Study: Health Care Reform Mandate Will Punish Employers, Kill Jobs
Under the provision, known as the play-or-pay mandate, another 10.2 million employees will face stunted wages and the loss of their benefits as employers try to find ways to fund the mandates......
Are we already seeing this happen?
Some History to remember:
A provision in President Obama's health care reform plan that requires businesses to offer health insurance to their workers or face a federal tax would cost employers at least $49 billion dollars a year, putting 5.2 million employees at risk of unemployment or underemployment, according to a new study.
"Health care reform is not going to be free," said economist Mark Wilson, who authored the study, which was commissioned by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Under the provision, known as the play-or-pay mandate, another 10.2 million employees will face stunted wages and the loss of their benefits as employers try to find ways to fund the mandates.
"Those will be a difficult decision for them to make and they're also going to have to decide to the extent they can raise prices and pass the cost onto consumers," Wilson said.
But supporters of Obama's health reform plan say under the current system, thousands already are losing their health coverage or jobs because of the enormous costs employers are bearing.
"What we need to think about in health reform is how to make the system more efficient, how to make sure the system is protecting jobs, and that's exactly what health reform will do," said Peter Harbage, a health policy analyst with the liberal Center for American Progress.
White House spokesman Bill Burton said Thursday that without health reform the entire U.S. economy faces ruin.
"If we don't do something, not only is health care going to be in crisis, but the deficit will -- we just will not be on a fiscally sustainable path as it relates to the deficit," he said.
And as the financial realities of health reform are coming together there are questions about why tort reform isn't part of the package.
At a town hall hosted by Democratic Rep. Jim Moran this week, one person demanded to know why the threat of medical lawsuits couldn't be reduced.
"There's $200 million dollars in savings over 10 years if we had tort reform and nobody loses but the lawyers," the person said before shouting, "Why have we not even considered that?"
Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, a proponent of health reform, responded that tort reform would create more enemies for lawmakers as they try to pass a reform bill.
"Plain and simple truth," he said.
The president of the American Medical Association says without more protections for doctors in the courtroom they will continue to order tests that may be unnecessary and drive up health care costs simply to protect themselves.
"Health care reform is not going to be free," said economist Mark Wilson, who authored the study, which was commissioned by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Under the provision, known as the play-or-pay mandate, another 10.2 million employees will face stunted wages and the loss of their benefits as employers try to find ways to fund the mandates.
"Those will be a difficult decision for them to make and they're also going to have to decide to the extent they can raise prices and pass the cost onto consumers," Wilson said.
But supporters of Obama's health reform plan say under the current system, thousands already are losing their health coverage or jobs because of the enormous costs employers are bearing.
"What we need to think about in health reform is how to make the system more efficient, how to make sure the system is protecting jobs, and that's exactly what health reform will do," said Peter Harbage, a health policy analyst with the liberal Center for American Progress.
White House spokesman Bill Burton said Thursday that without health reform the entire U.S. economy faces ruin.
"If we don't do something, not only is health care going to be in crisis, but the deficit will -- we just will not be on a fiscally sustainable path as it relates to the deficit," he said.
And as the financial realities of health reform are coming together there are questions about why tort reform isn't part of the package.
At a town hall hosted by Democratic Rep. Jim Moran this week, one person demanded to know why the threat of medical lawsuits couldn't be reduced.
"There's $200 million dollars in savings over 10 years if we had tort reform and nobody loses but the lawyers," the person said before shouting, "Why have we not even considered that?"
Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, a proponent of health reform, responded that tort reform would create more enemies for lawmakers as they try to pass a reform bill.
"Plain and simple truth," he said.
The president of the American Medical Association says without more protections for doctors in the courtroom they will continue to order tests that may be unnecessary and drive up health care costs simply to protect themselves.
Why The Affordable Health Care Choice Act of 2009 is unconstitutional and unhealthy...
We are not going to "Get Out Of The Way"
Not Get Out of Way
by Roger Kimball
Issue 138 - August 26, 2009 So, the President of the United States wants critics of his plans to socialize American health care to “get out of the way.” His operatives urge you to turn in your friends and neighbors if they say “something fishy” about the administration.
