American companies have responded to the Democrats’ new health care entitlement the only way they can – by anticipating how much it’s going to cost them to implement:
On top of AT&T’s $1 billion, the writedown wave so far includes Deere & Co., $150 million; Caterpillar, $100 million; AK Steel, $31 million; 3M, $90 million; and Valero Energy, up to $20 million. Verizon has also warned its employees about its new higher health-care costs, and there will be many more in the coming days and weeks.
President Obama and his Democratic cronies have been saying for more than a year that the plan will save Americans money while allowing them to keep their current coverages. Those claims have been bald-faced lies from the beginning and corporate America’s reaction to the program demonstrates the central fallacy that Democrats have been peddling: that we can get something – coverage for the poor – for nothing.
Now Democrats are hacked off at these companies for having the temerity to have done an economic analysis and revealing that the emperor has no clothes:
Henry Waxman and House Democrats announced yesterday that they will haul these companies in for an April 21 hearing because their judgment “appears to conflict with independent analyses, which show that the new law will expand coverage and bring down costs.”
Jennifer Rubin says it very well in response:
this is par for the course: a complete disregard for the consequences of their own handiwork, the bullying of private enterprise, and the determination to politicize what were once economic and legal judgments. One can see in the Democrats’ fury the desperate attempt to conceal the implications of their monstrous legislation, to maintain as long as possible the fiction that ObamaCare is a great cost-saver, and boon to employers. It’s going to be hard to keep up the charade, for as the editors note, ObamaCare “was such a shoddy, jerry-rigged piece of work that the damage is coming sooner than even some critics expected.”
We shouldn’t be surprised. Liberal Democrats were dead-set on passing healthcare reform – and I do mean dead set – for one reason: It is part of their agenda to create an all-encompassing welfare state, whether voters want it or not. So they did it, without regard to the economic consequences to the people and organizations that do the real work of making America go.