FixHealthCarePolicy

Unions Using Obamacare to Punish Small Business

When does Washington consider a successful small business a problem to be dealt with? When that small business successfully competes against unionized firms. Then it needs to be tied down with expensive red tape until it is no longer so successful.

Say what? Members of Congress routinely extol the praises of small businesses as the engine of job creation – especially in these difficult economic times. This is standard practice on Capitol Hill – small businesses do not have the same resources as large ones, and they often cannot afford to comply with federal mandates. Rather than put them out of business Congress exempts them from expensive regulations.

The Senate health care bill also gives small businesses an out. The bill fines businesses $750 for each employee if the company does not provide more expensive “qualifying” health coverage to all their workers. However, companies with less than 50 workers do not have to pay this fine.

Or at least, that was how the bill was written. A small provision slipped into the bill at the last minute changes that threshold for the construction industry. Now any construction company with five or more workers would have to pay the fine. With a few paragraphs in a 2,074 page bill the Senate gutted the small business exemption for construction companies. (more…)

Tags: construction company, employer mandates, ObamaCare, small business, unions

Morning Bell: The Six Key Issues the House Must Cave On Before Obamacare Becomes Law

This morning at around 8 AM, the Senate passed, again on a straight party-line vote, Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) manager’s amendment to the Senate’s version of Obamacare. This keeps the Senate on pace to pass the bill at 9 PM on Christmas Eve despite the fact that Americans overwhelmingly opposed the legislation. But even after the Senate gives President Barack Obama his $2.5 trillion Christmas present, the bill, assuming it is to be considered in regular order, still must go through a House and Senate conference.

President Barack Obama attempted to downplay differences between the House and Senate bills telling American Urban Radio Networks yesterday: “The Senate and the House bills are 95 percent identical. There’s five percent differences, and one of those differences is the public option. This is an area that has just become symbolic of a lot of ideological fights. As a practical matter, this is not the most important aspect to this bill.” We’ll let President Obama fight with his base abut how important a strong public option is to health reform, but a government run plan is just one of six key differences between the House and Senate bills:

Soak the Rich or Tax Everybody: The Senate bill relies heavily on a new excise tax on high cost health plans: a 40 percent tax on plan exceeding $8,500 for an individual and $23,000 for a family. The AFL-CIO and SEIU both call this a tax on working families. The Senate bill also includes a new premium tax on all insurers and the CBO confirms that the cost of this tax will be passed on to all Americans with private insurance. The House bill depends on a heavy new income tax targeted at top-earning taxpayers and small businesses. The 5.4 percent tax on individuals with incomes above $500,000, and on families with incomes above $1 million, is structured in a way that over time more and more Americans will be hit by this tax and small business owners would be particularly affected. (more…)

Tags: employer mandates, excise tax, individual mandates, Majority Leader Harry Reid, Medicaid Expansion, ObamaCare, public plan, senate health care bill, taxpayer funded abortion

Putting Party and Vanity Above Country

Like a desperate last-minute Christmas shopper who will grab any gift and pay any price, Congress may rush through a hasty and ill-conceived rewrite of health care legislation. President Obama’s message to Senators seems focused more on party loyal and an appeal to desires for glory than on what Americans want or need.

With public support collapsing all about them (61% in opposition according to CNN’s December polling), Democrats may be motivated by a feeling that they’ve gone too far to turn back now, even if it’s in the wrong direction. They could invoke Benjamin Franklin’s aphorism that “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Franklin, however, had a much nobler purpose in mind—independence from government tyranny.

What’s in the final bill may become immaterial in this Christmas rush. That’s dangerous because the ultimate language remains a mystery after earlier efforts ran afoul of multitudes of objections. The 11th-hour rewrite of the bill will be major version Number Nine since varying editions began surfacing during the summer. With or without a co-called “public option,” it’s certain that the bill will displace millions of Americans from their current private insurance, put Washington in charge of all health care and insurance, and expand the number of people who depend on taxpayers to pay for their coverage. (more…)

Tags: employer mandates, Health Czar, individual mandates, Obama Health Care Plan

Employment Discrimination in the Senate Health Care Bill

The Senate health care bill includes a well-known “employer mandate” provision that would require employers to offer “qualified” health plan and pay 60% of the premium, or pay an annual tax penalty of $750 per full-time employee.

What is less well-known is that the provision would also tax companies even if they do offer insurance – but only if they hire people from low- and moderate-income families who qualify for, and elect to accept, premium subsidies. And the tax penalty for hiring those employees – arguably the people who need jobs the most – would be a whopping $3,000 per year.

