We’ve been through a global recession. Now we’re fighting through a stalled recovery. Revenues are the lowest they’ve been in half a century. Their finances a wreck, many states have effectively sunk into bankruptcy.
Indiana is still afloat. In fact, we’ve fared better than most. We continue to meet our obligations without raising taxes, and the reserves we carefully built and protected will get us through the downturn.
But as if we did not already have enough on our plates, the passage and implementation of Obamacare presents us with a whole new set of challenges and a costly to-do list.
I note with special sadness that first and foremost amongst the bill’s consequences will be the probable demise of the Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP). This program is currently providing health insurance to 50,000 low-income Hoosiers. With its Health Savings Account-style personal accounts and numerous incentives for healthy lifestyle choices, it has been enormously popular and successful.
Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, soon to cover one in every four citizens, will not only scoop up most of HIP’s participants, but will also cost the state between $3.1 and $3.9 billion over the next decade. It is hard to see how my successors as governor will be able to avoid a steep state tax increase to pay for it. Meanwhile, our medical device companies and small businesses will shed jobs as they wrestle with the taxes and penalties levied to help finance Washington’s “reforms.”
In Indianapolis yesterday morning, Dan Coats listened to health care professionals lay out their concerns over the recently enacted Obama-Pelosi-Ellsworth health spending bill. For the seventh time during the general election campaign, Dan heard an overwhelming consensus of pessimism concerning the outlook of their profession, upcoming cuts to Medicare reimbursement rates and the ability to ensure quality care for their patients under new government mandates and regulations.
The health spending bill not only included numerous job-killing provisions for the health care industry, but also wrapped the student lending industry under its umbrella as well. Included were modifications to higher education financial assistance programs that resulted in the swift elimination of jobs at Sallie Mae facilities in Texas and Florida.
Missouri voters dealt Obamacare a significant setback yesterday, approving a statewide ballot measure with an overwhelming 71 percent of the vote.
The vote was the first time citizens had an opportunity to cast a ballot on the unpopular health care law. Missouri’s measure prohibits the federal government’s enforcement of the individual mandate to buy health insurance. The victory sends a strong message about Obamacare in a bellwether state.
“We’re excited and proud to be ground zero in the battle against this misbegotten federal health care reform,” said Missouri Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder in an exclusive interview. “We had the first vote in the nation in the Show-Me State. And we’re showing the nation the way to repeal and replace this big government, big bureaucracy, one-size-fits-all law.”
Throughout his presidential campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama promised the American people: “If you’re a family that’s making $250,000 a year or less, you will see no increase in your taxes.” After he became President, Barack Obama reiterated that pledge, promising the American people in his September 9th health care press conference: “The middle-class will realize greater security, not higher taxes.” But Obamacare does contain tax hikes. Tons of them. From taxes on tanning beds to taxes on employment and investments, Obamacare is a certified job-killing machine.
None of these taxes touches the lives of every American as closely as the individual mandate to purchase health insurance. For the first time in American history, Obamacare forces all Americans to purchase a product or face sanction from the Internal Revenue Service. This is clearly a tax, as pointed out by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos during a September 20th interview with the President himself. In an exchange that can only be described as “Clintonesque” Stephanopoulos pressed President Obama to admit his individual mandate was a tax. But President Obama refused to acknowledge reality and denied it. Stephanopoulos was forced to read the definition of “tax” straight from Merriam Webster’s Dictionary. But even then Obama refused to come clean: “George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. … Nobody considers that a tax increase.” Well nobody but President Barack Obama’s Justice Department.
Oh, that’s right. Obamacare, filled with stealth Nanny State penalties and taxes aimed at further controlling your life, is now threatening the yummy eats found at White Castle and IHOP, among others.
The Columbus-based family owned restaurant chain – known for serving small square hamburgers called “sliders” – says a single provision in the bill will eat up roughly 55 percent of its yearly net income after 2014.
Starting that year, the bill levies a $3,000-per-employee penalty on companies whose workers pay more than 9.5 percent of household income in premiums for company-provided insurance.
White Castle, which currently provides insurance to all of its full-time workers and picks up 70 to 89 percent of their premium costs, believes it will likely end up paying those penalties. The financial hit will make it hard for the company to maintain its 421 restaurants, let alone create new jobs, says company spokesman Jamie Richardson. White Castle employs more than 10,000 people nationwide, and more than 1,200 in Ohio.
