Saturday, September 13, 2014

Obamacare Tragedy Watch: Arizona Byways

Update 10/7:

Welcome Arizonans! I'm not sure what's driving you all here on this of all particular days but I'm glad to have you. Fans of Arizona conservatives might like to check out my series on the soon-to-retire Tom Horne, who has given me endless delight.
There's something terribly wrong with the editing of this video from GOP TV Clips, especially in its later parts when humble Joe Higgins the suffering family man, whose insurance premiums have doubled thanks to Obamacare, is off screen. But I'm not technically prepared to say what it is. What I am prepared to say...

What I am prepared to say is that the office under discussion is the Quality of Life Medical Center in Tucson, a pretty large-scale clinic/research outfit/weight-loss program/etc. shop, and that the unhappy employee complaining about how Obamacare has more than doubled his insurance premiums isn't just any old Joe Higgins but The Joe Higgins, COO and CEO of the company along with five other businesses—


—the last of which is a Tucson rightwing gabfest of which he is a co-host. So I'm sorry if his premiums went up but (a) not too sorry, (b) very doubtful he's telling the truth about anything here, and (c) certain whatever it is has no connection whatever to Obamacare unless he was enrolled in some fraudulent plan that has been canceled because it is now illegal.

Joe Higgins's premium of slightly under $1200 a month for a family of four isn't very expensive, either, for the CEO of five major companies. He should be ashamed of being so stingy with his family. It's a lot more, for sure, than he'd be paying with an Obamacare plan if his income was $50,000 (about $282 a month for the second-cheapest Silver corresponding to as much as $1200 unsubsidized, depending on the state), but substantially less than my boss and I pay for my far from wealthy family of four with a pretty good but far from Cadillac employer-sponsored Blue Cross plan (the Cadillac premium, on which a union-busting excise tax will be charged starting in 2018, starts at around $2300 monthly).

Oh, my employer has to pay for most of that (and both of us wish we could get some of that Obamacare action, but all the "moderates" said we couldn't have a universal system)! Forgot all about it! What Joe Higgins has done here, if there's any truth at all to what he's saying, which is not necessarily the case, is taken the 55 employees at QLMC off normal employer-sponsored health insurance and thrown them into Obamacare, illegally (but he doesn't have to pay a fine until 2015-16, of course, because Obama has delayed the implementation of the employer mandate—and I'll bet he's howled at Obama on his radio show for "breaking the law" in that case, even as he makes a handsome profit on it), just to make a buck of extorted rent. And then he has the ironclad balls to complain about it.

He's really a lying dick, in short, Reince, and your ill-informed Tweet compounds the error, and if that's all you've got you're going to have to try a lot harder.

More assertive-looking in his CEO glasses.

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