After 14-straight electoral victories in running for Congress, Alan Mollohan’s career as a representative from West Virginia comes to an abrupt end in the wake of his vote for ObamaCare, as he’s routed in the Democratic primary by a challenger from his right.
“We’re going to do everything we can to make sure this law never, ever goes into effect,” says House Minority Leader John Boehner — as the Republicans also plan to challenge the confirmation of Donald Berwick as the new administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Newt Gingrich thinks ObamaCare can and should be repealed, but until Americans elect enough ObamaCare opponents to Congress and the White House to bring that about, he says that ObamaCare opponents (almost all of them Republicans) have a duty to use Congress’s power of the purse to deny funding and thereby thwart its implementation.
Amidst all of the various mandates and costs that ObamaCare would impose on small businesses, the administration claims that the overhauls’ small-business tax credit would be a great benefit for companies with less than 25 employees and average wages under $50,000 — but the reality is that the tax credit would shrink sharply once a company gets above just 10 workers or $25,000 in average annual wages.
A new study by Mercer (a leading consulting firm) shows that up to one-third of employers, far more than Congress had assumed, could get hit with penalties from a little-noticed provision of ObamaCare, with employers of low-income workers getting hit the hardest — thereby giving them an incentive to avoid hiring, or keeping, low-income workers.
A new study by a former head of the Congressional Budget Office says that ObamaCare would make dropping employees’ insurance the sensible choice for the employers of up to 35 million workers — with the workers’ concurrence. These workers would flood into the government-run exchanges, which would then cost about $1 trillion more than projected over the next decade — essentially doubling ObamaCare’s published price and leading to massive new debt. Once in the exchanges, workers would find that their upward economic mobility would be strongly limited by the exchanges’ extremely high effective marginal tax-rates.
In the wake of ObamaCare’s failure to provide a Medicare “doc fix” and its plans to siphon nearly $1 trillion dollars out of Medicare in the overhaul’s real first decade (2014 to 2023), 42 percent of Texas doctors are now refusing to take new Medicare patients and hundreds are opting out of Medicare altogether.