This is just another “in” for some controlling bureaucrat-y sour pusses who are wanting to get all up in our stuff. Pry my sliders out of my cold, dead hands! I suggest a new slogan: “No Grease, No Peace!” Someone has to speak up for our delicious eateries. In fact, it would be Un-American to do otherwise. You know this isn’t one of those ‘unintended consequences’, only discovered once we were finally allowed to find out what was in the bill – that had to be passed first. It is clearly an intended consequence.
The ‘laser-like focus’ on jobs has proven to be a laser-like focus on killing all jobs in industries that the Obama administration deems icky and evil. Including the restaurant industry, particularly the fast food segment of the same. Remember, Michelle Obama has her war on childhood obesity and says that fat kids are a national security threat. I don’t think she’s really being fair there. While her husband is childishly naive and immature, he isn’t fat by any means.
In 1988, Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act. Officials in Washington were firmly united in creating the single-largest expansion of Medicare since 1965. Fast-forward 22 years, and we’ve just witnessed a monumental government takeover of the private health care sector.
But this doesn’t mean ObamaCare is set in stone. As we saw with the Medicare Catastrophic law, a focus on higher costs, disrupted health benefits and public revulsion to intrusive government bureaucracy helped ordinary America over the powerful players in Washington.
In a perfect world, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) would like to “fully repeal” Obamacare. “That’s what I voted for earlier this year,” he says, alluding to the Senate GOP’s repeal amendment from March, which failed by a vote of 58 to 39. “But, for now, full repeal is very tough. I would like to see that, but Republicans only have 41 votes.”
With those numbers — stuck in the minority until at least January 2011, with Pres. Barack Obama in office until January 2013 — Hatch says Republicans “need to be strategic, going after Democrats’ arguments and specific provisions” while simultaneously strengthening the broader case against Obamacare. That strategy, he says, is the best way, this year, to stop the Democrats’ march down the “primrose path to socialism.” Last Thursday, to get the ball rolling, Hatch introduced two new repeal measures: One would repeal Obamacare’s individual mandate, and the second would repeal the employer mandate.
According to surveys, no group of Americans is more skeptical of Obamacare than senior citizens—and with good reason.
While bits and pieces of the massive law are designed to appeal to seniors—more taxpayer subsidies for the Medicare drug benefit, for example—much of the financing over the initial ten years is siphoned off from an estimated $575 billion in projected savings to the Medicare program. Unless Medicare savings are captured and plowed right back into the Medicare program, however, the solvency of the Medicare program will continue to weaken. The law does not provide for that. Medicare is already burdened by an unfunded liability of $38 trillion.
Medicare Advantage plans, which currently attract almost one in four seniors, will see enrollment cut roughly in half over the next 10 years. Senior citizens will thus be more dependent on traditional Medicare than they are today and will have fewer health care choices.
This isn’t exactly news — except possibly to the most gullible Obamunists:
President Obama’s health care overhaul law will increase the nation’s health care tab instead of bringing costs down, government economic forecasters concluded Thursday in a sobering assessment of the sweeping legislation. … [The Health and Human Services Department] also warned that Medicare cuts may be unrealistic and unsustainable, driving about 15% of hospitals into the red and “possibly jeopardizing access” to care for seniors.
That’s what Comrade Obama’s own bureaucrats say. To get an idea of just how much damage this insane power grab will do to health care, the economy, and our liberty, wait around a few years, until BHO is safely out of office and the entire monstrosity has gone into effect.
“A trillion dollars gets spent, and it’s no surprise — health care costs are going to go up,” said Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., a leading Republican on health care issues.
Meanwhile, the most audacious liars among the liberal establishment continue to holler that Chairman Zero is reducing our tax burden, as if the $trillions he’s flushed away will magically reappear amid the lint BHO digs out of his navel.
In another flashing yellow light, the report warned that a new voluntary long-term care insurance program created under the law faces “a very serious risk” of insolvency.
As do Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and every other extravagant entitlement our socialist rulers have seen fit to bestow upon us — as well as the federal government itself. When the whole house of cards collapses, we’ll see if it turns out as well for the left as Cloward and Piven planned.
Nearly 4 million Americans will have to pay a penalty if they fail to get health insurance when that element of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law kicks in, according to congressional projections released Thursday.
The penalties will average a little more than $1,000 apiece in 2016, the Congressional Budget Office said in a report.
The vast majority of people paying the fine will be middle class, which would violate Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge not to raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 a year and couples making less than $250,000.
If duties are too high, they lessen the consumption; the collection is eluded; and the product to the treasury is not so great as when they are confined within proper and moderate bounds. This forms a complete barrier against any material oppression of the citizens by taxes of this class, and is itself a natural limitation of the power of imposing them. — Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 21, 1787
