Tag Archives: Kickbacks

If Obamacare is so great, then why do so many Democrats get waivers?

Investors Business Daily reports on who is getting exemptions from Obamacare.

Excerpt:

It’s bad enough that the administration has granted another 204 ObamaCare waivers. But even worse is that nearly one in five went to employers in the district of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, House architect of the bill.

It was Pelosi who said Congress had to pass the Democrats’ health care overhaul so the country could find out what’s in it.

Seems that quite a few businesses in her backyard found out what is in it and decided they didn’t like it.

According to the Daily Caller, 204 waivers for a provision of ObamaCare were approved last month — bringing the total waiver count to 1,372. Out of that April number, 38 of the waivers “are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in” the Democrat’s hard-left San Francisco district.

The waivers, which the administration began granting only months after the bill was passed and signed, let employers avoid terms of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that require health care insurance plans to carry at least $750,000 in benefits before being exhausted.

This requirement, found in the thousands of pages that make up the ObamaCare bill, is too costly for many businesses that can afford to provide health coverage only through less comprehensive plans.

The owner of Tru Spa, one of the San Francisco businesses granted a waiver, told the Daily Caller both ObamaCare and new local laws have “devastated” businesses in the region.

The employers that were granted waivers in Pelosi’s district include Boboquivari’s, a restaurant that, reports the Daily Caller, “advertises $59 porterhouse steaks, $39 filet mignons and $35 crab dinners.”

“Then, there’s Cafe des Amis, which describes its eating experience as ‘a timeless Parisian style brasserie,’ which is ‘located on one of San Francisco’s premier shopping and strolling boulevards.'”

Also among the 38 are the four-star hotel Campton Place and the self-proclaimed four-diamond Hotel Nikko.

While Pelosi’s constituents are being protected from her party’s health care wreckage, another Democratic constituency is being taken care of, as well.

A coalition of groups operating under the name wheresmywaiver.com says that “50.26% of waiver beneficiaries are unionized, despite union workers only making up 11.9% of the workforce.”

The Service Employees International Union, whose former President Andy Stern was one of the most frequent White House visitors before he was named to President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, has been well-represented on the waiver list.

So have the teacher unions.

Organized labor, of course, is a heavy donor to Democratic candidates and was among the groups that pressed hard for Congress and the president to ram ObamaCare through the legislature and into Americans’ lives.

If ObamaCare is so vital to our national well-being, why are these unions and employers in a heavily Democratic district seeking relief from the burdens it imposes?

And why would Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner, whose brilliant thought process led him to say “the bill and I are one,” ask for a waiver for his hometown of New York City?

This is what happens when the government takes money out of the private sector and lets politicians spend it. Especially left-wing politicians who are not inclined to cut taxes and reduce regulations.

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Republicans prepare to investigate Democrat corruption

Here is Darrell Issa on Fox News Sunday.

Story from the left-wing Politico web site.

Excerpt:

The WikiLeaks debacle, corruption in Afghanistan and Obama administration regulation are all on the agenda as Rep. Darrell Issa prepares to take the helm of the top House committee tasked with watch-dogging Washington.

[…]”We need to start by asking a very fundamental question: Why hasn’t the economy created the private-sector jobs the president promised?” the memo said.

That hearing would call business leaders to testify about how government regulations are doing “harm to job-creation efforts.” The hearing falls in line with what Issa talked about Sunday, when he told “Fox News Sunday” that administration regulation is hurting American competitiveness.

According to the agenda, Issa also plans to hold hearings on the role played by mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the foreclosure crisis. For that, he intends to call the Federal Housing Administration chief to testify, along with non-government experts. Along those lines, Issa is planning a hearing examining the “failure” of another government panel to find out more about the financial crisis — he wants to dig into the work of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which he claims has done a “biased” and “highly partisan” job of looking for the root causes of the financial crisis.

Issa also plans to detour into foreign policy. According to the memo, he’ll hold a hearing on how to combat corruption in Afghanistan. He also plans a hearing on WikiLeaks, examining ways the federal government can plug the disclosure of more sensitive information in the future. He plans to call National Security Adviser Tom Donilon to testify.

Issa said on “Fox News Sunday” that Attorney General Eric Holder needs to either do more to crack down on the WikiLeaks document dumps or leave the administration.

And so it begins.

Number of Obamacare waivers granted doubles to 222

From the Verum Serum.

Excerpt:

Last month it was revealed that 111 companies had received one year waivers from costly provisions of Obamacare.

[…]Yesterday HHS updated their site to show that the number of “waived” organizations has now doubled to 222. The total number of people excused from this particular requirement of the new law has gone from 1.1 million to 1.5 million in one month. The largest single addition is American Heritage Life Insurance Company with nearly 70,000 employees. There are also quite a few union locals on the updated list:

  • Bricklayers Local 1 – 1,985 employees
  • International Brotherhood of Trade Unions Local 713 – 861 employees
  • Local 1102 has three listings – 6,271 employees
  • Local 338 – 18,209 employees
  • SoCal Pipe Trades – 12,700
  • Teamsters Local 522 – 270
  • UFCW Local 1445 – 148
  • Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 630 – 1,166
  • UFCW Local 1000 – 3,855
  • SEIU Greater New York – 4,544
  • Laundry and Dry Cleaning Workers Local 52 – 1,547
  • Social Service Employees Union Local 371 – 34,000

I think that the aim is to cause small businesses to go out of businesses so that the government has an easier time controlling the economy, which is what socialists want. It is much harder to control a massive number of cats than a handful of mules.