Obamanomics: McDonald Sales Drop for First Time in Over a Decade

Get use to the news reporting about how bad the economy is. Their guy won reelection so those on the left will begin learning how bad the first 4 years of Obama truly was.

NEW YORK (AP) -McDonald’s Corp. says a key sales figure fell in October, marking the first monthly drop in nearly a decade for the world’s biggest hamburger chain.

The company, based in Oak Brook, Ill., says global sales at restaurants open at least a year fell 1.8 percent for the month. The last time the figure dropped was in 2003. The figure is a key metric because it strips out the impact of newly opened and closed locations.

The fast-food chain says the figure fell 2.2 percent in both the U.S. and Europe. In the region encompassing Asia, the Middle East and Africa, it dropped 2.4 percent.

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‘Barack Obama’ Robber Arrested

Is it Raaaacist?

From the stupid criminal file!

RIVIERA BEACH—The gun-toting ‘Barack Obama‘ restaurant robber is in custody, police said early Wednesday.

According to Riviera Beach police, a man named Marvin McTeare, 22, is the person who robbed a McDonald’s restaurant while carrying a gun and wearing a ‘Barack Obama’-type mask.

The incident happened early on the morning of January 28 at the McDonald’s at 3551 Broadway.

Wonder if he stated he was just acting like Obama and “redistributing the wealth?”

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Representative introduces bill to grant ALL AMERICANS an ObamaCare Waivers….says you shouldn’t have to be politically connected to keep your health insurance

Awesome! I’ve screamed this since the first ObamaCare waivers were issued. If corporations and unions are allowed to duck the ObamaCare law, why shouldn’t Americans be allowed to do the same? After all, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) admitted that most of those who received the waivers were “friends” of Democrats.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) writes, via Townhall.com:

During the debate over his health care law, President Obama repeatedly promised that “if you like your plan, you can keep it,” but for millions of Americans that promise has already been broken.

In a shocking admission, Obama’s administration has granted more than 1,000 waivers to the health law to prevent 2.6 million workers from losing their coverage. Millions more weren’t lucky enough to get a waiver, and have already been forced to switch plans.

Most waivers have been distributed to Fortune 500 corporations like Pepsi and McDonald’s, unions, Las Vegas casinos and in one case an entire state.

If corporations and unions can get a waiver from the health law, every American should get one. That is why I have introduced a bill that would allow anyone – an individual, a family, a small business – to receive a waiver. You should not need to be politically connected to keep your health insurance.

My bill uses the same standard created by the Obama Administration. If the law increases your insurance premiums, you can apply for a waiver. If you’re forced to drop the coverage you like, you can apply for a waiver. The bill also requires the Obama Administration to educate the public about the option and regularly report how many families and employers have received waivers.

Got to love when someone uses the same standards, set by the Obama regime, to make a point.

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Need a ObamaCare Waiver? Get in Line

The majority of Americans want a ObamaCare waiver. Where does the line start?

Detroit News reports:

Here is one of the secrets that Washington hopes that you don’t notice about the new $2.6 trillion health care law. If you don’t like the law’s slew of new mandates and taxes on families, doctors and employers, you can get an exemption.

If you don’t want the government picking your family’s insurance plan and your doctor, you can opt out. If you don’t want to pay higher premiums and watch your health care costs skyrocket, you can get a free pass.

How do you receive an exemption to the job-killing health care law? It’s simple: all you have to do is become politically connected. Beginning last fall, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius began awarding waivers to unions and corporations that couldn’t comply with one of the law’s countless new mandates.

But if the law is so great, shouldn’t it apply to everyone?

Here’s how it happened. Many employers provide workers with “mini-med” health plans, which is low-cost insurance with higher deductibles and smaller annual limits. It’s not full coverage, but for millions of hourly workers it’s better than being uninsured. Companies complained to Sebelius that they would have to drop this coverage because it doesn’t meet the health law’s unreasonable requirement that all plans include comprehensive benefits.

Some of the administration’s closest allies — including 43 unions — were quickly told that they didn’t have to comply with the law. The latest count is that 222 unions and corporations have been granted waivers to portions of the health care law by President Obama’s health secretary. The list includes names like the Service Employees International Union and McDonald’s.

More mandates are scheduled to take effect this year that will make it even harder for businesses to afford the coverage that they currently offer. When it’s all said and done, HHS is expected to release more than 30,000 pages of new regulations that will create an impossible compliance task for employers and families alike.

This charade is the clearest indication yet that the health law has failed to live up to the president’s often repeated promise that if you like your health plan, you can keep it. That promise has already been broken for workers with mini-med plans, and millions of other small business health plans will soon be deemed “unacceptable coverage” in the eyes of HHS bureaucrats.

