Let the Repercussions Begin
Employers
Pennsylvania's Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) is slashing the hours of 400 adjunct instructors, support staff, and part-time instructors to dodge paying for Obamacare. "It's kind of a double whammy for us because we are facing a legal requirement [under the new law] to get health care and if the college is reducing our hours, we don't have the money to pay for it," said adjunct biology professor Adam Davis. On Tuesday, CCAC employees were notified that Obamacare defines full-time employees as those working 30 hours or more per week and that on Dec. 31 temporary part-time employees will be cut back to 25 hours. The move will save an estimated $6 million. "While it is of course the college’s preference to provide coverage to these positions, there simply are not funds available to do so," said CCAC spokesperson David Hoovler. "Several years of cuts or largely flat funding from our government supporters have led to significant cost reductions by CCAC, leaving little room to trim the college’s budget further."
According to the Orlando Sentinel, Darden Restaurants, Inc., operator of casual dining chains such as Olive Garden, Red Lobster, and LongHorn Steakhouse, is doing just that. ObamaCare requires companies to provide “affordable” health insurance to employees working at least 30 hours per week or pay fines of up to $3,000 per employee who instead obtains taxpayer-subsidized insurance on a state exchange. Darden, therefore, is experimenting with limiting most of its employees to 28 hours per week, thus freeing it from the mandate and its accompanying fine.
Pillar Hotels & Resorts this summer began to focus more on hiring part-time workers among its 5,500 employees, after the Supreme Court upheld the health-care overhaul, said Chief Executive Chris Russell. The company has 210 franchise hotels, under the Sheraton, Fairfield Inns, Hampton Inns and Holiday Inns brands.
Kroger: beginning in January, any employee who is not full-time at that point,will be limited to 28 hours per week and all new hires will be subject to the same policy.
Like many franchisees, Robert U. Mayfield, who owns five Dairy Queens in and around Austin, Tex., is always eager to expand and — no surprise — has had his eyes on opening a sixth DQ. But he said concerns about the new federal health care law had persuaded him to hold off.
Doctors
The study, which appears in the medical-education-themed Dec. 5 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, fuels concerns that there will be a shortage of primary-care doctors available when patients need them most. Researchers surveyed internal medicine residents about their career plans. Of nearly 17,000 third-year residents, only 21.5 percent were planning on a career as an internal medicine doctor. "This is worrisome," said study author Dr. Colin West, an internist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "In the next decade, we will be 50,000 primary-care physicians short for the needs of the country."Compounding the likely shortage is health care reform under the Affordable Care Act, which is expected to flood the system with new patients in the coming years. "We will need even more primary-care physicians as the foundation of care and we are not generating enough," West said. And, in addition to fewer residents choosing internal medicine and more patients having access to health care, many providers are getting older and heading to retirement.
There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
Welcome to the part-time doctorless world of liberal progressives.http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/21/Surprise-PA-College-Slashes-Hours-To-Avoid-Obamacare
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/health-care/item/13160-restaurant-giant-cuts-hours-to-avoid-employer-mandate
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/20/ccac-obamacare_n_2165383.html
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2012/12/04/study-foresees-shortage-of-primary-care-doctors
Predictable, foreseeable, unintended or otherwise, the left apparently just doesn't believe in consequences.
ReplyDeleteOne of my best friends, uninsurable except via employer-based health insurance, is losing his coverage on January 1 -- a direct result of all the ObamaCare regulations. The health insurance company, a small and specialized one because of the kind of work my friend does, is folding! Now, there is no choice except for my friend and his wife to go on Medicaid.
ReplyDeleteI think they DO believe in consequences, Viburnum. These people may be destructive, but they are anything-but stupid. I classify them as Evil Geniuses. Whatever else they may be they are master strategists at getting their own way. Their being unburdened by qualm or conscience gives them a distinct advantage as tacticians in a war in which most Americans don't begin to know they are involved.
ReplyDeleteI try believe their INTENT has been to DESTROY the USA -- reduce it to rubble metaphorically -- which will, of course, make us ripe for DICTATORSHIP. That has always been the goal of The Long March Through the Culture that began over a century ago.
Anyone who fails at this late date to grasp that obvious truth is hopelessly naive.
What we might do about it is anyone's guess.
That old saw about the pen being mightier than the sword has been proved true by the terrifying success of the bloodless coup that has overtaken us -- a coup that succeeded because ruthless, relentless, INTELLECTUAL AGGRESSION.
As Rush said, "No one can beat Santa Claus." That sums it up very nicely.
