Friday, February 7, 2020

REPORT - STATES FACE MASSIVE TRILLION DOLLAR UNFUNDED LIABILITIES ON HEALTH BENEFITS FOR RETIRED EMPLOYEES - So, then why are Dems hell bent on handing Mexico "free" healthcare??? - "The 10 Democrat candidates participating in Thursday night’s presidential debate were unanimous in their response when asked to raise their hands if their government-run health care plan would cover illegal aliens."

Watch: All Democratic Presidential Candidates Say They Would Give Health Insurance to Illegal Aliens 

By Craig Bannister | 

The 10 Democrat candidates participating in Thursday night’s presidential debate were unanimous in their response when asked to raise their hands if their government-run health care plan would cover illegal aliens.
Every candidate on stage raised his or her hand when asked:
“A lot of you have been talking about government health care plans you proposed in one form or another. This is a show of hands question and hold them up so people can see. Raise your hand if your government plan would provide coverage for undocumented immigrants.”
The 10 Democrats participating in Thursday's debate were:
  • Joe Biden,
  • Rep. Eric Swalwell,
  • Sen. Michael Bennet,
  • Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand,
  • Sen. Kamala Harris,
  • Sen. Bernie Sanders,
  • Mayor Pete Buttigieg,
  • Andrew Yang,
  • John Hickenlooper,
  • Marianne Williamson

 

Free Health Care for Illegal Aliens Could Cost American Taxpayers up to $660B a Decade

AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee
JOHN BINDER
 28 Jun 20196,634
3:35

Providing free health care for all illegal aliens living in the United States could cost American taxpayers an additional $660 billion every decade in expenses.

This week, half of the 24 Democrats running for their party’s presidential nomination confirmed that their healthcare plans would provide free health care to all illegal aliens at the expense of American taxpayers — including former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY).
Center for Immigration Studies Director of Research Steven Camarotta told Breitbart News that only rough estimates are available for what health care for illegal aliens will cost American taxpayers, and though a comprehensive study has yet to be conducted on this specific issue, taxpayers can expect to pay a “significant” amount.
“If we offered Medicaid for illegal immigrants, it is possible the costs could be over tens of billions of dollars,” Camarotta said. “However, it would depend on eligibility criteria as well as how many illegal immigrants actually sign up for program once it was offered. So while the actual costs are uncertain, the size would be significant for taxpayers.”





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Every 2020 Dem in Second Debate Supports Healthcare for Illegal Aliens




A reasonable estimate of health care for each illegal alien, Camarotta said, is about $3,000 — about half the average $6,600 that it currently costs annually for each Medicaid recipient. This assumes that a number of illegal aliens already have health insurance through employers and are afforded free health care today when they arrive to emergency rooms.
Based on this estimate, should the full 22 million illegal aliens be living in the U.S. that Yale University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have estimated there to be, providing health care for the total illegal population could cost American taxpayers about $66 billion a year.
Over a decade, based on the Yale estimate of the illegal population and assuming all sign up for free health care, this would cost American taxpayers about $660 billion.
Even if there are only 11 million illegal aliens living in the U.S., as the Pew Research Center and other analysts routinely estimate, American taxpayers would still have to pay a yearly bill of $33 billion a year to provide them all with free, subsidized health care.
Should only half of the illegal population get health care, it would cost American taxpayers about $16.5 billion a year — almost the price of what it currently costs taxpayers to provide subsidized health care to illegal aliens.
Today, Americans are forced to subsidize about $18.5 billion worth of yearly medical costs for illegal aliens living in the U.S., according to estimates by Chris Conover, formerly of the Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research at Duke University.
Nearly every Democrat running for their party’s presidential nomination has endorsed having American taxpayers pay for free health care for illegal aliens. Those who have endorsed the plan include Biden, Sanders, Gillibrand, Buttigieg, and Harris, along with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), author Marianne Williamson, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), entrepreneur Andrew Yang, and Gov. John Hickenlooper (D-CO).
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

  

California’s $215 Billion Budget Includes Health Care for Illegal Aliens

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
KATHERINE RODRIGUEZ
29 Jun 2019109
1:42

California’s Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a $215 billion budget on Thursday, which includes taxpayer-funded health care for illegal aliens.