Confronted with spreading grassroots outrage, President Obama instructs his supporters “to punch back twice as hard.” Kenneth Gladney, the 38-year-old black conservative who was hospitalized by union goons, can testify that they are doing just that. (It’s what Obama once called “the Chicago way”: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” he said.)
Why all the Sturm und Drang? What is it about the issue of health care, or, rather, the prospect of a government takeover of health care, that arouses such passions on both sides of the debate? Sure, there are important issues at stake. It is legitimate to ask whether the Democratic plan will led to rationing of health care, especially for senior citizens. It is legitimate to ask whether it will limit choice, impede innovation, and lead to longer waiting times for various procedures. It is legitimate to ask about how the new system will be paid for.
But these concerns, while legitimate, do not really explain the level of passion that the prospect of government run health arouses. The real issue, I believe, concerns freedom.
Back in March, the President warned in a televised forum that if “if we don’t tackle health care, then we’re going to break the bank.” At the time, I noted in this space, that his warning about the need for instant action on health care was reminiscent of his warning a few weeks earlier that if we didn’t give him $800,000,000,000 instantly, right now, today, forget about bothering to read the bill, then the result would “catastrophe.” We gave him the dough. What happened? Let me repeat what I said in March:
Here’s how it works: the President tells you that we have a bad situation, which is true. He then says that spending huge sums of money–which he proposes to procure by extracting more money from (certain) citizens present and future — will solve the problem, which is false.
In the case of health care, the enthymeme is doubly painful, because not only will more government spending not be cure for government spending, but it will also do grave damage to what is still, despite the efforts of squadrons of government bureaucrats for decades, the greatest health care system in the world.
Obama has promised to change that, and judging by the warm fuzziness in evidence at his Potemkin forum on health care recently, I reckon he will succeed. What will we get instead? Obama talks about “universal” health care. He vowed to sign that into law before the end of his first term. If the Canadian experience — so much admired by the Left — is anything to go by, what that will mean is universal access to the government controlled waiting lists for health care. Not quite the same thing as universal health care.
Reflecting on the question of whether the Canadian economy should be a model for the American economy (the answer, by the way, is No), the Canadian journalist Mark Steyn observed that “if you have government health care, you not only annex a huge chunk of the economy, you also destroy a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher [e.g., Medicare patrons] , and you make it very difficult ever to change back.”
Those are the depressing bits: the loss of freedom and the difficulty of ever getting it back. On all these government expropriations, what we have is essentially a one-way ratchet. Once the government sinks its teeth into you, it is extremely difficult to wiggle free. The income tax and social security tax, we tend to forget, were both instituted as temporary, emergency measures. That’s why 1895 is one of my favorite years in US history: in that banner year the Supreme Court ruled that the income tax was unconstitutional. Needless to say, the ruling didn’t last long.
Looking at the grinning rogues gallery of mountebanks at Obama’s Potemkin forum — Ted “Chappaquiddick” Kennedy, Charlie “tax dodger” Rangel, and the rest — I thought of Ronald Reagan’s warning about how socialists so often use health care as a wedge to extract not only money but also freedom, including freedom of choice, from the citizenry. “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people,” Reagan observed, “has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.”
The name of that reluctance is compassion. Compassion is a noble human emotion. But it can be exploited by unscrupulous politicians and twisted into self-flagellating feelings of guilt, on one side, and the self-regarding emotion of virtue, on the other.
And this brings me to the even more frightening thing Obama said at the forum. There is, he said, “a moral imperative to health care.” Is there? What he meant was that if you agree with his proposal, you are an upstanding citizen who deserves the warm, self-regarding glow of moral infatuation. If you disagree with him, however, you are a greedy, selfish, unenlightened person who needs . . . well, the President hasn’t gotten around to that part of the scenario yet, except to note that anyone who is solvent can expect higher taxes.
...That is the really sobering thing about the emotional metabolism of abstract benevolence: that the capacity for evil so easily cohabits and feeds upon the emotion of virtue.
I doubt whether most of the people turning up at town hall meetings to express their dismay about the Presidents plans to revolutionize American health care have Robespierre in mind. But the people that White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs disparaging referred to as the “Brooks Brothers Brigade” sense that a lot is at stake in the controversy over the future of health care. It’s not just a question of what doctors you can see when, or even what sort of doctors will be available to be seen in a government-run health care system.