Too bad Santa Claus turns out NOT to be Jolly old Saint Nicholas, but SATAN CLAWS instead.
HAPPY SCREW YEAR!
~ FreeThinke
NOTE: Another one of the disadvantages of your new system has been the removal our ability to REMOVE our messages at will either to IMPROVE and ENRIH them, or because we later thought better of what we'd said in haste.
ReplyDeleteSorry, but I don't appreciate this change. Not to be nasty, but see it as A Victory for the Troll Who Sought Control.
The goddam son-of-a-bitch WON.
~ FT
So, the only answer is for government to provide health care for FREEEEE!
ReplyDeleteFreeThinke: Being a similarly conservative man, I do not like change either, but tis better to light a candle...
ReplyDeletePlease go here and create an account for yourself using your gmail e-mail address. You will then have complete editorial control over your comments
http://disqus.com/
Sorry you're feeling frustrated FT. Would you believe that our resident troll spammed close to 500 comments on Christmas Day? Pretty pathetic if you ask me, but none of us have the time nor inclination to deal with him on a daily basis. Again, I apologize for the inconvenience.
ReplyDeleteThere were over 500 in the spam folder, and that's not counting the ones that were deleted outright so it's probably closer to 600. A royal PITA to say the least.
ReplyDeleteWait a minute. I thought the Teapublicans said Mitt Romney, the father of Obama's bastardized Romneycare, was a financial genius?
ReplyDeleteThe perfect mess, brought to you compliments of Leviathan.
ReplyDeleteOnly the federal government would say they are going to lower costs by imposing a new tax. Effective January 1st, there is a new excise tax imposed on all medical devices. I must have missed that class in economics on how implementing a new tax on something will lower it's cost.
ReplyDeleteMy wife looses her supplemental insurance she has paid into because of Obamacare and for those who have insurance, you will have the privilege of paying $63.00 a year to help those who don't. If you are on medicare that you have paid for for years and still pay for, you are now part of the entitlement class
Don't you feel generous.
The need for more physicians is not a negative consequence of the ACA, but rather a striking reminder of how little primary care Americans now receive. Demand will fuel a needed supply here, and that's a good thing.
ReplyDeleteThe 30 hour rule is another striking reminder - of how poorly we treat workers in America, and how we need further health care reforms, like universal coverage. As the economy improves, these employers will have a harder and harder time finding quality employees, as those quality employees will find higher quality employers. The employers who choose not to take care of the employees will have two choices - suffer with poor employees, or rethink their pricing, cost, and profit models.
Hopefully these "problems" will force the government to further reform the system, and employers to take better care of their employees. Those would be two more good things that could come out of the ACA.
JMJ
Forgive my bluntmess, but your new platform SUCKS.
ReplyDeletesurely there's a way to set Disgust to display comments oldest to newest. This is worse than Haloscam.
ReplyDeleteWith a DISQUS account, you can sort 'em how you like 'em.
ReplyDeleteI wil test the format. I usually get caught in the spammer bin. Before I wax poetic.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Finntann. I do understand, and I'm over it now.
ReplyDeleteHave to admit I never did adjust to change very well -- especially when it's completely unexpected.
I'm very slow, so it may take a few days to sort things out, but I'll see what getting a Disqus account might do to my other 'puter functions before I take the plunge.
Meanwhile, this is okay. I appreciate the privilege of having been given relatively easy access.
HAPPY NEW YEAR to you and yours!
~ FT
Click on "Discussion" right below the comment frame and it gives you that option.
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine is a GP in Colorado. A frequent topic of discussion is how ObamaCare will radically affect how she does her job - even now she has to have an entourage of Medicare compliance employees when she goes on rounds in the hospital. She entered medicine to help people; increasingly she is ensnared in a web of Soviet-style regulation.
ReplyDeleteNo wonder fewer students are selecting medicine as a career.
Turns out ObamaCare was pushed by the insurance companies - just like they did 25 years ago with mandatory auto insurance. It also fits in with the liberal's desire to control a massive section of the US economy and controlling your life.
This is the best government money can buy.
Earth to Jersey! Rethinking their pricing, cost, and profit models is why they're cutting hours.
ReplyDeleteFuck them all;
ReplyDelete'Olive Garden, Red Lobster See Sharp Drop In Profits After Anti-Obamacare Campaign Backfires;'
To me this has shown how the men running these corporations are out of touch with average Americans. Their histrionics over providing health
care has revealed emotional greedy men who could care less about their employees.
