Tag Archives: Health-care

News

Three labor union leaders write letter to Democrats attacking Obamacare

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From the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

The roll out of President Obama’s health care reform package was always going to be tricky, with vehement opposition from his political opponents and pushback from employers large and small. But after announcing last week that penalties for companies failing to comply with the law will be delayed by a year, the Affordable Care Act has a new, high profile set of dissenters: Unions.

The leaders of three major U.S. unions, including the highly influential Teamsters, have sent a scathing open letter to Democratic leaders in Congress, warning that unless changes are made, President Obama’s health care reform plan will “destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.”

If that’s not bad enough, the Affordable Care Act, if not modified, will “destroy the very health and wellbeing of our members along with millions of other hardworking Americans,” the letter says.

Here’s one part from the letter than I think is worth posting:

When you and the President sought our support for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), you pledged that if we liked the health plans we have now, we could keep them. Sadly, that promise is under threat. Right now, unless you and the Obama Administration enact an equitable fix, the ACA will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.

[..]First, the law creates an incentive for employers to keep employees’ work hours below 30 hours a week. Numerous employers have begun to cut workers’ hours to avoid this obligation, and many of them are doing so openly. The impact is two-fold: fewer hours means less pay while also losing our current health benefits.

Of course, when the unions were busy lobbying for the passage of Obamacare, conservative voices were talking about all of these defects in the law, and more besides. But the unions weren’t listening. Labor unions just don’t understand economics, and that’s why people need to be careful about taking their advice on economic issues.

 

 

News

Report: Los Angeles students being trained by schools to promote Obamacare

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Investors Business Daily reports on it.

Excerpt:

With great excitement, the Los Angeles Unified School District has designed a nearly $1 million program to train teenagers to promote the glories of ObamaCare to parents, relatives and friends at home.

The state’s health insurance exchange, Covered California, is handing $990,000 to LA schools, along with federal grants totaling 36-million more U.S. taxpayer dollars to districts around the most populous state.

The goal is to train millions of student messengers statewide to sell the idea of government-subsidized health insurance to parents and relatives at home and to get more people enrolled in ObamaCare.

Taxpayer-paid public school staff will also be used to phone students’ homes urging enrollment under Obama’s Affordable Care Act. And they will be used to consume precious class instructional time to teach the students all about the healthcare program that the Democrat Congress did not read before passing in 2010.

[…]A spokeswoman for the LA school district proudly said the student ObamaCare scheme was actually a pilot program to see how well teenagers serve as messengers of government-sponsored information.

The goal, she said, is to determine “whether young people can be trained as messengers to deliver” a broad array of school and government-sponsored messages to family and friends. Now, there’s a student indoctrination idea that sounds like some country other than the United States.

If they prove proficient at influencing their own families to believe material sent home from schools, she said, the teens will be used to deliver numerous other official messages to adults in their home and neighborhoods.

One thing that the Los Angeles schools could do is tell everyone how well the British “public option” health care system works.

Here’s an article from the UK Daily Mail that the schools could use to make the case for Obamacare. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

As many as 1,165 people starved to death in NHS hospitals over the past four years fuelling claims nurses are too busy to feed their patients.

The Department of Health branded the figures ‘unacceptable’ and said the number ofunannounced inspections by the care watchdog will increase.

According to figures released by the Office for National Statistics following a Freedom of Information request, for every patient who dies from malnutrition, four more have dehydration mentioned on their death certificate.

Critics say nurses are too busy to feed patients and often food and drink are placed out of reach of vulnerable people.

In 2011, 43 patients starved to death and 291 died in a state of severe malnutrition, while the number of patients discharged from hospitalsuffering from malnutrition doubled to 5,558.

See? It works! Just think of it as post-birth abortion.

News

Wall Street Journal explains the death panel of Obamacare

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Guess what! Sarah Palin was right, as the Wall Street Journal explains.

Excerpt:

Signs of ObamaCare’s failings mount daily, including soaring insurance costs, looming provider shortages and inadequate insurance exchanges. Yet the law’s most disturbing feature may be the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB, sometimes called a “death panel,” threatens both the Medicare program and the Constitution’s separation of powers. At a time when many Americans have been unsettled by abuses at the Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department, the introduction of a powerful and largely unaccountable board into health care merits special scrutiny.

For a vivid illustration of the extent to which life-and-death medical decisions have already been usurped by government bureaucrats, consider the recent refusal by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to waive the rules barring access by 10-year old Sarah Murnaghan to the adult lung-transplant list. A judge ultimately intervened and Sarah received a lifesaving transplant June 12. But the grip of the bureaucracy will clamp much harder once the Independent Payment Advisory Board gets going in the next two years.

The board, which will control more than a half-trillion dollars of federal spending annually, is directed to “develop detailed and specific proposals related to the Medicare program,” including proposals cutting Medicare spending below a statutorily prescribed level. In addition, the board is encouraged to make rules “related to” Medicare.

The decisions of the IPAB are absolute, and very hard to overturn:

The ObamaCare law also stipulates that there “shall be no administrative or judicial review” of the board’s decisions. Its members will be nearly untouchable, too. They will be presidentially nominated and Senate-confirmed, but after that they can only be fired for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”

Once the board acts, its decisions can be overruled only by Congress, and only through unprecedented and constitutionally dubious legislative procedures—featuring restricted debate, short deadlines for actions by congressional committees and other steps of the process, and supermajoritarian voting requirements. The law allows Congress to kill the otherwise inextirpable board only by a three-fifths supermajority, and only by a vote that takes place in 2017 between Jan. 1 and Aug. 15. If the board fails to implement cuts, all of its powers are to be exercised by HHS Secretary Sebelius or her successor.

The IPAB’s godlike powers are not accidental. Its goal, conspicuously proclaimed by the Obama administration, is to control Medicare spending in ways that are insulated from the political process.

That’s what people were voting for when they voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Conservatives tried to warn them about the death panels in Obamacare, but no one listened. No one listened when we told them abotu the rising health insurance premiums, or the worker hour cuts that would result. Well, guess who was right?