Obamacare

Thanks To Obamacare, Employer-Based Health Insurance Is Becoming An Endangered Species

Obamacare 2013Barack Obama promised to fundamentally transform America, and when it comes to health care he has definitely kept his promise.  Thanks to Obamacare, health care spending is up, health insurance premiums are up, the number of hours Americans are working is down and employer-based health insurance is becoming an endangered species.  Of course employer-based health insurance will not disappear completely any time soon, but it has been steadily shrinking for over a decade, and Obamacare will greatly accelerate that decline.  If you go back to 1999, 64.1 percent of all Americans were covered by employment-based health insurance.  That was pretty good.  Today, only 54.9 percent of all Americans are covered by employment-based health insurance, and now thousands upon thousands of U.S. employers are considering reducing the scope of the health plans they offer to employees or eliminating them altogether due to Obamacare.  If you are thinking that this sounds like a potential nightmare for millions of Americans families, you would be exactly right.

There have already been widespread reports of companies dropping health insurance, but nobody knows for sure how widespread the carnage will be.  According to Businessweek, the surveys that have been done up to this point have come up with widely varying results…

A Deloitte study last year suggested 10 percent of employers would stop offering group health plans. A widely criticized McKinsey report from 2011 put the number as high as one-third. The Congressional Budget Office’s latest projections suggest 8 million fewer people will be covered by employer plans five years from now under the ACA than without it. Many of them will get policies through health insurance exchanges instead.

But what everyone does agree on is that employer-based health coverage will continue to diminish.

And we are already watching this happen right in front of our eyes.  Just this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the largest security guard firm in the United States is dropping health coverage for 55,000 employees…

The nation’s largest provider of security guards plans to discontinue its lowest-cost health plans and steer roughly 55,000 workers to new government-sponsored insurance exchanges for coverage next year, in the latest sign of the fraying ties between employment and health care.

The U.S. arm of Sweden’s Securitas AB is among more than 1,200 employers that offer the kind of bare-bones health plans that must be phased out beginning Jan. 1 under the health-care law. Nearly four million people are enrolled in these so-called mini-med plans, which cap benefits to participants, sometimes at as little as $3,000 a year.

“The mini-meds go away and we’re not replacing them,” said Jim McNulty, a spokesman for Securitas’s U.S. operation. “Their option is to go to the exchanges.”

Other big employers, including Darden Restaurants Inc., Home Depot Inc. and Trader Joe’s Co., say they will stop offering health insurance to part-time workers, and will direct those employees to the state exchanges. Darden, Home Depot and Trader Joe’s previously offered mini-meds to their part timers.

Speaking of Trader Joe’s, I wrote about how they are eliminating health coverage for part-time workers the other day.  Instead of providing health insurance for their part-time workers, Trader Joe’s will be writing them a check and pushing them on to the Obamacare exchanges…

Trader Joe’s, the grocer once lauded for providing health care coverage to its part-time workers, is about to push those employees off its plan.

According to a memo obtained by the Huffington Post, the company will stop covering employees who work less than 30 hours per week.

The change is set for the start of 2014. Instead of insurance, workers instead will get a check for $500 in January.

“Depending on income you may earn outside of Trader Joe’s, we believe that with the $500 from Trader Joe’s and the tax credits available under the [Affordable Care Act (ACA)], many of you should be able to obtain health care coverage at very little if any net cost to you,” said Trader Joe CEO Dan Bane in the memo.

And this is a huge reason why the shift from full-time work to part-time work in America has accelerated this year.  Obamacare creates an incentive for companies to have more part-time workers and less full-time workers.  In fact, almost all of the jobs that have been “created” by the U.S. economy in 2013 have been part-time jobs.

But it is incredibly difficult to try to support a family on a part-time job.  Sadly, the quality of our jobs continues to decline rapidly and only 47 percent of all adults have a full-time job in America today.  This is only going to continue to get even worse under Obamacare.

As a result of these trends, more Americans are going to be forced to go out and buy health insurance “on the individual market”.  When they do, they are likely to be in for a really nasty surprise…

Andy and Amy Mangione of Louisville, Ky. and their two boys are just the kind of people who should be helped by ObamaCare. But they recently got a nasty surprise in the mail.

“When I saw the letter when I came home from work,” Andy said, describing the large red wording on the envelope from his insurance carrier, “(it said) ‘your action required, benefit changes, act now.’ Of course I opened it immediately.”

