Today’s couple of items were buried in the news while most people focused on the still dismal employment results for January, which were pretty much flat at 7.9%.
Upward revisions for previous months gave some spark to securities markets this morning, however, investors have nowhere else to park their funds and will pull them out instantaneously at the slightest hint of bad news. Furthermore, the jobs report doesn’t reflect those no longer looking for work because they’ve given up hope, which if added back would likely make the real unemployment rate about 12%.
The stories that caught my eye, though, both concerned health care and the new legislation.
A Fox News.com headline reads: “Global medical company lays off 100 in US, blames ObamaCare. The story goes on to report that “In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year.
Under Obamacare, Americans will be required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the IRS.”
After reading the preceding, curiosity drove me to look up the average cost of health insurance plans in the U.S. And I found that according to Statistic Brain, a group that gathers data, the average cost of Healthcare in the United States is $15,745.
So, if that input’s correct, the cost of carrying the uninsured and deadbeats costs everyone else an average of almost $5 grand more a year. Isn’t socialism terrific?
Along the same lines, also found on Fox, “London-based Smith & Nephew, a global medical technology company has laid off nearly 100 employees at its offices in Tennessee and Massachusetts and is blaming the layoffs on the medical device tax tied to ObamaCare.
The company specializes in developing orthopedic reconstruction products, has nearly 11,000 employees and operates in over 90 countries, according to its website.
I’ve mentioned this new 2.3 percent tax on medical devices before, which is expected to raise nearly $30 billion over the next decade and is applied to gross sales revenues.
Back in November, medical supply company Stryker announced it would cut 1,170 jobs, or five percent of its worldwide workforce, in anticipation of costs associated with ObamaCare while the Advanced Medical Technology Association estimates that the medical device tax could cost up to 43,000 U.S. jobs.
So, here we have two more examples of what the financial geniuses in this administration devise. And yet, while all this goes on under their noses, steadily undermining the finest medical system in the world no one in D.C. actually does anything about it at all.
Yet, as for myself I’d like to take the same approach as our legislators have and simply avoid the whole subject altogether. However, I can’t because I’ve read too much about it already and need some therapeutic help, because the whole issue’s really making me sick.
That’s it for today folks.
Adios
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