http:\/\/spectator.org\/archives\/2010\/03\/29\/obama-in-rude-denial<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\u201cBut fear not, America,\u201d Rep. Price continues. \u201cHouse Democrats are preparing to punish and intimidate the Unbelievers with a public flogging next month.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, has summoned some of the executives to Capitol Hill to defend their assessment that the new law will cost their companies hundreds of millions of dollars in health insurance expenses. Rep. Waxman is also demanding company documents related to health care finances, a move one committee Republican describes to Byron York of the Washington Examiner as \u201can attempt to intimidate and silence opponents of the Democrats\u2019 flawed health care reform legislation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last Thursday and Friday, the companies — so far, they include AT&T, Verizon, Caterpillar, John Deere, Valero Energy, AK Steel and 3M — said a tax provision in the new health care law will make it far more expensive to provide prescription drug coverage to their retired employees.<\/p>\n
The news \u201cis an embarrassment for Democrats … not exactly what Democrats want to hear in the days after their historic victory,\u201d The Examiner reports.<\/p>\n
So Democratic enforcer Waxman has ordered the executives to explain themselves at an April 21 hearing before the Energy and Commerce Committee\u2019s investigative subcommittee.<\/p>\n
Rep. Waxman\u2019s letter suggests he does not believe the companies\u2019 analyses. \u201cThe new law is designed to expand coverage and bring down costs, so your assertions are a matter of concern,\u201d Waxman wrote to Randall Stephenson, chairman and CEO of AT&T. The companies\u2019 decisions, Waxman wrote, \u201cappear to conflict with independent analyses.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIndependent,\u201d as in \u201cwhat we told the Congressional Budget Office to say\u201d?<\/p>\n
Rep. Waxman\u2019s letters request internal financial documents document that \u201cthe executives will undoubtedly view … as confidential,\u201d The Examiner reports. \u201cBut if they fail to give Waxman everything he wants, they run the risk of subpoenas and threats from the chairman. And all as punishment for making a business decision in light of a new tax situation.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cApparently, these evil employers are conspiring together to make the Democrats look bad and trash the liberal utopian vision of universal health care,\u201d comments Rep. Price, with a measure of Republican sarcasm. \u201cThey clearly should have ignored their duty to their employees and their shareholders, kept quiet about the impending tax hikes and changes to insurance options, and sent the Democrats a nice thank you letter for taking over the health care system.\u201d<\/p>\n
In fact, there\u2019s some evidence the Democrats really are surprised — that (as Republicans consistently warned) they never really read and comprehended what was in their nearly 3,000-page law.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost of these people (in the administration) have never had a real job in their lives,\u201d a senior lobbyist for one of the firms told the American Spectator over the weekend. \u201cThey don\u2019t understand a thing about business, and that includes the President. My CEO sat with the President over lunch with two other CEOs, and each of them tried to explain to the President what this bill would do to our companies and the economy in general. First the President didn\u2019t understand what they were talking about. Then he basically told my boss he was lying. Frankly my boss was embarrassed for him; he clearly had not been briefed and didn\u2019t know what was in the bill.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Friday White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett were calling the CEOs and Washington office heads of the companies that took the financial hits and attacking them for going public — despite the fact corporate CEOs are generally held to have some legal obligation to inform stockholders of anticipated financial bad news.<\/p>\n
One Washington office head said the White House calls were accusatory and \u201cdownright rude,\u201d the Spectator reports.<\/p>\n
The companies are taking the charges because in 2013 they will lose a tax deduction on tax-free government subsidies they have had when they give retirees a Medicare Part D prescription-drug reimbursement. Many of these companies have more than 100,000 retirees each. AT&T may have more than three-quarters of a million retirees.<\/p>\n
Neither Rep. Waxman nor Rep. Bart Stupak, chairman of the Oversight and Investigations panel, had anything more than a cursory understanding of how the many sections of the bill would impact business or even individuals before they voted on the thing, one House Energy Democratic staffer tells the magazine.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had memos on these issues, but none of our people, we think, looked at them,\u201d says the staffer. \u201cWhen they saw the stories last week about the charges some of the companies were taking, they were genuinely surprised and assumed that the companies were just doing this to embarrass them.\u00caThey really believed this bill would immediately lower costs. They just didn\u2019t understand what they were voting on.\u201d<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s only just begun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
During the week following the Democratic enactment of \u201cPart One\u201d of Barack Obama\u2019s federal takeover of American medicine (\u201cPart Two\u201d will come after \u201cPart One\u201d has bankrupted or nationalized most private health insurance providers — the Democrats will blame the failures on \u201cgreed\u201d), \u201cnumerous companies have announced that they expect their taxes to increase, earnings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-medicine"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-7D","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=473"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":474,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions\/474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}