Republicans Can’t Get Over Not Being Able to Thump Syria

RB? Let me guess: "Rape By-stander"?

 

The OP for this thread called Republicans opposed the Syria settlement because they had "blacklash". My response was (along with several other posts since);

 

Oh, OK. Rape By-stander, Race-Baiter, Rodential Biatch.... they all fit.

 

Despite the title of this thread, let's not lose sight of the fact that BO's last ditch effort (after being rebutted by all parties involved) was to call for military action. But not for the leadership of Putin, BO would have us engaged in an action that was supported by very few.

 

I smell desperation and it has a Right-wing lunatic fringe aroma about it.

 

It's probably clueless that you smell.

 

Mr Nations SAYS he smells desperation so that means HE is desperate. With this guy, we can pretty much just assume the opposite of what he says from now on.

He says unions will never oppose Obamacare means the are dumping on it in droves.
He says the economy is recovering means the food stamp rolls are at the highest point in history.
He says spending has been cut means the debt and deficit is out of control......etc etc. So when he says he smells rightwing desperation, well...........

What have we lost? Nothing. What did we gain ? Nothing. We were not at war with Syria before and we are not at war with Syria now, so how can we have lost anything? If you insist that we have lost something I would guess it's Obamas credibility.

 

Oh Jack off, no tirade? I was hoping for another one of your gems. You make me sad.

 

I heard union boss Hoffa state Obamacare was a direct assault on the unions' 100 year long battle for worker's rights & the 40 hour work week they hold so dear.

 

The liberals on this forum claim Obamacare is such a good thing, but the unions are turning against it... Why?

 

Not that you have the ability to comprehend but here are some actual facts.

A lot of unions are going to end up hating Obamacare

By Ezra Klein, Published: August 5 at 2:29 pmE-mail the writer

In 2018, the Affordable Care Act will begin levying a tax on unusually expensive health-care plans. The tax will be 40 percent on each premium dollar over $10,200 for individual plans and $27,500 for family plans.

You may not love it after this. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
It's one of the most powerful cost control provisions in the bill. It's so powerful, in fact, that there's real evidence that it's already working, despite the fact that it won't go into effect for four years. But because it's working, it's going to make a lot of people who get good employer-based benefits really unhappy -- including some of the law's supporters, like labor unions.
The basic idea is simple. Due to some weird decisions we made during World War II, employer-provided health benefits aren't taxed, even though wages are. That means it's a much better deal for a worker to get health benefits through their employer than to get the wages and buy the health care themselves.
Pretty much every health economist believes this is a disaster. It's put employers in charge of health insurance decisions, which doesn't make a lick of sense, and it's made it so workers don't know the true cost of their health insurance, as their employer is picking up the tab. The damage is evident even in the language we use: employer-provided health care is called a "benefit,' as if the employer gives it away for free. Really, it's coming directly out of worker paychecks.
But with about 150 million Americans getting health insurance through their employers, ending it would be too much disruption, too fast. So the Affordable Care Act only taxes the really expensive health plans, and even then, it only taxes part of them. But there's a bit of a trick here: The tax grows really quickly, so with each year that goes by, more and more health plans are exposed to it -- at least unless they're able to hold down costs.

