Tag Archives: Health-care

News

Obamacare in action: 301 employers cut employee hours and/or jobs

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Investors Business Daily reports on the job creator response to Obamacare mandates.

Excerpt:

More than 300 employers have cut work hours or jobs, or otherwise shifted away from full-time staff, to limit liability under ObamaCare, according to a newly updated IBD analysis.

The ObamaCare Employer Mandate: A List Of Cuts To Work Hours, Jobs now includes 62 private employers and 239 public-sector employers. The list includes 80 school districts that have cited Affordable Care Act costs as a reason for cutting work hours — or in several cases outsourcing functions — of part-time instructional aides, cafeteria workers, custodians and bus drivers.

It also includes 46 universities and colleges — in some cases college systems — that have reduced teaching loads for adjunct faculty.

The 43 entries added to the list in the past two weeks reflect numerous actions taken before the Obama administration announced a one-year delay ofObamaCare employer mandate penalties on July 2. But the list also includes actions taken more recently, such as SeaWorld Entertainment’s decision to limit part-time workers to 28 hours per week, down from 32 hours previously.

Although the mandate won’t take effect until January 2015, fines will be based on employment levels beginning in the second half of 2014 — or earlier.

[…]In addition to SeaWorld (SEAS), 10 other private employers just added to the list include a group home for disabled adults; a YMCA; two private universities; the K-VA-T Food Stores regional supermarket; the Bealls regional department store ; and four restaurant operations.

[…]Workers in low-wage industries clocked the shortest average workweek on record in July, just 27.4 hours, an IBD analysis of the latest available Bureau of Labor Statistics industry data shows.

This low-wage segment covers 29 million private-sector workers, 25% of the total, in about 40 industry groups where nonsupervisors make up to about $14.50 an hour.

While the IBD list of private-sector hour-cutters is quite small to prove otherwise, it does offer clues that can be of help in interpreting official industry data on hours worked.

For example, the workweek at general merchandise stores tumbled from 31.1 hours in December to 29.8 hours in July. The inclusion of Wal-Mart (WMT) and Bealls on IBD’s list point to ObamaCare’s employer mandate as a significant contributing factor.

The average workweek in the hotel and accommodations industry hit a record low in July — lower than in the aftermath of 9/11 or at the bottom of the Great Recession.

In July, the workweek for nonsupervisors fell to 28.8 hours, down from 30.7 hours in March 2010, when ObamaCare was signed into law.

I’m looking forward to the 2014 elections, when we will get to vote again on this after we’ve seen “what’s in the bill”. I don’t think that the media’s blatherings are going to be able to convince people who are working under 30 hours a week that Obamacare was the right way to reform health care policy.

News

Surprise! New Stanford University study finds costs of Obamacare higher than estimated

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I’m just kidding. I’m not surprised. Here’s the story from Reason magazine.

Excerpt:

Obamacare could cost a lot more than the official estimates, according to a new study by researchers at Stanford University.

That’s because the law will create big incentives for employers to drop worker health coverage so that employees can get health insurance through the law’s insurance exchanges. Anyone who buys insurance through an exchange and has a household income between 133 and 400 percent of the poverty line is eligible for publicly funded subsidies. So if a lot more people than expected end up in the exchanges, that means a lot more subsidies — and a much higher total cost for the law.

The study, published this week in the journal Health Affairs, estimates that some 37 million people would benefit from shifting out of employer coverage and into exchanges. What “benefit” means, in this case, is that those people would be better off getting cash from their employer instead of coverage, and then buying subsidized coverage on the exchanges.

If all 37 million people in this category were to switch into exchange-based coverage, it would result in a dramatic increase in the law’s cost: about $132 billion annually in additional federal outlays, according to the study.

[…]The paper concludes with a warning: policy makers “should plan for the possibility that the exchange subsidies may end up costing the federal government much more than currently projected.”

It’s a warning they should take seriously. It’s also one they ought to have heard before. Former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin and James Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center have been sounding this alarm for years. Back in 2010, they estimated that, because of the law’s incentives to drop coverage, 35 million more Americans than expected could end up in subsidized coverage through the exchanges.

On election day in 2012, I wrote this post that quoted Investors Business Daily’s warning about Obamacare:

Despite repeated promises that the more we knew about ObamaCare, the more we’d like it, the law has never been less popular. Just 38% now approve of it, down from 46% when it passed in March 2010, according to the latest Kaiser Family Foundation survey.

But unless voters defeat Obama on Tuesday, they’ll never get rid of his disastrous “reform.” Even before ObamaCare takes full effect, its damage is evident.

