Financial topics

[aedens]

http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1721.htm lights out
http://freepatriot.org/2013/11/08/how-o ... ereotypes/
http://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/Africa/ ... tions.html

[Reality Check]

.
.
Obamacare Small Business Employees - Insurance Cancellations

Some small businesses are getting notice of insurance policy cancellations, just like their individual coverage counterparts. Other small business owners continue to wait to learn what options will be available to them through the law's online marketplaces.

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Daily-R ... ines%29%29


http://www.marketplace.org/topics/healt ... ncellation

In Arizona, Drs. Courtney and Matthew Dunn own DunnOrthodontics in central Phoenix.

It’s a small but profitable practice, which they’ve had for about seven years. They don’t have to offer health insurance, but Matthew Dunn says, they choose to.
"We’ve always offered health insurance. It was easy in the beginning because we only had one employee, now we have 13 full-time employees."

She thought they had a good plan. Their employees have used their existing plan to cover surgeries, births and emergency room visits. Dunn says she'd figured they could keep their plan, hang onto it for a year and see how the Affordable Care Act played out before jumping into the marketplace.

( Obamacare was suppose to provide a small business exchange website at the same time as the the Indivicual Exchange Market Websites, but that website is also not functioning properly, and with the delay in employer mandates, it is unclear what, if any incentives to small business would be available through the exchange if it was functioning).

On Tuesday ( Nov 5th, 2013 ), the Dunns received a letter from their health insurer, Humana. It was labeled, "Important information regarding your coverage."

It informed them that they would not be able to continue with their current medical plan in 2014 ( their employees' health insurance would be terminated in just over 45 days ) , as it did not meet all of the ACA ( Obamacare ) requirements.

The letter included information on a new Humana medical plan ( that ) did comply with the ACA's standards, but it would raise the Dunns' premiums by 60 percent.

Based on our experience at Scanning Devices Inc. a small business in Massachusetts, the cancellations are just beginning. Each year the Massachusetts minimum coverage changes, adding new coverage and cost. Our plan has been cancelled each year since "Romney-care" started in 2006, with suceeding plans offering new but rarely encountered benefits. The higher costs have driven us to high-deductible plans - higher premiums and few benefits for the healthy. Minimal coverage standards are decided by an unknown (at least to most of us) state agency. We expect that Obama-care will follow this pattern.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/healt ... ncellation


http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ ... ory_1.html

It has been a particularly rocky start for the small-business side of the exchange.

Obama administration officials this spring announced that a key cost-cutting feature meant to allow employers to choose multiple insurance plans would be delayed for a year.

Then, just days before the site was slated to launch in October, they announced that business owners would not be able to actually purchase plans online until the start of this month.

They have since pushed that deadline back to the end of November.

The result is a small-business marketplace in which employers can browse but not purchase insurance, and they still do not know exactly when the purchasing feature will be ready.

Meanwhile, some say even the browsing feature leaves a lot to be desired.

Glazier currently offers coverage to his 25 full-time employees, but his insurance company, United Healthcare, informed him this fall that his rates would jump more than 50 percent next year.

In addition, for the past three years, he has been taking advantage of a tax break for small businesses that offer health insurance.

Starting (January 1st, 2014,) next year, the credit is only available to firms that purchase plans through the new exchange, so if he does not find a plan through the government site, he will forfeit the tax break.

“It’s hard to connect, it’s slow to load, and once you finally get registered, it’s still hard to figure out exactly what the prices would be for our company,” Manor, who owns Bittersweet Catering, Cafe and Bakery, said in an interview.

“It’s all very confusing and it didn’t answer my main question — how much is it all going to cost?”

During a series of congressional hearings recently, Katherine Sebelius, head of the Department of Health and Human Services, acknowledged that using the new site “has been a miserably frustrating experience for way too many Americans” and insisted both the individual and small-business sites will be fully functional by the end of the month.

In Manor’s case, though, that would be too late.

During the first two years, only firms with fewer than 50 workers can shop for coverage on the exchanges (the limit must rise to 100 by 2016), which were designed to drive down rates by increasing competition among insurers.

However, Manor is slated to open his second restaurant on Nov. 17, just down the street from the first. In the coming week, he will have to hire another 20 or 25 workers.

If he could sign up for a plan on the exchange before eclipsing the 50-employee mark, he would be allowed to keep it as long as he wanted, no matter how large his company grows in the future. But based on the current timeline for the small-business exchange, the site will not be ready in time, and he will be stuck with his company’s current plan.
“I just wanted to see what our options would be on the exchange, and right now, I can’t.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ ... ory_1.html

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Daily-R ... ines%29%29

[aedens]

As USA Today notes, Sen. Mary Landrieu who is expected to face a tough re-election battle next year because of her support of Obama's health care law, has a long-standing commitment that will force her to miss the speech (but some political analysts suggest that the decision to skip the speech might be motivated in part by a desire to avoid images of her standing side-by-side with Obama).