It had stunning news. Insurance for the Mangiones and their two boys,which they bought on the individual market, was going to almost triple in 2014 — from $333 a month to $965.

The insurance carrier made it clear the increase was in order to be compliant with the new health care law.

Are you ready to have your health insurance premiums potentially double or triple?

In other cases, families are discovering that health insurance companies are simply cancelling their health insurance plans…

Across the country, insurers are sending out ObamaCare-induced health plan death notices to untold tens of thousands of other customers in the individual market. Twitter users are posting their ObamaCare cancellation notices and accompanying rate increases:

Linda Deright posted her letter from Regency of Washington state: “63 percent jump, old policy of 15 yrs. cancelled.” Karen J. Dugan wrote: “Received same notice from Blue Shield CA for our small business. Driving into exchange and no info since online site is down.” Chris Birk wrote: “Got notice from BCBS that my current health plan is not ACA compliant. New plan 2x as costly for worse coverage.” Small-business owner Villi Wilson posted his letter from HMSA Blue Cross Blue Shield canceling his individual plan and added: “I thought Obama said if I like my health care plan I can keep my health care plan.”

In fact, this even happened to one member of Congress.  U.S. Representative Cory Gardner had purchased health insurance on his own because he wanted to experience what his constituents were going through, and he recently got a letter informing him that his old plan had been “discontinued”…

“After my current plan is discontinued,” he wrote last week, “the closest comparable plan through our current provider will cost over 100 percent more, going from roughly $650 a month to $1,480 per month.” He now carries his ObamaCare cancellation notice with him as hardcore proof of the Democrats’ ultimate deception.

Is this what Obama was talking about when he promised that we could keep our old health insurance plans if we were happy with them?

In the end, millions upon millions of us are going to get pushed on to the Obamacare health insurance exchanges.

We were promised that there would be lots of competition and that prices would be reasonable.

Unfortunately, in some areas of the country it turns out that the “exchanges” are turning out to be “monopolies” where consumers will only have one company to choose from…

“Although seven insurance companies currently operate in North Carolina, under the new Obamacare exchanges, those options will dwindle down to one in the majority of counties,” Ellmers said Thursday following the disclosure of figures by federal health officials showing that more than 60 percent of North Carolina counties will have only one insurance provider option under Obamacare: Blue Cross Blue Shield.

“The whole point of an online marketplace was to provide options, so North Carolinians could go online, compare prices, and choose plans from different companies. That is how competition is supposed to work!,” Ellmers said.

Beginning October 1 under Obamacare, Blue Cross Blue Shield will be the only health insurance provider serving the entire state of North Carolina in the new Obamacare exchanges, serving all 100 of the state’s counties. Its competitor Coventry Health Care, which is owned by Aetna, will only reach 39 counties.

That leaves 61 counties, or 61 percent of all the state’s counties, in a Blue Cross Blue Shield-only zone.

Not only that, but a lot of these exchanges are not even going to be ready to function properly on October 1st.  For example, according to the Washington Post, the D.C. “health marketplace” is a complete and total mess at this point…

Just days away from launch, the District of Columbia’s health marketplace is announcing a pretty significant delay.

While the D.C. Health Link will launch a Web site on October 1, shoppers will not have access to the their premium prices until mid-November. The delay comes after the District marketplace discovered “a high error rate” in calculating the tax credits that low- and middle-income people will use to purchase insurance on the marketplace.

The insurance marketplaces, if working as plan, are supposed to spit out an estimate for a tax credit after a shopper enters in some basic information about where she lives and how much she earns. In the District, that won’t happen next month. Instead, the eligibility determination will be made “off-line by experts” by early November.

So who is going to benefit from this new system?

Well, it turns out that the health insurance companies will greatly benefit.  Health insurance companies helped write Obamacare, and their stock prices have absolutely soared since Obamacare was signed into law.  If you doubt this, just check out the amazing charts in this article.

Not that they were hurting under the old system either.  They have been raking in gigantic mountains of cash for years while trying to provide as little health care as possible.  For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “50 Signs That The U.S. Health Care System Is A Gigantic Money Making Scam“.

For the rest of us, Obamacare is going to be even worse than the old system.  A 2013 Health Care Survey that polled 200 top health care professionals discovered the following about what they believe Obamacare will bring…

— 53 percent, “Quality of health insurance policies will suffer.”

— 51 percent, “Quality of care will go down.”

— 49 percent, “The law is overly complicated.”

— 42 percent, “Insurance exchanges will be poorly managed.”

— 37 percent, “The law still allows insurance companies to be the middleman.”

— 32 percent, “Too complex for businesses.”

— 19 percent, “Americans will die earlier.”

So Americans are going to pay more, get worse care, have more paperwork and a more complicated system, and they are likely to die younger too?

Wow, that sounds like a great deal.

Where do we sign up?

America: Where Hard Working, Productive Members Of Society Pay For The Health Care Of Everyone Else

ObamacareEverybody in America wants health care – but most Americans seem to want someone else to pay for it.  In the United States today, the way that our system works is that the hard working, productive members of society pay for the health care of everyone else.  At least under socialism everyone gets the same benefits.  Our system of health care is a very twisted version of socialism where millions upon millions of very hard working people are forced to pay for the health care of others, but often can’t afford to purchase decent health insurance for themselves.  Personally, I don’t have a big employer paying for my health care so I have to buy it myself, and I just got a letter from my health insurance company telling me that I have another massive rate increase coming up.  Have you gotten a similar letter?  Health insurance premiums are going up all over America, and this is just the beginning.  In fact, the CEO of Aetna says that health insurance rates for many Americans will double when the major provisions of Obamacare kick in next year.

It would be bad enough if hard working Americans just had to pay for their own health insurance.  But no, they are also expected to pay for the health care of members of Congress, employees of the IRS and other federal agencies, state and local government employees, their adult kids (because they can’t afford health insurance), the elderly, the poor, and now under Obamacare they will also be expected to subsidize the health plans of tens of millions of other Americans that are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.

When you add it all up, the hard working, productive members of society are at least partially subsidizing the health care of well over half of all Americans while having to pay for their own health care at the same time.

Needless to say, it isn’t too hard to see who is getting the raw end of the deal.

Members of Congress certainly don’t want to pay for their own health care.  There was panic in the halls of Congress recently when they started realizing that due to certain provisions in Obamacare they may soon be forced to pay for their own health insurance plans.  There was widespread moaning and complaining about how they would be facing “thousands of dollars in additional premium payments” every year.

Things got so bad that Barack Obama got personally involved in the effort to find a solution.  Thankfully, members of Congress can relax because a ruling is being issued that will allow the federal government to continue to subsidize 75 percent of the cost of their health plans…

Lawmakers and staff can breathe easy — their health care tab is not going to soar next year.

The Office of Personnel Management, under heavy pressure from Capitol Hill, will issue a ruling that says the government can continue to make a contribution to the health care premiums of members of Congress and their aides, according to several Hill sources.

A White House official confirmed the deal and said the proposed regulations will be issued next week.

And the IRS, which has been put in charge of imposing the rules of Obamacare on all the rest of us, is freaking out about the fact that some members of Congress would like to force them to personally participate in Obamacare…

The union that represents IRS employees is urging its members to write to their congressmen to help get the union out of Obamacare.

The following are some excerpts from a letter that the union that represents IRS employees sent to members of Congress…

“H.R. 1780 would put federal employees in a special class where they would be prohibited from receiving health insurance through their employer. It would treat federal employees differently from state and local government employees and most employees of large private sector companies who receive health insurance benefits through their employer. The primary purpose of the Affordable Care Act was to provide a marketplace for the sale and purchase of health insurance for those who do not have such coverage – not to take coverage away from employees who already receive it through their employers,” the letter reads.

“I work hard and am proud of the services that I provide to your constituents every day. One of the main benefits I receive as a federal employee is the ability to purchase health insurance coverage through the FEHBP with an employer contribution towards those benefits. Please let me know your views on this legislation. I look forward to hearing back from you,” the letter concludes.

This is just shameful.  If the IRS is going to impose Obamacare on the rest of America, then it should be good enough for them too.

Just check out acting IRS chief Danny Werfel begging for employees of his agency not to have to go on Obamacare…

But we have always had to at least partially subsidize the health plans of federal, state and local government workers.

The big change under Obamacare is that we will soon be subsidizing the health plans of tens of millions of our fellow Americans.

CNN says that 26 million Americans will be eligible for health insurance subsidies, but others believe that the true number is far, far higher than that.

