Posted on 10/05/2013 8:46:06 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The presidents health care law is driving down employment in his home state, according to a recent report.
Employers in Illinois are cutting worker hours to avoid costly penalties from Obamacares employer mandate, where employees in the lowest wage sectors are the hardest hit.
The Illinois Policy Institute studied the three employment sectors retail, food, and merchandise whose average hours were closest to 30 hours per week prior to the Affordable Care Act.
The institute found that all three have now dipped below 30 hours per week, the threshold for a full-time worker under the law. Average hours for these sectors had remained steadily above 30 before Obamacare was enacted.
Since 2011, Illinois has lost the equivalent of about 66,000 jobs in these sectors through reduced work hours more than the number of jobs added in all sectors over the past year, the study said.
As Obamacare is implemented, Americans are seeing it fail on the important goals of health care access and affordability, said Naomi Lopez Bauman, director of health policy at the institute and author of the report.
But this labor data from the presidents very own home state shows that not only will Obamacare fail to deliver its health insurance goals, it also threatens to cause further damage to Illinois already-fragile economy, she said....
(Excerpt) Read more at freebeacon.com ...
Ovomitcare implemented - women & children hardest hit...
Just saying, this question is different for people who are not on a government fall-back program.
GOP get with it.
Propose a real, meaningful alternative.
Let’s here yours, since you are so keen on it.
Just offering an opposing view.
Not all of us are happy with the GOP insurance plan.
(since there isn’t a GOP insurance plan)
Basically. So we’ve decided to support the one which is out there.
If the GOP would get off their duffs and actually get a plan (at least in the House) then we could support it.
Minimum wage workers like the ones who work at fast food restaurants and retail stores will benefit because they will no longer have to choose between medical coverage through Medicaid and working (which disqualifies many from Medicaid without earning them enough to buy individual medical insurance, since few retail jobs offer medical coverage). For instance, a two-income couple that works for minimum wage at fast food restaurants will earn $21,866 if both average 29 hours a week 52 weeks a year. They earn too much to be eligible for Medicaid, but too little to buy medical insurance, which comes out to between $5K to $7K a year. Under Obamacare, they pay $759 a year, and the Federal government (aka budget aka taxpayers, eventually) makes up the $4311 difference The problem, of course, is the hit to the federal budget. If 50m people are subsidized for this amount annually, the cost is $100b a year or more, depending on how high premiums get.
The difficulty with the pre-Obamacare system is that poor individuals not part of some company group plan (1) have to buy insurance with after-tax dollars and (2) pay much higher rates than company group plans even before the company subsidy. Ultimately, insurance companies discriminate against individual purchasers of health insurance because large companies have leverage they can use against them, just because of the size of the business they bring with them. Healthcare is the one sector of the economy where price discrimination is legal. It's not just health insurance - hospital bills are the same way. Individuals paying cash end up spending more money for the same procedure than insurance companies do.
The problem with the GOP trying to come up with a solution is the institutional resistance against these changes by large corporations, which would have to pay higher premiums if premiums were required to be level for group vs individual plans. Obamacare avoids the question of premium discrimination by having the federal government pick up the difference and also buries some of the insurance premium tax deduction into the subsidy.
Why in the world would they be content with each of them working a part time job? Let’s make them more contented, so they will be happy slaves on the liberal plantation.
If one of them got a full time job they could afford better, as they could if one of them, heaven forbid, also worked two jobs.
They are only better off in the sense that they have medical care paid for by money taken from others at the point of a gun. But they are still slaves.
You want the GOP to produce a health care ‘plan’? Isn’t having a ‘plan’ the problem?
Millions and millions spent on this monster knowing it wouldn’t work. Most of the millions were paid to friends.
This isn't a matter of contentment. Some people are just not cut out for anything better. They're simply not bright enough. Black median IQ is 80, whereas white median IQ is 100. The more we discover about genes, the clearer it's becoming that the Calvinistic notion of predestination might not be so far fetched from a genetic perspective. Successful people think they get to where they are purely on the strength of hard work. But the reality might be that they not only get their intelligence from their genes - they also get their stick-to-it-iveness from those same genes. You can tell some of these football players to get their act together all day, but the reality is that the black players who generally end up in trouble are simply idiots savant who can throw or receive a ball well but can't be trusted with their own finances. The distance between an 80 and a 100 IQ person can be as much of a chasm as that between a merely competent scientist and Einstein.
As I understand it if an employer stops allowing the spouse on the plan, the spouse cannot get subsidies.
They have to had planned this to fail. The question is why did the insurance companies go along? The KNEW it wouldn’t work.
That’s a great big elephant in the room, huh.
Good! They voted for their own demise. Too bad.
I am somewhat in a minority on this site. But we are chasing American jobs to China, the last thing we should be doing is defending high insurance and limits on coverage.
We need some sort of competition. Something for the people whose insurance rates get railroaded currently.
That is what I am saying.
Personally I would prefer we could do that by bringing back American jobs and discouraging more immigration.
But our unemployment rate is sky-high now, and has been for more than one full administration.
I think the GOP has basically decided not to try to win over the part of the market, which is getting shafted right now in the insurance markets.
Frankly I believe that is a (huge) problem.
Go after all the American market. Everyone.
The idea that blacks will prosper if left to their own devices isn't necessarily borne out by the evidence. There's an entire continent of blacks with serious natural resource endowments, and yet most of them are way poorer than the North African Arab countries without oil. We established an entire country for freed slaves in the northwest corner of Africa and called it Liberia, and yet the country is in the bottom 5% of the nations of the world, GDP per capita-wise, despite over 100 years of Americo-Liberian rule.
So you agree with the premise that government is responsible for healthcare?
Yes and no.
I think healthcare is heavily meddled in already. In fact healthcare, is one of the most heavily regulated marketplaces anywhere.
As long as it is so heavily regulated, then we should drive down the cost.
If we were to free the market from all the tons of government regulation I would be all for that, but I see zero sign at the present of any such thing.
So I am very strongly advocating the GOP stop sitting on their hands, and actually compete for votes.
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