I’d cleared my calendar next Wednesday to watch Henry Waxman and his fellow Congressional nitwits grill a blue-ribbon group of uber-CEO’s on FASB rules and how they apply to the increased costs that companies will incur under Obama’s cost-saving healthcare plan. (Yeah, you read that right.)
I wanted to see Waxman order the CEOs to release fraudulent financial statements and “book” some of the pie-in-the-sky cost savings that ObamaCare promises to deliver …
The hearings would have made great theater …
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Excerpted from Washington Examiner: Waxman cancels Obamacare CEO hearing, 04/14/10
Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., has cancelled the April 21 subcommittee hearing in which CEOs were to testify about Obamacare.
Waxman had called the hearing in reaction to public statements by several companies — including Verizon, AT&T, and John Deere, among others — that Obamacare would cost them hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars because it laid a new tax on their retiree health benefit payments.
Ever since the passage of the Medicare Prescription Drug benefit, the payments had been subsidized, tax-free, as a way of preventing these companies from dropping enrollees onto the Medicare rolls, where they would cost the government far more.
When Obamacare changed the tax rules, it was quite clear that this would result in huge losses, but President Obama and Democrats had failed to heed warnings to this effect in the run up to Obamacare’s passage last month.
The CEOs, required by law to be honest about earnings projections, re-stated their bottom lines in reaction to Obamacare’s passage, earning the ire of Waxman and other Democrats.
Hearings on this matter would likely have proved an embarrassment to the Democrats and helped drag out discussion of Obamacare’s unexpected ill effects.
The Homa Files 
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