For example, according to CNBC, a family of three in New York that earns $78,120 a year would be eligible for a subsidy of more than five thousand dollars…

In New York, a family of three whose annual income totals $78,120, would pay $12,784 for the second-lower-priced silver plan on that state’s insurance exchange. After getting a $5,363 tax credit, the family’s net cost for the insurance would be $7,421.

So who pays for that?

You and I do through our tax dollars.

And if you can believe it, Obamacare actually provides an incentive to not work too hard, because if you make too much money you could lose your health insurance subsidy…

Working more could ultimately mean thousands of dollars less for you under a quirk in the new health-care law going into effect this fall. This could prompt some people to cut back on their hours to avoid losing money.

“Working more can actually leave you worse off,” the price-comparison site ValuePenguin.com notes in a new analysis.

“It’s sort of an absurd scenario,” said Jonathan Wu, ValuePenguin.com’s co-founder. “It’s something for people to be aware of.”

In that scenario, an individual or family whose annual income surpasses maximums set by the federal government—if only by $1—will totally lose subsidies available to buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

What a perverse system.

And of course Obamacare will allow young adults to stay on the health insurance policies of their parents until they reach 26 years of age.  As I mentioned the other day, 36 percent of all young adults in the 18 to 31 age bracket are currently living with their folks.  In most of those cases, the parents have to end up footing the bill for health care because the kids simply cannot afford it.

Medicaid continues to expand as well.  Certainly helping the poor is a very good thing, but unfortunately the number of poor just continues to explode.

Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid.  Today, one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid, and things are about to get a whole lot worse.

Right now, there are more than 56 million Americans on Medicaid, and it is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.

It is going to take a whole lot of money to support 72 million Medicaid patients.

And then of course there is Medicare.

When Medicare was first established, we were told that it would cost about $12 billion a year by the time 1990 rolled around.

Instead, it actually cost the federal government $110 billion in 1990, and it will cost the federal government close to $600 billion this year.

But if you think this is bad, just wait until all of the Baby Boomers retire.  It is being projected that the number of Americans on Medicare will grow from a little bit more than 50 million today to 73.2 million in 2025.  By then, we would be spending well over a trillion dollars a year on Medicare.

As you can see, under Obamacare the vast majority of all Americans will have their health care at least partially subsidized.

And it expected that our tax dollars will somehow be enough to pay for all of this.

The truth is that we have a deeply broken system.  Costs are spiraling out of control and nobody is quite sure how to fix things.  The following statistics come from one of my previous articles entitled “50 Signs That The U.S. Health Care System Is A Gigantic Money Making Scam“…

–This year the American people will spend approximately 2.8 trillion dollars on health care, and it is being projected that Americans will spend 4.5 trillion dollars on health care in 2019.

–The United States spends more on health care than Japan, Germany, France, China, the U.K., Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain and Australia combined.

–If the U.S. health care system was a country, it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire planet.

–Back in 1960, an average of $147 was spent per person on health care in the United States. By 2009, that number had skyrocketed to $8,086.

The sad thing is that many hard working Americans in the private sector are being forced to subsidize the health care of others, but they can’t even afford decent health care for themselves.

For example, I know of one hard working couple that has a health plan that has a $1,000 deductible.  Even with that deductible, their health insurance premiums are absolutely ridiculous.  Their health care strategy is simply to avoid going to the hospital or visiting a doctor as much as possible.

And of course health insurance companies make money by providing as little health care as possible.  Many Americans have discovered that when you need them the most, some health insurance companies will try to get out of covering you any way that they possibly can.

The reality is that just because you have health insurance that does not mean that you are “covered”.

According to a study that was published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in more than 60 percent of all personal bankruptcies in the United States.  Of those bankruptcies that were caused by medical bills, approximately 75 percent of them involved people that actually did have health insurance.

So what is the bottom line?

The bottom line is the system stinks, and Obamacare is going to make things a whole lot worse.

Goodbye Full-Time Jobs, Hello Part-Time Jobs, R.I.P. Middle Class

GraveyardA fundamental shift is taking place in the U.S. economy.  In fact, this transition is rapidly picking up momentum and is in danger of becoming an avalanche.  The percentage of full-time jobs in our economy is steadily declining and the percentage of part-time jobs is steadily increasing.  This is not a recent phenomenon, but now there are several factors which are accelerating this trend.  One of them is Obamacare.  The truth is that Obamacare actually gives business owners incentive to cut hours and turn full-time workers into part-time workers, and according to the Wall Street Journal and other prominent publications this is already happening all over the United States.  Perhaps this is part of the reasons why the U.S. economy actually lost 240,000 full-time jobs last month.

