Is it too late to stop Obamacare?

The Congressional Budget Office continues to revise its numbers on the effects of job loss and hour reduction as a result of Obamacare. “The reduction in CBO’s projections of hours worked represents a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024,” the report states.

That means a historically high number of people will either be laid off or see their hours reduced. Another unintended consequence of incessant government meddling.

The Congressional Budget Ofiice also says deficits will start to grow after 2015 because of

an economy that continues to limp along and a stubbornly high unemployment rate, that they project will not fall below 6 percent until at least the latter part of 2016.

To understand this is to understand basic economics. Heretofore, companies offered a variety of healthcare plans to both full-time and part-time employees. Now that every policy must be “Obamacare compliant” it’s no surprise that many part-timers are losing their healthcare coverage and many full-timers are seeing their hours cut below 30 hours per week to avoid the tremendous added expense of the mandated insurance policies.

Not only will lower-end employees not get health insurance, they’ll have less money to buy it on their own because their hours have been cut. But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. As I’ve been predicting since they were debating Obamacare in Congress, you’re going to see a flood of companies opt to pay the $2,000 fine and put their employees on Obamacare. They’ll even throw in a raise, which will pacify the employee who might otherwise protest the move.

Again, it’s basic economics. If you’re an employer and you’re paying 15-grand for a health insurance policy and you can pay $2,000 per year and not have to fool with it, why wouldn’t you? On top of that, think of the expense of HR hours and resources devoted to administering the policies, answering myriad questions about them and keeping up with the mountains of paperwork associated with them. All of that will be gone.

Just imagine your boss coming to you and saying, “Look, we simply can’t afford the new insurance policy required by Obamacare but I tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you a $5,000 raise. You’re going to be able to go to the Obamacare exchange and choose either a gold, silver or bronze policy. Chances are you’ll get a subsidy to help pay for most of the policy. You’re going to have much better insurance and you get a raise to boot.”

What’s not to love, right? Of course, we’ve learned that any expense over $40,000 falls not on the insurance company but on the federal government. A little deal between Obama and the insurance companies to get them on board. In short order the whole thing will be bankrupt and then the rationing begins.

It’s surreal that we’re even at this place. This is something the left could only dream about just a few, short years ago. Now it’s a reality and, barring some lawsuit hitting pay dirt, we’re stuck with it, thanks to an inept opposition party in Congress.

At this point, it appears it’s every man for himself, as the old saying goes. It’s a scene right out of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The moochers and looters set their sites on the producers. The producers assumed they could never breach the wall. Now the moochers and looters are inside. And they’re having their way with us all.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

More Obamacare surprises

Just when we thought we knew everything about Obamacare up pops another little surprise. The Weekly Standard reported that there’s a great reason insurance companies were so eager to jump on the bandwagon. Aside from compulsory customers, The Weekly Standard reported that we - the taxpayers - are on the hook for 80 percent of the expenses over $45,000. In other words, if someone has a catastrophic illness the government will pick up the tab for four-fifths of the cost.

This is one of the many paths laid down by Obamacare to a single payer healthcare system. You probably hear that term a lot. What it basically means is there will be one insurance

payer - the government. The insurance companies will essentially be administrators. They’ll handle the claims. What they don’t see coming is once the government assumes all of the risk they won’t need dozens of companies writing policies. They’ll just need one.

To make it more palatable the government will essentially absorb one of the big names you’re familiar with. Maybe Blue Cross. Perhaps United Healthcare. It won’t really matter. They won’t be insuring you any longer. The government will.

Now, you may not see the danger in that so let me open your eyes. A recent survey showed that Medicare denied more claims than your average insurance company. That’s counterintuitive to most people. They think the insurance companies are just sitting around waiting for claims to come in so they can deny them. Maybe they’d like to deny more than they do but what keeps them honest is the market. Yes, competition makes them better at servicing the patient than the government.

Eventually the reality of too many people and too few dollars to pay for their care will catch up with our new health insurance benefactor. In order to keep the program solvent they are going to have to start denying people healthcare. That’s just a fact. The program will be upside down from day one and the only way to keep it from eating us alive will be to cut services.

By then so many doctors will have left the profession that getting in to see your primary care physician will take weeks, if not months.

The free market makes healthcare better. It makes health insurance better. Insurance companies compete for business, especially with corporate accounts, and if too many people complain about the lousy insurance the company finds someone else. Once the government takes over there will be no one else. And by then the free market insurance companies will be just a memory.