No, it’s a question of what Ronald Reagan called “imposing statism” in the name of pursuing a humanitarian project. More and more people are waking up to the fact that statism is what lurks behind (and not very far behind) the Democratic plans for health care. They sense it, and they don’t like it. And that is why, Mr. President, they are not going to “get out of the way,” no matter how hard your “Chicago-way” supporters “punch back.”
Roger Kimball writes Rogers’s Rules at PajamasMedia, where this first appeared.
by Roger Kimball
Issue 138 - August 26, 2009 So, the President of the United States wants critics of his plans to socialize American health care to “get out of the way.” His operatives urge you to turn in your friends and neighbors if they say “something fishy” about the administration.
Confronted with spreading grassroots outrage, President Obama instructs his supporters “to punch back twice as hard.” Kenneth Gladney, the 38-year-old black conservative who was hospitalized by union goons, can testify that they are doing just that. (It’s what Obama once called “the Chicago way”: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” he said.)
Why all the Sturm und Drang? What is it about the issue of health care, or, rather, the prospect of a government takeover of health care, that arouses such passions on both sides of the debate? Sure, there are important issues at stake. It is legitimate to ask whether the Democratic plan will led to rationing of health care, especially for senior citizens. It is legitimate to ask whether it will limit choice, impede innovation, and lead to longer waiting times for various procedures. It is legitimate to ask about how the new system will be paid for.
But these concerns, while legitimate, do not really explain the level of passion that the prospect of government run health arouses. The real issue, I believe, concerns freedom.
Back in March, the President warned in a televised forum that if “if we don’t tackle health care, then we’re going to break the bank.” At the time, I noted in this space, that his warning about the need for instant action on health care was reminiscent of his warning a few weeks earlier that if we didn’t give him $800,000,000,000 instantly, right now, today, forget about bothering to read the bill, then the result would “catastrophe.” We gave him the dough. What happened? Let me repeat what I said in March:
Here’s how it works: the President tells you that we have a bad situation, which is true. He then says that spending huge sums of money–which he proposes to procure by extracting more money from (certain) citizens present and future — will solve the problem, which is false.
In the case of health care, the enthymeme is doubly painful, because not only will more government spending not be cure for government spending, but it will also do grave damage to what is still, despite the efforts of squadrons of government bureaucrats for decades, the greatest health care system in the world.
Obama has promised to change that, and judging by the warm fuzziness in evidence at his Potemkin forum on health care recently, I reckon he will succeed. What will we get instead? Obama talks about “universal” health care. He vowed to sign that into law before the end of his first term. If the Canadian experience — so much admired by the Left — is anything to go by, what that will mean is universal access to the government controlled waiting lists for health care. Not quite the same thing as universal health care.
Reflecting on the question of whether the Canadian economy should be a model for the American economy (the answer, by the way, is No), the Canadian journalist Mark Steyn observed that “if you have government health care, you not only annex a huge chunk of the economy, you also destroy a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher [e.g., Medicare patrons] , and you make it very difficult ever to change back.”
Those are the depressing bits: the loss of freedom and the difficulty of ever getting it back. On all these government expropriations, what we have is essentially a one-way ratchet. Once the government sinks its teeth into you, it is extremely difficult to wiggle free. The income tax and social security tax, we tend to forget, were both instituted as temporary, emergency measures. That’s why 1895 is one of my favorite years in US history: in that banner year the Supreme Court ruled that the income tax was unconstitutional. Needless to say, the ruling didn’t last long.
Looking at the grinning rogues gallery of mountebanks at Obama’s Potemkin forum — Ted “Chappaquiddick” Kennedy, Charlie “tax dodger” Rangel, and the rest — I thought of Ronald Reagan’s warning about how socialists so often use health care as a wedge to extract not only money but also freedom, including freedom of choice, from the citizenry. “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people,” Reagan observed, “has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.”
The name of that reluctance is compassion. Compassion is a noble human emotion. But it can be exploited by unscrupulous politicians and twisted into self-flagellating feelings of guilt, on one side, and the self-regarding emotion of virtue, on the other.