In a recent article entitled “Restaurant Shift: Sorry, Just Part-Time“, the Wall Street Journal explained the choices that employers are faced with thanks to Obamacare…

The Affordable Care Act requires employers with 50 or more full-time equivalent workers to offer affordable insurance to employees working 30 or more hours a week or face fines. Some companies have said the requirement could increase their costs significantly, although others have played down the potential hit.

The cost for small firms to comply with the health law will depend largely on the number of additional full-time employees that sign up for employer-sponsored coverage. Average annual premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance in 2012 were $5,615 for single coverage and $15,745 for family coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. That is up from $3,083 and $8,003, respectively, in 2002.

Thankfully the implementation of this aspect of Obamacare was recently delayed, but a lot of employers are saying that it won’t make a difference.  They know that it is coming at some point, and so they are already making the changes that they feel they will need to make in order to comply with the law…

Restaurant owners who have already begun shifting to part-time workers say they will continue that pattern.

“Does the delay change anything for us? Absolutely not,” Mr. Adams of Subway said, explaining that whether his health-care costs go up next year or in 2015, he will have to comply with the law. “We won’t start hiring full-time people.”

This is very sad, because we have already been witnessing a steady erosion of “breadwinner jobs” in this country.

It is very, very difficult to support a family if you just have a part-time job or a temp job.  But those are the jobs that our economy is producing these days.

In fact, if you can believe it, the second largest employer in the United States is now a temp agency.  Kelly Services is actually the second largest employer in the country after Wal-Mart.

Isn’t that crazy?

And full-time employment continues to lag far, far behind part-time employment.  The number of part-time workers in the United States recently hit a brand new all-time record high, but the number of full-time workers remains nearly 6 million below the old record that was set back in 2007.

For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “15 Signs That The Quality Of Jobs In America Is Going Downhill Really Fast“.

At this point, employees are increasingly considered to be expendable “liabilities” that can be dumped the moment that their usefulness is over.

For example, employees at one restaurant down in Florida were recently fired by text message…

It’s bad enough losing your job, but more than a dozen angry employees say they were fired from a central Florida restaurant via text message.

Employees at Barducci’s Italian Bistro said they lost their jobs without notice after the restaurant suddenly closed and are still waiting for their paychecks.

This shift that we are witnessing is fundamentally changing the relationship between employers and employees in the United States.  The balance of power has moved very much toward the employers.

Most employers realize that there is intense competition for most jobs these days.  If you get tired of your job, your employer can easily go out and find a whole bunch of other people who would be thrilled to fill it.

So why has the balance of power shifted so dramatically?

Well, for one thing we have allowed millions upon millions of good paying jobs to be shipped out of the country.  Now American workers literally have to compete for jobs with workers on the other side of the planet that live in nations where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.

This should have never happened, but voters in both major political parties kept voting for politicians that were doing this to us.

Now we all pay the price.

Another factor is the rapid advancement of technology.

These days, businesses are trying use machines, computers and robots to automate just about everything that they can.  The following example comes from a recent Business Insider article…

On a windy morning in California’s Salinas Valley, a tractor pulled a wheeled, metal contraption over rows of budding iceberg lettuce plants. Engineers from Silicon Valley tinkered with the software on a laptop to ensure the machine was eliminating the right leafy buds.

The engineers were testing the Lettuce Bot, a machine that can “thin” a field of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand.

The thinner is part of a new generation of machines that target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization — fruits and vegetables destined for the fresh market, not processing, which have thus far resisted mechanization because they’re sensitive to bruising.

So what happens when the big corporations that dominate our economy are able to automate everything?

What will the rest of us do?

How will the middle class survive if they don’t need us to work for them?

Over the past couple of centuries, we have witnessed several fundamental shifts in our economy.

Once upon a time, a very high percentage of Americans worked for themselves.  There were millions of farmers, ranchers, small store owners, etc.

But then the industrial revolution kicked in to high gear and big corporations started to gain more power.  Millions of Americans went to work for these big corporations, but it was okay because they paid us good wages to work in their factories and the middle class thrived.