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Judicial Watch Sues Health and Human Services to Obtain Documents Regarding Obamacare Waivers

Again, one must ask: If ObamaCare is so great, why all the issued health care waivers for corporations and unions? I have written about this subject on many occasions and pointed out the 222 ObamaCare waivers that have been issue by Health and Human Services.

From JudicialWatch.org:

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it filed a lawsuit on December 30, 2010, against the Obama Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to obtain records regarding the agency’s decision to grant “waivers” to companies and unions seeking to be exempt from requirements of Public Health Services Act Section 2711, President Obama’s healthcare reform law. According to HHS’s own estimate, at least 222 companies and unions have received waivers from the law, commonly known as Obamacare.

With its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, Judicial Watch seeks the following information:

A. All records concerning the decision to grant waivers of the Annual Limits Requirements of PHS Act Section 2711; and

B. All communications between McDonald’s Corp. and HHS concerning Annual Limits Requirements.

The time frame for this request is from March 2010 to the present.

Judicial Watch filed its original FOIA request on October 7, 2010. HHS was required by law to respond by November 8, 2010. However, to date, HHS has failed to produce any records or to provide a justification for withholding responsive records. Nor has the agency indicated when a response is forthcoming.

In September 2010, McDonald’s corporation announced it would have to eliminate a health insurance program for nearly 30,000 low wage employees due to an Obamacare requirement that 80 to 85% of all insurance premium revenue be spent on patient care. Due to the high administrative costs associated with this type of health coverage program (known as a mini-med plan), McDonald’s insurer indicated it could not possibly meet the Obamacare requirement. HHS provided McDonald’s a one-year waiver concerning the Obamacare mandate and has been deluged with waiver requests from hundreds of other companies and unions since.

The Wall Street Journal deemed the McDonald’s waiver request, “one of the clearest indications that new [Obamacare] rules may disrupt workers’ health plans as the law ripples through the real world.”

President Obama’s healthcare reform law does not specify which companies or unions should receive waivers for its requirements and under what circumstances. Critics of how HHS has chosen to handle these waiver requests highlight the haphazard nature of the approval process and the fact that companies able to secure these coveted Obamacare exemptions are given an unfair competitive advantage over their rivals.

“The Obama administration is the most secretive in modern times. The Obamacare waiver fiasco is exactly the type of chaos that ensues when the federal government attempts to seize control of a large sector of the private economy. And Kathleen Sebelius’s HHS is willing to violate the Freedom of Information Act to keep Americans in the dark about this Obamacare failure. Secretary Sebelius might want to begin her implementation of Obamacare by obeying federal law regarding public records. The Obama administration’s slapdash handling of these waiver requests has created an enormous potential for political favoritism and influence peddling. The Obama administration must make this waivers completely transparent to the American people so they can be assured, in the least, that the process is not infected by corruption,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

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More Health Waivers Issued to Avoid ObamaCare Mandates

Again I will ask the question. If big corporations and unions are granted health care waivers to avoid the ObamaCare mandate, will the American taxpayers be granted waivers to avoid the health care takeover?

Jamie Dupree reports, viaAJC.com:

The Obama Administration has quietly granted even more waivers to the new federal health reform law, doubling the number in just the last three weeks to a new total of 222.

One of the more recognizable business names included on the newly-expanded list of waivers issued by the feds is that of Waffle House, which received a waiver on November 23 for health coverage that covers 3,947 enrollees.

Another familiar name was that of Universal Orlando, which runs a variety of very popular resorts in the Orlando, Florida area.  Universal was given a waiver for plans that cover 668 workers.

These waivers deal with limited health benefit plans, sometimes referred to as “mini-med” policies, which companies as large as McDonald’s use for some its employees.

The plan have limits on how much can be paid out in coverage, limits which would be phased out under the new health reform law.

The feds though have granted waivers from that law, amid concern that certain groups would drop their health insurance programs entirely.  Those waivers are good for one year, and can be considered for renewal.

A spokeswoman for Waffle House refused to explain the need for the waiver, saying “because Waffle House is a private company, we are going to decline to comment.”

As for Universal Orlando, a spokesman defended the waiver in an email on Monday evening.

“The new legislation would have left our part-time workers without their medical coverage,” said Tom Schroder of Universal Orlando Public Relations.   

“We sought the waiver so that we could continue to provide them with the coverage they need and deserve,” Schroder added.

The information on the waivers, which is buried deep on the web site of the U.S. Health & Human Services Department, shows that since it was last updated in mid-November, the number of waivers issued has gone from 111 to 222, covering organizations as diverse as the “Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Ogdensburg” to the “Pearson Candy Company.”

You can find a list of all of the 222 waivers at http://is.gd/iiw3u

Several weeks ago, critics singled out a number of unions which had received government approval for exemptions from certain provisions of the law dealing with annual medical spending limit requirements.

