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A Costly Employer Mandate It's a Regressive Tax:The House and Senate draft proposals for health care reform include employer mandates that require employers to pay higher taxes (as much as an 8% payroll tax) if they do not offer health insurance or if they offer it but some employees decline it and use the government system. The result of such a tax penalty will cause lower pay and job losses, especially for low-income workers. By the Numbers: According to The Heritage Foundation, the mandates could cost businesses up to $49 billion a year, 10.2 million workers will be at risk...

That's it. And the ADP report this morning is showing the pathway to recognition, as construction has stalled and the destruction of job creation in small and mid-sized businesses exposed to Obamacare will finish it off. I continue to maintain that we're in a time very similar to 2007, when the facts were on the table. Banks paying dividends with money they didn't have. Hedge funds that blow. Bubbles in crazy places, then housing, this time in subprime car lending, student loans and even Bitcon. The transports are telling you that all is not well. CAT is confirming it. Copper...

Cheap, no-frills insurance that doesn't cover medication, maternity or mental health services will get the scalpel in 2014. Know that health care plan you just signed up for? Don't get too attached. The Affordable Care Act mandate most commonly known as Obamacare has some tight stipulations that, CNN says, are forcing health care companies to rip up most of their current plans and draft new ones that comply. According to a University of Chicago study, just about half of the individual health care plans currently on the market won't cut it once key provisions of the Affordable Care Act kick...

Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients, blaming the sequester budget cuts. Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially. Patients at these clinics would need to seek treatment elsewhere, such as at hospitals that might not have the capacity to accommodate them. “If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we’d be out of business in six months to a year,” said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New...

Remember how since-demoted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said we'd have to pass the massive ObamaCare health law to find out what's in it? Well, now three years later that's happening and a lot of people are not liking what they see. Remember how ObamaCare was going to save you money? Not going to happen. Premiums are going up, some by as much as 100%. And a new study by the nonpartisan Society of Actuaries finds that on average insurers will have to pay 32% more for claims under ObamaCare. Remember how ObamaCare was going to cover more than 44 million...

Parts of ObamaCare are starting to fray, even before full implementation. The Obama administration now says a special system of exchanges designed to make it easier for small businesses to provide insurance will be delayed an entire year -- to 2015

The administration’s rollout plans for their perfect ObamaCare timeline just keep getting punctuated with flaws and delays, from Sebelius oh-so-casually admitting that the overhaul is causing some insurance premiums to rise, to Congressional Democrats’ buyers’ remorse for the godawful medical device tax, to their recent decision to hold off on the promised small-business insurance-shopping option for a year. Whichever way you look at it, the telltale signs of bureaucratic incompetence are starting to peek through — and really, as Krauthammer outlined last night, how could it have gone otherwise? In a nutshell, ObamaCare basically dissolves the basic idea of insurance...

Tens of thousands of health care professionals, union workers and community activists hired as "navigators" to help Americans choose Obamacare options starting Oct. 1 will be paid up to $48 an hour, more than six times the federal minimum wage of $7.25, according to new regulations issued Wednesday. The 63-page rule covering navigators, drawn up by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, also said the government will provide free translators for those not fluent in English -- no matter what their native language is. It is still not clear how many navigators will be required. California, however, provides a...

The storm is brewing in the healthcare system. Even Democrats are concerned. Recently, I have been criticized for blaming the impending failure on President Obama. President Obama would rather blame the impending failure on congress. A reader wrote; “President Obama is a nice guy. He is trying very hard. Give him a chance.” It is true. He seems like a nice guy. My criticism is not personal. The fact is his philosophy and tactics are responsible for the mess. As time goes on it seems more likely that Obamacare will not work out. There are multiple reasons for the impending...

Let me try to understand this: The key incentive for small businesses to support Obamacare was that they would be able to shop for the best deals in health care super-stores—called exchanges. The Administration has had 3 years to set up these exchanges. It has failed to do so. This is a really bad sign. There will be those who argue that it’s not the Administration’s fault. It’s the fault of the 33 states that have refused to set up their own exchanges. Nonsense. Where was the contingency planning? There certainly are models, after all—the federal government’s own health benefits...