Unfortunately, the big corporations have realized that things have changed and that they don’t really need us anymore.  They can replace us with technology or with super cheap labor overseas.

So that leaves the rest of us in quite a quandry.  Very few of us own our own businesses.  In fact, the percentage of self-employed workers in the United States is at an all-time record low.  And the number of us that are needed by the monolithic corporations that dominate our system is dropping by the day.

All of this is very bad news for the middle class.  The only thing that most of us have to offer is our labor, and the value of our labor is continually declining.

Unless something dramatic happens, the future of the middle class looks very bleak.

Share This Massive List Of Post-Election Firings And Layoffs With Everyone You Can

The victory by Barack Obama on election night has resulted in a huge wave of firings and layoffs all over America.  A large number of businesses seem to have suddenly shifted into panic mode.  The number of layoff announcements that we have seen in the last 48 hours has been absolutely shocking.  So why is this happening?  Well, the truth is that the federal government is absolutely suffocating small businesses all over America with rules, regulations and taxes.  If you have never tried to run a small business, then you have no idea how oppressive this system actually is for people that are trying to run small businesses successfully.  It has steadily gotten worse over the years no matter who has been in the White House and no matter who has controlled Congress.  So we shouldn’t put 100% of the blame on Obama.  Bush massively expanded government and made things harder on small business people too.  But what many small business people were looking for on this election day was just a little bit of help.  Many were desperately holding out hope that Obamacare would be repealed so that they would not have to get rid of some of their employees.  Many were hoping to get a little bit of relief from the crippling regulations and taxes that are absolutely crushing them.  But now that Barack Obama has been given another four years, they understand that there is no hope on the horizon and that things are only going to get worse.  So they are making the hard decisions that they feel are necessary in order to survive in this economic environment.

And I certainly don’t blame them.  You only want to have employees if you can make a profit on them.  And in this environment it is getting harder than ever to make a profit on an employee.  You see, the truth is that what you cost your employer goes far beyond your salary or your hourly wage.  I think many of you would be absolutely shocked if you learned how much it actually costs your employer to employ you.  And now thanks to Obamacare, that cost is going to go up even more.

Many businesses are not even feasible at all in this economic environment.  Many small businesses had been holding out hope that somehow this election might turn things around and make it possible for them to keep going, but when Obama won it was kind of like the straw that broke the camel’s back.

You can’t do what the federal government and the state governments are doing to us and expect to have a thriving economy.  They are choking the life out of us.

New businesses and small businesses are supposed to be at the heart of our economic system.  Unfortunately, the environment that has been created is absolutely killing them.  This is a recipe for disaster.

In a previous article, I noted that the number of jobs created at new businesses in 2010 in the United States was less than half of what it was back in the year 2000.

Now we can expect that number to get even worse and we can expect large numbers of small businesses to shrink in size or close their doors completely.

The following is a list of some of the post-election firings and layoffs that we have seen since Tuesday night…

#1 Utah

A Utah coal company owned by a vocal critic of President Barack Obama has laid off 102 miners.

The layoffs at the West Ridge Mine are effective immediately, according to UtahAmerican Energy Inc., a subsidiary of Murray Energy Corp. They were announced in a short statement made public Thursday, two days after Obama won re-election.

The layoffs are necessary because of the president’s “war on coal,” the statement said. The slogan is one used frequently during the election by Murray Energy CEO Robert Murray, who was an ardent supporter of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

In its statement, UtahAmerican Energy blames the Obama administration for instituting policies that will close down “204 American coal-fired power plants by 2014” and for drastically reducing the market for coal.

#2 Ohio

I work for the oldest and largest health insurer in the state of Ohio in the underwriting department. At 9 a.m.this morning, my department (about 50) were called into a meeting in the executive boardroom. We were informed that due to a provision in the healthcare ‘reform’ effective 2014 called guarantee issue, our services would no longer be needed, and we were offered severance  So Obama got to keep his job, and we lost ours. It is maddening that some tyrant 400 miles away can have such a ruinous effect on peoples lives.

#3 Nevada

A Las Vegas business owner with 114 employees fired 22 workers today, apparently as a direct result of President Obama’s re-election.

“David” (he asked to remain anonymous for obvious reasons) told Host Kevin Wall on 100.5 KXNT that “elections have consequences” and that “at the end of the day, I need to survive.”

