3 of 10 employers will stop offering health care benes due to ObamaCare by 2014

[Straw Man]

And what will the price be afterwards. 

I thought you said it OBVIOUSLY already was in effect

how about you refrain from bitching about it until you have some actual facts

[Soul Crusher]

I thought you said it OBVIOUSLY already was in effect

how about you refrain from bitching about it until you have some actual facts

Its being implemented over a number of years.   Again why the need for 2000 waivers if it's so good? 

[tonymctones]

straw please tell us how this bill is going to drive down costs when a person doesnt need to have insurance b/c the penalties are less than the premiums and there is no pre existing conditions?

insurance is a just in case business when you take out the just in case and you no longer have ppl feeding the bank for those that do get sick, what do you think will happen to those that do try to keep insurance?

[Straw Man]

Its being implemented over a number of years.   Again why the need for 2000 waivers if it's so good? 

I never said it was "so good"

I thought it was a pretty weak compromise but better than doing nothing

looks like your neighbors in Albany can't wait for it to kick in

[Soul Crusher]

I just read straws article.   Ridiculous.   Says nothing at all about obamacare.  

[Soul Crusher]

I never said it was "so good"

I thought it was a pretty weak compromise but better than doing nothing

looks like your neighbors in Albany can't wait for it to kick in

Read your own article.   

[tonymctones]

I never said it was "so good"

I thought it was a pretty weak compromise but better than doing nothing

looks like your neighbors in Albany can't wait for it to kick in

wrong sir as usual...again

straw please tell us how this bill is going to drive down costs when a person doesnt need to have insurance b/c the penalties are less than the premiums and there is no pre existing conditions?

insurance is a just in case business when you take out the just in case and you no longer have ppl feeding the bank for those that do get sick, what do you think will happen to those that do try to keep insurance?

[Straw Man]

Read your own article.   

I did

what part don't you understand?

[Straw Man]

wrong sir as usual...again

good job addressing me as sir

I have no clue what part you think is "wrong"

[Soul Crusher]

The article does not have even one sentence saying how obamacare will reduce premiums.  Not one.   Fail.

[Skip8282]

I get quite the kick out of the fact that the liberals on this board go completely deaf, blind and dumb every time someone asks them to explain why Piglosi and co. have been racking up the waivers by the hundreds. After all, it's such an awesome and perfect law!

lol, pretty funny how they chickenshit away from that.

[tonymctones]

good job addressing me as sir

I have no clue what part you think is "wrong"

the part where you think its better than the way it was...

try responding to my original post you keep dancing around

straw please tell us how this bill is going to drive down costs when a person doesnt need to have insurance b/c the penalties are less than the premiums and there is no pre existing conditions?

insurance is a just in case business when you take out the just in case and you no longer have ppl feeding the bank for those that do get sick, what do you think will happen to those that do try to keep insurance?

[Kazan]

That's not the argument you need to make.  You need to show that it can be applied via the commerce clause and that's obviously not an easily made argument.

Maybe GW or 33 could give a better guess, but IMO it's 50/50 on who's going to win with the SCOTUS.

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.

Not sure how you get the ability to force or penalize someone to buy a product from a private sector company out of that. But should this BS stand in the SCOTUS, the America we know is dead

[dario73]

Like i said.  It does not make sense for employment and insurance to go hand in hand.  It's not good for either party.  

I'm not a fan of the current health care legislation, although i do believe it is better than the zero we had before.  I am holding out for single payer coverage for all.  With no employer paying for it.  

YOU want single payer but that is not what Obama promoted through his reform. YOU can believe that is better than what we had before but the facts are that you are wrong. Why? Because it does not live up to what Obama claimed it would do. It does not reduce premiums and it does not allow people to keep their current coverage or doctor.  It creates such uncertainty as to how much it would cost companies that businesses are rushing to get waivers, already thousands of waivers have been given, and because of the uncertainty it is estimated that MILLIONS might lose their current coverage. That is NOT what Obama stated it would do. If millions lose their coverage THAT IS NOT AN IMPROVEMENT ON WHAT WE HAD BEFORE.




