If health care legislation becomes law, those who do not comply with the mandate to buy health insurance could land in jail, according to a House Republican press release.
Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.
The American Chronicle claims this is a health care myth, but does nothing to actually refute the findings of the JCT letter. Politico also has some coverage of this.
Categories: Government Intervention · Healthcare
On Sept. 9, President Obama told Congress and Americans that illegal immigrants would not be able to receive insurance benefits under his health care bill. That promise has been broken, according to this Republican Study Committee document.
Categories: Healthcare · Immigration
The new Chariho teachers contract almost eliminates the traditional system of steps, which effectively amounted to a double raise. A contract might have, say, 12 steps, which are euphemisms for pay raises. Under this system, a teacher would graduate up to a new step with each new year of employment. Thus, the steps were a system of automatic pay raises. So when a school district speaks of “raises” that actually refers to a raise in the step, not teacher salaries themselves. In other words, a “raise” is really a raise on a raise.
Don’t you just love how government works?
When the two are combined, OSPRI President Bill Felkner found that teachers were actually receiving whopping 10.5 percent annual raises.
Click here for The Providence Journal report on this new contract and here for the Anchor Rising explanation of how the contract affects steps. Anchor Rising also has a nice tutorial on contracts here.
Categories: Contract negotiations · Municipal Government · Public Sector Contracts · Town Government
The GOP is showing that is it possible to reform health care without fattening the federal bureaucracy. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that a new GOP plan for health care reform would result in a net reduction of $68 in the federal deficit over the next decade. According to the New York Times, other highlights of the plan include:
House Republicans have come up with an answer to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, drafting an alternative health care bill that would reward states for reducing the number of uninsured, limit damages in medical malpractice lawsuits and allow small businesses to band together and buy insurance exempt from most state regulation.
….
The Republican bill differs from the Democratic measure in that it would not require people to obtain insurance or require employers to offer it. It is almost surely cheaper than the House Democrats’ bill because, unlike that proposal, it would not expand Medicaid or offer federal subsidies to low- and middle-income people to help them buy insurance. Nor would the Republican bill impose new taxes.
…
The bill would offer $50 billion in federal “incentive payments” over the next 10 years to states that reduce the cost of health insurance or the proportion of their residents who are uninsured.
The bill would also make it easier for insurers to sell insurance across state lines. Policies would be subject to laws in a company’s home state, but would be exempt from many of the consumer protection laws, rating rules and benefit mandates in other states where the company sold coverage.
Republicans would also allow small businesses to pool their insurance buying power through “association health plans,” sponsored by trade and professional associations and chambers of commerce. These plans would have “sole discretion” over what services to cover.
For more, read the CBO report is here and the House Republican Conference press release here.
Categories: Federal Budget · Healthcare
Steve Moses, our fellow for health care policy and the president of the Center for Long-Term Care Reform in Seattle, recently spoke with Patriot Games Radio about skyrocketing federal and state spending, how Medicaid is sinking states into a financial black hole, and how Social Security is being turned into a welfare program. To listen to the interview, click here.
Categories: Federal Budget · Healthcare · Medicaid · State Budget
The talking heads are all worked up over the Republican upsets in Virginia and New Jersey earlier this week. The rising conservative tide even sent ripples into the Ocean State, where a GOP leader won the mayoral race in Woonsocket.
Here is more from the current state GOP chairman, Giovanni Cicione:
Fontaine won the election by a 14.8% margin, made all the more dramatic by the fact that Woonsocket has long been a stronghold for Democrats, having most recently giving Barrack Obama a 32.2% margin of victory on the 2008 election cycle.
“To see such a dramatic swing in voter interests in a one year period is stunning,” said Cicione, “and is even more telling given that Leo is so strongly identified as a Republican, having served at State Party Chair. A win like this will certainly help put to rest any concerns about the Republican ‘brand’ in Rhode Island.”
Read the full press release here.
Some, like National Review, are taking the results in Virginia and New Jersey as signs of a grassroots, conservative uprising against big government, reminiscent of 1994. We certainly hope so.
Categories: Citizen Action
Higher education may sometimes seem like a strange parallel universe to those who live and work in the world of public policy. But this year, the State Policy Network made higher education reform the subject of two sessions at its annual conference. Their message to free-market advocates: initial legislative victories will undermined over the long term if the problems with higher education are not addressed.
In fiscal terms, spending on the public university system eats up as much as 10 percent of the budget in some states and state colleges and universities are as much havens of waste and corruption as any other public institution. Moreover, the issue is not limited to public colleges and universities. Private schools, like Brown University here in Rhode Island, are recipients of public funds as well. Brown most recently received $12 million in grants through the economic stimulus program – more than any other college or university in Rhode Island. Not the least concern is the political bias in college classrooms, which is turning the impressionable young minds of today into the left-wing activists and legislators of tomorrow.
Categories: Academia · State Budget · University Life
The Tea Party movement is all the buzz here at the State Policy Network annual conference, in Asheville, North Carolina. One speaker after another – grassroots organizers, an SPN vice president, a journalist – have all acknowledged the tectonic impact the Tea Parties have had on the political landscape. At dinner last night, Weekly Standard editor and Fox News pundit Fred Barnes suggested that the Tea Parties were at the center of a new political coalition.
The following questions emerged from these sessions: 1. What national figure will take the helm of this burgeoning movement? and 2. How can the grassroots fire be sustained over the long term? But make no mistake about it, the Tea Parties have caught the attention of the intellectual arm of the conservative movement.
Categories: Citizen Action
When asked what constitutional justification there is for federal health care reform, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office cited the Commerce Clause:
The 10th amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that the powers not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states… or to the people. But the Constitution gives Congress broad power to regulate activities that have an effect on interstate commerce. Congress has used this authority to regulate many aspects of American life, from labor relations to education to health care to agricultural production. Since virtually every aspect of the health care system has an effect on interstate commerce, the power of Congress to regulate health care is essentially unlimited.
The irony of all this – as Cato chairman Robert Levy pointed out today at the State Policy Network conference – is that Congress is not using the commerce clause for the one thing for which it was intended. The clause was intended to prevent states from imposing tariffs and other barriers to trade with other states. In terms of health care, an appropriate exercise of this power would be striking down state bans on the purchase of insurance across state lines. Of course, this one reform is absent from what President Obama and Congress are proposing.
A recent Wall Street Journal column made a similar point.
Categories: Constitution · Federalism · Healthcare
What is the worst thing you can say about the health care legislation proposed by President Obama and Congress?
This line we heard from a speaker at the State Policy Network conference today might be the best one:
What has the head and shoulder of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, the body of an iguana, and an ability to crush skyscrapers with its tail?
Now, it’s no longer godzilla, but health care reform.
I wonder what that makes the $787 billion economic stimulus program?
Categories: Healthcare
