I have two words,
Fuck. Them..
Big Business, GOP Complain That Health Reform Slashes Corporate Welfare.
The Republican Party and major corporations have joined forces in the first major rearguard attack on health care reform, charging that the cost of complying with "Obamacare" is resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in added business expenses.
The crime that reform is guilty of: Slashing corporate welfare.
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Under the previous system, major corporations were subsidized by the government to provide prescription drug coverage to their retired employees. At the same time, corporations could claim on their tax returns that it was they -- not the taxpayers -- who paid for the drug coverage, and could write the expense off as a tax deduction.
Health care reform cuts out that fat. The corporations still get taxpayer money to help pay for their drug coverage, but they can no longer continue the fiction that they're using their own money to do it.
Eat shit you greedy fucking assholes.
That shit came about via the Bush administration and of course, they are hyping the numbers.
UPDATE: The welfare in question originated with the 2003 prescription drug bill signed into law by President Bush after it passed a GOP-controlled Congress in the early morning, following a three-hour vote that was held open while leaders hunted down vote-switchers.
The program entitled corporations to a government subsidy covering 28 percent of the prescription drug benefit for their retirees. The companies were not required to count the taxpayer money as income. (Unemployment benefits, meanwhile, are taxed as income.) Companies were also allowed to claim the entire cost of the benefit as a write-off, even the part paid for by the government.
It's an unusually generous entitlement. When corporations get subsidies for research or for hiring new workers, for instance, they can't write-off the subsidy as if they were spending their own money.
The entitlement isn't removed until 2013.
snip
The size of the accounting reductions being announced is so large, analysts said, because they project out the benefit from the current subsidy for 30 years, rising with health care's current inflation rate, and then crams it all back into a one-quarter loss. First quarter profits will be reduced, but there will be no long-term impact on the companies' financial health, the AP reported.
AT&T's charge-off was reported as a billion dollars, but the actual cost of revoking the subsidy for one year will be $40 million, according to background information provided by the White House
Cry me a river you fucking bastards.
Now you know why the GOP and Big Business were so dead against it.
Follow the fucking money.
Read the whole thing over at HuffPo.