Who would qualify for such a subsidy?
There are two criteria. First, family income – not how much this employee is paid by this company, but total family income – would have to below four times the federal poverty level (FPL). The FPL depends on family size; for 2009 four times the FPL would be $43,320 for a single adult with no children and $88,200 for a family of four (regardless of whether it’s a single parent with three children or two parents and two children). (more…)

Tags: discrimination, employer mandates, federal poverty level, income inequality, IRS, Obama Health Care Plan

Heritage’s Ernest Istook Schools Ed Schultz on How Obamacare Kills Jobs and Hurts Poor

Ed Schultz is a leftist radio personality who recently graduated to MSNBCs barely watched opinion line up. Schultz still hosts his daily radio show and recently had Heritage Foundation fellow Ernest Istook on to discuss Obamacare. The following exchange (audio here) transpired:

SCHULTZ: OK, give us your new information from the Heritage Foundation on health care. Tell us how screwed up the Democrats are on that.

ISTOOK: Well, you know, I think this may be in the category of unintended consequences, although frankly it may be part of the cost control. As we’ve been going through this 2,000 pages that have been brought up for debate in the US Senate, evidently the penalties that they put upon employers if their, the people who work for them go into this public plan, this so-called insurance exchange …

SCHULTZ: Don’t tell me they’re going to jail! Please …

ISTOOK: No, this is not about that.

SCHULTZ: OK. (more…)

Tags: Ed Schultz, employer mandates, Obama Health Care Plan

Get Equipped on What’s at Stake with ObamaCare

After a sneak-through Saturday night vote to make Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s health care bill open for debate, the Senate comes back on Monday to decide how much more involvement the federal government will have over the private health care sector — one-sixth of the nation’s overall economy. With a record-breaking 2,074 pages, there are plenty of provisions in the Senate health care bill that most Americans probably aren’t aware of. Here are some of the highlights that Heritage has noted in the past week:

• The Senate bill breaks President Barack Obama’s promise not to impose new taxes on middle-class Americans.
• The legislation allows feds to micromanage all private health insurance plans.
• The bill creates the health exchange framework that allows for a government-run health plan to overtake the health insurance market. (more…)

Tags: employer mandates, government-run health care, individual mandates, Obama Health Care Plan, taxpayer funded abortion

The Senate Health Bill: Bad for Small Business

The Reid health bill (H.R. 3590) leaves small businesses, and particularly small business owners, largely out of the picture. Small businesses, and particularly small businesses that currently do not offer health insurance coverage, will not get much break from this bill. Reid’s bill outlines a “small business tax credit”, which only lasts for two years and largely excludes small business owners, small businesses with high-average payrolls, and firms with 25 or more workers. After all exclusions, essentially the only eligible firms are those firms with 10 or fewer workers as well as those with low-income workers—the least likely to offer coverage even with a significant price reduction.

Reid’s bill, even with these “cost-reducing” tax credits, will not address the many uncertainties small businesses face in deciding whether to offer health insurance coverage to its workers. Small businesses—and particularly small business owners—most often find it difficult to predict year-to-year profits as well as health insurance costs. This is compounded for many small businesses with the fear of having to withdraw coverage in future years. Moreover, most small businesses will not find it worthwhile to begin offering even with the credits. In 2007, only 2.5 percent of total small employers in Maine actually purchased health insurance coverage through the “public option” offered through the state health insurance exchange, even with full knowledge of the program and its “benefits”. (more…)

Tags: employer mandates, Obama Health Care Plan, ouble digit unemployment, small business

The Senate Health Bill: How the Mandates Kill Jobs and Punish Poor Workers

Last night, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid released his giant version of the Senate health care bill, H.R. 3590.

A first look at the bill – which is 2,074 pages long – shows yet another attempt to use taxes to punish uninsured Americans and punish companies that hire workers from low-income families, especially single parents. If you wanted to punish the poor and kill the job prospects of people who need jobs the most, this would be an effective way to do it.

The Individual Mandate. First, there is the “individual responsibility” provision in Section 1501 (pages 320-340). This would require anyone who fails to obtain a qualifying health plan – with a benefit package to be defined later by bureaucrats – to pay an annual tax penalty of $750 per adult family member and $375 per child, with a maximum penalty of $2,250 per family. These penalties will be phased in from 2014 to 2016 and then indexed for inflation, which means they are likely to increase nearly every year. These taxes are fixed amounts based on family size, not income. (more…)

Tags: double digit unemployment, employer mandates, individual mandates, Obama Health Care Plan

The Five Flaws of the Reid Health Bill

We’re still pouring over Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) just released health care overhaul, but the major outlines of the bill are no different than the policy train wreck the House passed earlier this month.

The five major flaws of both the Pelosi and Reid Bills are:

1. A New Public Plan. Both the House and Senate bills would create a new government-run health care plan — a so-called public plan — intended to “compete” with private insurers in a new health insurance exchange. The result: widespread erosion of private insurance and substantial consolidation of federal control over health care through the exchange. Congress is incapable of guaranteeing the American people a level playing field for competition between the government plans and private health plans. As the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has recently certified, what many have already concluded, millions of Americans will lose their existing employer-based coverage. (more…)

Tags: double digit unemployment, employer mandates, individual mandates, Medicaid, Obama Health Care Plan, public option, trillion dollar deficits