1 in 3 Employers Will Drop Health Benefits After ObamaCare Kicks In, Survey Finds

Published June 07, 2011

 Thirty percent of employers will definitely or probably stop offering health benefits to their employees once the main provisions of President Obama's federal health care law go into effect in 2014, a new survey finds.

The research published in the McKinsey Quarterly found that the number rises to 50 percent among employers who are highly aware of the health care law.

McKinsey and Company, which identifies itself as a management consultant that aims to help businesses run more productively and competitively, conducted the survey of more than 1,300 employers earlier this year. It said the survey spanned industries, geographies and employer sizes.

But the White House pushed back against the report.


"This report is at odds with the experts from the Congressional Budget Office, the Rand Corporation, the Urban Institute and history," a senior administration official told Fox News. "History has shown that reform motivates more businesses to offer insurance."

Health reform in Massachusetts uses a similar structure, with an exchange, a personal responsibility requirement and an employer responsibility requirement," the official said. "And the number of individuals with employer-sponsored insurance in Massachusetts has increased."

According to the survey, at least 30 percent of employers would reap financial gain from dropping coverage even if they compensated employees for the change through other benefit offerings or higher salaries.

The research notes among the new provisions that could spur employers to drop coverage is a requirement of all employers with more than 50 employees to offer health benefits to every full-timer or pay a penalty of $2,000 per worker. Those benefits must also be equal between highly compensated executives and hourly employees – requirements that will increase medical costs for many companies.

The findings are distinct from a Congressional Budget Office estimate that only about 7 percent of employees who currently get health coverage through their jobs would have to switch to subsidized-exchange polices in 2014.

The group said its variance is so wide because shifting away from employer-sponsored insurance "will be economically rational" given the "law's incentives." The law requires employers to make insurance available to low-income or part-time employees that may not otherwise be covered.

The research found that contrary to what many employers feared, most employees -- more than 85 percent -- would stay at jobs that no longer offered health benefits. But 60 percent of employees would expect higher compensation.



http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/How_US_health_care_reform_will_affect_employee_benefits_2813

[dario73]

The US Health System and How to Improve It

President Obama said back in March of 2010, ”No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what. My view is that health care reform should be guided by a simple principle: fix what’s broken and build on what works.”

However, many do not believe him. Republican John Boehner (Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives) sees it differently, ”According to experts, more than 87 million American could lose access to their current health care plan under the new law. Workers at a majority of the nation’s employers – including as many as four out of every five small businesses – would lose their current coverage, thus providing further evidence that ObamaCare is doing exactly the opposite of what Democrats promised it would do.”

http://theushealthsystem.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/will-obama-allow-you-to-keep-your-current-coverage/

[Deicide]

This is why I really hate those who still support obama.    If you support obama you support collapsing the nation. 

Support Ron Paul 2012.

[Soul Crusher]

Support Ron Paul 2012.

I am going to vote for him or bachmann in the N.Y. Primary.  I really like her.  I guess it depends on how things are going at that point.  I really think he needs to start going on the attack more.  Not personal and petty, but he needs to change his approach a little bit and he can zoom to the top easily IMHO.       

[Deicide]

I am going to vote for him or bachmann in the N.Y. Primary.  I really like her.  I guess it depends on how things are going at that point.  I really think he needs to start going on the attack more.  Not personal and petty, but he needs to change his approach a little bit and he can zoom to the top easily IMHO.       

It's not his style to attack people. Be more specific. What could he do?

[Soul Crusher]

It's not his style to attack people. Be more specific. What could he do?

He needs to attack obama and give mor red meat to primary voters.   

He is already rock solid on the issues, already has a ton of cred across the spectrum, and needs to really let it fly now.   

I think he needs to be almost sarcastic a bit when talking about obama and wht he has done so far.   Many GOP primary voters will flock to him since they re already with him on most issues.   

and - he will et a lot more press and coverage if he starts mocking obama on the econmy and his bullshit. 