I don’t mean to harp on this because there’s nothing we can do now but the House Republicans held all the cards during the last budget fight. Going along with a budget that fully funded Obamacare amounted to political malpractice. Now these same Republicans are back telling us how we need to stop Obamacare. You had your chance and you blew it.

The only thing that could save us now are the myriad lawsuits making their way through the court system. If just one of those finds light we still have some hope. Otherwise we need to begin preparing ourselves for the post-Obamacare world. Many will find physicians or physicians assistants who take cash and circumvent the entire mess. That’s great for day-to-day healthcare needs but God forbid you need to be hospitalized.

I guess Nancy Pelosi was right when she said we’d have to pass Obamacare to see what was in it. We’ve seen. We’d have been better off to burn it rather than pass it. 

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

The Republican House blows it yet again

The recent caving by Republicans in the House and Senate was breathtaking.  The much-ballyhooed budget from Republican Rep. Paul Ryan and Democrat Sen. Patty Murray will erase much of the hard-fought sequester cuts.  It also cuts military pensions.  Oh, it also raises the airport tax on your plane ticket that ostensibly goes for the TSA only this extra money is going to cover some of the sequester cuts.  That, my friends, is a tax increase, something Boehner and the boys in the House said they would never do.

The sequester cuts, although not ideal, were the first real cuts in federal spending since just after the Korean War.  Even Newt and the Republican Revolution of 1994 couldn’t get real

cuts and had to settle for slowing growth.  It was that slowing of the growth in spending that gave us several years of surpluses.  

This new budget does absolutely nothing to balance the budget.  Republicans who voted for it will tell you that it reduces the deficit but it doesn’t reduce it nearly as much as the sequester cuts and it doesn’t balance the budget.  

I’ve come to the conclusion that not enough people in Congress care about the deficits and the debt.  They say they do but they don’t.  They also say they want to kill Obamacare but each chance they have to do it they blow it.  The only way we were going to kill Obamacare was to defund it.  The House budget fully funded Obamacare.  Not one dime was stripped from it, despite the cacophony of protests from the millions who have had their policies cancelled.  

The Republicans who caved pointed to polling that showed the American people blamed them for the government shutdown.  The American people don’t even remember the government shutdown and if you’re not willing to go to the mat for something you believe in what good are you?  I’m sick of politicians who vote based on polls that say they’ll be wrongly blamed for something.  At some point you have to have the guts to stand up for what’s right.

Killing Obamacare is what’s right.  In fact, I believe those same polls would have shown support for anyone who tried to rid the country of this horrible law.  Unfortunately, we’ll never know.  But that’s really beside the point.  The point is we now have far too many in Congress who cherish their jobs.  We need folks up there who don’t care if they get re-elected.  We need statesmen instead of politicians.  We need reliable representation.  The mark of a true statesman is someone you know before they vote how they’re going to vote.  It’s someone who doesn’t pander to the people in order to stay in power.  It’s someone who is quite comfortable losing that power.

How many folks in Washington does that apply to these days?  Certainly not enough.

So, where do we go from here?  I think it is imperative that we get more involved in the process.  It’s very easy at a time like this to turn it all off, to take a vacation from the madness and the frustration.  That’s exactly what they’re hoping you’ll do.  When good people no longer pay attention then bad people prevail.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

So easy a 20-year-old could do it

When three 20-year-old computer programmers managed to build an Obamacare website in mere days with more bells and whistles than healthcare.gov, and it actually worked, the Obama administration’s ineptness was further exposed.  One of the programmers noted that

healthcare.gov’s problem was it didn’t offer the plans and the prices up front.  Instead, it requires applicants to enter all of the their personal information - including some odd questions about personal habits having nothing to do with health care - before it reveals the applicant’s cost.

The website designed by the young programmers works much like the health insurance calculator that’s been up for months at the Kaiser Family Foundation website.  The Kaiser website asks you your age, number of dependents and whether any of those to be covered are smokers.  Then it calculates not only how much your policy will cost but how much of a subsidy you’ll get.  Healthcare.gov waits until the last moment to reveal that information.

Can you imagine finding a product on Amazon.com and being required to enter in your credit card information and address before it tells you how much the product will cost?  And they wonder why only 3 percent of eligible applicants have signed up. 

The young programmers were scratching their heads at the simple “error” in healthcare.gov but it’s no error.  It’s by design.  Some news reports suggest the healthcare.gov site was originally designed to show you the prices first but someone in the Obama administration had that idea scrapped and the site had to be redesigned at the last minute.  That may partially explain why it’s been error-plagued.

