A little over a year ago, a newly-minted President Obama, appeared at a highly-publicized event at the headquarters of Caterpillar, Inc. in Peoria, just after the company had laid off 22,000 workers. Obama claimed that the stimulus would allow Caterpillar “to rehire some of the folks who were just laid off.” But the president had barely left the event when the company’s CEO Jim Owens was asked if the stimulus package would be able to stop the string of layoffs at the heavy equipment manufacturer. His reply:

“I think realistically no. The truth is we’re going to have more layoffs before we start hiring again.”

This week in a letter to the leaders of the U.S. House, Caterpillar warns that Obamacare will take a huge bite out of the nation’s economy. The company’s letter says that the bill now being considered would drive up CAT’s health care costs by more than $100 million in the first year alone:

In a letter Thursday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio, Caterpillar urged lawmakers to vote against the plan “because of the substantial cost burdens it would place on our shareholders, employees and retirees.”

Caterpillar, the world’s largest construction machinery manufacturer by sales, said it’s particularly opposed to provisions in the bill that would expand Medicare taxes and mandate insurance coverage. The legislation would require nearly all companies to provide health insurance for their employees or face large fines.

Obama and the supporters of his health care bill argue that it will allow businesses which are struggling with current costs to invest their money more efficiently. Caterpillar is one company which obviously disagrees.

Illinois’ unemployment rate is 12.2 percent, two and half points higher than the national average. The additional burden of $100 million in operating costs on companies the size of Caterpillar will make it more difficult to hire back those laid-off workers. Which is exactly what 130 economists said in a letter of their own to President Obama yesterday, saying that the bill would kill jobs, not create them.

Unfortunately, letters from economists and corporations will have no impact on radical leftists such as Obama and Pelosi. The financial health of capitalists and their companies mean little to these ideologues. All they care about is their collectivist agenda.

- JP

Of all of the audacious things President Obama has said, this one defies the laws of mathematics, not to mention common sense:

Monday in Strongsville, Ohio, President Obama said that ObamaCare will reduce health insurance premiums by “3,000 percent.” Considering that a 50 percent decrease in premiums would mean that we’d be paying half as much as we now pay for health insurance and that a 100 percent decrease in premiums would mean that we’d be paying nothing for health insurance, President Obama is telling us that insurance companies will actually start paying us money to keep our health insurance.

So if you are paying $5,000 a year for your health insurance, the president wants you to believe that your insurance company will have to pay you $145,000 a year (2,900 percent multiplied by $5,000)? Not exactly. Not even remotely.

Obama is always saying things like this, and a fawning lamestream media rarely dares to challenge him. A notable exception in this case, however, is the Associated Press:

A White House press spokesman later said the president misspoke; he had meant to say annual premiums would drop by $3,000.

It could be a long wait.

“There’s no question premiums are still going to keep going up,” said Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a research clearinghouse on the health care system. “There are pieces of reform that will hopefully keep them from going up as fast. But it would be miraculous if premiums actually went down relative to where they are today.”

The statistics Obama based his claims on come from two sources. In both cases, the caveats got left out.

According to moist experts, premiums will likely keep going up even if ObamaCare passes. True, if cost controls work the way they are supposed to, annual increases would level off over time. But don’t look for a big refund check from your insurance company in the mail box any time soon.

Listening to Obama’s sweet nothings as he pitches his plan, you might be led to believe that ObamaCare would usher in a new era of “Happy Days.” Sadly, it’s likely to be more akin to “Dark Shadows.”

- JP

President Obama and House Speaker Pelosi have started trying to sell the notion that passage of their health care bill will create jobs. ObamaCare is many things, but it is by no stretch of the imagination a jobs bill:

During the health-care “summit,” Speaker Pelosi claimed that the health-care bill will create “400,000 jobs almost immediately.” There’s only one problem: That claim relies on a highly flawed study done for the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) by David Cutler, a professor of economics at Harvard, and Neeraj Sood, an associate professor of clinical pharmacy and pharmaceutical economics and policy at the University of Southern California School of Pharmacy. Cutler was a paid consultant and senior health-care adviser for the Obama presidential campaign.

Higher taxes and government controls have seldom been associated with job creation anywhere in public discourse, much less in the precincts of academic economists. Yet Cutler and Sood managed to turn health-care reform into a job creator. How? By making guesses about health-care cost savings and then translating those guesses into estimates of job creation.

In order to answer numbers with numbers, the Americans for Tax Reform Foundation asked the Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University in Boston to review the Cutler-Sood findings for their economic credibility. What BHI discovered is that Cutler and Sood ignored the cost effects rigorously estimated by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in favor of estimates derived via their own (as Cutler put it) “less formal” methodology — i.e., extrapolating from anecdotes.

What if we choose to believe the cost estimates of the government agencies actually responsible for passing and implementing the legislation? BHI answered this question by applying the Cutler-Sood econometric methodology to the CBO and CMS estimates of cost effects. And voilà! Instead of creating 250,000 to 400,000 jobs per year over the next decade, Obamacare will cost Americans 120,000 to 700,000 jobs cumulatively by 2019.