And there are more unions who have received waivers in this latest batch, like the Bricklayers Local 1 of MD, VA and DC, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, the Indiana Teamsters Health Benefits Fund, Service Employees International Union Local 1 Cleveland Welfare Fund, and more are listed.

The goal all along has been to get working Americans away from employer-paid health benefits and to put them on the government roster. Listen to their own words for verification:

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ObamaCare was designed to Eliminate Private Health Care Insurance, Not to Lower Costs

I have pointed this out in several articles, ObamaCare was not designed to lower insurance costs. It was designed to eliminate private insurance and employer-paid health insurance. You just have to listen to what progressives say…

Investors.com reports:

Health Care: The more we know about ObamaCare, the more we find out it wasn’t designed to cut costs but to eventually eliminate private insurance coverage and create a government-run system.

Provisions of the Democrats’ health care overhaul started to become law only a month ago, yet the list of companies dropping medical benefits for their employers is piling up.

Mega-firms such as AT&T, Caterpillar, John Deere and Verizon are among those that are either considering ending coverage for their employees or have already chosen to do so.

It’s not just the big companies eliminating benefits, either. Smaller employers are doing the same. Larry M. Elkin, president of Palisades Hudson Financial Group, wrote Thursday in the Business Insider: “For 15 years, I have taken pride in paying the full cost of health insurance for every full-time Palisades Hudson employee who wanted it. This month marks the last time I will do that.”

Elkin said that every one of his employees has the option of staying on the company plan. But those who choose that route “will have to pay the entire cost — ranging from $574 to $683 per month — themselves, through payroll deductions.”

And where will those who don’t opt for staying on the company plan go? Maybe they end up leaning on the government along with the 46 million or so other uninsured Americans the Democrats are trying to cover.

Elkin is not acting out of spite because he doesn’t like the Democrats. He’s acting rationally, as any good businessman should.

He knew in March, before the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed, that it “is likely to make health coverage anything but affordable for those who actually pay the bills” and that he would have to make changes for his 20 employees.

While Elkin is one of a few willing to publicly discuss how Obama-Care is affecting his business, others are following a bitter path similar to the one he feels he is forced to take. He cites a survey by the National Business Group on Health that found that roughly 63% of businesses plan to make their workers pay a higher portion of their health care insurance costs next year.

Again, how many of these currently insured workers will, rather than pay the premiums out of their pockets, find themselves relying on government for their coverage?

As the debate over ObamaCare raged, Americans were assured by the president himself that those of us who like our insurance plans would be able to keep them. But workers will not only lose their employers’ plans due to their employers’ increasing costs under the law, they will also be losing coverage because carriers are dropping some of the policy options they offer.

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ObamaCare for Some….Will the Obama administration issue waivers to the Taxpayers?

The intended consequences of ObamaCare is slapping Americans in the face. ObamaCare has exposed those who voted for its passage as liars and know-nothings. The biggest lie exposed is on the issue of insurance premiums costing less.

As soon as several big corporations whispered they might drop insurance coverage for their employees due to the health care law, the Obama administration rushed out to issue waivers to avoid the negative publicity before the midterm elections.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Well, well. In the clearest evidence so far that ObamaCare is harmful in practice and an election-year liability, the Obama Administration has decided not to enforce some of the law’s “consumer protections.” At least when the results are politically embarrassing.

Over the last several weeks the Health and Human Services Department has granted dozens of temporary waivers to certain ObamaCare mandates so that insurers and businesses won’t drop or cancel coverage. The most conspicuous went to McDonald’s to protect the “mini-med” plans for some 30,000 hourly workers from a rule that prohibits annual restrictions on benefits. Mini-med policies offer modest coverage at low premiums and other low-wage fast-food chains like Jack in the Box and Denny’s have been granted waivers as well.

Cigna, Aetna and a few other insurers have been given hall passes to continue selling mini-meds. Another went to the United Federation of Teachers Welfare Fund. The New York union offers city teachers supplemental drug coverage that would have been banned under the new rules.

Got to protect those union votes after all.

At least this sudden regulatory flexibility is protecting the coverage that people have today, as President Obama promised. But it isn’t much of an improvement if HHS retreats only after a national political blow-up. After all, the essential point of the regulations was to destroy mini-med plans and other types of coverage that Democrats claim are insufficiently generous. Democrats from Mr. Obama on down call these rules “the patients’ bill of rights,” but people don’t regularly need exemptions from a bill of rights.

And is it really better that HHS will impose destructive regulations and then decide on ad hoc basis who they’ll hit? This is an invitation to play favorites, exact political retribution and pursue whatever arbitrary goals HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and her successors happen to hold. ObamaCare amnesty shouldn’t go merely to the CEOs who can get White House aide Valerie Jarrett on the horn.

