Jun 6
To no one’s surprise, the total theorized costs of Obamacare are continuing to increase years before the first patient is planned to be seen under the system. That is, if the nationalized healthcare fraud doesn’t die a quick death beforehand from strangulation by defunding or repealing. The whole process was interminably corrupt and opaque in order to be able to pass it against the vociferous opposition of a large majority of Americans.
Just to implement one of their ideological linchpins.
Fiscal Fraud of Obamacare Snowballing Already
Terence P. Jeffrey 6/02/2010
Remember the health care issue? Well, the fiscal consequences of the socialized medicine scheme enacted by President Barack Obama and Congress just two months ago are already beginning to snowball.
Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, was one of the key architects and advocates of Obamacare. He was back on the House floor on Friday delivering an urgent plea to fellow Democrats that inadvertently -- or, perhaps, unavoidably -- revealed the fraudulent nature of our new national health care regime.
It was supposed to save the taxpayers money, remember?
"This legislation will lower costs for families and for businesses and for the federal government, reducing our deficit by over $1 trillion in the next two decades," Obama said when he signed the bill.
On Friday, Waxman declared that the sky is about to fall on the Medicare system. He went to the House floor to "urge" his colleagues to vote for a bill that includes $102 billion in new federal spending and would add $54 billion to the national debt over the next 10 years -- $25 billion of it in the few months remaining in this fiscal year.
Why did Waxman believe this new borrowing-and-spending was necessary?
"It's absolutely critical to do this if we are going to keep doctors in Medicare and keep the promise to Medicare beneficiaries that they will have access to physicians' services," said Waxman. "This provision will provide a moderate increase in physicians' fees, 2.2 percent for the rest of the year. If we don't act, doctors' fees will be cut by 21 percent from where they are today. This would be unconscionable."
It would not merely be unconscionable. If the 21-percent cut in Medicare fees for doctors -- that, in fact, legally took effect on June 1 -- is allowed to stand, many doctors in this country will simply stop seeing Medicare patients. They will not be able to afford it. The cost to them of serving their patients will exceed what they are paid. Their profit margin will be swept away.
To make precisely this point, 12 national surgeons' associations -- including the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, the American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons and the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery -- sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter last Wednesday warning her what would happen if Medicare doctors' fees are slashed as they are scheduled to be under current law.
"These continued payment cuts, rising practice costs and a lack of certainty going forward, make it difficult, if not impossible, for already financially challenged surgical practices to continue to treat Medicare patients," the surgeons' associations told Pelosi.
The letter pointed the speaker toward the results of a survey of more than 13,000 physicians done in February by the Surgical Coalition, a group of more than 20 medical associations. The survey asked these doctors what they would do if Medicare fees were slashed by the scheduled 21.2 percent.
Twenty-nine percent said they would opt out of the Medicare system entirely. Almost 69 percent said they would limit the number of appointments they would take from Medicare patients, 45.8 percent said they would start referring complex Medicare patients to other physicians, 45.3 percent said they would stop providing certain services, 43.8 percent said they would defer purchasing new medical equipment and 42.7 percent said they would cut their staff.
Almost 4 percent of the doctors said they would close or sell their practices.
Why did Congress plan to slash the doctors' Medicare fees in the first place? It didn't. In the past, the majority in Congress has routinely enacted budget bills that fraudulently assumed that on some future date the federal government would dramatically slash the Medicare fees paid to doctors, knowing that before that date arrived the majority would pass "emergency" legislation postponing the cuts to some still-future date. The majority in Congress does this so the long-term deficits caused by their spending bills appear to be smaller than they actually are.
As originally proposed, Obamacare would have ended this practice, permanently setting Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors at the true anticipated level. But the Congressional Budget Office determined that doing so would have added $208 billion to the cost of Obamacare over 10 years, forcing the CBO to declare that Obamacare added to the deficit rather than reduced it. That would have cost Obamacare votes on the House floor and quite possibly defeated the legislation.
So the congressional leadership stripped the "doc fix" out of Obamacare and left it to another day.
Waxman went down to the floor last Friday to declare that day had come. Unfortunately, for him, the Senate had already left town for its Memorial Day vacation. So, the current fix will have to wait until it returns.
Even then, the fix only accounts for $22.9 billion of the $102 billion cost of the bill the House did pass on Friday. Most of the rest of the money is for extending unemployment benefits and special targeted tax breaks.
The $22.9 billion fix for the doctors' fees -- if passed by the Senate -- would only last through September 2011. Then Congress will presumably do it all again -- or let the Medicare system collapse.
In the meantime, Obamacare is supposed to cut half a trillion in spending from elsewhere in Medicare, while Obama's budget -- not counting the $54 billion in new debt included in this bill -- is expected to add $9.8 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?print=yes&id=37301
Posted in Democrat Government spending Healthcare Henry Waxman Medicare Medicare Obama Obama ObamaCare Physicians Tax Taxes with No Comments
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Apr 1
Where were these companies and why weren’t the potential costs widely and vehemently exposed while the legislation was still being “debated”? Inexcusable silence by thousands of companies and millions of citizens engendered the passage of Obamacare with less resistance than should have been the case? This is not to say that Americans were not outraged and didn’t translate this into positive and productive action – they unequivocally did with their letter writing, email and telephone calling campaigns and of course, with the Tea Party movement.
