Farm Contractors Balk At Obamacare Requirements

Obamacare is putting the agricultural industry in a tizzy. Contractors who provide farm labor must now offer workers health insurance are complaining loudly about the cost in their already low-margin business. Read more at NPR
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Insurer's Message: Prepare for Climate Change or Get Sued

To insurance companies, there’s no doubt that climate change is here: They are beginning to file lawsuits against small towns and cities who they say haven’t prepared for the floods and storms that will cost the companies billions in payments. Earlier this week, the U.S. arm of a major global insurance company backed away from an unprecedented lawsuit against Chicago and its suburbs for failing to prepare for heavy rains and associated flooding it claimed were fueled by global warming. While legal experts said the case was a longshot, its withdrawal didn't alter the message it contained for governments: prepare now for climate change or pay the price.

Read more at NBC News
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

History: Why is healthcare tied to the workplace?

(TIMELINE 2005: Gov. Romney is working on a universal health care plan for Massachusetts)

Excerpt: While employers first started experimenting with health coverage during the war [WWII/FDR era], the next decade saw a huge expansion of corporate health benefits. Between 1946 and 1957, the number of US workers receiving health coverage through an employer jumped by a factor of 12. By 1957, firms were covering 12 million workers plus 20 million dependents. The employer-based system was well suited to the America of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a time when healthcare was relatively inexpensive-amounting to less than 5 percent of Gross Domestic Product, as opposed to nearly 15 percent today [2005]-and when many Americans spent their entire working lives toiling for one company.

Read more at the Boston Globe Read More......

Doctor’s ‘I will not comply’ Obamacare break-up letter getting incredible praise from her peers

A Texas ophthalmologist and co-founder of AmericanDoctors4Truth tore down the curtain on Obamacare last week, describing President Obama’s “signature” legislative achievement for the con game of forced labor that it really is. When she wrote to the Aetna insurance company canceling her participation in its offerings, Dr. Kristin Held of San Antonio was informed she is contractually bound to care for the company’s patients for another year — as though Obamacare not only re-configured the American health care system, it repealed the 13th Amendment at the same time.

Read more at Biz Pac Review
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Heartland Blog: A Short Guide to Obamacare

By Matt Faharty - It’s not a national healthcare system. It’s not the free market. It isn’t what we’ve had for the last forty years. So what is Obamacare?

Maybe I am too late to write about this topic since the Affordable Care Act has already been passed and is in the process of implementation. Then again, the bill is infamously opaque, and I believe very few people, either in Washington, the media, or the general public understand what Obamacare is, or how it will make healthcare more affordable. A study in the Journal of Health Economics published this month claims that only 14% of Americans between ages 25 and 64 have a basic understanding of how insurance works, let alone how Obamacare will effect it. Nobody even seems to know how long the bill is with estimates ranging from 10,000 to 33,000 pages of mind-numbing bureaucratic documents.

According to Nancy Pelosi we should start to know what is in the bill at this point, so I will take a crack at it. Read more at Somewhat Reasonable, a Heartland.org/blog ... Read More......

Top Ten Obamacare Horror Stories the Media are Covering Up

John Nolte at Breitbart News writes, "Because the mainstream media lobbied every bit as hard as Obama to win passage of ObamaCare, they are every bit as invested in doing whatever is necessary to see that it is perceived as a success. Unfortunately for Americans who expect truth from their media, this means the media are having to manufacture a false reality that says ObamaCare is, to steal a phrase, 'doing fine.' ✧ In order to manufacture this phony reality, the media must further sell their blackened soul by violating one of their most cherished principals: reporting on how government policy hits America's weakest the hardest. It's just a fact that the worst fallout of ObamaCare is already landing hard on the working class, who are losing work hours, jobs, and their insurance." Read more at Breitbart... Read More......

