Posted on 02/25/2014 4:37:40 AM PST by LD Jackson
Here is a flashback for you. On December 23, 2013, I wrote about ObamaCare had a surprise in store for New Year's Day, 2014. There was a planned cut of 14% to the funds that help provide home health services to patients who do not go to the hospital. As it turns out, not only is that 14% cut a reality, but Kathleen Sebelius has doubled down on the cuts, to the tune of causing a 40% reduction in the amount of services home health providers will be able to supply. I would wonder what she is up to, if it were not so plain. And to think, the Obama administration, including Kathleen Sebelius, has the audacity to claim there are no job losses coming about as a result of ObamaCare. Do tell!
Fox News - Discussing the impact of ObamaCare on jobs, she said last week in Orlando, “There is absolutely no evidence and every economist will tell you this, that there is any job loss related to the Affordable Care Act."You see, the firms that provide home health services are just like any other small business. They have no choice but to make ends meet. If they are not profitable, they have to close the doors. Cutting 14% of their payments from Medicare is causing 40% of these businesses to go into the red. Unlike the federal government, who robs Peter to pay Paul and stays consistently in the red, home health providers have to stay in the black. If they do not, they can not operate for an extended period of time. The only options they have are to lay off employees or close their doors entirely.But Sebelius herself, using discretion granted her by the Affordable Care Act, cut the maximum allowed by law from home health care funds. The cuts were deep enough that officials offered a damaging prediction of the impact saying, it was estimated that approximately 40 percent of providers would have negative margins.
And companies with negative margins don't last long -- or have to cut workers.
Dan Weber, head of the Association of Mature American Citizens, says "forty percent will be put into the red and anyone who has a brain in their skull knows that they're going to have to cut jobs and reduce services in order to make up the money."
In fact, those cuts put in jeopardy 498,000 jobs of home health care workers who work just for that 40 percent of firms that will be forced into the red.
Home health providers supply an important service to the elder members of our society. Many of them have no desire to go to the hospital, especially when they can receive the care they need at home. That is important, to them and to their families. We now know that 40% of the businesses who provide these services will be forced to lay off employees or close their doors. The job losses may not be calculable, but as the quote from Fox News implies, 498,000 jobs are in danger of going down the drain of ObamaCare.
All the while, we are told ObamaCare is the greatest thing the government has ever came up with. Its praises are constantly praised by the liberals and their friends in the media. No matter how much proof we have to the contrary, our concerns are falling on deaf ears. We are told we are fear mongering and trying to stir up people against the federal government. We are labeled as someone who is against the poor receiving the health care they need. Except it is ObamaCare itself that is causing these problems, not those of us who are trying to tell the rest of America what it is really doing.
The proof really is in the pudding and the pudding of ObamaCare is becoming blacker every day.
“498,000 jobs are in danger of going down the drain of ObamaCare.”
The jobs frankly are a secondary issue. Removing home health care from the equation forces people into costly hospital care, assuming it is even covered. So what happens, individuals get warehoused in hospitals charging multiple thousands per day for beds which costs could be greatly reduced with home care.
Sebelious would be have been a hero sixty years ago in the Third Reich.
Amen!
You have a good point. The loss of the home health services is probably the real tragedy of these cuts.
This sounds like the Regime targeting a segment of the population that it wants to reduce in size.
IIRC, home health care servers were part of moving people from welfare to work...
part of "Contract with America" that Clinton took credit for?????
Somebody has to pay for the free care given to aids patients, free abortions, free sex ‘change’ operations, and free euthanisia.
Euthanasia: that’s what its about————The Final Solution.
If you like your grandmother, you can keep your grandmother....
40% cuts in home health care but no cuts in welfare, food stamps, Section 8 housing, cell phones, on and on.
The AARP would never support a program destined to hurt it’s memership so severly and so broadly. Oh wait, they did didn’t they.
My child is getting out of home health.... More’s the shame. These idiots in the government penalize hospitals if there is a readmission within thirty days. But to make sure that happens they cut home health. The wages aren’t all that good. The nurses and others who provide home care are leaving in droves. I guess if you ever need time at home you will have to figure it out yourself
Not all home health patients are elderly. There are many who have been discharged (sometimes too early in a medical sense) because the hospital and doctor can no longer ‘justify’ the stay. Since home health is available (and it is declining fast), the outcomes are not good. Wounds don’t heal. People end up back in the hospital and the vicious circle continues
But I think that the hospitals are penalized for re-admitting people with the same problems.
Home healthcare worker will be limited to only giving “the pill” that the elderly would be better off taking. /sarc off
Obama simple wants sick or older people to hurry up and die. They are thought of as refuse to the state.
I’s what this POS law is all about. Allowing a faceless, unaccountable, bureaucracy power over life and death.
Slow motion Eugenics.
If we had an opposition party that gave a damn about the middle class, we could fight this.
they are. that is the point. It is also why some hospitals are taking to listing the patient as observation only rather than an admit. Problem with that is insurance doesn’t cover most ‘observations’. O and his group of commies have royally screwed us. But it started long ago at the end of the 50s and beginning of the 60s when medicare first was enacted
Sometimes you just have to take the pill.
But what is really important is Sandra the slut Fluck gets free birth control.
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