Recall, too, that the original McDonald’s memo the Journal exposed was actually warning about the future damage that will be caused by the forthcoming definition of the “medical loss ratio,” that is, what insurers are allowed to count as spending on health-care services. HHS said in a statement that Ms. Sebelius has the power to waive those rules too when they come out and “we fully intend to exercise her discretion under the new law to address the special circumstances of mini-med plans in the medical loss ratio calculations.”

In other words, HHS is pre-emptively declaring that it will grant a special dispensation to rules that haven’t even been finalized. Wouldn’t it be better to write less destructive rules in the first place? Or why not give everyone a waiver from everything?

The reality is that ObamaCare assigns HHS vast, undefined new powers that will mean whatever Ms. Sebelius and her team decides they will mean. The bill uses the phrase “the Secretary shall” or one of its variants more than a thousand times. Earlier this year, the Congressional Research Service found that ObamaCare created a “currently unknowable” number of new boards, commissions and offices, adding that “it is currently impossible to know how much influence they will ultimately have.”

HHS is also not building this bureaucratic apparatus in a transparent way. Ten of the 12 new regulations that HHS has issued in the last six months have been “interim final rules” that are not open to the ordinary process of public comment.

The White House had to play favorites with Senators and special interests to pass ObamaCare, and its implementation is no less ugly. But the waiver wave is most telling for what it says about the architects of this plan. By bending their own rules, they’re conceding their destructiveness.

I would like to know if the taxpayers will get the same treatment and be allowed waivers as well? How about those taxpayers living in Connecticut who just learned their premiums are going to increase by 47%? How about those sick children that will be affected by higher insurance premiums the administration approved of?

Where’s our waiver?

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ObamaCare Waivers Address Talk of Dropping Health Coverage

This is what happens when you ram through a bill and find it unnecessary to read the bill before voting it into law.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

As Obama administration officials put into place the first major wave of changes under the health care legislation, they have tried to defuse stiffening resistance — from companies like McDonald’s and some insurers — by granting dozens of waivers to maintain even minimal coverage far below the new law’s standards.

The waivers have been issued in the last several weeks as part of a broader strategic effort to stave off threats by some health insurers to abandon markets, drop out of the business altogether or refuse to sell certain policies.

Among those that administration officials hoped to mollify with waivers were some big insurers, some smaller employers and McDonald’s, which went so far as to warn that the regulations could force it to strip workers of existing coverage.

At a time when the midterm elections are looming and Republicans have been vocal in campaigning against the law, reaction to the rollout has been closely watched.

To date, the administration has given about 30 insurers, employers and union plans, responsible for covering about one million people, one-year waivers on the new rules that phase out annual limits on coverage for limited-benefit plans, also known as “mini-meds.” Applicants said their premiums would increase significantly, in some cases doubling or more.

These early exemptions offer the first signs of how the administration may tackle an even more difficult hurdle: the resistance from insurers and others against proposed regulations that will determine how much insurers spend on consumers’ health care versus administrative overhead, a major cornerstone of the law.

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.McDonald’s May Drop Health Plan thanks to ObamaCare

Getting Americans away from employer-paid health insurance is the goal of Obama. He said so himself:

The Wall Street Journal reports:

McDonald’s Corp. has warned federal regulators that it could drop its health insurance plan for nearly 30,000 hourly restaurant workers unless regulators waive a new requirement of the U.S. health overhaul.

The move is one of the clearest indications that new rules may disrupt workers’ health plans as the law ripples through the real world.

Trade groups representing restaurants and retailers say low-wage employers might halt their coverage if the government doesn’t loosen a requirement for “mini-med” plans, which offer limited benefits to some 1.4 million Americans.

The requirement concerns the percentage of premiums that must be spent on benefits.

While many restaurants don’t offer health coverage, McDonald’s provides mini-med plans for workers at 10,500 U.S. locations, most of them franchised. A single worker can pay $14 a week for a plan that caps annual benefits at $2,000, or about $32 a week to get coverage up to $10,000 a year.

Last week, a senior McDonald’s official informed the Department of Health and Human Services that the restaurant chain’s insurer won’t meet a 2011 requirement to spend at least 80% to 85% of its premium revenue on medical care.

McDonald’s and trade groups say the percentage, called a medical loss ratio, is unrealistic for mini-med plans because of high administrative costs owing to frequent worker turnover, combined with relatively low spending on claims.

Democrats who drafted the health law wanted the requirement to prevent insurers from spending too much on executive salaries, marketing and other costs that they said don’t directly help patients.

McDonald’s move is the latest indication of possible unintended consequences from the health overhaul. Dozens of companies have taken charges against earnings—totaling more than $1 billion—over a tax change in prescription-drug benefits for retirees.

More recently, insurers have proposed a round of double-digit premium increases and said new coverage mandates in the law are partly to blame. HHS has criticized the proposed increases as unwarranted.

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