And this brings me to the even more frightening thing Obama said at the forum. There is, he said, “a moral imperative to health care.” Is there? What he meant was that if you agree with his proposal, you are an upstanding citizen who deserves the warm, self-regarding glow of moral infatuation. If you disagree with him, however, you are a greedy, selfish, unenlightened person who needs . . . well, the President hasn’t gotten around to that part of the scenario yet, except to note that anyone who is solvent can expect higher taxes.
...That is the really sobering thing about the emotional metabolism of abstract benevolence: that the capacity for evil so easily cohabits and feeds upon the emotion of virtue.
I doubt whether most of the people turning up at town hall meetings to express their dismay about the Presidents plans to revolutionize American health care have Robespierre in mind. But the people that White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs disparaging referred to as the “Brooks Brothers Brigade” sense that a lot is at stake in the controversy over the future of health care. It’s not just a question of what doctors you can see when, or even what sort of doctors will be available to be seen in a government-run health care system.
No, it’s a question of what Ronald Reagan called “imposing statism” in the name of pursuing a humanitarian project. More and more people are waking up to the fact that statism is what lurks behind (and not very far behind) the Democratic plans for health care. They sense it, and they don’t like it. And that is why, Mr. President, they are not going to “get out of the way,” no matter how hard your “Chicago-way” supporters “punch back.”
Roger Kimball writes Rogers’s Rules at PajamasMedia, where this first appeared.
Senior Death Discount
by Gregory ConkoIssue 138 - August 26, 2009
White House health care policy advisor Ezekiel Emanuel favors allocating fewer health care resources to senior citizens in order to save money. In a medical journal article published earlier this year, Emanuel justified rationing health care services based on the controversial “senior death discount.”
Cost-benefit and comparative-benefit analysis are useful tools and should be used in analyzing regulatory policies. But, when President Obama tells Americans that his health reform proposals, which use the senior death discount, will ensure they get the highest quality care, he’s selling them a bill of goods.
In recent weeks, Democratic members of Congress have criticized Cass Sunstein, nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, because Sunstein favors the statistical practice of taking into account years of life expectancy when evaluating the benefits of regulatory proposals, a practice critics deride as the “senior death discount.” However, health policy advisor Emanuel recommends using the same senior death discount policy to ration health care services for elderly Americans.
In a January article published in the British medical journal Lancet, Emanuel and his co-authors advocate a health rationing policy that discriminates against older people. They wrote, “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination … Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life years is not.” And, “although life-years are equally valuable to all, justice requires the fair distribution of them.”
Current analytical tools don’t take sufficient account of the vast differences among individuals in physiology or value preferences so they should be relied upon much more sparingly where collective decision-making is intended to cut off individual choice. This is a controversial move, but health care reformers are happy to rely on the senior death discount when it can help them book savings for their proposals.
Gregory Conko is a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where this first appeared
White House health care policy advisor Ezekiel Emanuel favors allocating fewer health care resources to senior citizens in order to save money. In a medical journal article published earlier this year, Emanuel justified rationing health care services based on the controversial “senior death discount.”
Cost-benefit and comparative-benefit analysis are useful tools and should be used in analyzing regulatory policies. But, when President Obama tells Americans that his health reform proposals, which use the senior death discount, will ensure they get the highest quality care, he’s selling them a bill of goods.
In recent weeks, Democratic members of Congress have criticized Cass Sunstein, nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, because Sunstein favors the statistical practice of taking into account years of life expectancy when evaluating the benefits of regulatory proposals, a practice critics deride as the “senior death discount.” However, health policy advisor Emanuel recommends using the same senior death discount policy to ration health care services for elderly Americans.
In a January article published in the British medical journal Lancet, Emanuel and his co-authors advocate a health rationing policy that discriminates against older people. They wrote, “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination … Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life years is not.” And, “although life-years are equally valuable to all, justice requires the fair distribution of them.”
Current analytical tools don’t take sufficient account of the vast differences among individuals in physiology or value preferences so they should be relied upon much more sparingly where collective decision-making is intended to cut off individual choice. This is a controversial move, but health care reformers are happy to rely on the senior death discount when it can help them book savings for their proposals.
Gregory Conko is a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where this first appeared
