Impeding changes to our Health Care system

[SamIam]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

The intentions of Democrats are only the best. They want all of the old to have lavish retirements, all of the young to have scholarships, verse-penning cowboys to have festivals funded by government, and everyone to have access to all the best health care, at no cost to himself. In the face of a huge wave of debt swamping all western nations, this is the core of their argument: They want a fair society, and their critics do not; they want to help, and their opponents like to see people suffer; they want a world filled with love and caring, and their opponents want one of callous indifference, in which the helpless must fend for themselves. (“We must reject both extremes, those who say we shouldn’t help the old and the sick and those who say that we should,” quips the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg.) But in fact, everyone thinks that we “should” do this; the problem, in the face of the debt crisis, is finding a way that we can. It is about the “can” part that the left is now in denial: daintily picking its way through canaries six deep on the floor of the coal mine, and conflating a “good” with a “right.” http://www.weeklystandard.com/articl...te_576909.html

Canaries, my ass. Those are the bodies of your fellow Americans. Soaring unemployment? Food? Medical care? And the Republican response is to stop assistance to Americans impacted by the worst economic crisis since the Depression? And your commentator would have us believe that it's all about "can"?

No. It's all about greed. God forbid that those in the highest percentiles of income go back to paying the same amount of taxes that they were before W. came along. I noticed all those rich people on street corners with signs that read, "Will actually do some work (as long as my hands don't get dirty) to pay my taxes." Yeah, right.

Oh, and God forbid that anything resembling a "transfer of wealth" occur in the good old USA. Well, I take that back. It's OK to transfer wealth to continuous wars, defense contractors like Halliburton, and the Generals at the Pentagon. No one mentions that almost half the US budget goes to the military (and thus half of everyone's taxes). Dick Chaney can bloat himself with the tax payer's dollar, but a family hit with unemployment better not get a few food stamps.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- One in six Americans is receiving help from the government, just as fiscal austerity threatens to reduce some of that aid.

Soaring unemployment during The Great Recession has driven tens of millions of people to the dole. Enrollment in Medicaid and food stamp programs are at record highs, while unemployment insurance rolls remain at elevated levels. Many people depend on more than one program.

But as President Obama and lawmakers fiercely debate budget cuts to reduce the country's $14 trillion-plus debt, some of those lifelines could be at risk. House Republicans are looking to revamp and slash funding for many programs, including Medicaid and food stamps.

[DanaC]

But what about the Job Creators? Won't somebody think of the Job Creators!

[SamIam]

Originally Posted by DanaC

But what about the Job Creators? Won't somebody think of the Job Creators!

They're busy creating jobs for 12 year olds in factory sweatshops in Rwanda.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by SamIam

They're busy creating jobs for 12 year olds in factory sweatshops in Rwanda.

Blame Clinton, he signed that bill.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Blame Clinton, he signed that bill.

Ah well. As long as we can ascribe blame then that's alright.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Ah well. As long as we can ascribe blame then that's alright.

Well if you don't think we can assign blame for the movement of jobs overseas to a Free Trade Agreement, then that's cool. There are certainly enough people around here blaming everything else on other people and groups they perceive as the souce of our problems, so, as you say, "then that's alright".

[Griff]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

There are certainly enough people around here blaming everything else on other people and groups they perceive as the souce of our problems...

[TheMercenary]

No shit. That was my point.

[TheMercenary]

Federal payments required by President Barack Obama’s health care law are being understated by as much as $50 billion per year because official budget forecasts ignore the cost of insuring many employees’ spouses and children, according to a new analysis. The result could cost the U.S. Treasury hundreds of billions of dollars during the first ten years of the new health care law’s implementation.

“The Congressional Budget Office has never done a cost-estimate of this [because] they were expressly told to do their modeling on single [person] coverage,” said Richard Burkhauser in a telephone interview Monday. Burkhauser is an economist who teaches in Cornell University’s department of policy analysis and management. On Monday the National Bureau of Economic Research published a working paper on the subject that Burkhauser co-authored with colleagues from Cornell and Indiana University.

Employees and employers can use the rules to their own advantage, he said. “A very large number of workers” will be able to apply for federal subsidies, “dramatically increasing the cost” of the law, he said.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/08/08/re...#ixzz1UZeO5xD0


The Importance of the Meaning and Measurement of “Affordable” in the Affordable Care Act
Richard V. Burkhauser, Sean Lyons, Kosali I. Simon

This working paper highlights the practical importance of two critical but under-explored assumptions behind existing estimates of the Affordable Care Act (ACA)’s potential impact on the mix of employees and families who may have employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) in the future or may receive subsidies in the new health insurance exchanges. The first assumption is whether ACA’s affordable coverage rule will be interpreted to mean that employers must provide affordable single coverage or that they must provide affordable family coverage policies to workers with families to avoid paying a fine. The second assumption is how much employers and employees will cooperatively agree in the future to designing new compensation contracts to take advantage of the way “affordability” is determined. We show that depending on these assumptions, the ACA could lead to far more lower to moderate income families gaining access to affordable coverage through exchanges or, conversely, to far fewer of these families being covered by ESI, even if no employers drop their health insurance plans as a result of the new law. Using our stylized models, we find at one extreme that the share of private sector workers covered by ESI would fall by as much as 12.7 percentage points, relative to a case of full compliance with the law, if the ACA affordability coverage rule is interpreted to apply to family coverage and employees directly pay 100 percent of the cost of the ESI in premiums, with compensating higher wages making them no worse off. At the other extreme, we find no changes in the share of private sector workers covered by ESI along this margin if employee contribution shares do not change in the future and affordability is interpreted to refer to single coverage. What constitutes a realistic point between these two extremes depends on exactly how the affordability coverage rule will be interpreted and the degree that employers and employees will actually be able to make these adjustments because of labor market rigidities. This working paper’s contribution is to point out the importance of these hitherto unexplored factors for future consideration in research that uses more sophisticated micro simulation models. In our stylized model, most of the effect of the movement onto the subsidized exchanges occurs when employees directly pay less than 50 percent of the ESI family premium. We conclude by discussing the limitations of stylized calculations relative to full simulation models, and directions for future research.

[classicman]

“The Congressional Budget Office has never done a cost-estimate of this [because] they were expressly told to do their modeling on single [person] coverage,”

I thought they were an independent agency. How is it they were "told" to do anything?

[SamIam]

Originally Posted by classicman

I thought they were an independent agency. How is it they were "told" to do anything?

Yeah, I was wondering about that, too. Of course, the rag Merc did his cut and paste from seemed biased and has its own agenda. What a surprise!

[classicman]

I never heard of the man, so I goggled him.
Looking through the news feeds that carried his name were all suspect.
So I dug a lil deeper ...

I figured that I'd get a bunch of right wing extremist crap. I was shocked when I read his Biography

Then again there is this

[TheMercenary]

It was a 9-11 conspiracy.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by classicman

I never heard of the man, so I goggled him.
Looking through the news feeds that carried his name were all suspect.
So I dug a lil deeper ...

I figured that I'd get a bunch of right wing extremist crap. I was shocked when I read his Biography

Well given his educational credentials I would say he has something to back up his opinions, like them or not, agree with them or not.... But rather than attack the person maybe you can attack the opinion directly?

[TheMercenary]

How is that unemployment rate since the advent of "millions of Shovel Ready jobs"? Anyone?