Letter: Merkley's addition to health care slapped burden on small builders

CORVALLIS GAZETTE-TIMES/LETTERS, 12/29/2009 by Jean Nelson - "I'm shocked! In the midst of high unemployment and disappearing jobs, U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon slipped another killer into Obamacare. ∴ Inserted into the "health care" bill as a "manager's amendment," so that there was no discussion and no vote, Sen. Merkley added a requirement that construction companies with more than five employees will be required to offer health insurance. ∴ Small construction companies in Oregon and in the nation will be devastated by this requirement. If this bill becomes law, every other industry with more than 50 employees must provide health insurance. ∴ Why were small construction companies singled out? That is a question that needs to be asked of Sen. Merkley. It appears to be another one of the payoffs that are so rampant throughout the health care bill. ∴ Please call Sen. Merkley's district office at 503-326-3386 and insist that this provision be removed."

Jean Nelson
Corvallis Read More......

Can Obama and Congress Order You to Buy Broccoli?

TOWNHALL.COM, 10/21/2009 by Terry Jeffrey - Can President Barack Obama and Congress enact legislation that orders Americans to buy broccoli? If so, where did they get that authority? What provision in the Constitution empowers the federal government to order an individual to buy a product he does not want? Read more at Townhall.com... Read More......

About that health-reform cost study

WASHINGTON POST, 10/20/2009 by Karen Ignagni (Hat tip: John Detweiler) - It has been alleged that health insurers commissioned a report recently from PricewaterhouseCoopers as part of a last-ditch effort to kill health-care reform. A relentless public relations campaign has attacked the messengers -- our association, America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), and PricewaterhouseCoopers -- as a way of discrediting the findings that major provisions in the Senate Finance Committee proposal will have the unintended effect of increasing the cost of health-care coverage.

Let me be clear and direct: Health plans continue to strongly support reform. In fact, last year we proposed new insurance market rules and consumer protections to achieve universal coverage, remove restrictions on preexisting conditions and end the practice of basing premiums on health status or gender. We firmly believe that all the cost concerns the report raised can be resolved. Read more at the Washington Post... Read More......

Neurosurgeon Questions Obama Care

Hat tip: Lee McLaughlin - Paid for by the League of American Voters and posted by the National Republican Trust.com (NRTPac/GOPTrust.com) Read More......

Uninsured in America

By Stuart Browning - Visit FreeMarketCure.com
(Figures presented in this video are shown below the fold)

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Data presented in this video:
Claim: 45 million Americans are uninsured

• 17 million live in households with yearly average incomes of $50,000 (38%)
  
• 9 million live in households with yearly average incomes of $75,000
  
• 18 million are the "Young Invincibles," age 18-34 who spend 4 times as much on alcohol, tobacco, entertainment and dining out as they would spend on health insurance (40%)
  
• 14 million of the uninsured are eligible for Medicade or SCHIP but choose to opt out (31%)
  
• 12 million illegal immigrants have no health care insurance but cannot be turned away from health care
  
• With "Compassionate Entry," Mexican citizens living in Mexico can receive free health care in border states

This leaves 8 million people of the claimed 45 million who are actually uninsured in America and either fall through the cracks and don't get health care or refuse treatment.

Claim: The numbers of "Uninsured in America" are exaggerated by advocates of universal (or nationalized) health care. Read More......

Mandates costly? Who knew?

Want To Reduce Health Insurance Costs? Eliminate Mandates
Say Anything (Blog), May 20, 2008, posted by Rob

Or, in other words, make the health insurance market truly free. Or freer, at least.

A 2005 study by the Commonwealth Fund illustrates how insurance rates for young people are far higher in states with guaranteed issue and community rating than in states that do not have them. For instance:

• A healthy 25-year-old male could purchase a policy for $960 a year in Kentucky but would pay about $5,880 in New Jersey.
• A similar policy, available for about $1,548 in Kansas, costs $5,172 in New York.
• A policy priced at $1,692 in Iowa costs $2,664 in Washington and $4,032 in Massachusetts. . . .

Forcing insurers to cover benefits that many consumers may not want (or need) also drives up premiums. For instance, New Jersey is one of only four states to mandate coverage for chiropody. And it is one of only 13 states that mandate coverage for in vitro fertilization — adding 3 percent to 5 percent to the cost of premiums. Proponents often argue that their particular mandate costs little; but when all 42 of New Jersey’s mandated benefits are added together the costs are significant. Nationwide, as many as one-quarter of the uninsured may have been priced out of the market by costly mandates.

What’s troubling is how many politicians want to solve this problem which was created by too much government interference with more government interference in the form of expanded government-provided health care.

Read More......