Here’s an excerpt from the interview. Click the audio tab below to hear even more from this compelling conversation:

“I’ve done my share of educating my employees. I never tell them which way to vote. I believe in the free system we have, I believe in the right to choose who they want to be president, but I did explain as a business owner that I have always put my employees first. I always made sure that when I went without a paycheck that [I] made sure they were paid. And I explained that I always put them first and unfortunately I’m at a point where I’m being forced to have to worry about me and my family now and a business that I built from just me to 114 employees.

#4 Posted below is a list of layoff headlines from the past few days that was posted on AmericanThinker.com…

Obama was “fired up” and so were the voters, and so now, the mass firings begin. Here’s a collection of today’s headlines.  Please say a prayer for the families who will be suffering. Had Romney won, many of these companies would now be hiring.

Teco Coal officials announce layoffs

Momentive Inc plans temporary layoffs for 150

Wilkes-Barre officials to announce mandatory layoffs

600 layoffs at Groupon

More layoffs announced at Aniston Weapons Incinerator

Murray Energy confirms 150 layoffs at 3 subsidiaries

130 laid off in Minnesota dairy plant closure

Stanford brake plant to lay off 75

Turbocare, Oce to lay off more than 220 workers

ATI plans to lay off 172 workers in North Richland Hills

SpaceX claims its first victims as Rocketdyne lays off 100

Providence Journal lays off 23 full-time employees

CVPH lays off 17

New Energy lays off 40 employees

102 Utah miners laid off because of ‘war on coal’, company says

US Cellular drops Chicago, cuts 640 jobs

Career Education to cut 900 jobs, close 23 campuses

Vestas to cut 3,000 more jobs

First Energy to cut 400 jobs by 2016

Mine owner blames Obama for layoffs (54 fired last night)

Canceled program costs 115 jobs at Ohio air base

AMD trims Austin workforce – 400 jobs slashed

100 workers lose jobs as Caterpillar closes plant in Minnesota

Exide to lay off 150 workers

TE Connectivity to close Guilford plant, lay off 620

More Layoffs for Major Wind Company (3,000 jobs cut)

Cigna to lay off 1,300 workers worldwide

Ameridose to lay off hundreds of workers

#5 According to the Blaze, the following major corporations have all announced layoffs in just the past two days…

Energizer

Exide Technologies

Westinghouse

Research in Motion Limited

Lightyear Network Solutions

Providence Journal

Hawker Beechcraft

Boeing (30% of their management staff)

CVPH Medical Center

US Cellular

Momentive Performance Materials

Rocketdyne

Brake Parts

Vestas Wind Systems

Husqvarna

Center for Hospice New York

Bristol-Meyers

OCE North America

Darden Restaurants

West Ridge Mine

United Blood Services Gulf

You can get the rest of the details right here.

#6 The following is a list of companies that will be laying off workers just because of Obamacare that was compiled by FreedomWorks…

Dana Holding Corp.

As recently as a week ago, a global auto parts manufacturing company in Ohio known as Dana Holding Corp., warned their employees of potential layoffs, citing “$24 million over the next six years in additional U.S. health care expenses”.  After laying off several white collar staffers, company insiders have hinted at more to come.  The company will have to cover the additional $24 million cost somehow, which will likely equate to numerous cuts in their current workforce of 25,500 worldwide.  

Stryker

One of the biggest medical device manufacturers in the world, Stryker will close their facility in Orchard Park, New York, eliminating 96 jobs in December.  Worse, they plan on countering the medical device tax in Obamacare by slashing 5% of their global workforce – an estimated 1,170 positions.

Boston Scientific

In October of 2009, Boston Scientific CEO Ray Elliott, warned that proposed taxes in the health care reform bill could “lead to significant job losses” for his company.  Nearly two years later, Elliott announced that the company would be cutting anywhere between 1,200 and 1,400 jobs, while simultaneously shifting investments and workers overseas – to China.

Medtronic

In March of 2010, medical device maker Medtronic warned that Obamacare taxes could result in a reduction of precisely 1,000 jobs.  That plan became reality when the company cut 500 positions over the summer, with another 500 set for the end of 2013.  

