Obamacare slippery slope

By Jim Killebrew

[February 16, 2015]  Let's say you have been working for several years at the same job. You have had a decent salary, although you would like more, but adequate, and you have been happy for having a job. Then one day a couple of years ago you were called into your boss's office and told you were going to have your hours reduced from your current forty hours per week to only twenty-nine hours per week. Of course you were disappointed as well as entering a tail spin since you also had your pay reduced to be commensurate with your new part-time status. Then you learned your insurance that had been provided by your company had been discontinued for you. You would have to pay all of your premiums on your own without any subsidy from your employer. Your question: "Why is this happening to me?"

What happen of course, was Obamacare. Built into the law is an out for businesses and corporations for having to pay for their employee's insurance. The President re-defined the work week: It went from the traditional 40-hour week to a 30-hour work week. At the same time, however, the Obamacare law allows the employer to back away from paying for the insurance if the employee works less than 30 hours per week. Owners of small businesses and Executive Boards of large businesses, as well as the big guns in the larger corporations saw the opportunity to dump the cost of the insurance onto the employee by cutting their hours from the 40 hours, full-time jobs, to the 30 hour or less part-time positions. So now, the individual employee finds him or herself with a part-time job, making less in salary, plus now having to pay premiums on health insurance. In order to do that, the employee likely has to get another part-time job just to afford to have insurance.

Now comes Obamacare with the promise of subsidies for those people who cannot afford their insurance. The Administration worked behind closed doors with absolutely no transparency for anyone to see the nuances being built into the legislative Bill that would eventually become law. Every democrat in the House and Senate voted for the Bill with no republican vote. Then Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House at that time crowed, "We have to pass the Bill to read what is in it." Make no mistake, she knew what was in it, all those who worked in secret knew what was in it. They knew it would be a calamity for the working person. But their aim was to follow the President's desire to redistribute the wealth so he could keep his campaign promise. Here is how that works.

Forcing the businesses of America to follow what was actually built into the law to avoid having to pay for the employee's insurance by re-defining the work week to less than 30 hours virtually ensured the owners and leaders of companies and businesses all over the country would comply to the reduction of hours in order to avoid the prohibitive costs of providing the insurance. The Administration then advertised subsidies for people who could not afford the insurance. So the law relieved the companies from having to provide it for their employees by cutting their hours, but now the employee would have to depend on the government to provide a subsidy to pay the necessary premiums. The problem is, nothing is free, so somebody has to pay for it. Guess who that is; of course it is the taxpayer. It is called redistribution, exactly what the President campaigned on when he was running for election for his first term in office.

But now, he has successfully re-directed the average guy who is trying to make ends meet by working two or more part-time jobs to blame the very employer he had worked for prior to being laid off from full-time to part-time. Additionally, for businesses to keep from going belly-up financially, they had to reduce the working hours to meet the stipulations of the law to avoid having to pay unsustainable amounts of money to provide insurance for their employees the way they had in the past. Premiums and deductibles had to be raised by the law in order for all of these elements to fall in place. So disgruntled employees blame the company for reducing their hours, the taxpayer not only pays for their own insurance, but they now pay for the subsidies being provided to the part-timers, while all the blame is being deflected from the law, which is the real culprit, over to the initial employers who own the businesses.

Listen to the propaganda being spewed by the Administration against small businesses; listen to the propaganda being spewed by the various unions against the management who made the decisions to cut the hours of the employees. Then listen to the full wave of propaganda being spewed from the Administration toward the corporate America to try to force them into some kind of support for a single payer plan...of course, the government. That would grow the government to even a larger extent.

Pretty slick, huh?

[By JIM KILLEBREW]