[Soul Crusher]

June 8, 2011
Let's Not Forget About Obamacare
‹‹Previous Page |1 | 2 |
By David Harsanyi


Democrats will often get irritable when some clingy philistine refers to Obamacare as "socialized medicine." It's simply not a precise phrase for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In any event, it's not socialized yet, you ignoramuses! Progress doesn't happen overnight. No worries, though, recent signs portend that Obamacare will give us the state-run plan we proles deserve.

A new study published in McKinsey Quarterly claims that in 2014, the provisions of Obamacare will induce 3 in 10 employers to "definitely or probably" stop offering health coverage to their employees. And we can only assume the companies have had the good sense not to read the legislation.

Sure, the president promised we could keep our insurance if we liked it. But why would you want to be mixed up with pitiless corporations that focus on profits, anyway? Obamacare courageously forces states to implement concocted "exchanges" so that someone much smarter than you can pick participants, regulate prices and keep an eye on things. Sounds like a vigorous marketplace. It's only a wonder that more Americans aren't clamoring for government-run supermarkets, smartphones and dating exchanges, as well.

You'll also recall that the un-socialized system allowed 20, 30, 40 million (please feel free to come up with any number you'd like; The New York Times won't care) people to go uninsured. Medicare's chief actuary estimated that 400,000 would sign up for these high-risk pools before Obamacare kicked in. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the budget would be able to handle 200,000, and others claimed that the program would need eight times the funding to meet demand. This was the driving reason for Obamacare. But as Megan McArdle of The Atlantic points out, just as with the exchanges, folks have been standoffish, with only about 18,000 people signing up.

Victory, right? The success of a government handout is always measured by how little Americans need to use it, right? Well, judging from the food stamp administration's actions, that would be a big no. What this probably calls out for is more public service announcements or a wider net. Hey, we'll just get some toffee-nosed yacht jockeys to offset the cost.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That's not to say there aren't people out there who really need support. The president has generously handed out nearly 1,400 Obamacare waivers to the neediest among us. About 20 percent of them have been awarded to an upmarket district in San Francisco that, by pure chance, is represented by Nancy Pelosi. Others, such as the AARP and local unions, had demanded we pass Obamacare so they could not take part in it immediately.

We'll also soon be hearing more about the lawsuits challenging Obamacare's individual mandate. Randy Barnett, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University Law Center, recently asked, "If Congress can impose this economic mandate on the people, what can't it mandate the people to buy?" Everything and nothing. And that's the beauty of it.

And let's not forget it was Obama, the newfound holy savior of Medicare, who pinned the key cost control component of health care reform on Medicare through his Independent Payment Advisory Board, or what bitter righties call a rationing board.

Rationing boards. Political favors. Lies. Coercion. Broken promises. Precedents that can force us to buy about anything. It might not be socialism, technically speaking. But really, what's not to like?

|


Copyright 2011, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/06/08/lets_not_forget_about_obamacare_110129-full.html at June 08, 2011 - 05:00:41 AM PDT

[Soul Crusher]

ObamaCare: What’s Really Sending Seniors Off a Cliff Posted by on
Frontpagemagazine ^ | Jun 8th, 2011 | Tait Trussell

________________________ ________________________ ___________


Even though a demonic TV commercial depicts a frantic grandma in a wheelchair being dumped off a cliff by a man resembling Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), author of a plan to save the Medicare system, Section 3025 of ObamaCare would suppress readmissions to hospitals, where delay or denial could mean death for millions of grandmas.

Democrats hate the reasonable Ryan plan to turn Medicare into a sound system involving patient choice. (Nearly all the House Republicans voted for it April 15.) The aforementioned commercial, sponsored by the liberal AgendaGroup Project began in May. It characterizes the Ryan plan as privatizing Medicare. The strain of “America the Beautiful” accompanies the scandalous melodrama of grandma’s fate, as conceived by the left-wing fabrication.

Section 3025 of Obama’s mislabled Affordable Care Act calls for financially penalizing hospitals which admit sick Medicare individuals who need to return to the hospital within 30 days after their discharge. The overlord of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), Dr. Donald Berwick, was granted a formula to penalize hospitals. He hopes to save $15 billion a year by suppressing hospital readmissions. A 250-bed hospital could lose $1.7 million unless it blocks follow-up hospital treatment for one of three categories of illness — pneumonia, heart attack, and heart failure.