[aedens]

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-seeks-turn- ... 27057.html

http://www.opensecrets.org/

[vincecate]

As long as the Fed has a fixed amount of money printing per month, then I think interest rates going up will indicate when things are going to fall apart. Higher interest rates will result in a higher velocity of money and inflation. Higher interest rates will result in lower P/E ratios, which will mean the stock market going down. If the Fed switches to the Japanese method of just printing whatever is necessary to buy as many bonds as come up for sale, then I think hyperinflation will be coming soon. Anyway, when the interest rates look like they are going up I think it is worth taking note. My guess for real trouble is 3.5% on the 10 year bonds.

bonds.gif (10.35 KiB) Viewed 2997 times

[aedens]

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hangingman.asp

Which grain of sand adding on a pile causes the collapse.

[Reality Check]

.
.
Obamacare Database Security - Breached by Organized Crime ?
.
.
The Obama administrations has been dodging questions about the lack of security in the Obamacare Website by claiming that regardless of the lack of security, they have no knowledge of anyone exploiting those "alleged lacks of security" for criminal purposes.

That may have changed:

http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1721.htm

...the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has placed a Russian national named Alexsey Belan on their “most wanted” list after it was discovered that this notorious hacker had gained access to, and still has in his possession, the private information of every single American who has, to date, registered their private data into what has been described as the Obamacare Healthcare Website System.

According to this report, Belan is alleged by the FBI to have invaded the computer networks of three major United States-based e-commerce companies in Nevada and California. After hacking the systems, Belan is accused of stealing and exporting user databases with passwords to his server. Belan also allegedly negotiated the sales of the databases.

Two US federal arrests warrants have been issued for Belan in Nevada and California. In Las Vegas, Belan is charged with obtaining information from a protected computer; possession of fifteen or more unauthorized access devices; and aggravated identity theft. In San Francisco, Belan was charged with two fraud counts and two counts of aggravated theft of identity.

The specific e-commerce systems Belan illegally gained access to, this FSB report says, are the Covered California ™ and Nevada’s Silver State Health Insurance Exchange, both of which are linked to the Obamacare HealthCare.gov website and that all are described as being “e-commerce insurance marketplaces.”

http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1721.htm
.
.

[Reality Check]

.
.
The Hidden Costs of Obamacare - Why Sh** is Happening
.
.
Funding for the projected "additional" cost of Obamacare came from a number of different budgetary sources.

The goal, when attempting to pass, Obamacare into law was to make the "additional costs" to the Federal Government appear to be below 1,000 Billion ( 1 Trillion ) over the ten year period after Obamacare was passed. This also had the additional benefit of allowing those who voted for Obamacare to "claim" the Congressional Budget Office "certified" that Obamacare reduced ( future ) federal budget deficits.

This ( making the ADDITIONAL TEN YEAR cost appear to be below $1 Trillion dollars), was done by making it appear that:

a. Just by passing Obamacare into law was going to massively cut costs in other areas of the federal government thereby ( decreasing the increase ) in federal government spending required by Obamacare.

b. State governments were going to voluntarily pickup a huge percentage of the costs of Obamacare by voluntarily picking up the vast majority of the cost of Obamacare expanding state welfare medicaid spending to cover half of the formerly uninsured that Obamacare was projected to help. This cost saving illusion was created by delaying the expansion of state Welfare Medicaid for three years, and pretending the federal government was only going to help the state's pay the state's share of the costs for the first three years of the expansion, and then states were going to pay 100% of the states share of the massively increased costs of their state welfare programs entirely, for the last four years, of the total ten ( 10 ) year federal government budgeting period ( if the states are stuck with there traditional share of the costs state welfare medicaid, beginning four years from now - as the Obamacare law says they will be - then those states which voluntarily expanded their state welfare medicaid programs will go bankrupt ).

c. Increasing the costs of private health insurance policies and increasing the percentage of healthy people who would buy these more expensive health insurance policies. Put another way, forcing people who would not even buy less expensive medical insurance policies, to buy more expensive insurance policies. The U.S. Supreme Court turned this mandate into a tax penalty and explicitly gave each citizen the right to simply pay the tax fine instead of buying insurance.

d. Massively increasing annual deductibles and co-pays, so that more of the costs of seeking health care would be shifted to the patients, thereby discouraging sick people from going to the doctor/hospital. There are no subsides to help with co-pays or annual deductibles - so this negative incentive for going to the doctor for middle income and lower income individuals with private insurance would be huge and compelling.

