No. of Recommendations: 3
One reason I dislike the democrat party as I do is because so much of what it is, what it does and how it communicates is based on bad faith. Not merely stretching the truth, but in outright lying, deception and distortion: it's very hard to respect an entity that purports to want to benefit society but in reality exists merely to reward its insiders and cronies.
Which brings us to Obamacare. It's long been known that it was designed to eventually make health care so expensive there would be no choice but to turn the thing over to the federal government to run...but now new wrinkles on other "problems" the ACA was designed to "solve" are coming to light.
Many of us on the right have posted about blue cities buying votes with unaffordable retirement pledges to the public sector unions over the years. The unions get blue city democrats elected and the unions expect the democrats to funnel taxpayer money into lavish benefit packages for their members.
Works great! Until the bills come due.
Enter Rahm Emmanuel. After he took over as Mayor of Chicago, 'ol Rahm found himself with a problem: A ballooning budget deficit in the form of retiree health care. Large unfunded liabilities of the sort that ended up killing GM in 2008. Hmm. What to do?
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-obamacare-blue-cit...Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago was scrambling to close a $369 million deficit in 2013. The inception of ObamaCare offered an enticing target for cost shaving: retiree health coverage.
The city expected to spend $194 million that year subsidizing health insurance for its retirees, many of whom were too young to qualify for Medicare. Such costs were projected to increase to $540 million by 2023 at the same time as pension payments were ballooning. While courts in Illinois and other states have held that public employee pensions are legally protected, governments have more latitude to make changes to medical benefits.Whoa. $369M heading to north of $540M in 10 years is no joke. Fortunately, Rahm knew just where to dump-, er, "service" the city of Chicago's obligations:
So Mr. Emanuel dumped his city’s retirees onto the nascent ObamaCare exchanges, where federal subsidies can reduce premium payments. Voilà, Chicago’s $2.1 billion unfunded retiree healthcare liability vanished. Now U.S. taxpayers pick up the tab for Chicago’s retirees in their 50s and early 60s.
Chicago isn’t alone in trying this neat fiscal trick. Detroit, Stockton, Calif., and San Bernardino, Calif., also saved billions by shifting pre-Medicare retirees to ObamaCare when they filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in the 2010s. That minimized cuts to workers’ compensation and pensions. Detroit’s $170 million annual retiree healthcare bill made up nearly 20% of its general fund budget, one of the city’s biggest costs.
Other municipalities may move retirees to ObamaCare to avoid layoffs and tax hikes.What a great solution! Take your years of corrupt vote-buying and pass the cost on to the rest of the taxpayers. A scheme that worked great - and was helped along by the COVID-era "let's help people afford health insurance" (but was in reality a mere smokescreen for this stuff) - until the democrats tried to blackmail the Republicans:
The reality is that extending the sweetened subsidies will encourage more states and cities to follow the lead of Chicago, shifting the healthcare costs of their young retirees to national taxpayers. It’s a backdoor bailout.
Governments across the country are staring down large deficits as their labor costs and retirement obligations balloon at the same time as federal Covid dollars are drying up. Public employees in many places can retire in their 50s or early 60s with relatively generous pensions and subsidized health insurance until they become eligible for Medicare.
Yet few governments have set aside money to pay for their retirees’ future healthcare costs. The Reason Foundation reports that state and local governments faced $958 billion in retiree medical obligations in 2023, about $2,900 per American. The liabilities are largest in blue states like New York ($15,017 per capita), New Jersey ($10,599) and Connecticut ($6,657), which let workers retire early with generous health benefits.And
Unions could do the math. The annual premium for retirees over 50 on an ObamaCare plan can run upward of $15,000 for a single and $30,000 for a couple. Before Democrats sweetened the subsidies in 2021, government retirees with bigger pensions who were dropped onto ObamaCare would have had to pay their full premium cost. Heaven forefend, this might have pushed them to work longer.So there you have it. Part of this latest exercise in democrat party bad faith was to keep their back door bailout scam afloat.
And the democrats were willing to let little kids starve and have air travel ground to a halt to get it.
The democrat party doesn't work for the United States. It works for its own craven, corrupt interests. And it's willing to destroy large swaths of the US to serve those interests.