Currently, Medicare pays for all rehospitalizations, except those in which patients are readmitted within 24 hours after discharge for the same conditions.

An important study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), written by a group of doctors, pointedly said “there is very limited research” addressing the issue of “diseases and processes that contribute to rehospitalization.” But analyzing a year in the mid-2000s, for which all Medicare billing statements were available, the authors found a total of 13,062,937 patients enrolled in the Medicare program were discharged from 4,926 hospitals. Some 516,959 of these patients died, and 690,276 went to other acute care settings, leaving 11,855,702 at risk for rehospitalization. That’s a lot of grandmas and grandpas.

The NEJM article quoted another study, which found that among persons 18 to 64 years of age, the rate of rehospitalization was “only weakly related to age.” So, why is Dr. Berwick given to such fascist inclinations with grandma and other Medicare patients? The devilish ObamaCare law makes him do it.

The NEJM physicians wrote: “We were unable to link measures of the number of beds in a community” to the over readmitting of patients or whether “higher rehospitalizaion rates are evidence of better care or just more care…etter care may reduce the number of rehospitalizaions, but we have no data on where these features are provided.” Research, the doctors mentioned, shows that palliative care can reduce rehospitalization. (That should be apparent because palliative care normally is given to those in their final stage of life. It is care for comfort, not cure and normally found in Hospice.)

Variation in readmissions among different states and hospitals “may be possible on a national scale,” the authors of the NEJM study said, but “the data do not show which practices cause the differences or whether the differences are exportable” to other hospitals.

When the typical patient has “two chances of three of being rehospitalized or dying” within a year after discharge “it is probably wiser to consider all Medicare patients as having a high risk of rehospitalization…It would be premature to predict how much [cost] reduction can be achieved,” the study’s authors wrote.

This section of ObamaCare is a direct physical threat to seniors, whose lives apparently are not considered worth the money to pay for their return to the hospital. It also is a killer for hospitals. In Detroit, just as one example, St. Joseph Mercy Health System (hospitals) depends on Medicare for 45 percent of its revenue. In rural communities, the percentage often is even higher.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has the power to expand the list of the three selected conditions without limit after 2013. So, what ObamaCare considers “excessive” hospital care is, in truth, a real and effective way for Democrats to push grandma off the cliff.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/06/08/obamacare-off-the-cliff/

[kcballer]

Oh dear the scare mongering continues! 

Current health care legislation is not perfect.  There are many flaws to it but it's a step in the right direction.  Towards a system which allows the richest country in the world to provide affordable coverage for those in need.  I support that move 100% even if i don't 100% agree with the current legislation.

Like i've said earlier i could not care any less about employers dropping employees.  It's a dumb idea to have employment and insurance linked as it is. 

[Kazan]

Oh dear the scare mongering continues! 

Current health care legislation is not perfect.  There are many flaws to it but it's a step in the right direction.  Towards a system which allows the richest country in the world to provide affordable coverage for those in need.  I support that move 100% even if i don't 100% agree with the current legislation.

Like i've said earlier i could not care any less about employers dropping employees.  It's a dumb idea to have employment and insurance linked as it is. 

It is not a step in the right direction, IT IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL!!!!!! The only step in the right direction is removing the federal government from healthcare

[kcballer]

It is not a step in the right direction, IT IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL!!!!!! The only step in the right direction is removing the federal government from healthcare

Not if it's a tax used for healthcare.  Then it is CONSTITUTIONAL.  You see - The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

So if congress decides to levy a single payer 'tax' for the general welfare of the united states, that being the welfare/health of the people.  How is that unconstitutional? 

Oh it's not.

[Kazan]

Not if it's a tax used for healthcare.  Then it is CONSTITUTIONAL.  You see - The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

So if congress decides to levy a single payer 'tax' for the general welfare of the united states, that being the welfare/health of the people.  How is that unconstitutional? 

Oh it's not.

Again it is the general welfare of the United States no the individual, that is up to the states see 10th Amendment. I am done debating with the constitutional illiterate on this subject.