'Obamacare' mandate delay will cost $12 billion, affect 1 million workers

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's decision to delay implementation of part of his healthcare reform law will cost $12 billion and leave a million fewer Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance in 2014, congressional researchers said Tuesday.

The report by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office is the first authoritative estimate of the human and fiscal cost from the administration's unexpected one-year delay announced July 2 of the employer mandate - a requirement for larger businesses to provide health coverage for their workers or pay a penalty.

The analysts said the delay will add to the cost of "Obamacare's" insurance-coverage provisions over the next 10 years. Penalties paid by employers would be lower and more individuals who otherwise might have had employer coverage will need federal insurance subsidies.

"Of those who would otherwise have obtained employment-based coverage, roughly half will be uninsured (in 2014)," CBO said in a July 30 letter to Representative Paul Ryan, Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Budget Committee.

Under Obama's healthcare reform law, employers with 50 or more full-time workers were supposed to provide healthcare coverage or incur penalties beginning January 1. But the requirement will now begin in 2015.

The delay intensified doubts about the administration's ability to implement Obama's signature domestic policy achievement and stirred Republican calls for a similar delay in another Obamacare mandate that requires most individuals to have health insurance in 2014.

Via: Yahoo

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Nancy Pelosi: Obama most ‘non-partisan’ president ever to serve in White House

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi may have finally fallen completely off her rocker Tuesday as she commended the President and her fellow Democrats in Congress for propelling the Left into a “bipartisan, cooperative alternative” party.

The 73-year-old California Democrat seemed to fan-girl over President Obama during a meeting with USA Today’s editorial board Tuesday, calling him “one of the most practically non-partisans I have seen in the White House.” It seems the Commander-in-Chief has earned this special place in Pelosi’s heart by his apparent willingness to work with Republicans to thwart yet another upcoming fiscal crisis.

In fact, Pelosi, who is the most well-known leader on Capitol Hillaccording to a Gallup poll from April, believes that the GOP is solely to blame for all the bickering in Washington – something which they’re doing solely for political gain.

“Nothing deters voting more than confusing, ‘a pox on both your houses,’ and that confusion is one of the successes of the Republican Party, to make it look equivalent in terms of who is holding up jobs,” she told the board. “It’s not equivalent, and we have to make that clear to the American people.”

Pelosi seems to have forgotten some of her own shining moments in which she scorned House Republicans. Just a few weeks ago she threw a tantrum on the House floor, yelling ”Poverty!” repeatedly at her more conservative colleagues while debating the chamber’s farm bill. She has also laughed at New York Rep. King for considering a bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, and called her successor, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) the “weakest speaker in history.”

Via: Red Alert

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Obama: ‘Economy Would Be Much Better Off’ With More Government Workers

(CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama – citing the job losses since he took office -- said “the economy would be much better off,” unemployment would be 6.5 percent and the national deficit would be in decline if there were more federal, state and local government workers.

“If those layoffs had not happened, if public sector employees grew like they did in the past two recessions, the unemployment rate would be 6.5 instead of 7.5,” Obama said. “Our economy would be much better off, and the deficit would still be going down because we would be getting more tax revenue.”

Obama spoke Tuesday at the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Chattanooga, Tenn., where he promoted plans he said would help the middle class such as corporate tax reform, increased federal spending on infrastructure, more education spending, public-private partnerships and rolling back the sequester.

“Instead of using a scalpel to get rid of programs we don’t need and keep vital investments that we do, the same group has kept in place this meat cleaver called the sequester that is just slashing all kinds of investments in education and research and our military,” Obama said.

“Yet all the things that are needed to make this country a magnet for good middle class jobs, those things are being cut. These moves don’t just hurt our economy in the long term. They hurt our middle class right now,” he added.

Via: CNS News

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