Newsom signed the massive $214.8 billion funding bill into law, which includes a provision that would expand health care for people who are illegally in the U.S. and penalizes people who do not purchase health insurance, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The California Democrat had proposed expanding health care for illegal aliens long before he took office.
In an August 2018 interview, Newsom said he would use an executive order to give universal health care to those residing in the U.S. illegally. Once Newsom took office in January, he proposed expanding Medi-Cal, the state version of Medicaid, to illegal aliens up to 26 years old.
The plan sailed through California’s Democrat-controlled legislature, although there were concerns over how much money the state should provide for expanding Medi-Cal for low-income illegal aliens.
Newsom proposed that $98 million in the budget should go to expanding taxpayer-funded health care for illegal aliens between 19 and 25 years old, but one state Assembly bill proposed setting aside $3.4 billion to cover all illegal aliens over 19 years old.

The bill is Newsom’s first budget since he took office in January, largely helped along by a $21.5 billion surplus carrying over from his fellow Democrat, former Gov. Jerry Brown’s, administration.


Report: States Face $1 Trillion in Unfunded Liabilities


February 6, 2020 Updated: February 6, 2020
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States are facing more than $1 trillion in unfunded future liabilities related to health and life insurance benefits for their retired employees, a growing shortfall that amounts to about $3,100 for every person in the United States, according to a new report by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
ALEC, which has come under attack by left-wing advocacy groups in recent years, describes itself as “the nation’s largest nonpartisan, voluntary membership organization of state legislators, with more than 2,000 members across the nation.”
Its mission is “to discuss, develop, and disseminate model public policies that expand free markets, promote economic growth, limit the size of government, and preserve individual liberty.”
The new study, the latest in an annual series from ALEC’s Center for State Fiscal Reform, comes after critics have complained for years that cash-strapped states don’t adequately fund their retiree-related obligations, which has allowed those sums to accumulate.
Its authors say that, “in the end, government must be held accountable for its actions.” Without policy changes, these liabilities could lead to future tax increases or force cuts to core public services in states.
Making governments use “more prudent actuarial assumptions and increasing transparency prevents state governments from making impossible promises and allowing unfunded liabilities to accumulate,” the report states.
These unfunded benefit programs for retired public employees fall under a category that fiscal analysts call “other post-employment benefits,” or OPEB. OPEB excludes public pension plans but includes benefits to retired workers such as health insurance, life insurance, supplemental Medicare insurance, and more. The study examined 132 OPEB plans from fiscal 2013 to 2017, drawing on the most current Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFRs) and Actuarial Valuation Reports.
“While a trillion dollars is a rounding error in Washington, D.C., at the state level, it’s a huge threat to government programs and taxpayers,” Jonathan Williams, chief economist and executive vice president of policy at ALEC, told The Epoch Times in an interview.



Epoch Times Photo
Jonathan Williams of the American Legislative Exchange Council. (Courtesy American Legislative Exchange Council)

“Governments, if they want to spend more money on new programs, need to view OPEB liabilities as a threat, so I think there is something for both parties to like from tackling these liabilities.”
Public pensions have generally been prefunded at 80 percent in order to be considered healthy, “but now a lot of us are thinking 100 percent is better.” OPEB items, by contrast, have generally not been prefunded at all, he said.
“OPEB liabilities have flown under the radar, but they have become more visible as a result of federal accounting rule changes that force states to list them on their balance sheets,” Williams said. Even so, they have been “overshadowed” by fiscal problems in Detroit and Puerto Rico.
“Unfortunately, this new transparency has left us with these very huge liabilities,” he said.
The states with the largest OPEB liabilities are California ($166.6 billion), New Jersey ($130.4 billion), New York ($129.3 billion), Texas ($115.7 billion), and Illinois ($64.4 billion), according to the study. The states with the smallest OPEB liabilities are Nebraska and South Dakota, which Williams said are tied at zero because they don’t pay for retired employees’ health care, followed by Kansas ($285,000), Oklahoma ($9.1 million), and Utah ($210.9 million).
“There is a lot of doom and gloom in the report,” but there are also a handful of states that are doing a good job getting a handle on their OPEB liabilities, Williams said.


