Don't Forget Haiti

A bit more than four months have passed since the horrible Haitian earthquake.  Habitat for Humanity International has made a major commitment to the recovery effort in Haiti.  In keeping with its core mission, Habitat has been working to provide temporary and transitional shelter and permanent housing for displaced Haitians.

The rendering below depicts the "core house" that Habitat will be building in Haiti.  The house is made of solid materials and is built to withstand both earthquakes and hurricanes.  The house is small, with only a single room, a porch and separate toilet facilities.  However, and as its name indicates, the house is designed to be the core of a larger home that the family may enlarge over time.

I have been a Habitat for Humanity volunteer through my local Habitat affiliate since 1989. During that time, I have seen at first hand the difference that a decent place to live makes for a family in need. Truly, the earthquake victims of Haiti are in need of shelter.

For quite a while now, I have had a banner ad on the IVM blog that links to a site where anyone may make a donation to support Habitat's relief efforts in Haiti. If you feel moved to help, you may click on the banner ad to make a donation to Habitat's work in Haiti. You may also text "Habitat" to 25383 to make a $10 donation to Habitat's recovery efforts. The donation amount will be added to your phone bill.

More Hidden Costs from Obamacare

The front page of The Charleston Gazette for today details yet another of the invoices that will be coming due as taxpayers continue to be fleeced by Obamacare.  This time, the consequences of the President's fiscal disaster are reaching deep into the pockets of West Virginia taxpayers who will have to pay the additional costs for mandated expansions of coverage to every West Virginia public employee and their dependents covered by the State's health care plan.

Ted Cheatham, the Director of the West Virginia Public Employee's Insurance Agency ("PEIA") broke the bad news to PEIA's Finance Board yesterday.  Because of the coverage mandates under Obamacare, PEIA's expenses will increase by $30.1 million in fiscal year 2012 (which runs from July 1, 2011, to June 30, 2012).  By fiscal year 2015, the estimated cost increases will reach $38 million.  (Sorry, I wasn't able to find a full copy of the report online, but if I do, I will post it.)

So what are these coverage mandates?  Under Obamacare, coverage for mental health issues must be the same as coverage for all other medical conditions (previously, PEIA placed coverage caps and other cost controls on mental health coverage).  In addition, Obamacare requires all insurance plans to cover the children of the insured to age 26 (ahh, the cycle of dependency).  Just the expanded coverage for children alone will cost PEIA $8.6 million per year by fiscal year 2015.

The subsidy provided by West Virginia taxpayers to public employees for the cost of health insurance runs to more than 70% of the total cost of the insurance, so the taxpayers will be hit by these increased costs in a big way.  But the increased costs will hit public employees hard too, as premiums, copays and deductibles are raised to cover the increased costs caused by Obamacare.  The current PEIA Board has taken a lot of hard positions lately and tried its best to hold the line on costs, as the article details.  But no amount of cost-cutting will save West Virginia's public employees, who are not particularly well-paid to begin with, from increased costs:

Projections are that PEIA will finish the current budget year on June 30 with an annual surplus of about $40 million.

Cheatham said he had initially hoped those funds could be used to avoid having to impose any premium increases next year.

"The problem is, it's all going to be offset by the federal health reform," he said.

I wonder what the West Virginia Education Association, which strongly supported Obamacare through its parent the National Education Association, do when Obamacare causes the WVEA's members to go home on payday with less scratch in their pockets?  And how many other states will have to deal with the same issues as PEIA?

A Muslim Student for Genocide

David Horowitz, who devotes much of his time to exposing the hypocrisy of the culture of political correctness on American college campuses, had an interesting encounter last week with a Muslim student while taking questions following a talk at the University of California at San Diego.  The student identified herself as a member of "MSA" (the Muslim Students Association) at UCSD and asked a question about a statement made in some of Horowitz's literature that connected the MSA with jihadi organizations.  In response, Horowitz asked the student whether she supports Hamas.  The entire exchange may be found in the following video clip:



The leader of Hezbollah to whom Horowitz refers is Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah.  If you are interested in reading more about Nasrallah, his Wikipedia biography may be found here.  I cannot add anything to this exchange; the young woman speaks for herself.