That's the point of the tax: Give employers both an incentive and an excuse to get really serious about holding down costs. If workers complain, the HR department can just blame Obamacare.
And it's working. In New York, for instance, "the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in its final months in office, is asking municipal unions to agree to seek new bids for the city’s health insurance business, hoping to lower premiums. It has already achieved one small victory, getting the city’s current primary insurer to freeze premiums for one year if it keeps the city’s business, the mayor said on Friday."
All that cuts costs. But it also infuriates workers -- and, in some cases, the unions that represent them. After all, they're getting something for all that health-care spending. Their plans feature vast networks, low out-of-pockets costs, and much else. Some of that will be ratcheted back. And in a state like New York, some of a plan's costs have less to do with its generosity than the fact that New York is a really expensive health insurance market.
All this was known back when the tax was first being considered, which is why many labor-affiliated groups opposed this provision in the law. But ultimately they cared more about passing the bill than eliminating this bit, and the Obama administration managed to keep the tax around. As the tax comes closer and more employers and local governments begin assessing their benefit plans to try and avoid it, however, the effort to fight the tax will be fierce.
That sets up one of the recurring problems in health-care policy, which is that the more you do to control costs, the more people will hate you. Insurers found this out in the 1990s, when HMOs managed to save a lot of money without doing any measurable harm to care, but the American people loathed them for it. Various provisions in the Affordable Care Act -- or any serious cost-control effort -- will end up proving it again.
This will present a useful test for seeing who's serious about controlling health-care costs. Conservative economists, for instance, almost universally hate the fact that employer-provided health benefits aren't taxed, and that public-sector workers have bargained so aggressively for generous benefits. John McCain's 2008 health plan relied on ending the employer deduction entirely and converting it to a capped deduction for individuals -- which is a much more violent version of this kind of change.
But as the excise tax comes closer, it's going to lead to a fair amount of anger at Obamacare -- and it's going to be hard for Republicans to pass that up strategically. Back during the debate over the law many conservatives dealt with this tension by simply claiming the tax wouldn't go into effect. But that's clearly not what corporations and municipalities think, and really, the only plausible way in which the tax gets repealed is that Republicans work to repeal it.
So here, as with much else in the law, they're going to face a choice: Their policy goals or their political ones?

 

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5 questions about the unions’ beef with Obamacare​

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The SEIU remains supportive of the law, but the AFL-CIO has expressed disenchantment. | AP Photo​

Close​

By BRETT NORMAN | 9/12/13 6:20 PM EDT​

Key parts of organized labor have a case of buyer’s remorse over Obamacare and they’re letting everyone know about it.​

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The AFL-CIO at its convention this week passed a resolution calling President Barack Obama’s health law “highly disruptive” to some union insurance plans, “substantially changing the coverage available for millions of covered employees and their families.” The labor federation did back the sweeping goals of Obamacare — covering people and restraining costs —but that wasn’t the part of the message that resonated politically.​

“It’s encouraging to see those who strongly endorsed the health care law finally recognize its fundamental problems,” the GOP-led House Education and Workforce Committee said in a statement Thursday.

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The SEIU remains very supportive of Obamacare. It even announced this week that it was pitching in for outreach and enrollment efforts across the country. But that was eclipsed by the disenchantment of the AFL-CIO, the biggest labor federation in the country.​

Here are five questions about the brewing conflict between labor and Obamacare.​

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What are “multiemployer” plans and who is in them?​

About 20 million people get insurance through multiemployer or Taft-Hartley plans.​

Instead of contracting directly with private insurers, these health benefit plans are collectively bargained between unions and multiple employers often in the same industry, like food service or construction.​

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The government treats the plans like other employer-sponsored insurance, providing the same generous tax breaks on employer and employee contributions.​

Often, industries that use these multiemployer plans don’t employ a long-term, full-time workforce. But the plans are portable — workers can often take their insurance from job to job among participating employers. A roofer, for instance, can go from job to job, without any interruption in coverage. With a traditional health plan, he’d change insurance each time he changes jobs — if he even got insurance.​

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Why do unions feel these plans are threatened?​

That’s easy. Smaller employers who now pay into these multiemployer plans may look at the deal their employees can get on the new Obamacare health insurance exchanges and decide they would be better off there. The unions are also worried about rising costs.​

“The threat is that employers and in particular small employers are going to say, ‘I basically have low-income employee who would be better off in the exchange than they would be with my contribution to a Taft-Hartley plan, so I’m going to walk away,” said Tim Jost, a professor at Washington and Lee University and expert on the Affordable Care Act. “That then undermines the Taft-Hartley plans because fewer employers contribute to them, and fewer employees will want them. It’s going to undermine the ability of the unions to have a benefit they can offer their members.”​

