News

Obamacare bronze plans up 15% on average, but there’s more wrong than just that

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Sure, the cost of Obamacare health plans is higher, especially the cheapest bronze plans which are going up 15%.  But that’s not the only thing wrong with Obamacare. Here are 14 more ways Obamacare is a disaster, as reported by the Federalist.

The list:

  1. Premium Increases
  2. Exchange Subsidy Roller Coaster
  3. Reducing the Quality of Insurance
  4. Slashing Quality of Employer-Provided Insurance
  5. Here Come the Trial Lawyers!
  6. Enrollees Are Older and Sicker than Average
  7. People Dropping Exchange Coverage Are the Ones Exchanges Need Most
  8. The Exchanges Benefit Big Business at the Expense of Smaller Businesses
  9. Policy Cancellation Déjà Vu
  10. Medical Research Has Tanked
  11. Medicaid Still Provides Terrible Care for the Poor
  12. The Deficit Will Increase $131 Billion in the Next Ten Years
  13. Fewer Jobs for Low-Wage Workers
  14. More Economic Woes Ahead

The last two stuck out to me, because they have to do with jobs.

Labor force participation rate
Labor force participation rate

Thirteen:

Obamacare’s employer mandate requires employers with 50 or more full-time employees—“full time” defined as 30 hours or more per week—to provide their workers with health insurance or pay a fine. Critics claimed this would lead to an increase in part-time work leading up to the mandate’s imposition, but many liberal economists insisted part-time work was not increasing. Then Jed Graham of Investor’s Business Daily dug into the data and found that work hours had declined for employees in industries where the average hourly wage was $14.50 or less.

Graham showed that part-time work appeared stable because the decline in hours for low-wage workers was offset by an increase in hours for higher-paid workers. As Graham states, “Overall, in these low-wage industries which employ 30 million rank-and-file workers, the average workweek shrank to 27.3 hours per week in July [2014]…. For low-wage industry workers… the recovery in the workweek from a then-record low 27.5 hours in mid-2009 began to reverse in the latter half of 2012, and it’s been pretty much all downhill since then.” Employers appear to be limiting the work hours of employees who are least likely to have employer-provided insurance. Given the low wages, there are likely many workers in this group who are in need of full-time hours.

Fourteen:

The employer mandate is causing even more damage as its January 1, 2015 imposition nears. In August, the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas, New York, and Philadelphia released survey data on how businesses in their regions were responding to the costs of Obamacare. Businesses that had or were expecting to increase part-time employees, outsourcing, and prices far exceeded the number that that had or intended to reduce them. More business also had or intended to reduce the total number of workers and/or wages in response to Obamacare than expected to increase them.

Obamacare is a job killer. And it hurts low-wage workers the most. Imagine what would happen if Obama did an executive order to raise the price of low-wage workers for employers – another incentive to get rid of them. What a disaster.

Commentary

Will pro-life women vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 just because she is a woman?

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Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood
Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood

This story is from Life News.

Excerpt:

Candidates such as out-going Colorado Senator Mark Udall and Iowa Senator-wanna-be-but-defeated Iowa Rep. Bruce Braley, along with other Democratic candidates, ran campaigns based on an extremist pro-abortion position. They were absolutely convinced that the American public would vote for candidates who say it’s okay to kill helpless, innocent unborn babies at any stage, provided they mischaracterized opposition to this extremism as a “war on women.”

But they took this charade even further. Pro-abortion figures such as Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards tried to tell voters that female candidates who oppose abortion know nothing about what women really want.

Clinton, at a pro-Braley rally, told voters in Iowa, “It’s not enough to be a woman, you have to be committed to expand rights and opportunities for all women.” Because Joni Ernst (who defeated Braley) thinks unborn babies should be protected, she isn’t committed to expanding rights and opportunities for women?

Obviously, the voters didn’t see Ernst in that light. She won by almost a hundred thousand votes and she is now the pro-life Senator-elect from Iowa.

Pro-abortion advocates like to say abortion is a woman’s issue, but only pro-abortion women should voice their opinions. Indeed, they come very close to saying it is illegitimate for a woman who is pro-life to speak on abortion. The voices of pro-life women just don’t count. The hypocrisy, or should I say the gall, of people who think you have to want to kill unborn children in order to be pro-woman is stunning.

In 2008 and 2012, many, many black people who were personally pro-life voted for Barack Obama. Will pro-life women do the same for Hillary Clinton in 2016?

I have to say that it is always a concern to me, as someone who would like to get married, when the majority of young, unmarried women vote Democrat. Maybe I am wrong, but I not only see this as a vote against family in favor of bigger government (via taxes), but I also see it as a rejection of the pro-life and pro-marriage views.

