November 21, 2013
Short by 45,000
According to the RAND Corporation, in 12 years the number of primary care physicians will be 45,000 less than the projected demand.
A major failing of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was not to provide for how we will get the needed doctors for the increased demand mandated by Obamacare. What this means is there will probably be lengthy delays in order to see an “affordable” doctor.
New Jersey Comes Out a Winner
Not only did Chris Christie, a politician known for his tax cutting preference win reelection to the New Jersey governorship but Bill De Blasio, won the job of NYC Mayor. De Blasio represents the left wing of a very Progressive Democratic Party in New York City and wants to raise taxes on “the wealthy” in order to pay for full day preschool. His first trip will be to Albany to try and convince the NYS legislators to approve his ideas, which are similar to those of Governor Andrew Cuomo.
New Jersey will welcome more of the “NYC Wealthy Job Creators” as they move across the Hudson.
The Obamacare Awakening
For all of the Affordable Care Act’s technical problems, at least one part is working on schedule. The law is systematically dismantling the individual insurance market as its architects intended from the start.
The law has been interpreted by Health and Human Services so that even minor policy changes such as increasing a copay by $5 means that a plan cannot be renewed without rewriting it to obey all of the Obamacare regulations. The law’s 10 very broad categories of statutory benefits like hospitalization, prescription drugs or maternity care were construed so that 79.6% of current individuals plans do not meet the targets and so most persons with individual coverage (such as self-employed people) will lose their current coverage because if they like it they cannot keep it and will be forced to seek new coverage.
Liberals believed that they must destroy the market in order to save it and lied to convince people otherwise. Wall Street Journal 10/30/13 p. A14.
We are one of those companies happy with their coverage but the insurance company cannot continue to offer us coverage under Obamacare!
The Big Short
Once in a while, a book comes along that allows you to part the clouds, silence the noise, and make sense of the world. Michael Lewis has done this many times in the past with Liar’s Poker and Moneyball. He has done it again with a book to explain in layman’s terms what caused Wall Street and the entire world to melt down in 2007 and 2008. Other books like Too Big to Fail documented the blow-by-blow action while the world was imploding but not what caused it. Additionally, he tells you who else besides John Paulsen made money by predicting the fall. In addition, he shows that those who figured out what was wrong with Wall Street were slightly dysfunctional and not the regular Wall Street types.
My thanks to a client who sent me the book to read thinking I would enjoy it. I did!
Churchill is Home Again and Here to Stay
In January of 1941, Winston Churchill dined at a Glasgow hotel with his physician, Sir Charles Wilson (later Lord Moran), and his secretary of state for Scotland, Tom Johnston. The other member of the party was Harry Hopkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s redoubtable unofficial ambassador and the American president’s most trusted adviser. Hopkins had been sent to investigate and report back in this hour of deadly peril for Britain, now standing alone in the battle against Nazi Germany.
At the Glasgow dinner, he turned to the British prime minister. “I suppose you wish to know what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return. Well I am going to quote you one verse from that Book of Books in the truth of which Mr. Johnston’s mother and my own Scottish mother were brought up: ‘Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God’.”
Then he added very quietly: “Even to the end.”
“I was surprised to find the P.M. in tears,” Lord Moran wrote in his diary. “He knew what it meant.”
On October 30, 2013, a ceremony was held on Capitol Hill to dedicate a new bust of Winston Churchill, considered by some to be the greatest man of the 20th century to be on permanent display in the Capitol building. House Speaker John Boehner, whose office conceived of the project, served as host for the occasion, advertised as bipartisan, with former speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid.
The subject of Churchill busts has a certain resonance - recall the disappearance of the one that had adorned the Oval Office until Barack Obama’s election. Barack Obama returned the bust that Prime Minister Tony Blair had given to President Clinton because in Obama’s eyes, and Obama’s father’s eyes, Churchill, an honorary American citizen whose mother was an American, was a hated imperialist and a colonial ruler. The planners of the event - which came to pass via House Resolution 497 authorizing a Churchill bust to be placed in the Capitol - are assured that this one won’t disappear. The resolution, introduced by Mr. Boehner and unanimously passed in December 2011, marked the 70th anniversary of Churchill’s 1941 address to a joint session of Congress.
Still, the hold Churchill exerts on the American imagination is worthy of note and more - it’s astounding. Astounding that 70 years after their delivery those speeches, their cadences, and the dauntlessness for which they speak have lost none of their power. He brought ordinary language to extraordinary heights of eloquence. But there was little that was ordinary about the point of his renowned wartime speeches rallying the British to battle. Wall Street Journal 10/29/13 p. A15.
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Wishing you all a very Happy Thanksgiving and to some of you a Happy Thanksgivukkah, a once in a lifetime event so big that Macy’s will include a giant dreidel in its Thanksgiving Day Parade. And speaking about the Parade, whenever you see Santa at the end of the Parade you should be reminded it is the time to do your year-end tax planning.
As always, if you have any questions about these or any other matters, do not hesitate to call us.
Remember, We’re Here For You!