Washington is reducing the deficit but abandoning the unemployed

When injured workers are hurt, employers have the tendency to replace the workers. After temporary disability benefits are exhausted then injured workers traditionally look toward State unemployment funds to survive. Congress is about to severely limit that safety net by drastically reducing unemployment benefits. Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from m.washingtonpost.com

There's one big thing left out of the Murray-Ryan budget deal: unemployment insurance. On December 28, federal jobless benefits expire for 1.3 million workers. These aren't normal unemployment benefits. These are the extended, emergency benefits meant to help the long-term unemployed. A little-known fact about the economy is that short-term unemployment -- the percentage of the labor force unemployed for five weeks or less -- is back down to where it was before the recession. It's long-term unemployment -- which lasts more than 27 weeks -- where the crisis lingers. No one has a very good answer for these workers. They're often stuck in areas of the country where jobs are scarce. They face a vicious cycle of employment discrimination in which employers don't want to hire them because they've been unemployed for so long, which in turn extends their unemployment and makes it even harder for them to find a job. And now we're just cutting them loose.

Hacking the Affordable Care Act

Workers' Compensation is really "married" to the Affordable Care Act (AFA). As that law is modified so will workers' compensation medical delivery. Today's post was shared by The Health Care Blog and comes from thehealthcareblog.com

By ROGER COLLIER It may say something about expectations for the Affordable Care Act that the simplistic “just repeal Obamacare” cries of Congressional Republicans are starting to be supplemented by proposals for its replacement. The most detailed so far is from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which has published an unexpectedly non-doctrinaire study authored by Harvard professor Michael Chernew and seven other respected academics. It’s far from perfect, but it’s worth reading. Structural details of the AEI proposal, modestly titled “Best of Both Worlds,” aren’t always clear (page 1 lists four “principles,” page 5 lists five “priorities”, and page 16 lists three “major planks”), but it does attempt a bipartisan approach, combining ideas from left and right. Some of these ideas have been contained in other proposals, such as those of Wyden and Bennett and Fuchs and Emanuel (which may damn the AEI proposal in right-wing eyes), and most recently in a THCB piece by Martin Gaynor. They include the elimination of the employer coverage tax preference, the provision of “premium support” subsidies for most individuals, and the establishment of a national insurance exchange. Together, they are designed to encourage individual choice and responsibility and to maximize competition between insurers, while removing some of the inequities of the present system (and of the ACA). The AEI...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Related articles

• Some doctors speak out against Affordable Care Act (kens5.com)
• Affordable Care Act -- Three Taxes (and paperwork) No One Is Talking About (forbes.com)
• The Affordable Care Act and Young Adults (theobamacrat.com)
• Discussion to focus on understanding the Affordable Care Act (journalstar.com)
• Health overhaul confuses Medicare beneficiaries (sacbee.com)
• White House Delays Affordable Care Act Employer Mandate Until 2015 (turbotax.intuit.com)

Found on