Month: March 2010

Companies say health care costs hard to swallow

Companies say health care costs hard to swallow

I really love this line:

Consumers Energy, a Michigan gas and electric company with 2.9 million customers, said it will not take a big first-quarter charge because, like most utility companies, it can try to recover the added costs from its customers through rate hikes.

I am sure the state with the highest unemployment in the country will LOVE having their energy rates increased to pay for medical costs!

I get it, health costs will go down because it will get subsidized by the taxes on energy! We can just rob Peter to pay Paul because Peter is too stupid to realize he got robbed.

The really good news in all that is we may get some more new jobs – the bill gives the IRS $1B a year to hire new employees to collect all of these new taxes – that is about 12,000 new jobs for the IRS! Obama has finally come up with a solution to unemployment – hire the entire US population so that no one is unemployed!

Wall Street Journal has an opinion on all of these charges. They quote:

Towers Watson estimates that the total hit this year will reach nearly $14 billion

This is after AT&T, Deere, Caterpillar, AK Steel, 3M, and Valero announced a total of about 1.4B in combined charges. Verizon has already said they will need to announce charges just not sure how much.

That is okay though – I am sure that these companies are really rich and they will just absorb the charges and they won’t pass them on to the consumers. In fact, I am sure that these companies will now accelerate their plans to hire more people.

Obviously, a lot of what I said above is sarcasm. Here is what really going to happen. The door is open by a bad bill. Now there will be a lot of little fix bills to cover these problems. These little bills won’t get a lot of media attention in fact many will just be amendments on other bills. It won’t matter who controls the legislative or executive branch, the amendments will happen. These and other taxes are going to get taken out because they are stupid and punitive but the promise of free health care will continue (and probably expand) until 20 years from now it is as bad of a monstrosity as Social Security – under-funded and over-extended.

Speaking of Social Security, did you see that Social Security is now paying out more than it brings in as of this year (NY Times – the bastion of socialistic thoughts). Of course this is 6 years earlier than CBO said it would happen. CBO must have made a mistake. Isn’t that the same CBO that said ObamaCare will slightly help the federal deficit? I sure hope that it wasn’t the same group of counters that analyzed both programs since the Social Security analysis sure wasn’t on target!

There is very little that a government can do better than private enterprise. Now we have just placed 1/8 or more of our economy into the hands of the incompetents that can’t get a job in private companies so they run for political jobs.

What in the world are we doing? Will our children curse this day 40 years from now?

Companies say health care costs hard to swallow
By JOSH FUNK
AP Business Writer

The health care overhaul will cost U.S. companies billions and make them more likely to drop prescription drug coverage for retirees because of a change in how the government subsidizes those benefits.

In the first two days after the law was signed, three major companies — Deere & Co., Caterpillar Inc. and Valero Energy — said they expect to take a total hit of $265 million to account for smaller tax deductions in the future.

With more than 3,500 companies now getting the tax break as an incentive to keep providing coverage, others are almost certain to announce similar cost increases in the weeks ahead as they sort out the impact of the change.

Figuring out what it will mean for retirees will take longer, but analysts said as many as 2 million could lose the prescription drug coverage provided by their former employers, leaving them to enroll in Medicare’s program.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs defended the tax law change Thursday, saying the original provision allowing companies to deduct the federal subsidies from their taxable income was a “loophole” that will be closed by the health care overhaul.

For the government, the tax changes are expected to raise roughly $4.5 billion over the next decade to help pay for the health overhaul. Some of the savings would be negated by retirees enrolling in the Medicare plans.

“You’re increasing the incentive for companies to say ‘We don’t want to be in the health care business any more,'” said James Gelfand, senior manager of health policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which fought the overhaul.

American industrial companies that are struggling to compete globally against companies with much lower labor costs are particularly likely to eventually drop retiree coverage, said Gene Imhoff, an accounting professor at the University of Michigan.

“Anything that they can use to justify pushing something away from the employees, pushing it back on the employees or the government, they’re going to do it,” Imhoff said. “I’m not sure you can really blame them for trying to do this.”