If you buy your own health insurance now, you'll be in for a big change when you sign up for coverage in 2014. Just over half of the individual plans currently on the market do not meet the standards to be sold next year, when many key provisions of President Obama's Affordable Care Act kick in, according to a University of Chicago study. That's because the law sets new minimums for the basic coverage every individual health care plan must provide. "They will offer a lot more financial protection," Jon Gabel, the report's lead author, said of the individual plans...

Citing the challenges in establishing a new health insurance marketplace, the Obama administration is delaying a key provision of the Affordable Care Act designed to provide employees of small businesses affordable health coverage. The New York Times reported Monday that in most states employers will not be able to provide workers with a choice of health plans as the law intended. Instead, they will be limited to a single plan. One of the health law’s provisions, known as “employee choice,” called for each state to operate a Small Business Health Options Program, known as a SHOP exchange. The exchange, which...

Implementation of the taxes and fees from President Obama’s healthcare law is on track despite the cutbacks at the IRS from sequestration. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), enacted 2010 and derided by Republicans as “ObamaCare,” contains the broadest set of tax changes enacted in some two decades — more than 40 alterations in all, including penalties on people who choose not to purchase insurance. But while IRS and Treasury officials have warned of reduced services as employees are furloughed under the sequester, neither agency has expressed any concern that the automatic spending cuts would delay the rollout of the healthcare...

Unable to meet tight deadlines in the new health care law, the Obama administration is delaying parts of a program intended to provide affordable health insurance to small businesses and their employees — a major selling point for the health care legislation. The law calls for a new insurance marketplace specifically for small businesses, starting next year. But in most states, employers will not be able to get what Congress intended: the option to provide workers with a choice of health plans. They will instead be limited to a single plan. This choice option, already available to many big businesses,...

**SNIP** As the controversial law passes its third anniversary, and as the Obama administration struggles to get a whole new national health care system up and running by next January, a visible sign of the law’s economic costs is seen in the 12,000 pages of regulations to implement the law’s 2,801 pages of legalese. Printed out and stacked, that tower of paper stands seven feet tall. Laid end to end, it stretches for two and a half miles. **SNIP** Rosemarie Battaglia, a senior citizen from Texas, is on Medicare Advantage. Last month, the Medicare agency issued regulations that will reduce...

Over the next 10 years health reform will impose upon us about $1 trillion in new taxes and it will take another $716 billion out of Medicare, imperiling access to care for the elderly and the disabled according to Medicare's Office of the Actuaries. It will impose a mandate to buy health insurance on most people and fine us if we don't comply. It will compel all but the smallest employers to provide insurance to their employees and fine them if they don't. Since economic theory teaches that workers pay for health benefits with lower wages and fewer non-health...

Jobless claims stopped their record-breaking, fearsome, FOUR-WEEK job-creation rampage today as the BLS reported that initial claim rose- again- by more than economists expected. “First-time jobless claims rose by 16,000 to 357,000 in the week ended March 23,” reports Reuters, “the highest level in more than a month, Labor Department data showed today in Washington. The median forecast of 48 economists surveyed by Bloomberg called for an increase to 340,000. The four-week average climbed from the lowest level in five years.” Economists, says Reuters, were expecting claims to come in between 330,000 at the low end and 355,000 at the...

Medicare and Medicaid do not pay for sex-change surgery, but that may change. In response to a formal request from a transsexual woman, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced on March 28 that it has launched a formal “reconsideration” of its current refusal to cover surgical treatment for “gender identity disorder.” …

On Saturday, President Obama marked the birthday of his “most important domestic achievement” with a statement in which he catalogued the miracles this prodigy has already performed in its first three years. Among these, you may be surprised to learn, is that it is saving us money: “Most importantly,” he said, “the growth of health care costs is beginning to slow.” He made the same claim in his SOTU address, and his toadies in the establishment media dutifully repeated it, but the facts reveal this to be just another example of Presidential prevarication. In reality, the costs associated with...

(Reuters) - Millions of Americans will be priced out of health insurance under President Barack Obama's healthcare overhaul because of a glitch in the law that adversely affects people with modest incomes who cannot afford family coverage offered by their employers, a leading healthcare advocacy group said on Tuesday. Tax credits are a key component of the law and the White House has said the credits, averaging about $4,000 apiece, will help about 18 million individuals and families pay for health insurance once the Affordable Care Act takes full effect, beginning in January 2014. The tax credits are geared toward...