Tag Archives: Barack Obama

News

Obamacare’s impact on ER wait times and low-wage workers

2 Comments

First, ER wait times. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

As the number of insured people goes up while health care reform takes place, the long waits and crowded lobbies at emergency rooms are anticipated to increase as well.

“We’re starting out with crowded conditions and anticipating things will only get worse,” American College of Emergency Physicians president Dr. Angela Gardner told the Associated Press.

Nearly 32 million more people will have health insurance as a result of changing health-care laws, and about 16 million are to be added to the Medicaid system, but that apparently won’t keep them out of the ER, the AP reported.

“Just because we’ve insured people [that] doesn’t mean they now have access,” Dr. Elijah Berg from Boston told the AP. “They’re coming to the emergency department because they don’t have access to alternatives.”

[…]Since 2006, when it began offering government-run health care to its residents, Massachusetts has been considered the test model for the federal health changes, requiring health coverage for everyone, but data has shown visits to the ER have continued to rise since the Massachusetts law took place.

ERs are already overly crowded, with the biggest users being those under the federal Medicaid plan. Many doctors limit the number of Medicaid patients that they see because of the low rate of reimbursement from the government.

Here’s what should have happened. Voters should have looked at Massachusetts and Tennessee and seen what government control of health care does to health care. Universal coverage increases demand, but supply stays the same because of onerous certifications, taxes and regulations that block new entrants. Somewhere along the line there will be a shortage. And that means waiting lists, abortion, denial of care, and eventually euthanasia in order to keep costs down.

But there’s more – from the Heartland Institute.

What about Obamacare’s impact on low-wage workers? (H/T Rob)

Excerpt:

The requirements of President Obama’s new health care regime could penalize low-wage workers and cause a further slowdown of hiring for positions at chain restaurants and other small businesses.

White Castle, a national fast food chain, recently announced it would slow planned expansion in the United States and curtail hiring at its numerous restaurant outlets thanks to Obama’s law, which the chain says will cut its earnings in half.

According to a White Castle representative, the requirement that employers pay a $3,000 fine to the federal government for every employee whose out-of-pocket cost of health insurance exceeds 9.5 percent of their income will destroy their business model.

[…]Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a health care analyst at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, says much of this process is out of the employer’s control.

[…]Furchtgott-Roth says this aspect of Obamacare is part of a larger trend toward government pricing low-skilled workers out of the U.S. economy.

“The burden of all these Obamacare provisions is going to fall more on America’s low-skilled workers—the workers at White Castle, Burger King, and so on. Because their labor will become more expensive for companies to use, we’re going to see more mechanized solutions, a trend that is already happening in Europe,” Furchtgott-Roth said.

Well, some of these people who don’t pay income taxes are certainly going to be getting a wake-up call. Larger companies like John Deere, Verizon, Valero, Caterpillar, etc. already announced that they were going to be taking huge hits to their bottom line as a result of Obamacare. All these good intentions and high-minded blabberings don’t amount to any benefits for American working families. Happy-talk wins elections, but it doesn’t pay the bills or feed the children.

Next time, we need to be more diligent at looking at what actually happens in other countries and even in our own states when people try to nationalize health care in order to provide universal coverage. We can have universal coverage – we just need to let people choose what level of coverage they want and we need to make market reforms to the health care industry. Choice and competition works better for consumers. That’s real health care reform.

Commentary

If Democrats understand economics, then why is unemployment so high?

2 Comments

First, Nancy Pelosi thinks that the productive people should pay people not to work. (H/T Hot Air)

What’s wrong with that?

Ed Morrissey writes:

  • “This is one of the biggest stimuluses to our economy” — No, it’s a net drain on the economy, although for understandable purposes.  It reroutes capital from production to non-production.  We are paying people who aren’t working by using capital that could otherwise go to creating jobs.  It’s a policy tradeoff and understandable, although not for 99 weeks, which is what Pelosi is attempting to extend further.
  • “It injects demand into the economy” — Not at the rate in which the capital gets destroyed.  Remember, the money for this program gets confiscated from producers and passed through the government bureaucracy to non-producers.  What winds up back in the hands of producers is much less than what left their hands in the first place.
  • “It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative” — No, it doesn’t.  In fact, it depresses job creation, which is part of the policy tradeoff.  If this was right, we’d be at zero unemployment by now.  Tax cuts, especially on capital gains, creates jobs by getting capital into the hands of job creators.
  • “It’s impossible to think of a situation where we would have a country without unemployment benefits” — That’s not actually the debate.  No one is suggesting that we eliminate all unemployment benefits.  The debate is whether we will keep extending them further.

The trouble is here is that the federal government takes a cut for themselves whenever they redistribute money from one group to another. And the government doesn’t produce jobs as well as the producers they take the money from – because government is wasteful and inefficient compared to private business.

