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US Congress: John Boehner STILL Can't Count (But Nancy Pelosi Is A Boss)
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So what you're saying is that there is a mandate?
They are not mandated in that they can pay a penalty instead of offering health insurance. In the same sense then, there is no individual mandate. But that is splitting semantic hairs at best.
It may well not be a strong mandate, but that is not a good argument to weaken it further.
I'm pretty sure the slice of America you actually routinely see is warping your viewpoint on how frequent this is. Household median for the US is only 53k. That wage cap actually applies to a fuck ton of people once you get outside the financial sector and even more when you get out of NYC.
My my employer, a small manufacturer, it absolutely is an effective economic requirement.
I'd have preferred Feinstein, but it'll be good to see some new blood in there.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Jungle primary + Democrats' usual capacity for organization = GOP opportunity.
Earning $1 less than 4x poverty for a family of three would cover ~67% of households and for a family of four would cover ~75% of households. (for 2010 families, I don't want to bother with looking up the new SCF versus hitting wikipedia) For individuals it'd cover 70% of earners.
Also, for employees and hours worked:
Setting the threshold at 30 hours per week the odds of screwing with people in order to drop them to 29 hours is real, but only effects a fairly small slice of the workforce. Eyeball it at 15m workers, even though people working 34 hr/wk may well not get screwed around as much as somebody working 31 hr/wk. At 40 hours per week you're talking about 70m workers, and really, damn near everyone. Hell, you don't even really need to screw with people's hours that much. Just require an hour lunch and that they clock out at 5:00. Presto, 37.5hr work week for your newly 'part-time' workforce.
Though, ultimately, I'd be fine with scrapping any employer requirement and just having a national individual system which would be a bit more akin to Switzerland's. Beef up the subsidies more and maybe provide some tax incentives for employers to give you the equivalent of an HSA contribution to spend on Healthcare.gov but ultimately just decouple healthcare from employment. Which is likely going to be where this winds up. Just in ~20 years rather than tomorrow. Sort of similar to how pensions no longer really exist.
I question the actual severity of this. My wife handled benefits for a pretty large restaurant group with thousands of employees. She was the only person pulling the data to determine their average hours per week for the years in question they had to review. It all came straight from payroll and she just had to do some extra work in Excel.
Though I think that's the first time I've seen anybody point out that the "full time" definition is intentionally different from traditional breakpoints because they don't want there to be too much determined by the 40th hour worked.
Go go Democratic messaging.
I also question just how much of an administrative hassle it is. I mean, it should just be some brand new excel/access reports but if it isn't a fucking computerized search...well I don't know where the fuck that business has been for the last 30 years.
In my experience, restaurant employees aren't very thrilled about asking them to pivot tables...
Eh, I've heard them talk about how much it would screw over workers whenever McConnell or Boehner bring it up. And really, that's mostly just because you don't really need to justify current law as it is current law. The inertia is in your favor. Republicans can snark about it all they want, but until they get a new President it doesn't really matter that much and bitching about the ACA just doesn't work in elections like it used to. Which is why it took a backseat for the midterms. I'm sure it'll be a thing for 2016, but I doubt it'll do much to return in 2018, and by 2020 everything will be implemented and mentioning it will basically be the same as bitching about welfare generally.
And, really, I'd be fine with them using the employer mandate as a bargaining chip to fix some of the drafting errors in the law and maybe do some other stuff with it. Same with the medical device tax. It isn't that essential a thing, and if they can get something good in return, well, I like things that are good.
I was making a terrible pun. Really just awful.
Oh, I think I wasn't clear. I've heard the Republican/Business grumbling over the difference but I have literally never heard anybody give any defense of it much less say "It was done intentionally because of x, y and z."
Like, I could understand it won't be a five second sound bite but even in longer form discussions I've never seen a D point out it was to avoid the destruction of the 40 hour work week.
Eh, I've seen it. But then I haven't really watched cable news since 2008 so it might just be that I'm looking at the wrong (or rather, right) outlets. Though I do wish Democrats would get back to knowing how to talk to people about that stuff, since it'd make things so much better. There's a quote from a random voter in Ken Burns' thing on FDR that really should encapsulate Democratic messaging. "He's the only President we've ever had who understands that my boss is a sonofabitch!"
30 hours has been the breakpoint for full-time/part-time benefits at both the jobs I've had post-college too - I wouldn't be surprised to find out that it's actually a common one (at least places with sane HR, since shift workers might fluctuate around 35-45 each week for instance)
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My prior employer, a staffing company whose bread-and-butter was electronics assemblers making $15-25/hr, absolutely had to deal with the employer mandate.
Saying there's no employer mandate because the mandate doesn't cover a minority of companies with particularly high-income employees is silly. It's a mandate with a significant exception, but it's still a mandate.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Any thought that 30 vs. a different number is a burden is BS, as they're tracking those people hourly anyhow, so payroll will be able pull numbers super easy (or your payroll company). Unless changing a filter is a burden.
Except that the penalty does not apply solely for the individual who wound up getting coverage through the exchange. If any-one employee gets their insurance through the exchange with a subsidy then you are fined for every-one of your FTE's. That's not a cost sharing mechanism to make up for the government outlay, it's a penalty. I mean, I guess companies could choose to only hire people under 26 and fire them on their birthday, or exclusively hire married persons and fire them in the event of divorce or their spouse losing their job, or just pay everybody $100k down to the janitor, but that seems like a rather odd argument to make.
Employers either need to offer all their FTE's insurance or pay the government for offering all their FTE's insurance. When coupled with the 'Cadillac Tax' provision only growing by CPI rather than medical cost inflation it may well reach a new equilibrium point where it's not really a mandate for group coverage so much as a tax to help fund universal exchange coverage. But that would only be the case in an inexorable future where employers were going to drop everybody from insurance anyway.
What counts as a mandate, to you or your friend? Because to myself, if the Government says "Do X or be fined", that is a mandate. It is a legal obligation with a set penalty for failure to comply.
By the sound of it, if it doesn't compel a single person to do something then it's not a mandate.
It's the biggest, goosiest pedantic argument this bored has ever had.
Coverage at 11.
California is pretty Democratic though. As long as we don't pick a Coakley, we should be just fine.
You don't understand my meaning. Because it's a jungle primary the top two vote getters in the primary are on the November ballot regardless of party affiliation. So if the Democrats are their usual selves and split the primary vote between like 18 candidates and the GOP only runs two...
... I am aware of how California votes, yes.
Also (unrelated), he was a judge here. I think we are slightly better off with him in Congress.