The medical insurance costs at my company have gone up the last 14
years...every year....sometimes as much as 20%. Why when medical
insurance goes up THIS year it is Obama's fault? Who's fault was it all
those other years? Maybe it will go up... but less this next year.
Still Obama's "fault"?
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/12/20/1365461/olive-garden-red-lobster-see-sharp-drop-in-profits-after-anti-obamacare-campaign-backfires/
You're full of shit.
ReplyDeletePlease refrain from such language, or we will banish you to beyond the gates of civilization.
ReplyDeleteAnd wingnuts like to invent them, lol!
ReplyDeleteYou heard me. We like disagreement here, but please check the vulgarities at the door
ReplyDeleteWe didn't invent the time reductions at CCAC. ACA caused them
ReplyDeleteDon't know if this will publish correctly. I sympathize with the blog administrators here. I'm on comment moderation [because of, well, you know who--his name starts with "Thers" and ends with "ities"--and was close to coming off of it until the "Steve" troll started spamming my blog as well with disgusting vulgarities. Hope it works for you guys.
ReplyDeleteThanks Shaw, and I'm sorry to hear that you were plagued as well.
ReplyDeleteIt's our hope that this will allow us to avoid outright 'moderation' and though a bit cumbersome it seems to hold some promise. It does have a feature which, even when on moderation, will allow trusted persons to pass through, relieving some of the burden of scrutinizing every post. You might want to take a look at that.
GOOD!
ReplyDeleteOlive Garden, Red Lobster See Sharp Drop In Profits After Anti-Obamacare Campaign Backfires
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/12/20/1365461/olive-garden-red-lobster-see-sharp-drop-in-profits-after-anti-obamacare-campaign-backfires/
No. It's why they're hiding their heads under the sand and waiting for it all to go away. I quality employers want quality workers, and they do not want universal healthcare, and they don't don't want employer health care, than quality workers will seek out quality employers who take better care of them.
ReplyDeleteIn very obvious terms: The employer based healthcare system depends on employers providing health care, and if they don't, than how do people get health care? POS doesn't work in the health care market, yet health care is obviously absolutely necessary to a Modern Western way of life. So what do we do?
Quality employers will work with government to utilize efficient health care provider pools. It's a decent answer. It's an answer you conservatives and libertarians could live with.
If the employers don't? ...Well, then good luck with employee loyalty in the future.
Why American employers don't push for universal healthcare, with a private actuary sector, is beyond me. I often accuse you guys of being simplistic, but forgive me for a simplicity here. I say a Swiss-like system (granted, a few major tweeks) would work really well in the USA.
JMJ
Unfortunately, due to the economy, restaurant receipts are down all over, not just at the chains mentioned.
ReplyDeleteI partially agree with you Jersey, employers wanted quality employees, which is why health care was part of a negotiated compensation package. Employers no longer have an incentive to offer better packages than the status quo, they are not going to compete with the government and they no longer have an incentive to compete with each other. Once again, progressives have fostered equality by reducing everyone else to the lowest common denominator, and when the baby-boomers age out of the workforce, the entire system is going to collapse, as there will be insufficient workers to pay for retiree entitlements.
ReplyDeleteThere's that unholy partnership of Big Government with Big Business again, Hug, effectively conspiring against the best interests of the public (and employees too, of course) to enrich themselves and strengthen their death grip on power.
ReplyDeleteI believe this septic relationship began with TR and the emergence of "Progressivism." Once government -- probably responding to the still-new union pressures -- started to intervene and interfere with the practices of Industry, Business, rightly feeling itself under attack, decided to "join 'em," since no one could "beat 'em." This returned a large measure of control to Business, but at the cost of making both Government AND Business increasingly corrupt.
That's what I believe must have happened. Does anyone have other ideas? Sometimes, when you think you know something, yu may be on the wrong track.
I accuse liberals of that all the time. As Ronald Reagan said of liberals, "They know so much that is not true."
That's probably true of all of us who proceed largely on assumptions and suppositions.
The "Parallel Universe" phenomenon is confounding, because each opposing faction claims to have "the facts."
If that could be true, then we really have walked straight through the looking glass and are living in Wonderland.
I still maintain that [isolated, carefully-selected, agenda-serving] "FACTS" are not "TRUTH." I have to laugh when idiotarians refer to "the true facts," as though they knew there were a whole bunch of false facts out there.
If we all learned to think, write and speak better English, we might be able to make genuine progress. That's why I'm a stickler -- and will DIE a stickler -- for good grammar, graceful syntax, rich vocabulary, and proper spelling.