[Reality Check]

.
.
Over 65 Years of Age blind sided by Obamacare - Blame Game Starts

Funding for the projected "additional" cost of Obamacare came from a number of different budgetary sources.
( see the above post for details )

One of those sources of funding was:

Just by passing Obamacare into law was going to massively cut costs in other areas of the federal government thereby ( decreasing the increase ) in federal government spending required by Obamacare.

The largest part of the federal government that was cut by "just passing the Obamacare law" was the Health Care Benefits for those over 65 Years of age called Senior Citizen Medicare.

Let the blame game begin over ObamaCare’s oversights.

The nation’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealthcare ( the largest insrance company in the United States ), claims the Affordable Care Act is responsible for forcing it to boot doctors from its ( Senior Citizens over age 65 ) Medicare Advantage program that serves thousands of elderly patients in the New York metro region.

CEO Jack Larsen, under fire for separating seniors from their MDs, took out full-page ads to explain that cuts in Medicare spending forced the ­insurer’s hand.

“We are working to collaborate with a more focused network of physicians to help us provide higher quality and more affordable health care coverage to meet the needs of our members, and help them get more from their health plan benefits,” Larsen said.

The largest part of the federal government that was cut by "just passing the Obamacare law" was the Health Care Benefits for those over 65 Years of age called Senior Citizen Medicare.

Obamacare, by law, made these cuts in Federal medical benefits to those over 65 permanent by law. Anyone who wanted to restore them would instead have to increase them by adding to the federal deficit and by adding "additional spending for Medicare".

These massive cuts to medical benefits for those over 65 totaled around $500 Billion dollars ( 1/2 Trillion dollars ).

Most of these cuts were minor talking point cuts that did not add up to a hill of beans - like cutting fraud and abuse.

But two were massive cuts that would have, to a small degree already have, hurt seniors in a big way.

The smaller of the two huge cuts was eliminating the so called doc fix. This was a budgeting gimmick introduced under President Clinton where by the Medicare doctors had there payments slashed "forever" into the future to make future federal budgets appear smaller. Then after the budget was passed an emergency "doc fix" bill, off budget, would be passed to restore the payments for Medicare doctors.

The budgeting gimmick had been partially eliminated prior to passing Obamacare and the true then current cost of paying medicare doctors was included in all future budgets. Obamacare put the gimmick back in place and counted that as savings in future government spending that could be used to fund Obamacare at "no cost to the federal government".

Medicare doctors started notifying their Medicare patients that they would no longer be serving Medicare patients unless the "doc fix", and the doctors full payments, were restored.

Republicans and Democrats who had voted against Obamacare, had vowed to force those who voted for Obamacare to explain these cuts to the Seniors, but eventually everyone agreed the "Doc Fix" would be restored without the money being taken back from Obamacare, and without those who voted for Obamacare admitting they had cut Medicare. The doc fix monies that had previously been included in future budgets before it had been diverted to Obamacare, was added back into future budgets a second time time thus paying for the "Doc Fix" twice, and the money diverted to Obamacare was never paid for, those billions for Obamacare remained "free" from the Congressional Budget Offices point of view.

The largest of the cuts, was permanently ending all monies the U.S. government paid for the benefit of Seniors in the highly popular Medicare Advantage program. These massive permanent cuts were scheduled by the Obamacare law to hit long before December 31st, 2013. The sooner they took effect during the 10 year period, the more money for Obamacare they added up to on paper.

But Obama used executive orders to divert monies from other parts of the federal government to extend ( these benefits to seniors older than age 65 ) past the original cutoff date, equally importantly, past Obama's re-election date, but making clear after December 31st, 2013 there would be no more monies from the Federal Government for Medicare Advantage programs.

As a result the private insurance companies that manage these Over 65 Medicare Advantage Plans have been changing these plans so in a little over 45 days the services delivered by these plans will be massively cut, the premiums, deductibles and/or co-pays will massively increase, and or some combination of those.

One of the ways to cut costs for insurance companies, is to restrict access, or eliminate access, to certain doctors, for certain types of medical needs.

The blame game regarding over age 65 (Health Care provided to those over 65 ) is heating up between the Obama Administration, Doctors and Insurance Companies and is now starting to make national media headlines, such as the below article:

http://nypost.com/2013/11/09/blame-game ... e-debacle/

[Higgenbotham]

My guess for real trouble is 3.5% on the 10 year bonds.

You had asked us to guess this before. It wouldn't surprise me if Friday's spike in interest rates begins to weigh on the stock market as soon as next week. jc probably made a good sell even with the comeback Friday. a mentioned the hanging man which may have happened over the past 2 days. I'm not short stocks yet but looking to start shorting early next week. I had tried a couple times in the past 2-3 weeks and was too early.