In much the same way as climate “researchers” in the UK manipulated data to fit the conclusion they wanted to make, Cutler and Sood cooked the jobs numbers in order to help the administration and Congress misrepresent health reform as a job-creation program.

Beacon Hill and Americans for Tax Reform say the Democrats should not have gone where they went with their bogus “study.”. Health care is one of the very few sectors of the American economy to actually add jobs during the current recession. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 14.3 million — one in every eight — Americans work in health care.

If the Democrats succeed in ramming ObamaCare down our throats, they are likely to push the national unemployment rate well over 10 percent. That’s not only legislative malpractice in the name of health care reform; it’s also political suicide. Sadly, they will take a lot of good and dedicated health care professionals down with them when they go.

- JP

According to a survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine, nearly a third of all doctors may stop practicing medicine if ObamaCare is enacted:

The survey, which was conducted by the Medicus Firm, a leading physician search and consulting firm based in Atlanta and Dallas, found that a majority of physicians said health-care reform would cause the quality of American medical care to “deteriorate” and it could be the “final straw” that sends a sizeable number of doctors out of medicine.

More than 29 percent (29.2) percent of the nearly 1,200 doctors who responded to the survey said they would quit the profession or retire early if health reform legislation becomes law. If a public option were included in the legislation, as several liberal Senators have indicated they would like, the number would jump to 45.7 percent.

The medical journal published the results in its March and April edition, saying: “While a sudden loss of half of the nations physicians seems unlikely, a very dramatic decrease in the physician workforce could become a reality as an unexpected side effect of health reform.”

Kevin Perpetua, managing partner for the Medicus Firm, reported that a reform bill could be “the final straw” in an already financially precarious industry.

“We’re sorry. The doctor is not in. He’s getting a law degree so he can make a living…”

A doctor shortage is just another effect of the radical leftist Obama-Pelosi-Reid troika’s determination to make the United States another failed socialist state. As per the law of supply and demand, fewer physicians will mean less supply, more demand and higher prices for medical services. It will also result in the long lines of people waiting for medical treatment that we have seen in other socialist states. Rationed health care will be a reality.

More hope and change, anyone?

- JP

Candidate Obama campaigned on a platform of Hope and Change, pledging that his administration would usher in “an unprecedented level of openness in government.” But like so many other Obama’s promises, it was all “just words.” As it turns out, the Obama Administration is concealing information at nearly twice the rate of its predecessor, the administration of George W. Bush. The federal government under President Obama has increased the use of legal exemptions to keep records secret:

An Associated Press review of Freedom of Information Act reports filed by 17 major agencies found that the use of nearly every one of the law’s nine exemptions to withhold information from the public rose in fiscal year 2009, which ended last October.

Among the most frequently used exemptions: one that lets the government hide records that detail its internal decision-making. Obama specifically directed agencies to stop using that exemption so frequently, but that directive appears to have been widely ignored.

Major agencies cited that exemption at least 70,779 times during the 2009 budget year, up from 47,395 times during President George W. Bush’s final full budget year, according to annual FOIA reports filed by federal agencies. Obama was president for nine months in the 2009 period.

AP’s analysis is not the only one which exposes the Obama hypocrisy on government transparency:

Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday that the Obama administration has “delivered” on its promise to make government more transparent, but a new study released the same day concludes the Obama administration is “falling short” of its promise.

“This past year has brought a shift in the way our entire federal government operates,” Holder said as he commemorated “National Sunshine Week,” which celebrates open government and freedom of information. “It’s also signaled the emergence of a government that’s striving to work more openly and more effectively for the people it serves.”

In January 2009, on his first full day in office, President Obama issued an executive order promising a “new standard of openness,” and two months later Holder, picked by President Obama to lead that effort, issued a government-wide memorandum “ordering a change in the way we approach, release and disseminate information,” as Holder put it Monday.

“I asked that we make openness the default, not the exception,” Holder told a crowd gathered inside the Justice Department.

But only “a minority” of federal agencies have responded to those actions with “concrete changes,” according to a new report by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

A recent poll found that Americans believe that the federal government is as secretive as ever, despite the high-minded rhetoric about openness and transparency from Obama and Holder:

A new survey of 1,001 adult residents of the United States found that 70 percent believe that the federal government is either “very secretive” or “somewhat secretive.” The largest portion of respondents, 44 percent, said it is “very secretive.”

That matches the worst rating the federal government received during the final year of George W. Bush’s presidency.

The poll is part of a five-year series of studies into public attitudes toward government openness commissioned by the American Society of News Editors. It was conducted by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University. The latest survey is being released Sunday, the beginning of National Sunshine Week.

The survey also found that people believe state and local governments tend to be much more “open and transparent” in their operations than the federal government. Only 36 percent believe their local governments are very or somewhat secretive. Forty-eight percent said the same of their state governments.

There is a wide gap between what Obama says and what his administration does. Perhaps the editors of The Washington Times summed it up best in a December editorial:

You can’t have a closed-door meeting about the need for fewer closed-door meetings and expect anyone to take you seriously. That’s like writing a memo to order fewer memos. Such folly is business as usual in the Obama White House.

- JP