Hillary Clinton

Here’s a post from The Right Scoop showing what Hillary Clinton thinks of producers. (H/T ECM)

She says:

It’s important, too, that we look at how to promote broadly-based prosperity. One of the problems in societies around the world today is that too much of the productivity of the economies are going to too few. Too few people, the political and economic elite, are realizing the vast majority of benefits from economic activity. It’s true in my own country where, unfortunately, economic inequality is increasing. And it’s true in Ukraine. It’s true in Europe and Asia and Africa and South America. So part of the challenge of economic growth and prosperity is to make sure it gets down and equally spread among people.

When you take money from the few, and reward the many, it also helps you to get re-elected – because you’re buying more votes. Pretty soon, you have half the population paying no federal taxes and the top half of earners paying almost all the federal taxes. Eventually, the top earners realize that they are being bled dry by the the preening wealth redistributors in government, and they scale back their production and hiring, outsource their jobs to other countries, or leave the country entirely. And that’s why unemployment is at 10%. It’s something that leftists like Pelosi and Clinton never learned – they have no concern st all about how the people they rob will respond to being robbed. And it impoverishes us all when we punish the most productive members of society. Where do you think jobs come from? The poor?

Barack Obama

The Detroit News reports on one of the reason why we all lose when government decides that they know better ways to spend money than entrepreneurs. (H/T The Blog Prof)

Excerpt:

The government is handing out nearly $2 billion for new solar plants that President Barack Obama says will create thousands of jobs and increase the use of renewable energy sources.

Obama announced the initiative in his weekly radio and online address Saturday, saying the money is part of his plan to bring new industries to the U.S.

“We’re going to keep competing aggressively to make sure the jobs and industries of the future are taking root right here in America,” Obama said.

The two companies that will receive the money from the president’s $862 billion economic stimulus are Abengoa Solar, which will build one of the world’s largest solar plants in Arizona, creating 1,600 construction jobs; and Abound Solar Manufacturing, which is building plants in Colorado and Indiana. The Obama administration says those projects will create more than 2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs.

That’s $1,333,333 per new permanent job.

That money could have created many more jobs in the private sector. But now it’s been wasted for politically correct solar power. And that’s why government spending prolongs recessions – it takes money away from job creators for fashionable boondoggles designed to get people elected.

UPDATE: The ONLY stimulus that counts is A JOB – or several job offers. People on unemployment are not going to spend because the future is too uncertain. What makes people spend is a current job, along with the prospect of other jobs if this one falls through. That’s what caused people to spend. You need to give tax breaks to the suppliers – suppliers stimulate demand by creating products that people actually want to buy.

Commentary

How economic uncertainty causes businesses to hire fewer workers

2 Comments

Story from center-leftist Fareed Zakaria in the radically leftist Washington Post. (H/T Marathon Pundit)

Excerpt:

But government spending can only be a bridge to private-sector investment. The key to a sustainable recovery and robust economic growth is to get companies investing in America. So why are they reluctant, despite having mounds of cash? I put this question to a series of business leaders, all of whom were expansive on the topic yet did not want to be quoted by name, for fear of offending people in Washington.

Economic uncertainty was the primary cause of their caution. “We’ve just been through a tsunami and that produces caution,” one told me. But in addition to economics, they kept talking about politics, about the uncertainty surrounding regulations and taxes. Some have even begun to speak out publicly. Jeffrey Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, complained Friday that government was not in sync with entrepreneurs. The Business Roundtable, which had supported the Obama administration, has begun to complain about the myriad laws and regulations being cooked up in Washington.

One CEO told me, “Almost every agency we deal with has announced some expansion of its authority, which naturally makes me concerned about what’s in store for us for the future.” Another pointed out that between the health-care bill, financial reform and possibly cap-and-trade, his company had lawyers working day and night to figure out the implications of all these new regulations. Lobbyists have been delighted by all this activity. “[Obama] exaggerates our power, but he increases demand for our services,” superlobbyist Tony Podesta told the New York Times.

Most of the business leaders I spoke to had voted for Barack Obama. They still admire him. Those who had met him thought he was unusually smart. But all think he is, at his core, anti-business. When I asked for specifics, they pointed to the fact that Obama has no business executives in his Cabinet, that he rarely consults with CEOs (except for photo ops), that he has almost no private-sector experience, that he’s made clear he thinks government and nonprofit work are superior to the private sector. It all added up to a profound sense of distrust.

I think this was one of the points that really stood out to me in Amity Shlaes’ book “The Forgotten Man”, a badly-written book on the Great Depression. She spoke at length about how the unpredictable interventionism of statists like Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt caused businesses to get so flustered that they just stopped all entrepreneurial activity, including hiring, in order to wait the big-government socialists out. It ended up delaying the economic recovery.

And that’s what we see with Obama and his interventions into the free market today. Every dollar spend by the government costs jobs. Every regulation passed to control businesses costs jobs. Every line of anti-capitalist rhetoric costs jobs. Every Obama is doing to oppose businesses costs jobs. At some point, he’s going to realize that the election is over and he needs to stop scaring businesses in order to win the votes. Now is the time for tax cuts on businesses.