Caterpillar spokesman Jim Dugan said the company is still studying the health care law and doesn’t yet know what the full impact will be. But he acknowledged that benefit changes are possible.

“Obviously, there’s greater cost pressures on us that could drive changes to plans, but we haven’t made any decisions on that,” Dugan said.

Spokesmen for Deere and Valero said it was to soon to say how the change would affect the benefits they offer retirees.

When Congress approved the Medicare prescription drug program in 2003, it included government incentives for employers to provide drug benefits to retirees so the public system wouldn’t be overwhelmed. Employers that provide prescription drug benefits for retirees can receive subsidies covering 28 percent of eligible costs; those subsidies totaled $3.7 billion in 2008.

Under the 2003 law, companies could deduct the entire amount they spent on the drug benefits from their taxable income — including the government subsidy, an average of $665 per retiree.

The health care law signed by President Barack Obama on Tuesday prohibits companies from writing off the subsidies starting in 2011, meaning they will no longer be able to deduct them from their taxable income.

For example, if a company spent $100 on benefits, including a $28 government subsidy, it could write off the full $100 on its taxes under the old rules. The new rules would allow the same company to write off only $72.

The follow-up health care bill to reshape parts of the overhaul would delay the changes until 2013.

As many as 1.5 million to 2 million retirees could lose the drug benefits provided by their former employer because of the tax changes, according to a study by the Moran Company, a health care consulting firm.

James Klein, president of the American Benefits Council, said between 6 million and 7 million retirees currently get the benefits. But the number of companies offering them has been dwindling for years.

Generally, retirees would prefer to stay with prescription drug coverage provided by their companies as opposed to enrolling in a Medicare Part D plan, said Marilyn Moon, a health care economist with the nonpartisan American Institutes for Research.

She said most of the company-sponsored plans are more generous and almost none have the coverage gap that comes with Part D plans.

“That’s particularly painful and problematic for people who have substantial expenses at any one point in time,” she said.

Industry groups say they lobbied hard against the change in the tax rules before it was added to the health care law over the winter.

“It was in all of our letters and communications that went up to the Hill, and the companies were heavily involved in that,” said Dena Battle, a tax specialist with the National Association of Manufacturers.

Nationwide, companies would take a $14 billion hit on their financial statements if all of the roughly 3,500 companies receiving the subsidies continued to do so, according to a study by Towers Watson, a human resources consulting firm.

That financial hit will be a one-time cost as companies report a new cost estimate for the benefits over the life spans of all retirees.

Deere and Caterpillar were among a group of 10 companies that sent a letter to congressional leaders in December warning of the cost increases. The others were Boeing Co., Con-Way Inc., Exelon Corp., Navistar Inc., Verizon, Xerox Corp., Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. and MetLife Inc.

Most of the other companies that signed the letter said Thursday that it was too soon to estimate their costs. A number of other major U.S. companies also said they did not know how much the tax change would cost them. Some companies might wait until they release their earnings reports next quarter to address the costs so they have time to review the entire law.

The companies that signed the December letter warned that changing the way retiree drug benefits are subsidized would have a broad impact on the economy, and there are already indications that the effects will trickle down to individuals.

Consumers Energy, a Michigan gas and electric company with 2.9 million customers, said it will not take a big first-quarter charge because, like most utility companies, it can try to recover the added costs from its customers through rate hikes.

RANT: 11% of voters rate Congress’ performance as good or excellent

RANT: 11% of voters rate Congress’ performance as good or excellent

This is disgusting:
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/congressional_performance

As Scott Rasmussen notes in his new book, “If we ever found a Little League team behaving as poorly as the Republicans and Democrats or the congressman and senators, we’d probably disband the team and go home. Heck, we might even disband the entire league and bulldoze the field.”

RANT: I SAY WE THROW ALL OF THEM OUT AND START OVER!

