Category Archives: 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:

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.

Minimum Wage, Maximum Economic Illiteracy

Democrats, Economy, Labor, Law, Regulation

The Bill to raise the minimum wage has three Democratic lawmakers — Reps. John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), and Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.) — swelling with pride.

The “Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2012” … would spike the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10 while mandating that future increases be tied to inflation. Jackson and his Democratic colleagues proclaimed that the legislation would model the 1968 minimum wage rate for inflation in today’s dollars. “This legislation is long-overdue and sorely needed,” Conyers affirmed. “More than 30 million Americans would see their wages increased, which would provide an immediate boost to the economy.”

Today’s youth don’t have the economic smarts with which to understand why they are less likely to be hired under legislation that fixes the price of their labor above its productivity.

Those who claim to represent unemployed youngsters—whose labor-participation rate has been in decline—don’t much care that such legislation circumvents voluntary exchanges in the market. Because government has fixed the price of labor, economic actors are prevented from engaging in mutually beneficial, voluntary exchange.

Still less is the hike justified because it impoverishes. For government can bid wages above market value, but it cannot compel business to hire, the outcome of which is unemployment among the young and the poor.

Keeping The Competition OUT

EU, Free Markets, Internet, Regulation, Socialism, Taxation, Technology, The State

Under the guise of upholding a fair and free-market order, uncompetitive companies, given the option, will petition centrist establishments to regulate the market. This kneecaps the competition and ensures the lobbyists retain ‘market share’ without having to compete for it. This is what ETNO is doing.

“The ETNO,” informs RT, “is made up of telecommunication companies including Swisscom and Spain’s Telefonica that are well-established in nearly three dozen European countries.” The ETNO’s Executive Board, which is a European-based lobby group, “has asked the United Nations to tax American websites that provide services abroad.”

In December, the leak reveals, the European Telecommunications Network Operators Association (ETNO) approached the United Nations with a proposal that would outline a restructuring of the Internet’s business model when taking into account Web entities with an international presence. If approved, the legislation would tax American-based content providers — such as Apple, Google and Netflix — for offering services to customers overseas. Should they get their wish, the ETNO might soon usher in some serious revisions for the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITR), a legislation that deals with cross-border communications traffic that has remained untouched since its last revision in 1988.


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