Category Archives: Healthcare

IdiotCare’s Stunting Consequences

Barack Obama, Business, EU, Europe, Healthcare, Regulation

IdiotCare, aka ObamaCare, kicks in once a company is 50 people strong. In a word, once the business starts to grow. The costs imposed by this mandate compel the company to duck-and-dive in order to stay alive.

Kari DePhillips, co-owner of a small PR firm, explains how the health-care law would impact her small businesses, and what she is doing to stay in business. Incidentally, small businesses are already adept at handling similar situations, so as to avoid incurring the costs of affirmative-action laws.

DePhillips, of The Content Factory, told Fox’s Gerri Willis that she is “scrambling” to comply with the mandate, for she must provide employees with healthcare or face fines.

The additional costs the Ass With Ears will be imposing on Mrs. DePhillips: The year 2012, for this business woman, will mark the first time the cost of healthcare per employee “broke the 10,000 mark”! “Multiply that by 50,” and this entrepreneur is in hock to the tune of $500,000.

Hiring “fewer people or hiring in a different capacity (part-time, “1099 contractors”) are two solutions mentioned on The Willis Report.

Moving to the state of New Hampshire, as part of the “Free State Project,” is another option this enterprising young woman intends to exercise in the future.

Both women failed to mention to the incorporation option. Create a new business (at a certain cost) each time your company reaches 49, hardly a viable option. It’s probably least risky to stay small.

Like the Europeans, don’t shoot for the sky.

In 2006 I visited The Netherlands, one of the more free-market countries on the Continent. Shops did not open, on Monday, until 11:00 am so as to conserve the labor force. Expensive merchandize was kept under lock-and-key; customers treated like potential thieves. The supermarkets—a small, expensive selection of merchandize—made a visit to Costco as invigorating as smelling salts following a fainting spell.

Wait until our businesses look like Europe’s: small, meager, expensive. Then, Americans will blame business and look to Obama for yet more regulation.

UPDATE II: Heeere’s Health Care: ‘The Tax Man Cometh For YOU’ (Obey, Or Else)

Barack Obama, Healthcare, Law, Regulation, Socialism, Taxation

Someone asserted in my presence the other day that Obama Care would not affect his physician (and by extension, his own medical care).

The poster person for this mathematical improbability is Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi promised (and she believes her own institutionalized stupidity) to expand government through this enormous entitlement program, and drastically reduce the deficit and debt at the same time.

Pelosi math aside, call Obama’s Affordable Care Act what you may—penalty, tax, plunder, rape—it’ll affect you and your physician.

Via The Washington Examiner:

The health care law “includes the largest set of tax law changes in more than 20 years,” according to the Treasury inspector general who oversees the IRS. The agency will have to hire thousands of workers to manage it, requiring significant budget increases that already are being targeted by congressional Republicans determined to dismantle the president’s signature initiative.
“Knowing the complexity of the health law, there’s no question that the IRS is going to struggle with this,” said Rep. Charles Boustany Jr., R-La., chairman of the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee. “The IRS wants more resources. Well, we need to start digging down into what are they doing with the resources and personnel.”
Treasury spokeswoman Sabrina Siddiqui said, “The overwhelming majority of funds used by the agency to implement the Affordable Care Act go to administer the premium tax credits, which will be a tax cut averaging about $4,000 for more than 20 million middle-class people and families.
…an insurance company would send the taxpayer and the IRS forms each year verifying that the taxpayer has qualified insurance. Taxpayers would file the forms with the IRS along with their returns, and the IRS would check them to make sure they match the information supplied by the insurance companies.
The IRS says it is well on its way to gearing up for the new law but has offered little information about its long-term budget and staffing needs, generating complaints from Republican lawmakers and concern from government watchdogs.
The IRS is expected to spend $881 million on the law from 2010 through 2013, hiring more than 2,700 new workers and upgrading its computer systems. “