Congressman threatens federal prosecution for voicing opinion

Congressman threatens federal prosecution for voicing opinion

Whatever you read today, spend 10 minutes and read this story of a concerned citizen calling his Congressman to try to influence his vote on the upcoming health care legislation.  While the blogger tried to connect his congressman to Speaker Pelosi, I am not sure he effectively makes the case. What the story does point out is how little the comments and opinions of every day constituents affect the opinion of elected representatives.

I think that President Andrew Jackson is spinning in his grave.

Is this a Constitutional crisis of epic proportions?

Is this a Constitutional crisis of epic proportions?

I don’t know about you but I remember my federal government classes in high school (and grade school for that matter).  I even remember a cute little commercial by School House Rocks talking about how a bill becomes a law. Under the U.S. Constitution a bill has to pass both the House and Senate to become law. Until this week, that is, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi is moving to merely “deem” that the House has passed the Senate health-care bill and then send it to President Barack Hussein Obama to sign anyway.

Under the “reconciliation” process, the House is supposed to approve the Senate’s Christmas Eve bill and then use “sidecar” amendments to fix the things it doesn’t like. Those amendments would then go to the Senate under rules that would let Democrats pass them while avoiding the ordinary 60-vote threshold for passing major legislation. This alone is an abuse of traditional Senate process but is not truly unconstitutional as it is only Senate “rules” and not constitutional law.

But Pelosi fears she lacks the votes in the House to pass an identical Senate bill, even with the promise of these reconciliation fixes. House Members hate the thought of going on record voting for Harry Reid’s Cornhusker kickback and other special-interest bribes that Reid added to get this mess through the Senate, as well as the new tax on high-cost insurance plans that Big Labor hates.

So at the request of Pelosi, New York Democrat Louise Slaughter, the chair of the House Rules Committee, may insert what’s known as a “self-executing rule.”  Under this procedural ruse, the House would then vote only once on the reconciliation corrections, but not on the underlying Senate bill. If those reconciliation corrections pass, the self-executing rule would say that the Senate bill is presumptively approved by the House—even without a formal up-or-down vote on the actual words of the Senate bill.

Democrats would then send the Senate bill to President Obama for his signature even as they claimed to oppose the same Senate bill. They would be declaring themselves to be for and against the Senate bill in the same vote. Even John Kerry never went that far with his Iraq war flip-flops!

This two-votes-in-one gambit is a brazen affront to the plain language of the Constitution, which is intended to require democratic accountability. Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution says that in order for a “Bill” to “become a Law,” it “shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate.” This is why the House and Senate typically have a conference committee to work out differences in what each body passes.

If Congress can now decide that the House can vote for one bill and the Senate can vote for another, and the final result can be some arbitrary hybrid, then we have abandoned one of Madison’s core checks and balances. As long as one party is in power in both houses and the Executive branch then legislation can simply be rammed through by the party leadership.

We have entered a political wonderland, where the rules are whatever Democrats say they are. Mrs. Pelosi and the White House are resorting to these abuses because their bill is so unpopular that a majority even of their own party doesn’t want to vote for it. Fence-sitting Members are being threatened with primary challengers, a withdrawal of union support and of course ostracism.

Democrats are, literally, consuming their own majority for the sake of imposing new taxes, regulations and entitlements that the public has roundly rejected but that they believe will be the crowning achievement of the welfare state. They are also leaving behind a procedural bloody trail that will fuel public fury and make such a vast change of law seem illegitimate to millions of Americans.

The concoction has become so toxic that even Mrs. Pelosi isn’t bothering to defend the merits anymore, saying instead last week that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Or rather, “deeming” to have passed it.

NCAA Div. 1 Men’s Basketball Tournament Brackets

NCAA Div. 1 Men’s Basketball Tournament Brackets

There are a lot of brackets out there that you can print off as a PDF file but this one is based in MS Excel and it has drop downs for each game that progress with the the winners that you pick. If you aren’t using one of the web based pool management systems but are using a paper based system, this is a much easier way to run your pool or manage your personal picks.

Click this link to download the Excel file:ncaa-pool-master-2010

Please do not post this file on any other site but rather just refer them back to this page.