Archive for September 23rd, 2009

What if folks who don’t have health insurance just don’t want it?

September 23, 2009

Excerpted from NY Post, ObamaCare: Losing everyone, Sept 21, 2009

The latest data from Scott Rasmussen’s poll of those who lack health insurance indicates that they’re starting to turn skeptical about the Obama plan. It’s supposed to help them, yet they back ObamaCare by only 58 percent to 35 percent — and only 30 percent support it strongly.

More to the point, only 35 percent feel it will improve the quality of their health care — and, by 41-26, they feel the cost of their care will go up, not down, under the plan.

Having the uninsured — the stated object of Obama’s compassion — turn against his reform would be the most lethal cut of all.

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Requiring everyone to buy insurance will impose a massive tax on all who now are uninsured. The Congressional Budget Office projects that it would force the middle-income uninsured to pay on average more than 15 percent of their income.

CBO estimates that … an individual earning $32,400 a year would have to pay $4,100 in premiums before getting any subsidy.

With deductibles and co-payments, he’d have to shell out $5,600 a year, or 17.3 percent of his income.

A family of four, making $80,000 a year, would have to pay about $10,500 in premiums alone — with deductibles and co-payments, up to $15,000 or just under 20 percent of income.

And if they don’t buy insurance, they’ll face federal fines that begin to approach these same premium levels. They won’t be able to buy what they truly need — catastrophic-only coverage at a lower premium — that won’t satisfy ObamaCare’s “minimum insurance” mandate.

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Full article:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/obamacare_losing_everyone_GMoSJylS0ZJLsQAtWEVKyN

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Posted in Health Care / Medical Insurance | Leave a Comment »

The experience gap: have any Presidential advisers run a business … or, for that matter, held a real job?

September 23, 2009

Excerpted from RCP, Saving A Million Jobs at $787,000 Per Job, September 14, 2009

The White House Council of Economic Advisers is lead by three presidential appointees. Currently, these are Christina Romer, Austan Goolsbee, and Cecilia Rouse.

According to their biographies on the Council web site, these people have never held jobs outside of academia. Their positions at Princeton, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago were protected by lifetime tenure. Unemployment, to them, is a theory that cannot become a personal reality. What in their backgrounds makes them experts on the subject of job creation?

  • They never had to meet a payroll.
  • They never had to raise money to fund their businesses from skeptical investors.
  • They never bet their life savings on their own business judgment. They never had to scramble to pay off a banker who called in a loan.
  • They never had to decide whether to take a calculated risk to expand their workforce hoping to take market share from a fierce competitor.
  • They never had to make a judgment call on whether or not to launch an unproven new product.
  • They never had to manage a reduction in force, explaining to employees that their jobs have been eliminated because the tax and regulatory burdens imposed by some new law forced them to cut costs.
  • They never lost business to a government-subsidized competitor whose cost of capital was vastly lower than theirs.
  • They never had to grease the palms of politicians offering constituent services to resolve a bureaucratic hangup caused by the labyrinthine government approvals these selfsame politicians inflict on many businesses.
  • They never had to deal with a missed sales forecast caused by an economy so roiled by capricious and uncertain fiscal policy that frightened customers were holding back orders.
  • They never had to deal with a key supplier that unexpectedly went bankrupt because their source of credit dried up as dollars got sucked out of the commercial economy into government debt.
  • They never had to negotiate with angry landlords after being forced to shut down a business destroyed by spurious mass-manufactured class action lawsuits.
  • They never had to stand up in front of disappointed investors to explain why they lost money that had been entrusted to them.
  • And you can be sure that none of them ever fell on their face and had to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and decide whether it was worth going through all of the joys described above to take another shot at building a business from scratch.

They are prize winning experts in macroeconomics. They are ambitious, articulate, well connected, and brilliant.

But, what qualifies these people to work as high level apparatchiks of a governing class determined to manage the businesses of others?

Long after these experts return to their sinecures in academia to train another generation of economists on the wisdom of central planning and Keynesian pump priming, it’s we and our children and our grandchildren who will be paying the price.

Full article:
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2009/09/14/saving_one_million_jobs_at_787000_per_job_97404.html

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Posted in Obama Administration | Leave a Comment »

Wanna know what cyber-folks are saying about you? Try Google Alerts.

September 23, 2009

Stumbled on an interesting web tool :

Google Alerts notifies you via email when your name shows up on the Web, and it provides links to the reference sites so you can see exactly what’s being said.

It’s a great way to stay on top of all cyberspace references to your name.

You can receive alerts in real time or in daily or weekly digests.

Register  alerts at www.google.com/alerts

To improve search accuracy,   put your name in quotes (e.g., “ken homa”) when you establish your alerts.

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Google Alerts aren’t restricted to your name and personal info.

You can to track Web postings related to your area of expertise, (e.g. marketing strategy”), sports teams (“chicago bears”), professional contacts (“warren buffett”), etc.

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For other Web and Tweet tracking tools:
http://www.marketingprofs.com/9/tools-tracking-measuring-evaluating-personal-brand-online-arruda.asp?adref=znnpbsc4499

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Posted in Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment »