subsidies to the big five oil companies and we use those proceeds to invest in clean energy, in creating jobs, and reducing the deficit,” Menendez said Monday when introducing the bill. “I think the American people are sick and tired of paying ridiculously high gasoline prices at the pump and then paying big oil again with … taxpayer subsidies.”

However, as Bob Adelman asserted last May in The New American, there is a grave difference between tax breaks and what Obama and Menendez characterize as “subsidies.” “The echo chamber of the mainstream media and liberal Democrats merely confirms their attempt to confuse the issue to promote their agenda,” Adelman affirmed. “Subsidies and tax breaks are different entities entirely, and getting the terms wrong means getting it all wrong.”

As stated above–these are not subsidies–subsidies are what we are paying to alternative energy companies that keep going broke or shipping their business to China. Not only are these not subsidies–they are tax breaks that all companies routinely get.

The article concludes:

But Menendez goes a step further, and calls the oil tax breaks “wasteful subsidies.” Is this contrary to the clean-energy industry’s un-wasteful subsidies? Obama’s Energy Department has dished out billions of dollars in “green” subsidies, to companies like SpectraWatt, Eastern Energy, Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, and the controversial Solyndra — which all ended up in bankruptcy. These five companies, along with seven others, are now in financial disarray, after collectively reaping more than $6.5 billion in taxpayer-backed government assistance.

In effect, one might suggest that Obama and Menendez are pointing their fingers in the wrong direction.

The Obama Administration has never actually had a successful energy policy. It is unrealistic to think that they will develop one at this point.

 

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

A Surefire Way To Increase The Price Of Gas

Yesterday CNS News posted an article about the White House’s plan to end the tax breaks oil companies currently receive. Obviously, this will increase the tax burden on the oil companies. As I have previously stated–corporations don’t pay taxes–they simply pass them on to the consumer. Guess what? This is a recipe for even higher gas prices at the pump.

The article reports:

“From our perspective, it’s a fairness issue,” Zichal (Heather Zichal, deputy assistant to the president for energy and climate change) said. “At a time when we’re making difficult decisions about the budget and where to make investments and where to cut, the fact that oil and gas companies are making record profits and at the same time getting $4 billion in subsidies annually, those subsidies should be repealed. The president has called for that, and I believe the Senate will be acting to vote on this as well.”

What about fairness to the consumers who need to gas to get to work?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Solar Energy In Germany

As Americans learn about the amount of money the Obama Administration is spending to subsidize solar energy, there is an interesting report posted at The Association of Mature American Citizens website

The article reports:

Germany invested  gargantuan amounts of money in green energy, doling out more than 130 billion in  subsidies to install solar systems and spends an additional 10 billion per year  subsidizing existing solar installations.

Yet after all of this capital  expenditure, Germany has little to show in terms of reducing green house gasses  and helping the country’s power needs. Despite massive investment, solar power  accounts for approximately three percent of Germany’s total energy… when the  sun shines!  To add insult to injury, Germans also pay the second highest  price for electricity in the developed world, due mainly to the fact that they  are heavily subsidizing green energy by adding the cost to everyone’s utility  bills.

The article explains that Germany will be phasing out subsidies for solar energy over the next five years.

The article further reports:

According to Der Spiegel, members of Chancellor Merkel’s staff are  describing the policy as a massive money pit. Philipp Rösler, Germany’s minister  of economics and technology, has called the spiraling solar subsidies a “threat  to the economy.”

We need to learn from Germany’s experience.

.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Have They Really Thought This Through ?

The Obama Administration is using taxpayer money to subsidize electric cars. John Hinderaker at Power Line posted an article yesterday that pointed out that only 29 percent of Americans support those subsidies. Please follow the link to see a wonderful cartoon that explains exactly how electric cars work! The article at Power Line reminds us where the electricity for electric cars comes from–coal-fired power plants.

The article points out:

Note, too, that as the Obama administration feverishly tries to put power plants out of business with onerous new regulations, the effect will be to force the cost of driving electric vehicles higher and higher.

Man has been looking for the perpetual motion machine for centuries. We haven’t found it yet. Meanwhile, the Obama Administration is attempting to subsidize it!

Enhanced by Zemanta

At Least They Got It Half Right

Investors.com reported yesterday that the Congress has let the ethanol subsidies expire, but has not repealed the mandates requiring the use of ethanol. The money saved will go into the treasury–not to the taxpayers.

The article reminds us that ethanol is NOT good for the environment:

Farmers will do fine, but most taxpayers and consumers will not. The price of corn will remain high, continuing to be pushed higher by the forced use of ethanol in gasoline that has not expired. Food prices driven higher by this mandate will continue to rise, as will gas prices as the added cost to ethanol producers is passed down the line, paid ultimately by the consumer at the gas pump.

Ethanol was supposed to save the earth and pave the way to energy independence. It has done neither. We are more dependent more than ever on foreign sources of petroleum, used in a wide variety of products and processes as well as our cars, and increased biofuel cultivation has hurt the environment through increased use of pesticides, farmland expansion and agricultural runoff polluting our rivers and coastal waters.

It takes 1,700 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol.

Each acre of corn requires 130 pounds of nitrogen and 55 pounds of phosphorous.

Increased acreage means increased agricultural runoff that is creating aquatic dead zones in our rivers, bays and coastal areas.

The article also points out that adding ethanol to gasoline results in poorer gas mileage than gasoline without ethanol. Ethanol is not good for the environment or the economy. We need to end the ethanol mandate as well as the subsidy.

Enhanced by Zemanta