Just a couple of problems
By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist
Once again, examples abound of government tinkering gone wrong. Today’s lessons are from the fields of health care and energy.
Remember when Nancy Pelosi said Congress would have to pass the bill (Obamacare) in order for us to understand what was in it? That day has come.
A number of news sources, including The Wall Street Journal, have reported recently that companies are dropping spousal coverage in their insurance plans. Why? They can save considerable costs and, interestingly, Obamacare does not require spousal coverage.
So, as the full brunt of the costs of Obamacare kick in over the coming 10 months, companies are looking at any way possible to mitigate these.
Yes, dependent children up to age 26 are required to be covered, but not spouses. In fact, in 2014, there is a $65 per covered person fee that must be paid to the government for everyone covered.
Hence, not only can the coverage be dropped according to the law, this $65 fee can be avoided.
The other incentive is that spouses tend to use more healthcare services than employees, thus costing more to cover in the first place.
According to The Wall Street Journal (MarketWatch), “…last year, 6 percent of large employers excluded spouses, up from 5 percent in 2010, as did 4 percent of huge companies with at least 20,000 employees, twice as many as in 2010, according to human resources firm Mercer.”
By the way, if you want to know what Obamacare is going to cost you, the Kaiser Family Foundation has produced a calculator: http://healthreform.kff.org/Subsidycalculator.aspx?CFID=146759486&CFTOK…
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References to problems with the other issue, energy, are also sourced from The Wall Street Journal. In the Feb. 27 edition of the Journal, it is reported that shale-rock formations of natural gas will keep prices low until at least 2040 and prices will grow only moderately after that.
We are awash in natural gas. While environmentalists scream about fracking chemicals, in truth, 99 percent of the fracking cocktail is water and sand. Small amounts of chemicals enhance the process. (You can look them up on Wikipedia, if you so desire.)
Fracking is viewed by some environmentalists as dangerous, but I suspect they are only, at best, fooling themselves, and at worst trying to fool the rest of us.
For they now have a dilemma on their hands. We are awash in natural gas and will be for a long time to come. It is cheap, burns very clean, and is widely available around the world. It does not need subsidies to be very, very competitive.
More importantly, natural gas forces solar, wind, and corn ethanol to be highly subsidized forever in order to be competitive. Highly subsidized means you and I have to keep paying for these other energy sources through taxes and federal borrowings.
The National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) in Golden, Colo., with its 1,700 engineers and scientists, has to continue to be funded. So do other national labs working on energy problems.
The Department of Energy, unnecessary in a world awash with cheap energy, wants to stay in business. The government and the environmentalists do not want the energy crises to ever be over. Hence, they will have to turn natural gas into a bad, nasty source of energy. They have no other way to fight the wonderful laws of economics.
How inconvenient that private enterprise has found an abundant and cheap source of energy.
They have another reason they don’t want natural gas to solve the energy crisis, too. For if it does, wind farms and solar panel fields will immediately become environmental cleanup sites. Solar cells are full of chemicals far worse than fracking fluids. Acres and acres of abandoned 500-foot-tall windmills with foundations 20 feet in diameter and at least 40 feet deep will be a dangerous disaster.
The government itself has a lousy track record of environmental stewardship, despite the existence of its agency, the EPA.
One only has to mention Hanford, Wash.; Rocky Flats, Colo.; Paducah, Ky.; Oak Ridge, Tenn.; and Fernald and Piketon in Ohio to realize the worst polluter in the history of our nation is the federal government itself.
Abandoned solar panel arrays and wind farms, though private, were built at the behest of and using designs approved by the feds. Their abandonment will leave the taxpayers stuck with the cleanup, a larger environmental disaster in scope than the concentrated highly toxic remnants of radiation left at the aforementioned sites.
Once again, without trying, the government, in healthcare and energy, has shown us private enterprise is far superior to government meddling. This will continue until the voters and taxpayers say enough is enough.
Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga., following decades of wandering the world, and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.