Some corporations might have stayed silent out of fear of government retribution, greed or diaphanous promises by politicians … but now we will all pay the price.
Now that many companies have “elected” to reveal the real devastating financial consequences of Obamacare (driven to a sizable extent by their legal obligations as public companies to release the information), several prominent Democrats are egregiously seeking retribution against them for exposing the gargantuan financial fraud that has been perpetrated with the healthcare legislation.
Our government has abrogated many of our rights and freedoms while aggrandizing their power … and continues to thirst for more. This is the evil addiction and corruption of power which must be vanquished and reversed.
This must not be the new America that we have to live in!
Dems Threaten Congressional Show Trials After US Companies Leak Real Economic Damage of Obamacare
Jim Hoft March 28, 2010
Late last week several US corporations leaked how the democrat’s health care bill will kill their businesses. The radicals in Congress were not pleased that these corporations would go public with this devastating information. In response, democrats threatened to call for Congressional show trials to publicly humiliate these corporations.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
It’s been a banner week for Democrats: ObamaCare passed Congress in its final form on Thursday night, and the returns are already rolling in. Yesterday AT&T announced that it will be forced to make a $1 billion writedown due solely to the health bill, in what has become a wave of such corporate losses.
This wholesale destruction of wealth and capital came with more than ample warning. Turning over every couch cushion to make their new entitlement look affordable under Beltway accounting rules, Democrats decided to raise taxes on companies that do the public service of offering prescription drug benefits to their retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare. We and others warned this would lead to AT&T-like results, but like so many other ObamaCare objections Democrats waved them off as self-serving or “political.”
…Henry Waxman and House Democrats announced yesterday that they will haul these companies in for an April 21 hearing because their judgment “appears to conflict with independent analyses, which show that the new law will expand coverage and bring down costs.”
In other words, shoot the messenger. Black-letter financial accounting rules require that corporations immediately restate their earnings to reflect the present value of their long-term health liabilities, including a higher tax burden.
Should these companies have played chicken with the Securities and Exchange Commission to avoid this politically inconvenient reality? Democrats don’t like what their bill is doing in the real world, so they now want to intimidate CEOs into keeping quiet.
On top of AT&T’s $1 billion, the writedown wave so far includes Deere & Co., $150 million; Caterpillar, $100 million; AK Steel, $31 million; 3M, $90 million; and Valero Energy, up to $20 million. Verizon has also warned its employees about its new higher health-care costs, and there will be many more in the coming days and weeks.
The last paragraph says it all about the democrat’s trickery:
The Democratic political calculation with ObamaCare is the proverbial boiling frog: Gradually introduce a health-care entitlement by hiding the true costs, hook the middle class on new subsidies until they become unrepealable, but try to delay the adverse consequences and major new tax hikes so voters don’t make the connection between their policy and the economic wreckage. But their bill was such a shoddy, jerry-rigged piece of work that the damage is coming sooner than even some critics expected.
Byron York at The Washington Examiner has more on the show trials.
Waxman is also demanding that the executives give lawmakers internal company documents related to health care finances — a move one committee Republicans describes as “an attempt to intimidate and silence opponents of the Democrats’ flawed health care reform legislation.”
…Waxman has ordered the executives to explain themselves at an April 21 hearing before the Energy and Commerce Committee’s investigative subcommittee. That subcommittee just happens to be chaired by Rep. Bart Stupak, the Michigan Democrat who held out his vote on health care reform until a few hours before final passage on March 21, giving the bill’s opponents the unfounded hope that he might vote against it.
Waxman’s demands came Friday in letters to several executives. “After the president signed the health care reform bill into law, your company announced that provisions in the law could adversely affect your ability to provide health insurance,” Waxman wrote to Randall Stephenson, chairman and CEO of AT&T. A few hours before Waxman sent his letter, AT&T announced it will take a $1 billion charge against earnings because of the tax provision in the new health bill. AT&T also said it will be “evaluating prospective changes” to its health care benefits for all workers…
Waxman’s request could prove particularly troubling for the companies. The executives will undoubtedly view such documents as confidential, but if they fail to give Waxman everything he wants, they run the risk of subpoenas and threats from the chairman. And all as punishment for making a business decision in light of a new tax situation.
These democrats in Washington are nothing but thugs. They’ll try anything to keep the truth from coming out about their disastrous legislation.
http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2010/03/dems-threaten-congressional-show-trials-after-us-companies-leak-real-economic-damage-of-obamacare/
Posted in Congress Corruption Democrat Freedom of Speech Henry Waxman Taxes Tea Parties with No Comments
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