printNancy can be seen in media photo opportunities smooching a gold-embossed copy of the bankrupting healthcare bill. You can’t expect the little woman to grasp that the regulation and confiscation of private property, what’s left of it, has costs.
Caterpillar, “the world’s largest maker of construction and earth-moving equipment, said Wednesday that the new healthcare legislation in the U.S. will cause the company to take a $100 million tax charge in the current quarter,” reported Fox News.
Caterpillar said the additional expense and higher taxes to come could damage the recovery efforts that began after the company lost 75% of its profit in 2009.
According to the Charleston Gazette, “In the first two days after the law was signed, three major companies – Deere & Co., Caterpillar Inc. and Valero Energy – said they expect to take a total hit of $265 million to account for smaller tax deductions in the future.”
“With more than 3,500 companies now getting the tax break as an incentive to keep providing coverage, others are almost certain to announce similar cost increases in the weeks ahead as they sort out the impact of the change.
Figuring out what it will mean for retirees will take longer, but analysts said as many as 2 million could lose the prescription drug coverage provided by their former employers, leaving them to enroll in Medicare’s program.”
The WSJ reports that,
“AT&T Inc. plans to take a noncash $1 billion charge in the first quarter in anticipating the impact of changes brought by the nation’s health-care overhaul.”
The Dallas-based telecommunications giant is the latest—and largest—company to take a charge to account for the increased costs under the new health-care plan. Specifically, the legislation prevents corporations from deducting tax-free subsidies they receive from the government for providing retirees with prescription-drug benefits.
The company will evaluate prospective changes to its active and retiree health-care benefits, according to a filing with Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.
The size of AT&T’s charge is notable. The company employs more union workers than all of the U.S. auto makers combined, and has to support a sizeable retiree base
I FULLY EXPECT to hear shortly from our insurance company as soon as it has figured out how to nudge us over onto ObamaCare.
Abysmal news. I’ve always supported Caterpillar, one of the last remaining bastions of American know-how. The D9 is integral to the IDF’s mission, and I myself have worn the same pair of steel-toed Cats for the past nine years.
I guess the Israelis better hope the Chinese start making decent armored bulldozers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDF_Caterpillar_D9
http://tinyurl.com/yapemf4
The company I work for self-insures. It’s not one of the so-called “cadillac” plans but it is a very good one featuring a personal savings account to which the company contributes on a yearly basis. I fully expect that in my case what Obama has always said about being able to keep your insurance if you’re happy with it will turn out to be another one of the lies he’s very good at telling. The company is happy with it and the employees are happy with it but I suspect the IRS will be very unhappy as it does nothing to contribute to the pool to help pay for the gazillions of uninsured and thus flies in the face of Obamacare.
I think they don’t care what the cost is to the companies. If the country is in a shambles it will be easier to control.
I don’t think they care about costs either. The original CBO estimates are a joke and a lie, and were intended to deceive people. How anyone could believe we could cover 30 million previously uninsured people, many with pre-existing conditions, and still reduce the deficit (!) probably needs to put the crack pipe down.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that costs are going to skyrocket, premiums for the healthy will be jacked up to support the sick, and eventually insurance companies will either go under or get bailed out.
The result of Obama’s power grab: A single-payer plan and complete government control, which is what the crooks in Washington wanted all along. Supply will shrink (who in his right mind would go medical school and get paid a pittance for his trouble?), demand will surge, quality will suffer, and rationing will be enforced.
The same people that gave you the Post Office, Amtrak, and FEMA are now in charge of hospitals. Don’t get sick. You life may literally depend on staying healthy.
One of my family members is an MD (general practitioner). He practices in a rural area of the Rust Belt. He told me a few days ago that he is now seeing folks with insurance who cannot find a primary care physician.
Understand this: These patients are not the uninsured nor are they Medicaid patients; they have private insurance. Yet they cannot find a primary care physician.
The farce known as Obamacare does not address the shortage of GPs in the country.
So, of what use is it other than a power grab by the State?
The costs of this latest venture into Socialist Perfection were obvious long ago–to anyone who can think.
Sadly, most Americans have abandoned their ability to think. The most damaging assumption shared by mental cripples is that consciousness is more fundamental than reality. This absurdity, widely shared but rarely challenged, is at the root of our political and social problems.
If consciousness is logically precedent to reality, then thoughts determine facts. If thoughts are primary, then the ideas of leading “intellectuals” and “leaders” carry great weight, as does political “consensus”. Evidence and reasoned coherence count for little.
This nihilistic world view explains why most people are immune to reasoned arguments. It explains the dominance of Keynesian economics, despite its glaring
contradictions; it explains the intellectual docility of MDs hostile to evidence that refutes orthodox beliefs; it explains the maddening refusal of most people to look at disturbing facts that overturn court history.
I see evidence of this disturbing malady everywhere. I wish I could tune it out.
Now we have Henry Waxman demanding that the CEOs of Deere, Caterpillar and others appear before his committe and justify their claims with their internal company records in tow. I hope these men tell the hacks of our congress to shove it up their collective noses. Of course I suspect they won’t but it would neat to see those clueless boobs in congress be shown up for the fools they are. It’s obvious they are only trying to cover their collective behinds and also cover the business killing lies of the health
reform bill.