Tag Archives: regulation

Obamacare—Finding Out More of What Is In It

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Labor is discovering more about Obamacare that isn’t all that.

the law doesn’t take into account that health benefits have been negotiated by employers and unions over decades, and that rewriting plans to meet new requirements can affect wages and other labor terms.

And

Uncertainty about future costs is also hampering negotiations. One of the biggest looming unknowns is the so-called Cadillac tax on high-cost health plans scheduled to take effect in 2018. The provision imposes a 40% tax on the annual cost of health care above $10,200 for individual coverage and $27,500 for family coverage.

The regional transit system in Philadelphia, Septa, estimates the tax will boost its health-care costs by $15 million a year, or 12.5% of the $120 million it currently spends each year on health coverage.

And [emphasis added]

Another provision of the law that eliminates caps on annual and lifetime health-care costs has forced multi-employer plans to purchase their own insurance to prevent potential runaway costs from bankrupting plans.

Jim Ray, a lawyer who represents the Laborers International Union of North America in benefits negotiations, said these provisions have increased construction-industry health plans’ costs by 5% to 10%, and already resulted in lower wages for some laborers. He said employers are frequently seeking contract language to cap their own liability for future cost increases from the law.

“When we first supported the calls for health-care reform, we thought it was going to bring costs down,” he said.

Hmm….

Coups and Freedom

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Thailand’s new ruling junta said Thursday it has no desire to “cling to power” but also has no clear timeframe for when it will allow free elections.

“We will definitely have an election,” said Lt General Chatchalerm Chalermsukh, the army’s deputy chief of staff. But he added, “this will take some time. If you ask me how long it will take, that’s difficult to answer.”

And

Several political figures, mostly on the pro-government side, were held incommunicado for a week and freed only after signing a waiver agreeing not to say or do anything that could stir conflict.

And

The military has said it will crack down on online speech it considers inflammatory.

And further from Chatchalerm:

Today there are still protests. It shows that some people want to create turmoil. So it’s impossible to hold elections at the moment.

Well, all right, then.

Nanny State and School Lunches

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The fight over school lunches intensified Tuesday as first lady Michelle Obama defended her signature school-nutrition program during a meeting with school officials and decried efforts in Congress to allow schools to delay the program.

“Now is not the time to roll back everything we have worked for,” Ms Obama said[.]

Part of the fight, presently, is over a House proposal to waive the school “nutrition” program’s requirements for those schools that can’t afford to comply. Part of the fight is over puny servings that leave the student hungry—and so just as distracted from learning as if he had eaten a sugar-laden lunch. Part of the fight is over who should pay for the mandated lunching system, even by those schools able to “afford” those costs.

But none of the fight is over whether States should determine for themselves what their schools should be doing in their cafeterias. Worse, none of the fight is over what the parents should be doing about their children’s nutrition.

Whose responsibility are the kids, after all? Certainly not the schools’. Certainly not the State governments’. Most especially not the Federal government’s.

The parents are responsible for their own children. If their kids aren’t getting adequate lunches at school, and that argument is a reasonable one, then the parents should be sending their kids to those schools with sack lunches that are balanced and nutritious and with appropriate (the parents’ definition, not government’s) serving sizes. And an enjoyable treat—which may be a sugar bomb, it may be an extra piece of fruit, it may be…. That treat should be determined by what the responsible parents have been teaching their kids, from the cradle, about healthy as well as fun eating. That treat should not at all be influenced by a government intruding into a family’s lunch table.

Greater parental involvement won’t help much in improving the nutrition of children from poverty-stricken (true poverty, not the Federal Poverty Guideline defined poverty) homes, whose only real meal too often comes from the school they attend. But those children aren’t helped, either, by a Federally-mandated one-size-fits-all law that requires schools in well-to-do districts to supply what those children’s well-to-do parents should be supplying. Nor are those children helped who are in school districts that can’t afford yet another costly Federal mandate and so must sacrifice education on the Church of Nanny State’s altar of “appropriate” school lunches.

However, limiting an overreaching, private resource-grasping (can you say taxes?) Federal government will leave more resources in the private economy where they belong. From that better private economy, family, friends, church, charity, et al., will be much better equipped to help the children in those truly poverty stricken families, and by being local being able to apply resources directly and more efficiently to those most needing the help.