So, why would the administration not want you to see the prices up front?  They still claim that most people will save money through the exchanges.  Were that true they would gladly post the costs up front to attract more applicants.  The truth is there’s no way most people will save money.  If that were the case the whole program would be upside down from day one, despite Obama’s contention that Obamacare will reduce the deficit, not add to it.

Supporting that contention is Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economics professor and one of the architects of the Massachusetts plan.  He admitted to Politico.com that in order for Obamacare to work the insurers must cancel lower-premium plans for healthy patients in order to drive them to the exchanges.  There’s no “free lunch,” he told Politico.  He says Obamacare is structured on the assumption that health insurance companies that chose to be a part of the exchanges would get a defined number of customers.  That’s why they’re canceling policies and sending them to the exchanges.  Once there, these same customers are finding their premiums have doubled or tripled or worse.

When you understand that you understand why the Colorado exchange ran print and Internet ads featuring young white males doing keg stands urging them not to blow their beer money on healthcare.  Join the exchange, they were urged.  Why?  Because the “keg-standers,” who are primarily 26 to 32-year-old white males, are the least likely to use health services.  Obamacare has to have them to pay for those who are high risk.  The only problem is the keg-standers aren’t showing up at the exchanges.  And why would they?  More than likely they get their insurance through their employer and even if they don’t, they’re low-risk enough to get a cheaper policy through a private exchange unassociated with Obamacare.

The whole program was doomed to failure from the start.  And Obama knew it.  He just hoped you’d never find out.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

The new entitlement class - artists

I was reading a piece in The Tennessean newspaper that “artists” were twice as likely not to have health insurance as the rest of us.  I rolled my eyes. I’ve known a few of these “artists.” They’re somehow not too proud to take a handout but much to proud to take a job.

I also learned from a caller to my radio show that the city of Nashville offers subsidized housing for these so-called “artists” so they can continue to work on their “art” while they wait for their government checks. I was reminded of what Nancy Pelosi said during the Obamacare debate way back when.  

“We see it as an entrepreneurial bill,” Pelosi said of Obamacare, “a bill that says to someone, if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care.”

In other words, let’s encourage people to be irresponsible. I arrived in Nashville, Tennessee back in the ‘80s, as many young folks do, all starry-eyed and eager to make it in the music business. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the radio business took off for me and I ditched my dreams of being the next big thing.

Art is a relative term. What some call art others call trash, whether it be paintings, dance, music or filmmaking. I would love to make films full time but I’m not going to quit my day job to do it. At least not yet. People like Nancy Pelosi think that’s unfair. I call it being responsible. I have a wife and kids to consider.

Let me be honest. Twice as many artists are without health insurance because they’re bums. I know that sounds harsh but it’s the truth. Somehow somewhere along the way they were convinced that it was their god-given right to sponge off the rest of us in order to allow them

the freedom to chase their dream. I’m, quite frankly, offended by the notion that there are people who value their dreams more than their responsibility. Nothing wrong with dreams. I have a few of my own but pursue them when you’re financially able. Just because you want to be an “artiste” doesn’t mean I have to subsidize it.  Or, at least, it used not to mean that. I guess now in this post-Pelosi world it does.

A good 98 percent of those trying to be an artist will fail and there’s a reason for that. A good 98 percent of that 98 percent are fooling themselves into believing they really have talent. Or maybe they’re listening to folks like Nancy Pelosi.

I’ve got news for the dreamers. Everybody has a secret dream. Everyone has this deep secret of being someone or something else. It’s perfectly natural. It’s perfectly healthy. Some of us will break out of our mold and become that new person we always knew we could be. Most of us won’t. There’s no shame in either. The only difference is in how we go about it. There are more important things than self-servingly chasing a dream. If you have a family you’re obligated to them first. Even if you don’t you should have enough pride not to become a ward of the state. Pelosi wants you to be just that.

Far be it from me to rain on your parade. If you think you have talent, whether it be in music or dance or painting or filmmaking, go for it. Just go for it on your own dime.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Government Shutdown: This ain't 1995

Harry Reid, Barack Obama and the rest of the Democrats made a gross miscalculation.  They thought no matter what happened the American people would blame a government shutdown on the Republicans.  After all, they were working off the template of 1995.  But the template from 1995 is obsolete.

In 1995 the issue was Medicare.  The Democrats had one talking point: "The Republicans want to cut Medicare and give a tax cut to their rich constituents."  You heard that from every Democrat at every turn.  Forget that it wasn't true, it was repeated so often and never challenged by the media that it stuck. The truth was the Republicans were merely trying to slow the rate of growth.  There was no cut in Medicare but that didn't matter.  What mattered was Speaker Newt Gingrich had become a lightning rod in American politics.  Even those who admired his guts and his leadership skills had a hard time dealing with his arrogance and his ego.  There is no Newt Gingrich to focus on in this current budget fight.