Others

A short list of other companies facing future layoffs at the hands of Obamacare:

  • Smith & Nephew – 770 layoffs
  • Abbott Labs – 700 layoffs
  • Covidien – 595 layoffs
  • Kinetic Concepts – 427 layoffs
  • St. Jude Medical – 300 layoffs
  • Hill Rom – 200 layoffs

A lot of other businesses are going to reduce the number of employees they have or reduce the average work week in order to avoid the Obamacare insurance coverage mandate that will soon be implemented.

This is how CNSNews.com describes the choice that many employers will be facing…

That section, known as the employer mandate, requires any business with 50 or more full-time employees to provide at least the minimum level of government-defined health coverage to those employees. In other words, a business must provide insurance if it has 50 or more employees working an average of just 30 hours per week, which is 10 hours per week fewer than the traditional 40-hour work week.

Thus, by cutting employees’ hours to ensure they average less than the 30 per week, employers could potentially avoid the cost of providing the minimum insurance levels mandated by Obamacare.

So if your company trims the number of workers to just under 50 or starts going to “29 hour work weeks”, then you will know who to blame.

All of this is complete and utter insanity.  We are committing national economic suicide.

But perhaps we deserve this.  After all, Americans willingly chose their leaders on election day.  It is getting harder and harder to deny that our politicians are truly a reflection of who we are as a nation.

The American people chose this path, and now we get to see where it leads us.

111 Obamacare Waivers And Counting – Can The Rest Of Us Get Waivers From Having To Comply With Obamacare Please?

In a stunning admission of just how job-killing and business-crushing the new health care law really is, the Obama administration has issued a staggering total of 111 Obamacare waivers (and counting) so far. The list of the dozens of companies and organizations that have been approved for a waiver is very, very deeply buried on the website of the Department of Health & Human Services.  In fact, it takes six separate clicks to get to the list.  Some of the companies that have been granted waivers include McDonald’s, Darden Restaurants (owners of the Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurant chains), Aetna, the United Federation of Teachers Welfare Fund in New York, and Dish Network.  These Obamacare waivers cover a total of 1.2 million Americans.  However, as news of these waivers spreads, it is inevitable that thousands more companies will want to apply.  In the end, tens of millions of Americans may be covered by health plans that have been exempted from Obamacare.  So can the rest of us get in on this action or is the Obama administration going to play favorites with these waivers?

So far, the Obamacare waivers have primarily been granted to companies that offer very limited health plans.  The Obama administration has apparently been afraid of the public relations nightmare that would result if dozens of companies suddenly started dropping health coverage for their employees.  The following is how the New York Times recently described what is going on with these waivers….

Last month, federal officials granted dozens of one-year waivers that were aimed at sparing certain employers, including McDonald’s, insurers and unions who offer plans that sharply limit the coverage they provide. These limited-benefit plans, also known as “minimeds,” fail to comply with new rules phasing out limits on how much policies will provide in medical care each year.

So do you want to get an Obamacare waiver for your own company?  Well, just over a week ago the Department of Health & Human Services published a set of new guidelines for those seeking to apply for a waiver.  As news of these waivers starts to spread they will likely get absolutely swamped with applications, so you better get yours in early.  In fact, it is being reported that the number of approved applications has tripled in just the last month alone.

But these waivers raise some very important questions.

-If Obamacare is such a great law, shouldn’t it apply equally to everybody?

-If Obamacare is going to cause firms to drop their “mini-med” health plans, shouldn’t all firms with “mini-med” plans be given a blanket exemption?

-Are all firms that apply for an Obamacare exemption going to be given one or will the Obama administration be playing favorites?

-Won’t firms that are granted these Obamacare waivers be given a very substantial competitive advantage over other firms in the same industry that do not have an exemption?

-What does it say about an administration when they grant dozens upon dozens of exemptions from a law that they spent months upon months selling to the American people as the ultimate solution to our health care problems?

The following is a recent video news report about these Obamacare exemptions…..

The truth is that the U.S. health care system was deeply broken before Obamacare, and after the new health care law the U.S. health care system is still deeply broken.

Before Obamacare, the U.S. health care system was all about making as much money as possible for health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry.  After Obamacare, the U.S. health care system is still about making as much money as possible for health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry, only now we all have to deal with more suffocating layers of government bureaucracy and much higher health insurance premiums.

The entire health care system in the United States should be dismantled and built again from scratch.  It was a complete and total nightmare before Obamacare and it is still a complete and total nightmare.

But perhaps you disagree.  Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing, and if you have a different perspective feel free to express it below….

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