UPDATE I (July 9): SHORTAGES. The deadly silence from the Obama Heads at The American Medical Association over the devastating survey conducted by the Doctor Patient Medical Association is understandable. Unlike the AWE (Ass With Ears) and his supporters, some doctors are able to anticipate the effects on the practice of medicine of an increase in demand for services with no adjustment in the price. Via the Daily Caller:

Eighty-three percent of American physicians have considered leaving their practices over President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, according to a survey released by the Doctor Patient Medical Association.
The DPMA, a non-partisan association of doctors and patients, surveyed a random selection of 699 doctors nationwide. The survey found that the majority have thought about bailing out of their careers over the legislation, which was upheld last month by the Supreme Court.
Even if doctors do not quit their jobs over the ruling, America will face a shortage of at least 90,000 doctors by 2020. The new health care law increases demand for physicians by expanding insurance coverage. This change will exacerbate the current shortage as more Americans live past 65.

MORE.

UPDATE II (July 10): Obey, Or Else.

Gerri Willis, who does good reporting, claimed that “the government has no way to enforce the individual mandate – the tax that scofflaws have to pay for failing to get health insurance coverage.”

That’s unless the IRS’s arsenal doesn’t count. Judge Andrew Napolitano corrects this misrepresentation:

UPDATE II: A Romp Down Memory Lane With Justice Roberts

Bush, Constitution, Federalism, Founding Fathers, Healthcare, Justice, Law, The Courts

HERE are excerpts from “A Romp Down Memory Lane With Justice Roberts,” now on RT.

Is John G. Roberts Jr. no more than a smooth operator, I wondered on September 15 2005.

I began tracking the now infamous Justice Roberts a month earlier, around the time he was exciting admiration from gay-rights activists for winning “Romer vs. Evans” for them. The Los Angeles Times, at the time, noted that “Romer vs. Evans” had “struck down a voter-approved 1992 Colorado initiative that would have allowed employers and landlords to exclude gays from jobs and housing.”

Gay activists still consider the decision Roberts won for them the “single most important positive ruling in the history of the gay rights movement.” Special pleading not being this column’s “thing,” arguments from and against so-called gay rights did not sway me much.

Rather, I urged readers to pay attention to Roberts’ efforts against the private property and freedom of association of Coloradans. “When property is rendered insecure,” said Edmund Burke, “so is liberty.”

Alas, Roberts’ (pro bono) work comported with 14th-Amendment jurisprudence, aspects of which violate private property rights and freedom of association. Simply put, to the extent that the Constitution coincides with the natural law, it is good. More often than not, it has buried natural justice under the rubble of legislation and statute.

My choice for the Supreme Court of the United States, back when President Bush was pushing the goofy Harriet Myers, was Justice Janice Rogers Brown. An originalist, Justice Brown is also black. Pigment, however, only works in favor of candidates of the Left.

“Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much ‘free stuff’ as the political system will permit them to extract.” This was just one of Justice Brown’s many admirable utterances. (Today’s brazen cannibals would object to Brown’s maligning as vociferously as the obese derided this writer for telling the truth about their fat and flaccid icon, Citizen Karen Klein.) …

… But, here’s the thing that unsettled so about Roberts’ performance during confirmation proceedings. Or so I wrote on September 15, 2005:

“He seems to be all about the moves” …

READ the complete column. “A Romp Down Memory Lane With Justice Roberts” is now on RT.

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UPDATE I: “A vast new federal power to ‘tax'” has been birthed by the philosophical successor to chief justice of the United States, John Marshall, the “intellectual progenitor of federal power”:

No one can know the true motivations for the idiosyncratic rationale in the health-care decision written by Marshall’s current successor, John Roberts. … Perhaps Chief Justice Roberts really means what he wrote – that congressional power to tax is without constitutional limit – and his opinion is a faithful reflection of that view, without a political or legal or intra-court agenda. But that view finds no support in the Constitution or our history. It even contradicts the most famous of Marshall’s big government aphorisms: The power to tax is the power to destroy.
The reasoning underlying the 5-to-4 majority opinion is the court’s unprecedented pronouncement that Congress’ power to tax is unlimited. The majority held that the extraction of thousands of dollars per year by the IRS from individuals who do not have health insurance is not a fine, not a punishment, not a payment for government-provided health insurance, not a shared responsibility – all of which the statute says it is – but rather is an inducement in the form of a tax.

