Tag Archives: AT&T

Who knows more about economics? Obama or people who run businesses?

Consider this article from The American Spectator, which talks about the Obammunist response to companies losing massive amounts of money because of Obamacare. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

By last Friday, AT&T, Caterpillar, Deere & Co., and AK Steel Holding Corp. had all announced that they were taking the one-time charges on their first-quarter balance sheets. More companies were expected to make similar announcements this week.

[…]On Friday White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett were calling the CEOs and Washington office heads of the companies that took the financial hits and attacked them for doing so. One Washington office head said that the White House calls were accusatory and “downright rude.”

[…]”Most of these people [in the Administration] have never had a real job in their lives. They don’t understand a thing about business, and that includes the President,” says a senior lobbyist for one of the companies that announced the charge. “My CEO sat with the President over lunch with two other CEOs, and each of them tried to explain to the President what this bill would do to our companies and the economy in general. First the President didn’t understand what they were talking about. Then he basically told my boss he was lying. Frankly my boss was embarrassed for him; he clearly had not been briefed and didn’t know what was in the bill.”

[…]”We had memos on these issues, but none of our people, we think, looked at them,” says  a staffer. “When they saw the stories last week about the charges some of the companies were taking, they were genuinely surprised and assumed that the companies were just doing this to embarrass them.  They really believed this bill would immediately lower costs. They just didn’t understand what they were voting on.”

And more from National Review, where the CEO of Aetna was interviewed. (H/T Ace of Spades via ECM)

Excerpt:

Will insurance premiums go up?

The answer is yes, and some of the things that will drive those premiums are significant additional taxes the industry will ultimately have to pay in the first year.

The President said that this bill would not have any impact on people who already had coverage, that it was about the uninsured, that there would be no change. Will this legislation change the coverage of people who are already paying for it?

My perception is, yes, things will change. You might not have a plan that includes the exact same doctors. You might have plans that have richer benefits, and therefore you’re going to pay more for benefits you may or may not want. It would have been a better message to say, we’re going to make certain you maintain your eligibility.

The “Robin Hood” intention of giving to the unproductive by taking from the productive seldom pays off, since the productive are the ones who give people jobs. And a lot of people are going to lose their jobs because of Obama’s economic ignorance. Either that, or companies will raise their insurance premiums, so that the poor will have to pay more for health care. Obama doesn’t know what he is doing, he probably thinks that communism has made Cuba rich. He’s just trying to help poor America reach the opulence of communist North Korea.