Now NYT Whining About Getting Rid Of Obaney Care

Opinion/Editorial

 

  Well todays piece is now on the New York Times crying about Obaney Care. Their rant this morning and lead OPED "The Piecemeal Assault on Health Care."

   It begins "Now that they will dominate both houses of Congress, Republicans are planning to dismantle the Affordable Care Act piece by piece instead of trying to repeal it entirely.

They are expected to hold at least one symbolic vote for repeal in the next session so that newly elected Republicans who campaigned against the law can honor their pledges to repeal it. But Republican leaders know they don’t have the supermajorities needed to override a presidential veto, so they will try to inflict death by multiple cuts.

All of the provisions they are targeting should be retained — they were put in the reform law for good reasons. Some may need adjustments now that they are in effect. But the Republicans are not interested in improving any provisions. They are bent on destruction."

MEDICAL DEVICE TAX Congressional Republicans are determined to repeal this tax and are virtually certain to succeed, thanks to strenuous lobbying and campaign contributions from the device industry.

The Affordable Care Act imposes a 2.3 percent excise tax on medical devices, like artificial joints and pacemakers, which will raise $29 billion over the next decade to help pay for health care reform. Last year, the Senate voted 79 to 20 to repeal the tax, with 34 Democrats joining the majority on a nonbinding sense-of-the-Senate measure. Even stalwart liberals, like Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Al Franken of Minnesota, who have device manufacturers in their states, voted against the tax.

There is no good reason to eliminate the tax. The Congressional Research Service estimated in a report this month that the tax will have “fairly minor effects” on the industry’s output and jobs (reducing them by a fraction of 1 percent) and a “negligible” effect on the price of health care.

EMPLOYER MANDATES The reform law penalizes firms with more than 50 full-time workers if they don’t offer affordable health insurance. The vast majority of bigger firms already cover their workers and seem inclined to continue to do so.A few high-profile employers have converted full-time workers (employed at least 30 hours a week) to part-time to avoid the cost of providing insurance. Republicans want to raise the threshold to 40 hours to allow more businesses to escape providing insurance. Eliminating the mandate completely could increase the number of uninsured people by anywhere from 200,000 to 500,000 and cost the federal treasury $46 billion to $130 billion over 10 years, according to estimates from the Urban Institute and the Congressional Budget Office. The cost includes additional federal spending for Medicaid and for marketplace subsidies to cover the increased number of workers without insurance, as well as the loss of the revenue from penalties on the employers.

That is too many people to cut adrift and too much public money to lose. A better path would be to improve the mandate by, for example, requiring employers to spend a minimum percentage of payroll on health benefits, with provisions to ensure that low-wage workers benefit.

RISK TO INSURERS House Republicans may try to repeal a temporary program that protects insurers against unexpectedly high losses and thus encourages them to offer policies on the health insurance exchanges. The Republicans claim, wrongly, that the program is a federal bailout of private insurers. In truth, the program mostly redistributes money among the insurers and will not cost the federal government anything over its three-year existence. Eliminating the program could drive up premiums on the exchanges, because insurers would have to raise premiums to offset the additional risk.

INDIVIDUAL MANDATE The requirement that the vast majority of Americans obtain health insurance or pay a fine is a centerpiece of health reform, because people would otherwise wait until they were sick to buy insurance. That would cause the insurance pools to be filled with sick people requiring expensive care, and premiums would have to rise to cover their costs.

The reform law solved that problem by requiring everyone — healthy and sick, young and old — to join the risk pools from the start. Repealing the individual mandate would send premiums soaring, drive some insurance companies to curtail individual coverage, and ultimately destroy the viability of the health insurance exchanges on which people can shop for affordable policies.

Repealing the individual mandate would harm millions of newly covered Americans, who deserve decent, affordable health care and until now have not had it.

The reality is that over 99.99% of us the American people dont want any form of forced health care on to us but the left and Obama and Mitt Romney think they all know better than us LMAO!