Typical Obama move. Wait until late on Friday afternoon to put out information. Why this is done is laughable. It’s not like the mainstream media will report this.
In what is fast becoming a weekly event, the Obama administration granted 200 more companies aivers from the Democrats’ sweeping health care law in the Friday night news dump. That brings the number of companies receiving waivers to 1,372. (You can get a full list of the companies exempted here.)
Not surprisingly, it helps to be a Democratic ally when seeking a waiver. The Republican Policy Committee reports that over half of the workers that have been exempted so far belong to unions:
The plans newly approved for waivers cover more than 160,000 people, bringing to nearly 3.1 million the number of individuals in plans exempted from the health law’s requirements. Of the participants receiving waivers, more than half – over 1.55 million – are in union plans, raising questions of why such a disproportionate share of union members are receiving waivers from the law’s requirements. The percentage of participants receiving waivers that come from unions also continues to rise – the number was 48% in April, and 45% in March.
More and more are seeking exemptions from ObamaCare. Just as predicted by those of us who actually read the bill and pointed out it was nothing more than a Obama power grab. More intended consequences from ObamaCare:
WASHINGTON — It is an oddity of American health care: Many nursing homes and home care agencies do not provide health insurance to their workers, or they pay wages so low that employees cannot afford the coverage that is offered.
The numbers are stark. Among workers who provide hands-on care to nursing home residents, one in four has no health insurance. Among those who provide care to people living at home, one in three is uninsured.
The new health care law is supposed to fix the problem by guaranteeing access to affordable coverage for all. But many nursing homes and home care agencies, alarmed at the cost of providing health insurance to hundreds of thousands of health care workers, have started a lobbying effort seeking some kind of exemption or special treatment.
These nursing homes and employees better hope they are unionized, since unions are the biggest group to receive ObamaCare waivers.
Mark Parkinson, president of the American Health Care Association, the largest trade group for nursing homes, says the problem is that reimbursement rates for Medicaid and Medicare, set by government agencies, do not pay them enough to offer their employees medical coverage. “We do not have much ability to increase prices because we are so dependent on Medicaid and Medicare” for revenue, he said.
So thanks to the unread ObamaCare bill, doctors and physicians will no longer accept Medicare or Medicaid due to low payments and nursing homes will have to cut their staff or face penalties. But you won’t have to worry about granny, Obama is looking out for her.
Mr. Parkinson acknowledged that when nursing homes do offer health insurance to employees, the benefits are often limited. The coverage “is probably not up to what will be required” by the federal law, he said.
Remember folks, Obama wants to end employer-paid health insurance benefits.
Medicaid covers about two-thirds of nursing home residents. States set Medicaid rates, and many states, facing severe budget problems, have reduced payments for nursing homes.
Starting in 2014, the law will require employers with 50 or more full-time employees to offer affordable coverage or risk paying a penalty. For a midsize nursing home, that penalty could easily exceed $200,000 a year. Nursing home executives are urging Congress and the Obama administration to spare them from the penalties.
Where in the Constitution does it grant Congress the power to punish taxpayers with penalties? Congress only has the power to lay and collect taxes and Obama said these penalties were not taxes.
Just don’t ask them to stop spending. They consider this draconian and catastrophic. Now the Obama regime is going after people’s pensions to pay for their historic spending spree.
The Obama administration will begin to tap federal retiree programs to help fund operations after the government loses its ability Monday to borrow more money from the public, adding urgency to efforts in Washington to fashion a compromise over the debt.
I’m sure this isn’t going to affect those unionized federal workers.
Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has warned for months that the government would soon hit the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling — a legal limit on how much it can borrow. With the government poised to reach that limit Monday, Geithner is undertaking special measures in an effort to postpone the day when he will no longer have enough funds to pay all of the government’s bills.
Great idea. Instead of asking our feckless President to stop his spending spree, they are going to steal redistribute the wealth of others to keep on spending.
Geithner, who has already suspended a program that helps state and local government manage their finances, will begin to borrow from retirement funds for federal workers. The measure won’t have an impact on retirees because the Treasury is legally required to reimburse the program.
Translation: The taxpayers are footing the bill.
The maneuver buys Geithner only a few months of time. If Congress does not vote by Aug. 2 to raise the debt limit, Geithner says the government is likely to default on some of its obligations, which he says would cause enormous economic harm and the suspension of government services, including the disbursal of Social Security funds.
Translation: We want to keep spending America into insolvency by scaring old people with the threat that they won’t get their social security checks.
Many congressional Republicans, however, have been skeptical that breaching the Aug. 2 deadline would be as catastrophic as Geithner suggests. What’s more, Republican leaders are insisting that Congress cut spending by as much as the Obama administration wants to raise the debt limit, without any new taxes. Obama is proposing spending cuts and tax increases to rein in the debt.
There are no cuts because Obama has increased spending to historic levels. So much for that Obama campaign promise to “cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term.”
“Everything should be on the table, except raising taxes,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Because raising taxes will hurt our economy and hurt our ability to create jobs in our country.”
The Obama administration has warned that it is dangerous to make a vote on raising the debt limit contingent on other proposals. But Boehner is demanding that Congress use the debt vote as a way to bring down government spending.
Obama was against raising the debt ceiling as a Senator back in 2006. Here is his infamous stance back them as he claimed raising the debt ceiling under George W. Bush a “failure of leadership.”
“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend of ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies.
Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”
As we know, anything Obama’s says has a expiration date.
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