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Bill to Make it Illegal to Cut Hours to Avoid Paying Health Benefits to Get Hearing

Thursday, February 20, 2014

 – By Steve Benham, KATU: Feb 10, 2014

SALEM, Ore. – Concerns about colleges and universities cutting faculty hours to avoid paying health benefits under the new federal health care law has prompted state Sen. Michael Dembrow, D-Portland, to introduce legislation to make the practice for all Oregon employers illegal.

Senate Bill 1543 is scheduled to get a hearing before the Senate Health Care and Human Services committee today at 3:00 p.m.

Dembrow, who has taught English at the Cascade campus of Portland Community College for years, told KATU last week he’s heard “through the grapevine” and has read news reports that some community colleges “have been advised to reduce their teachers’ hours” in order to get out of paying health benefits to some employees.

Under the new health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also known as “Obamacare”), companies that employ 50 or more employees are required to provide their workers with health insurance if they work an average of 30 hours or more a week…

Our Response & Your Comments

We’ll ignore the delicious irony of colleges, probably the single biggest institutional fans of ObamaCare, slashing professors’ hours to get out of paying for…ObamaCare!

Our larger point is that laws like these are the steroids that drive government hyper-growth. Here’s why…

First they pass ObamaCare, which is 2200 pages of dizzying complexities, dazzling contradictions and unintended consequences. Now you need more laws to clean up the complexities, contradictions and, most of all, unintended consequences. Thus emerges from the swamp Dembrow’s bill.

Then the new law demands  more government to make it work. How do you prove in court that

State U cut Prof. Propellerhead’s hours to avoid paying his ObamaCare bill? Hire psychiatrists to muck about in his brain? Plus you need investigators to hunt down evidence. They need lawyers, offices and assistants. Plus you need new laws to empower the investigators and lawers. And the beat goes on and on –  as government matasaticizes at your expense.

 

 

 

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We’re Shocked! Shocked!

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Accounting Error Causes 16.2 Million Shortfall to Implement Oregon Healthcare Exchange…Before it Even Starts—Expect Millions More in Shortfall Before it is Done

State officials organizing a new health insurance exchange are planning to ask for more federal grant funding to plug a projected $16.2 million shortfall.

The shortfall stemmed from an accounting error that caused state budget and fiscal analysts to misproject when the state would use up funding from a grant to partially launch a computer system for the exchange.

Oregon’s exchange, called Cover Oregon, is an online marketplace where individuals and small business owners can comparison shop for health insurance and apply for financial assistance.

qwong@StatesmanJournal .com

Lane Solutions Responds…

We’re shocked! We just don’t believe it…a government program short $16 Million because of an “accounting error”? Has this ever happened before? Surely not for the Affordable Care Act (AKA “Obamacare”), of which Cover Oregon is a part!

What’s that, Dear Readers? You say that it has? That the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan for “uninsurables” – people with serious illnesses like cancer – has nearly run through a cool $5 Billion and needs big bucks from the states?

That Obamacare itself, originally set to cost $898 Billion over 10 years, is now projected to ring up $1.85 Trillion in costs?

But there’s no need to worry…because the government can always reach into your wallet to make up for its shortfalls, cost overruns or just plain ol’ “accounting errors.”

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