Insurance premiums, which Obama promised to slash $2,500 by the end of his first term, have climbed 14% since the law went into effect. Nearly six in 10 doctors say ObamaCare has made them less positive about the future of health care in America, and almost two-thirds say they’d retire today if they could, according to a Physicians Foundation survey.

Businesses are holding back on hiring, or are shifting workers to part time because of ObamaCare’s looming coverage mandate. Darden Restaurants, for example, has stopped offering full-time schedules at several of its popular eateries “to help us address the cost implications of health care reform.”

This is only one of the horrors ObamaCare will unleash if fully implemented in 2014. Among others:

  • ObamaCare will force as many as 20 million workers into government-run insurance exchanges after their employers drop coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
  • More companies will follow Darden’s example, refusing to schedule workers more than 30 hours wherever they can to avoid the coverage mandate.
  • Insurance costs will explode. Even ObamaCare’s fans admit that its benefit mandates, marketplace rules and bans on coverage caps will force premiums to skyrocket. Jonathan Gruber, who helped design ObamaCare, says the law will add 30% to premiums in the individual market in the states he’s studied.
  • Doctor shortages will reach 90,000 in about a decade, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
  • Seniors will find it increasingly difficult to get treatments, as ObamaCare’s deep Medicare payment cuts cause one in six hospitals to become unprofitable and still more doctors to refuse to see Medicare patients.
  • Even when a patient does get to see a doctor, ObamaCare will intrude, using the law’s “Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute” to create top-down rules for what doctors can prescribe for any given ailment.
  • ObamaCare’s vast new taxes — including a crippling $20 billion surtax on the medical device industry and a $123 billion surtax on investors — will slow down medical innovation.
  • And when these and dozens of other new taxes fail to cover ObamaCare’s massive 10-year $1.76 trillion price tag, everyone will suffer a bigger tax bite.

Not to mention the fact that ObamaCare will, for the first time in our nation’s history, force people to buy a government-approved product, setting a frightening new precedent for federal intrusiveness.

That’s a warning that we should have heeded as voters in the 2012 election. But we didn’t. And 2014 is almost here.

Look, even when a person means well and wants to help others, if they don’t know what to do to help others, then we shouldn’t put them in charge. The best way to tell if someone knows how to do what they say they want to do is to look at their record and see if they have been able to do what they say they want to do in the past. That’s what a job interview is – it’s when the people doing the hiring look at the candidate’s record – not his rhetoric – and decide whether to hire him to do certain specific tasks. The requirements of the job should be key to the decision of whether to hire or not. Obama had no experience passing health care laws that lowered costs, improved access, and so on. He had never done anything remotely like that in all of his life. If we wanted to fix health care, then we should hire people like Bobby Jindal. People who know how to do the work because they’ve actually done the work before.

News

Stephen Moore: Obama’s failing economy has hit his supporters the hardest

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From the Wall Street Journal, a must-read.

Excerpt:

Each month the consultants at Sentier analyze the numbers from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey and estimate the trend in median annual household income adjusted for inflation. On Aug. 21, Sentier released “Household Income on the Fourth Anniversary of the Economic Recovery: June 2009 to June 2013.” The finding that grabbed headlines was that real median household income “has fallen by 4.4 percent since the ‘economic recovery’ began in June 2009.” In dollar terms, median household income fell to $52,098 from $54,478, a loss of $2,380.

What was largely overlooked, however, is that those who were most likely to vote for Barack Obama in 2012 were members of demographic groups most likely to have suffered the steepest income declines. Mr. Obama was re-elected with 51% of the vote. Five demographic groups were crucial to his victory: young voters, single women, those with only a high-school diploma or less, blacks and Hispanics. He cleaned up with 60% of the youth vote, 67% of single women, 93% of blacks, 71% of Hispanics, and 64% of those without a high-school diploma, according to exit polls.

According to the Sentier research, households headed by single women, with and without children present, saw their incomes fall by roughly 7%. Those under age 25 experienced an income decline of 9.6%. Black heads of households saw their income tumble by 10.9%, while Hispanic heads-of-households’ income fell 4.5%, slightly more than the national average. The incomes of workers with a high-school diploma or less fell by about 8% (-6.9% for those with less than a high-school diploma and -9.3% for those with only a high-school diploma).

To put that into dollar terms, in the four years between the time the Obama recovery began in June 2009 and June of this year, median black household income fell by just over $4,000, Hispanic households lost $2,000 and female-headed households lost $2,300.

The unemployment numbers show pretty much the same pattern. July’s Bureau of Labor Statistics data (the most recent available) show a national unemployment rate of 7.4%. The highest jobless rates by far are for key components of the Obama voter bloc: blacks (12.6%), Hispanics (9.4%), those with less than a high-school diploma (11%) and teens (23.7%).