Secondly, the issue is dramatically different.  Medicare was an issue that resonated with everyone.  We all paid into the program and seniors were due what was coming to them.  To think that anyone would cut that (which they weren't) rubbed people the wrong way.  Couple that with the accusation that Newt and the boys were greasing the palms of wealthy donors with a tax cut (which they weren't) and you can see how they lost the argument.

The issue today is Obamacare, a program of which millions of Americans are terrified.  They've heard the reports of numerous companies cutting employee hours below 30 per week to get around the tremendous cost increases.  They've seen co-workers laid off in anticipation of its implementation.  They've witnessed the nightmare of the exchange launch.  They're happy with their health insurance now and they are frightened everything about it is going to change and change for the worse.

Like they did with their Mediscare tactics in 1995 the Democrats tried to create Obamascare.  It blew up in their faces.  Harry Reid was so sure a repeat of 1995 was inevitable that he got cocky.  A little too cocky.  He shot down every proposal for compromise from the House Republicans to the point that it became obvious he was the obstructionist, not the House Republicans.

Then came the kids with cancer.  Reid thought he had found the perfect photo op.  Kids with cancer were being locked out of clinical trials because workers from the National Institutes of Health were being furloughed.  He blamed the heartless Republicans of wanting to kill little children.  Then John Boehner outflanked him.  Boehner offered to fully fund the NIH with a stand-alone bill.  Harry Reid rejected the offer which led to a question from CNN reporter Dana Bash that encapsulated the whole government shutdown fight.

"But if you can help one child who has cancer, why wouldn't you do it?" Bash asked Reid.  Harry's response?  "Why would we want to do that?"

Wow!  Frying pan?  Meet fire.

Then there were the World War II veterans.  They flew into Washington on Honor Flights, a program designed to take veterans near the end of their lives on a final trip to pay tribute to their fallen comrades at the World War II Memorial.  The memorial is an open-air park that's open 24/7, regardless of whether or not park employees are around.  Obama sent barricades to keep them out.  They ignored the barricades and visited the memorial anyway.  As one veteran said, "Normandy was closed when we got there, too."

What a powerful scene.  Men from the greatest generation who fought to save the world from the Nazis were being played by an egotistical, spoiled brat who was on the verge of being stripped of the chance to force-feed his socialist agenda down the throats of the American people.  The initial confrontation was a PR nightmare so what did the president do?  He doubled down.  The next day he had the park service erect a fence to keep the veterans out, a move that obviously cost much more money in the midst of a government shutdown than allowing these men to pay tribute to their lost friends.  They stormed the fence, too, leaving park personnel with the unenviable task of arresting 90-year-old men in wheelchairs.  As one park police officer put it, "I'm not going to enforce the 'no stopping or standing' sign for a group of 90 World War II veterans," according to WND.com  "I'm a veteran myself."

They whipped fascism in their teens and in their 90s they may very well have whipped socialism.

What Democrats hoped would be a story of mean, ole Republicans shutting down the government ended up being Democrats with a nasty streak who were willing to deny kids with cancer the care they needed and World War II heroes a chance to say a final goodbye to friends they lost on the battlefield just to score political points.

Make no mistake about it, Government Shutdown 2013 is Obama's Katrina.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

It's your economy, stupid

Now that Syria has sort of blown up in President Obama’s face he’s once again turned to the economy.  In a speech marking the fifth anniversary of the demise of Lehman Brothers the president sought to take credit for anything he could find good in the economy and blame the rest on the Republicans.  Nice try, Mr. President, but the people are no longer buying it.

He bragged about 7.5 million private sector jobs he has created but the facts tell a completely different story.  The fact is there have only been a little over a million jobs created since Obama took office.  This is one of the slowest, if not the slowest, recoveries from a recession in the history of the country.  Why?

Well, for starters, George W. Bush and the Republicans have nothing to do with it.  Consider this.  Obamacare is turning the American work force into part-timers.  There are stories every day of companies that are cutting employee hours so they don’t have to bear the sticker shock of higher healthcare costs under Obamacare.  And the working poor are being hurt the most.  Here’s the reason.  Obamacare mandates that an employee pay no more than 9.5 percent of their income on health insurance.  Of course, health insurance is a fixed cost so, naturally, it’s a bigger percentage of someone’s salary making $30,000 than it is someone making $300,000.  So, if your employer is now paying 60 percent of your health insurance they don’t have to pay more money for the higher-salaried employee but they do for the lower-salaried employee.