I'm also a very poor typist, so I apologize in advance for all the inadvertent errors my arthritic old fingers and weak eyes are bound to commit.
HAPPY SCREW YEAR!
~ FT
"As the economy improves...". What makes you think that's going to happen?
ReplyDeleteFour Reasons Why The Court’s Decision To Uphold Obamacare Is Good News For The Economy:
ReplyDelete1) Obamacare will reduce the deficit. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2011 that Obamacare will reduce the federal deficit by $210 billion over the next decade. The law is expected to save about $1 trillion over its second decade, according to other CBO analyses. The CBO found that repealing the law, as Republicans attempted to do in 2011, would increase the deficit by $230 billion over the next 10 years.
2) Health care costs for young Americans won’t skyrocket. More than 3.1 million young Americans have insurance thanks to Obamacare. Without the law, the cost of acquiring an equivalent health care plan would have risen dramatically at a time when young people are still struggling with the effects of theGreat Recession.
3) Millions of jobs will be created. Health reform will help create roughly 4 million jobs over the next decade, according to a 2010 Center for American Progress report, by reducing the cost of health care and making it cheaper for businesses to hire. The law will create between 250,000 and 400,000 jobs a year, and they will be spread across sectors: according to the study, the law will help create more than 200,000 manufacturing and 900,000 in the service sector by 2016.
4) It will be cheaper for employers to provide health care.
American businesses are under tremendous pressure thanks to rising
health care costs, and these costs are often passed on to customers (one study estimates that each car sold by General Motors contains $1,200 in built-in health costs).The ACA, however, will make it cheaper for businesses to provide care, and not just by reducing the cost of care. Small businesses are already receiving tax credits
contained in the law to help insure their employees, and it has already
offered more than $4.7 billion in reinsurance payments to companies
that are providing health care to retirees who aren’t yet eligible for
Medicare.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/06/28/505510/four-reasons-why-the-courts-decision-to-uphold-obamacare-is-good-news-for-the-economy/
Really? So me this.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't call it free. Assets beyond the house and a small amount of cash are seized by the state. Good luck having enough money for burial!
ReplyDeletehttp://nrn.com/latest-headlines/full-service-restaurant-sales-recover-june
ReplyDeleteRead the HuffPo piece closer, and then go read the link above. The full service dining industry has been on the skids for years.
You need to get out more, Libmann, munching on leftwing cotton candy all day will rot your brain.
Really?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.qsrmagazine.com/competition/fall-pizza
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/09/business/mcdonalds-reports-global-decline-in-sales.html?_r=0
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2012/10/restaurant-performance-index-declined.html
http://247wallst.com/2012/12/12/americas-disappearing-restaurant-chains/
A person who posts frequently is not a troll if he (or she!) holds and expresses a point of view unpopular with the majority at a given blog or website -- as long as he (or she!) is honest and not merely taunting and deliberately disruptive for the sake of attracting attention to him, her or itself. Persistence may be irritating, but it's not a criminal act, and doesn't deserve to be prosecuted.
ReplyDeleteMaintaining a sense of humor helps enormously if only to keep things in perspective. There are times when every one of us takes him, her or itself MUCH too seriously.
Time to get over THAT once and for all.
Cheerio!
Aw....look and the widdle wingnut and his need for ad hominems. This reports is from June. Papa Johns, Longhorns, etc have all dipped well below this trend. Nice try, though!
ReplyDeleteReally? It's no coincidence that Olive Garden, Red Lobster See Sharp Drop In Profits After Anti-Obamacare Campaign Backfires.
ReplyDeleteI'd say a loss of 37% below whatever declines other restaurants have shown.
"Aw....look and the widdle wingnut and his need for ad hominems"
ReplyDeleteOh, the irony!
Bravo! Bravo! FreeThinke. I am in full agreement with you. Wishing you and everyone on this blog many blessings in the New Year.
ReplyDeleteAre you really that naive?
ReplyDeleteLet me know when Walmart tanks.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/12/09/walmart-bails-on-obamacare-sticks-taxpayers-with-employee-healthcare-costs/
You notice those are all things that have not materialized yet. We'll see. It's already established that Obama robs $800 billion from medicare, so right now it looks like a shell game.
ReplyDeleteAs for your other comment that didn't make it through, try it without the potty mouth.
SHAZAM! ZOWIE! BINGO! ZOTZ! and HURRAH!
ReplyDeleteLiberalmann has been living under the bridge too long. Yep! He's another one. BEWARE! ;-)
ReplyDelete