Mendacity, and the Color of Money

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According to The Daily Caller,

Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) expects to have more money for medical care than it can spend for the fifth fiscal year in a row.

In fact,

[The] VA carried over $1.449 billion in medical-care funding from fiscal year 2010 to 2011, $1.163 billion from fiscal year 2011 to fiscal year 2012, $637 million from fiscal year 2012 to 2013, and $543 million from fiscal year 2013 to 2014.

[The] VA expects to carry over $450 million in medical-care funding from fiscal year 2014 to fiscal year 2015. VA received its full requested medical care appropriation of $54.6 billion this fiscal year, which is more than $10 billion more than it received four years ago.

Yet the AFGE, a Federal employee union, says that the VA is underfunded in the areas about which it cares. We’ve also seen this underfunding bit presented as an excuse for the failure of the VA to provide access to medical care—those secret waiting lists, for instance: the VA doesn’t have the funding to man the facilities to shorten/eliminate those waits.

But this isn’t contradictory. The VA is short of money here, and has an excess there, but it can’t just transfer the excess from there (the medical side for instance) to here (the AFGE’s identified shortfall side)—that’s a color of money problem: Federal funding that’s appropriated for a purpose requires Congressional approval to transfer the money to another purpose, even within Departments. It’s on Congress to stop overfunding one purpose and to stop underfunding another purpose.

And there’s this:

The Daily Caller reported that VA spent more than $3.5 million on furniture the night before the government shutdown on the last day of fiscal year 2013 so as not to lose that money in the department’s budget the next fiscal year.

This certainly looks shameful and shady—and it is, at bottom—but that’s not entirely the VA’s fault. Here it’s the case that, the VA’s medical care funding notwithstanding, in general Federal budgeting is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition: Departments cannot carry forward unused appropriated funds; they must spend the money in the fiscal year for which it was appropriated, or they lose the unspent funds.

These things are what come of a Byzantine budget process—it’s Congress’ failure of budgeting.

This does not, though, absolve the VA personnel of their mendacity in their failure to take care of our veterans as they’re charged to do. No amount of confusion from a labyrinthine budgeting process can excuse falsifying wait lists or simply not bothering, leaving our veterans without prompt care when it’s needed.

The SEC’s Nanny State

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The excuse here is the existence of so-called dark pools, or off-exchange stock trading in private venues like “banks or other firms.” It’s certainly true that the information exchange concerning companies whose stocks trade in the dark pools is less—often quite a bit less—than that available for exchange-traded stocks.

What the SEC wants to do, though, is push the dark pool trading onto the SEC-preferred stock market exchanges. In applying this pressure—it’s hard, even for this administration, simply to mandate the move—the SEC is proposing a rule that would, in a “pilot program,” force the dark pool to offer a better price for any stock (that the SEC chooses to have) included in the pilot program than is available on the exchange. Because participants in the dark pool mustn’t be allowed to exercise their own judgment outside of government oversight; participants in the dark pool mustn’t be allowed to arrive at their own agreements on suitable exchanges of value. They’re just not as smart as government bureaucrats. Or the participants in the government-preferred stock exchanges.

In March, 37% of all trading occurred away from stock exchanges, up from 33% two years ago, according to Tabb Group.

There’s a reason for this, and it has to do with excessive government regulation of those preferred exchanges. Oh, and the fees not paid in the dark pool on those completed trades. Here is a list of the fees charged by the NYSE, many of which are imposed by the government. On a per-share basis, they don’t look like much, but over the volume of trading that goes on, the fees add up to a handsome sum. The exchanges and the government want “their” money.

The real problem, though, is that the pressure against the dark pool is largely illegitimate.

Don’t understand the trade? Don’t have enough information? Don’t do the trade. Don’t know enough to know whether you have enough information to assess the risk? Don’t do the trade. It’s not that complicated.

Caveat emptor. Personal responsibility. Apparently the SEC thinks Americans are just too dumb to live under those precepts. Instead, they want caveat imperium [sic: most of you get my point. For the scholars who see the grammatically correct meaning, I suggest that’s on my point, also). Government responsibility.