Consider this example.  The Kaiser Family Foundation says the average family insurance plan is now just north of $16,000.  For that employee who’s making $300,000 by law they can’t pay more than $28,500 of their salary toward health insurance.  So even if they were footing the whole bill their employer wouldn’t be obligated to pay anything toward their health insurance.

Now let’s take the employee making $30,000.  By law they can’t pay more than $2,850 toward their health insurance.  If their employer is now paying 60 percent they’re paying $9,600 of that $16,000 health insurance tab.  Under Obamacare they’ll be required to pay $13,150 or 82 percent of that person’s health insurance.  Now do you understand why lower-paid employees are getting cut back to under 30 hours?  If you’re employed under 30 hours then your employer isn’t required to pay a dime of your health insurance.

We also have far more people trapped on welfare since Obama changed the standards during the recession.  More people on welfare means fewer people working.  Obama’s EPA has waged war against the oil and coal industries, killing tens of thousands of jobs in the process.  At a time when there’s an oil boom going on in North Dakota, primarily on private land.  Were the president to open up public land to oil development experts say we could be energy independent in five years, only having to import a little oil from Canada.  Imagine that.  No more entanglement in the Middle East over oil.

Between the president stubbornly standing in the way of getting at our energy resources and blocking the completion of the Keystone Pipeline millions of potential jobs go unfilled.  The way to economic recovery is through a booming economy and that comes from allowing the private sector to create jobs, not by killing them.  Unfortunately, the recession is still real for most Americans.

This is your economy, Mr. President.  After nearly five years at the helm there’s simply no one left to blame.  It’s time for you to own it.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

The Obamacare train is coming

It’s becoming an all too familiar refrain.  People are calling my radio show with stories of being down-sized to part-time status so their company can get around the Obamacare regulations.  One lady, age 59, called in to say that she’d been a nurse at a hospital for 21 years.  Because of lower reimbursements from the government she’s been let go.  She says the hospital is firing its older nurses because they make more money.  Of course, under Obamacare more people will be flocking to the hospitals which will be understaffed with less experienced healthcare professionals.  It’s a recipe for disaster.

One guy told me when he started at a major grocery store chain 12 years ago 90 percent of the employees were full time.  Now only 9 percent are full time.  It’s frightening.

Obamacare is quickly turning the American workforce into a bunch of part-timers.  That means these folks will have to find second jobs which means even fewer jobs available.  The healthcare plan that ostensibly was designed to help people is causing millions of Americans to not only lose their healthcare but now they’re making even less money.

You’d think President Obama would see this and realize he’s made a mistake but this is exactly what he hoped would happen.  Those who get thrown off their employer’s insurance end up at the doorstep of the exchanges.  Depending on their income, these folks will qualify for large subsidies from the government.  It’s a trap and it was designed to be a trap from the beginning.

Those fortunate enough to retain their full-time status won’t fare much better.  Once companies realize they can pay a $2,000 fine and turn those employees over to the exchanges there’ll be a stampede to do so.  Essentially, we could see the vast majority of Americans standing in line at the new healthcare exchanges waiting for their handout from the government.

So, who qualifies for a subsidy?  According to the Kaiser Family Foundation calculator, a family of five with the parents at age 50 and making a family income of $110,000 per year gets a healthcare subsidy of over $6,000 from the government.  About 90 percent of the population makes less than that amount which means potentially 90 percent of Americans could be getting assistance from the government.

Two points on that.  There’s no way we can afford to subsidize 90 percent of Americans.  That means something has to give.  What will give first is the amount of money the government reimburses doctors and hospitals which means a lot of doctors will be leaving the profession and a lot of hospitals will be closing down.  The second point is having 90 percent of the people beholden to the government is just what the Democrats want.  You’ve seen how they’ve used the Mediscare tactic to get votes.  Imagine the stump speeches about those mean, old Republicans who want to take away your healthcare subsidy.

Here’s what we can expect down the road.  Most of us will be on the healthcare exchanges, meaning we will be required to purchase our own insurance.  Most of us will qualify for subsidies.  Reimbursements for healthcare will drop significantly and a lot of good doctors will retire early.  Potential doctors will use their talents to go into professions more lucrative and we’ll see and shortage of doctors.  Healthcare quality will suffer greatly if you can actually get in to see a doctor.

The vast majority of Americans don’t want this.  The only solution left is for Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives to defund Obamacare.  Unfortunately, that’s our last best hope. 

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.