Tim Schlittner, spokesman for the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, said, “That’s a pressure that’s been created by this law and one of the unintended consequence. I don’t think anyone could have imagined that the ideal outcome of the law would be to cover millions of people by disrupting the good insurance that millions of people already have.”​

Some of the other labor complaints are the same ones that conservative critics lodge — Obamacare is chock full of taxes and fees that will make insurance more expensive. They also worry about a “Cadillac tax” — a tax on the most generous insurance plans starting in 2018 that may affect some unions’ health coverage. The idea is to encourage smarter utilization of health care, but the unions fear it will just erode benefits.​

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Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/questions-about-unions-obamacare-96738.html#ixzz2fHaS0YgA​

 

They want the workers enrolled in multiemployer plans to be eligible for the tax credits that the law provides to low- and moderate-income people buying their own insurance on the exchanges.​

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That would make those plans doubly attractive to employers and employees because they would benefit not only from the tax breaks given to regular employer insurance — but also government subsidies to employees.​

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They say the White House has bent other rules — like when it pushed off until 2015 the requirement that large employers provide insurance or pay a penalty.​

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But the union plans are just a poor fit for the structure of Obamacare, which in general tries to preserve the existing large-employer market, which the labor plans are part of. The health law focuses on the individual market for people who don’t get covered through a job, and on small businesses.​

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“It’s one thing to bend the rules, and it’s another thing to completely restructure the statute,” Jost said. “And I don’t see they can do that administratively.” In other words — Jost’s view is that Congress would have to step in and change the rules and give more money to subsidize union members in health plans that are already getting tax breaks. And that’s not a very likely scenario.​

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The unions also don’t like that Obamacare imposes penalties on larger employers that don’t provide health benefits to employees who work more than 30 hours a week, because that puts pressure on businesses to cut hours.​

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Schlittner said they support the Part-Time Worker Bill of Rights that would keep pressure on all employers to provide insurance by pro-rating the penalties for part-time employees.​

The unions also don’t want to pay various taxes and fees that all insurers must pay to fund Obamacare.​

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What does the Obama administration say?​

At this point, not a whole lot, other than to say that multiemployer plans have not been singled out for some special torment in Obamacare. They also say officials are working on smoothing out problem issues where possible.​

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“There is nothing in the Affordable Care Act that changes the law for multiemployer (Taft-Hartley) plans,” an administration official told POLITICO in an email. “We are committed to making the law work to make health care more effective and affordable for all Americans, including those covered by multiemployer plans.”​

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News reports said the administration tried to get the AFL-CIO to stop or soften the resolution passed in Los Angeles on Wednesday night. That failed — although the unions didn’t go so far as to call for repeal.​

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What do Republicans say?​

That one’s easy too. They don’t want “special treatment” for unions — but they like watching the traditionally bedrock Democratic constituency gripe about the president’s crowning domestic achievement.​

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As the complaints began a few months ago, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and other Republicans beseeched unions to find common cause in the Obamacare repeal effort — but with a few exceptions, the unions have chosen not to go that route.​

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And even if the administration isn’t signaling that it’s going to respond to union demands — Republicans are moving to preempt any such accommodation.​

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Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) has introduced the Union Bailout Prevention Act and filed it as an amendment to the energy bill the Senate is debating. By Thursday, he had 10 co-sponsors.​

“The Republicans are perfectly happy to crow about how the unions hate the law too, but hell will freeze over before they agree to do” anything legislatively to address their concerns, Jost said.​

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Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/questions-about-unions-obamacare-96738_Page2.html#ixzz2fHbJRxmo​

 

See? I can cut-and-paste, too! But, I'd like to know your opinion WHY the unions are turning against Obamacare. Could you please give your opinion WHY?

 

And again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!