Daily Archives: 2 July 2015

Obamacare….

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…again. The claimed purpose of Obamacare is to get every American covered by a health plan.

Prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, with its mandate that all Americans purchase insurance and requirement for businesses to offer employees insurance plans, many small companies provided coverage by directly reimbursing medical costs or for the cost of private insurance plans. Businesses do it because that’s a less complicated process than dealing with an official health insurance plan….

An IRS Rule (remember these guys and their rules?) that took effect on 1 Jul punishes those businesses for helping their employees.

…those reimbursements…are “considered to be group health plans subject to the market reforms, including the prohibition on annual limits for essential health benefits and the requirement to provide certain preventive care without cost sharing.”

“Such an arrangement fails to satisfy the market reforms and may be subject to a $100/day excise tax per applicable employee (which is $36,500 per year, per employee) under section 4980D of the Internal Revenue Code[.]

No. The true purpose of Obamacare is to get every American covered by a government-approved health plan. Choice be damned. An employer actually helping his employees be damned.

US Access to Space

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Last weekend, a SpaceX rocket carrying supplies to the Space Station exploded while staging after launch. This follows an Orbital Sciences resupply rocket explosion last fall and a Russian resupply rocket failure last spring.

USAF General (Ret) William Shelton, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, is lamenting legislation barring the use of Russian rocket engines in our launchers, and his concern is sparked by those failures.

The problem, and it’s a legitimate concern, is that SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, are the only two American reliable rocket companies we have—Orbital Sciences hasn’t succeeded yet—and ULA uses those Russian rocket engines in its launchers. With the legislation, of the two rocket companies (and at least two are strongly desired for safety and redundantly assured access to space), only one will be able to fly until ULA develops another engine.

The other side of the problem, though, is that of the two current American companies, one can fly only with the engines supplied by one of our enemies. That’s not very reliable, either.