Obamacare and the Law of Unintended Consequences

In an article published on May 6 in the online version of Fortune magazine, we get a good look at the manner in which capitalism works.  The article details how several large corporations have responded to the passage of Obamacare by performing analyses of the cost of continuing to pay for health care for employees versus the cost of paying the penalties provided in the Obamacare bill for not providing health care.  We learn that Verizon, AT&T and other large companies performed cost/benefit analyses of the Obamacare provisions and found that they will be able to save significant amounts of money if they simply cut their employees loose and instead pay the penalties:

AT&T revealed that it spends $2.4 billion a year on coverage for its almost 300,000 active employees, a number that would fall to $600 million if AT&T stopped providing health care coverage and paid the penalty option instead.

Corporations exist to make money for their shareholders.  If you were on the board of directors of AT&T and you learned that you could save $1.8 billion per year by cutting off health care benefits for your employees and instead turn those employees over to the government-run health care "exchanges" that will be created under Obamacare, don't you think you would owe a duty to your shareholders to give the matter serious consideration?  In fact, under the fiduciary responsibility laws that apply to corporate directors, those AT&T directors are probably required by law to consider turning the employees over to the exchanges.  What would be the downside to the company?  Certainly, in the marketplace for employees, AT&T would have to compete for employees with other companies that do not make the switch.  Potential employees might choose a different job over an AT&T job in order to avoid the government-run insurance exchanges.  But the Fortune article explains how a company like AT&T could cut off health care benefits and still compete for employees:

So what happens to the employees who get dropped?

And why didn't these big employers drop employee coverage a long time ago? The Congressional Budget Office, in its crucial cost estimates of the bill, projected that company plans will cover more employees ten years from now than today. The reason the bill doesn't add to the deficit, the CBO states, is that fewer than 25 million Americans will be collecting the subsidies the bill mandates in 2020.

Those subsidies are indeed big: families of four earning between $22,000 and $88,000 would pay between 2% and 9.5% of their incomes on premiums; the federal government would pay the rest. So policies for a family making $66,000 would cost them just $5,300 a year with the government picking up the difference: more than $10,000 by most estimates.

As bean counters know, that's not a bad deal for a company's rank-and-file, and it's a great deal for the companies themselves. In a competitive labor market, the employers that shed their plans will need to give their employees a big raise, and those raises could be higher, even after taxes, than the premiums the employees will pay in the exchanges.

So what does all of this mean for taxpayers?  According to the article, if 50% of the employees who are currently covered by employer-sponsored health care plans are instead turned over to the Obamacare exchanges, the cost to the taxpayers of the subsidies to the insurance exchanges will be $160 billion per year by 2016.  Ouch.  And guess what?  None of these costs show up anywhere in the budget projections for Obamacare.

The ultimate irony from this story is that none of this information would have been made public but for the grandstanding of Congressional Democrats.  After the passage of Obamacare, many large corporations subject to SEC regulation issued earnings restatements, which those companies are required by law to issue when events occur that will cause a significant change in expected earnings.  According to The New York Times, forty companies issued earnings restatements because of Obamacare reflecting total earnings reductions of $3.4 billion.  Congressman Henry Waxman then demanded that AT&T, Verizon, Deere and Caterpillar appear before his Congressional committee and explain themselves.  Rep. Waxman was just certain that the companies were involved in a grand conspiracy to discredit Obamacare.  But after reviewing thousands of pages of documents submitted by the companies, Rep. Waxman changed his tune and cancelled the hearings.  It turns out those earnings restatements were proper after all.  And among all of the pages of documents submitted by the four companies to Congress were those pesky cost/benefit analyses referenced in the Fortune article.  Ah, embarrassment.

And what of all this mess?  The law of unintended consequences will leave taxpayers to pay the bill for the outrageous costs of Obamacare, costs that were concealed and obfuscated in the course of the debate by every Democrat from the President on down.

Moving Forward

I have not posted here since April 2, when I wrote about my emotions as I watched my Father die.  On April 4, which was Easter, Dad died in his hospital bed at about 4:30 in the morning.  He was 83 years old.  Not one day has passed since he died that I haven't thought about him.  I miss him.