Here’s the now famous recent statement suggesting that the Health Care Bill would reduce group health care insurance costs by 3000 percent. It comes 1 minute 20 seconds into the 1:43 clip.
Thus suggesting that companies could actually provide health care insurance free to employees and make gobs of money doing it. Apparently this would be accomplished by some sort of magical money machine equivalent of the mythical perpetual motion machine. This machine only exists in Washington:
Or, see it on
YouTube if the embedded player is not working.
Some of the realities of the situation are beginning to come into focus.
“…AT&T Inc. plans to take a noncash $1 billion charge in the first quarter in anticipating the impact of changes brought by the nation’s health-care overhaul.
The Dallas-based telecommunications giant is the latest–and largest–company to take a charge to account for the increased costs under the new health-care plan. …
…The company will evaluate prospective changes to its active and retiree health-care benefits, according to a filing with Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday….”
I can translate that last sentence to read “Retiree and employee contribution payments for health-care benefits are about to rise.”
An interesting thing about taxing businesses, or taking actions which apply added costs to businesses is that those costs are not really paid by businesses – people pay.
Real people pay in one or more of the following ways: 1) Decreased profits for owners (IE: shareholders, including your 401k, 403b, retirement fund, IRA, or whatever); 2) Decreased employee compensation; 3) Higher prices to customers.This is an absolute mathematical certainty.
Taxes and fees can be perfectly legitimate, but it drives me nuts when people think that the money just comes out of the ether, as if nobody pays, as if there is no weight, as if there were no economic consequences for anyone.
The Health Care Bill is a massive money shell game. There will be some intended effects and some unintended consequences.
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