This is a stunning reversal of the progress for these groups during the expansions of the 1980s and 1990s, and even through the start of the 2008 recession. Census data reveal that from 1981-2008 the biggest income gains were for black women, 81%; followed by white women, 67%; followed by black men, 31%; and white males at 8%.

[…]Mr. Obama has often contemptuously, and wrongly, branded the quarter-century period of prosperity beginning with the presidency of Ronald Reagan as a “trickle down” era. For many in the groups that Mr. Obama set out to help, a return to the prosperity of that era would be a vast improvement.

The Census Bureau data on incomes include cash government benefits, such as unemployment insurance, disability payments and the earned-income tax credit (but excludes Medicaid and food stamps). Most of the cash programs have surged in cost during the Obama presidency, yet incomes have still declined for the lowest-income eligible groups. This suggests that wages and salaries from employment have shrunk at an even faster pace than the Census data show. The shrinking paychecks of the past four years are consistent with two unwelcome anomalies of the recovery: a swift decline in labor-force participation to 63.4% from 65.5% during that period and a rise in part-time employment.

What all of this means is that the stimulus-led economic revival that began officially in June 2009—Vice President Joe Biden’s famous “summer of recovery”—has only resulted in lower incomes for at least half of Americans, the very ones who were instrumental in electing Mr. Obama twice.

Guess what? Borrowing trillions from future generations to spend on Democrat-run sham companies like Solyndra doesn’t stimulate the economy. Shocking, I know. And yet that’s what we voted for.

Investors Business Daily explains how the President’s own policies are causing the troubles that his supporters are facing.

Look:

More than 250 employers have cut work hours, jobs or taken other steps to avoid ObamaCare costs, according to a new IBD analysis.

Mind the data have been the refrain from the White House as it downplays anecdotal reports of employers limiting workers to fewer than 30 hours per week.

But the anecdotes are piling high enough that they now constitute a body of data that can help gauge the impact of the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate.

IBD is introducing ObamaCare Employer Mandate: A List Of Cuts To Work Hours, Jobs — a compilation of employers who have opted to restrict work hours to limit new liability for employee health coverage.

As of Sept. 3, this list has reached 258 — including more than 200 public-sector employers.

Almost all of those employers have cut the hours of part-time workers to below 30 per week — the point at which ObamaCare’s insurance mandate kicks in.

A few have cut payrolls to steer clear of ObamaCare’s 50 full-time-equivalent-worker definition of a large employer subject to employer fines. A few others have reduced staff while contracting with employment services firms to limit their ObamaCare exposure.

The Wall Street Journal explains how health care premiums, which Obama promised to LOWER by $2500, are up $3000.

Excerpt:

Central to ObamaCare are requirements that health insurers (1) accept everyone who applies (guaranteed issue), (2) cannot charge more based on serious medical conditions (modified community rating), and (3) include numerous coverage mandates that force insurance to pay for many often uncovered medical conditions.

[…]We compared the average premiums in states that already have ObamaCare-like provisions in their laws and found that consumers in New Jersey, New York and Vermont already pay well over twice what citizens in many other states pay. Consumers in Maine and Massachusetts aren’t far behind. Those states will likely see a small increase.

By contrast, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Wyoming and Virginia will likely see the largest increases—somewhere between 65% and 100%. Another 18 states, including Texas and Michigan, could see their rates rise between 35% and 65%.

While ObamaCare won’t take full effect until 2014, health-insurance premiums in the individual market are already rising, and not just because of routine increases in medical costs. Insurers are adjusting premiums now in anticipation of the guaranteed-issue and community-rating mandates starting next year. There are newly imposed mandates, such as the coverage for children up to age 26, and what qualifies as coverage is much more comprehensive and expensive. Consolidation in the hospital system has been accelerated by ObamaCare and its push for Accountable Care Organizations. This means insurers must negotiate in a less competitive hospital market.

Although President Obama repeatedly claimed that health-insurance premiums for a family would be $2,500 lower by the end of his first term, they are actually about $3,000 higher—a spread of about $5,500 per family.

So, every cloud has a silver lining, and the silver lining to this Obama-cloud is that at least the people who voted for socialism are facing the consequences of their own economic illiteracy. I hope they learn. But if they don’t learn now, then they’ll learn when the welfare and entitlements run out. I hope that the people who voted for our American Idol president will take a Thomas Sowell book out of the library and learn something about economics for a change.

UPDATE: From Ian B.: 40,000 Longshoremen (union workers) quit the AFL-CIO union. Socialism hurts employers? It’s all so unexpected! How could reality not match honeyed words and good intentions?