It bothers me when a woman says she is pro-abortion, because to me it means that she wants to perform actions (sex) that are pleasurable to her, but then resort to murder to avoid being burdened with the natural consequences of her actions. You can’t make a marriage with a woman who is willing to resort to murder in order to avoid taking responsibility for her actions. If you’re going to marry a woman, you want her to be pro-life – to put the lives of little innocent babies first – however they come into being. You want her to have the attitude that it is more important to care for innocent people than to be without the encumbrance of relationships with others. After all, she will be encumbered by a relationship to you if you marry her, and that will not always be pleasant.

It also bothers me when a woman says she is pro-gay-marriage, because to me it means that she is denying the complimentary nature of men and women. She is saying that men can take the place of a mother, and a woman can take the place of a father. In that case, it seems to me that you are dealing with a person who doesn’t take the needs of children seriously. Rather than taking a child’s real needs seriously, they are more interested in telling selfish adults what they want hear. A man shouldn’t make children with a woman who doesn’t care about the child’s need for a mother and a father. If she doesn’t think that a father is necessary to raise a child, then it will be much easier for her to divorce you. It’s wrong to celebrate any arrangement that deprives a child of biological parents.

Commentary

Supply-side economist Larry Kudlow: marriage is pro-economic-growth

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Here’s a Real Clear Politics editorial from one of the biggest supply-side economics boosters out there.

Excerpt:

The greatest economic challenge of our time is how to restore economic growth. Over the past dozen years, average real growth has slowed to 1.8 percent annually, under both Republican and Democratic presidents and congresses. It’s a bipartisan problem.

And it’s a new one. For the past 50 years or so, the American economy grew at just less than 3.5 percent per year. But we’re now experiencing one of the longest slow-growth periods in the past 100 years. Excluding the Great Depression, I bet it is the longest slow-growth period in a century.

There are any number of fiscal and monetary prescriptions for restoring economic growth. As a Reagan supply sider, I would recommend lower marginal tax rates, lighter regulations, limited government and a sound dollar.

But I want to add this to the list: marriage. I have come to believe that marriage is a key element of a stronger economy.

Like any good economist, he’s got the numbers to back it up, too:

Naomi Schaefer Riley writes that “children of married parents are more likely to graduate high school, less likely to go to jail and more likely to delay sexual activity. And of course, children of unmarried parents are more than five times as likely to live in poverty.”

Economic writer Robert Samuelson notes that single-parent families have exploded, that more than 40 percent of births now go to the unwed, and that the flight from marriage “may have subtracted from happiness.” Citing a study from Isabel Sawhill, he notes that some unwed mothers “will have multiple partners and subject their children ‘to a degree of relationship chaos and instability that is hard to grasp.'”

Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore writes “that marriage with a devoted husband and wife in the home is a far better social program than food stamps, Medicaid, public housing or even all of the combined.” Moore points to a Heritage study showing how welfare households are much more likely to have no one working at all, with social assistance becoming a substitute for work.

A recent report from the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, authored by W. Bradford Wilcox and Robert Lerman, reveals that married men have higher average incomes, seem to be more productive at work and work more and earn more. Wilcox and Lerman write that 51 percent of the 1980-2000 decline in male employment is due to the drop in marriage rates, and is highest among unmarried men. They find that “differing employment rates among married and unmarried men aren’t simply due to education levels or race, either.”

They conclude: “Promoting the importance of marriage, looking for ways to reduce marriage penalties in current means-tested welfare programs and engaging leaders at every level to find ways to strengthen marriage in their communities, are other critical steps to take to restore a culture of marriage.”

I’ll only add this, as I did at the Coolidge Foundation dinner: While restoring economic growth may be the great challenge of our time, this goal will never be realized until we restore marriage.

In short, marriage is pro-growth. We can’t do without it.

In case you missed it, there was a nice new study linking marriage to economic growth. It was put out by the American Enterprise Institute, a fiscally conservative think tank. It’s getting to be that fiscal conservatives are more interested in social conservatism than the reverse. Now if only we could get pro-lifers and pro-natural-marriage people to come towards lower taxes, smaller government, less restrictive regulations and a stronger dollar. How about it, social conservatives? Can you you run your family better when government leaves you more money in your pocket? Fiscal conservatism and social conservatism go together like peanut butter and jelly.

By the way, if you’d like to read a remarkable booklet put out by the Heritage Foundation called “Indivisible”, click here. In it, you’ll find well-known social conservatives advocating for fiscal conservatism, and well-known fiscal conservatives advocating for social conservatism. The essays are short and easy to understand. They don’t try to prove everything, just one little point per essay. You’ll find lots of names you recognize in it, like Jennifer Roback Morse, Michele Bachmann, Paul Ryan and Jay Richards.