“The logic in the majority opinion is the jurisprudential equivalent of passing a camel through the eye of a needle. The logic is so tortured, unexpected and unprecedented that even the law’s most fervent supporters did not make or anticipate the court’s argument in its support. …”

UPDATE II (July 6):

From: J
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2012 11:49 AM
To: Ilana Mercer
Subject: Recent article

Your article today was excellent.

Most notably the part about how Roberts answered the question posed by the Senator about the administrative state….. so true. That’s our biggest problem in this country because half of all “conservatives” are for it. Very strange how he steered around the question.

J.

Dr. Paul Continues To Cast Pearls Before Swine

Healthcare, Individual Rights, Regulation, Republicans, Ron Paul, Socialism, The Courts, The State

Responding to Justice Roberts’ smart-alec SCOTUS decision in the matter of “The Affordable Care Act,” Ron Paul said this:

“Today we should remember that virtually everything government does is a ‘mandate.’ The issue is not whether Congress can compel commerce by forcing you to buy insurance, or simply compel you to pay a tax if you don’t,” said the Texas Republican. “The issue is that this compulsion implies the use of government force against those who refuse. The fundamental hallmark of a free society should be the rejection of force. In a free society, therefore, individuals could opt out of “Obamacare” without paying a government tribute.”

“Those of us in Congress who believe in individual liberty must work tirelessly to repeal this national health care law and reduce federal involvement in healthcare generally. Obamacare can only increase third party interference in the doctor-patient relationship, increase costs, and reduce the quality of care … Only free market medicine can restore the critical independence of doctors, reduce costs through real competition and price sensitivity, and eliminate enormous paperwork burdens. Americans will opt out of Obamacare with or without Congress, but we can seize the opportunity today by crafting the legal framework to allow them to do so.”

As you read through Dr. Paul’s diagnosis and prescription, of Jun 27, 2012, remember that conservatives in power support third-party health-care distortions in almost all their permutations:

I recently discussed absurd legal arguments by Obamacare advocates that Congress can compel the purchase of health insurance, and the dismal record of federal courts applying so-called “judicial review” in protecting liberty. It is obvious that Obamacare’s legal apologists either are wholly ignorant of constitutional principles, or wholly lawless in their blatant disregard for those principles.
Likewise, supporters of Obamacare are willfully ignorant of basic economics. The fundamental problem with health care costs in America is that the doctor-patient relationship has been profoundly altered by third-party interference. Third parties, either government agencies themselves or nominally private insurance companies virtually forced upon us by government policies, have not only destroyed doctor-patient confidentiality. They also inescapably drive up costs because basic market disciplines — supply and demand, price sensitivity, and profit signals — are destroyed.
Obamacare, via its insurance mandate, is more of the same misdiagnosis.
Gabriel Vidal, chief operating officer of a U.S. hospital system, sees this problem squarely in his daily work. As he explains, Obamacare will only make matters worse because it fails to recognize that “costs are out of control because they do not reflect prices created by the voluntary exchange between patients and providers”» like every well-functioning industry.”
Instead, “health costs reflect the distortions that government regulators have introduced through reimbursement mechanisms created by command-and-control bureaucracies at federal and state levels,” he continues. “But it is theoretically and practically impossible for a bureaucrat — no matter how accurate the cost data, how well-intentioned and how sophisticated his computer program — to come up with the correct and just price. The (doctor-patient) relationship”» has been corrupted by the intrusion of government and its intermediaries (HMOs, for example) to such an extent that we can no longer speak of a relationship that can produce meaningful pricing information.