Leaving the Democrats
I was brought up a military brat.  My father did 22 years in the United States Air Force.  In 1954 when he joined, they promised if he made a career of it, he and his wife, my mother, would be taken care of for life.  He got out in 1976 after extending his service a couple of extra years so I would not have to switch high schools in Florida.
We moved out west after my father retired and I finished high school.  In 1978, I got a job in the wood products industry at a particleboard factory and began work a schedule that just became normal to me. seven days on, two days off, working nights, weekends, and most holidays.  I wore “save the whales” t-shirts at work.
The industry came under attack because of environmental concerns for the spotted owl.  The lumber and wood products industry in the West was decimated over the next 15-20 years.  We tried to muster support from our government, but our efforts fell on deaf ears.  Eventually after 22 years, the facility I worked at closed.  The ability to do what we did, which was to recycle sawdust and discarded wood into a usable product, became too expensive as we had to go further and further away for our raw materials.  The logging industry was gone because of environmentalism and government policies to put animal concerns ahead of humans.
The spotted owl (the Mexican spotted owl in the southwest) was noted later on to be mating with other ‘species’ of owls.
It occurred to me if they can call an owl of a different color another species, then this should be applied to humans.  By a definition of species, we are all our own species based on external color, size and shape, etc..  Why were we not being looked after by our government in our lives?  We paid taxes and worked our butts off, only to be told we were killing the planet.  Where was the Human Protective Agency?  Why was I paying taxes to have the government pay bureaucrats to work against me?
In the 90s, I watched the Clintons. Bill at that time seemed to be a pragmatist but Hillary, the unelected first lady, tried to take over the healthcare system.  I saw it as a blatant power grab by an overly ambitious person in government.  By this time, we were well into the spotted owl era, and my distaste for the government sticking its nose into our lives was huge.  My save the whales t-shirts were history long before this.
Now, my parents were Roosevelt Democrats who fed on the nightly news: Huntley-Brinkley, Walter Cronkite.  That was the source for news.  In their minds, republicans were the evil ones trying to take away their VA benefits promised to them in the 50’s.  They believed the nightly news.  There was no internet, no counterpoint.  When I reached adulthood, we argued over politics a lot more than we should have.  My Mother actually believed the SPLC was a conservative organization.  We believed the same things really as she espoused conservative positions, but she thought the Democrats had her back on it all.  I swore to my mother I would never vote for a party that would put a damn bird above a human.
It has only gotten worse.
After securing a job at a hospital, I watched ObamaCare tear through healthcare and then almost immediately watched as our pension benefits were frozen as a result of having to comply with new rules and regulations.  My wife and I lost 3000 dollars a month in future retirement income as a result of her company having to reorganize, and my pension is a private plan. Not a single Republican voted for the ObamaCare scam. But hey, 70 million dollars later the hospital has EPIC.  My Chart anyone?  I understand the CEO of that company has a lot of ties to Obama.

Hospitals now have departments of people working just to make sure all of the I’s are dotted and T’s crossed and the punctuation is correct just so we get paid for taking care of those on Medicare and Medicaid.  I can imagine on the other end that the government bureaucracy has people just looking for mistakes and ways not to pay out.  It is really mindboggling.
I watched my father get piss-poor treatment at the VA hospital, waiting months to get appointments and then just handed more drugs.  He struggled with issues from Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam.  He had back surgery there without any physical therapy follow-up.  He could not straighten out his back to lie down or stand up straight after the surgery.   He died in 2011 after having to live and sleep in his easy chair for years due to the pain. I want to say he was taken care of for life as promised years before without sounding sarcastic.  But I can’t.
I watched as my mother walked away from the Democrats.  She quoted Reagan…. they left her.  She voted for President Trump.
I never went to college, I am totally self-taught.  I am a doer of many trades and master of none.  I have had a great life in the greatest country on earth.  All along the way, the Democrats have stepped on me, taxed me more, lied to me, called me names, and demand I give up my rights.  Democrats were the ones pushing environmental causes at the expense of humans and government takeover of healthcare.  They have mismanaged everything they get their hands on, and then blame others for their own deeds.  I watch them lie and cheat and twist words.  Democrats have alienated their own base to the point they have to argue for foreigners to come into this country illegally in order to vote for Democrats, mainly by calling those of us opposed to this "racist."
In all fairness, the weak Republicans in our government have hardly stood in their way.  But that is another day, another rant.
I am now called racist, homophobic, misogynist, and Islamaphobic.  A gun-toting, Bible-believing bitter clinger.  A deplorable.  A white nationalist.  Nazi. I can’t remember all of my Democrat party subtitles.
But I am middle class. I have been given nothing by our government and have given too much to it.  And it always wants more, telling me I have to pay my fair share.  It is a sad state when you get to a point in life of maximum dollars earned that it is taken away by higher tax brackets and the loss of deductions.
I will never vote for anyone advocating for more government control.  Or for anyone who is trying to denigrate me by name-calling or label-making.  The reason is my life.

American horror story


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