Waxman’s Unintended Consequences Reveal Intended Consequences | RedState

Waxman’s Unintended Consequences Reveal Intended Consequences | RedState

Shortly after the boondoggle known as the health care bill was passed, corporations discovered that the bill had a lot of detrimental factors to it, which, as Nancy Pelosi infamously said, we couldn’t find out until the bill was passed. As such, upon its passage, corporations began taking write-downs due to the elimination, by the new law, of many deductions they had previously been allowed to take.

This didn’t sit well with Representative Waxman, being utterly ignorant in the ways of business, and it got his rather unfortunate nose out of joint. He decided to use strong arm tactics, in his position as Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and demanded various things from corporations, including confidential memos. Egregious enough as that was, he didn’t stop there. Unfortunately for him and his fellow Democrats, there were unintended consequences of his strong arm tactics. They ended up revealing the intended consequences of the Health Care Bill: No more employer-provided health care for you.

Waxman was angry that corporations were performing analysis, as they have a duty to do for their stockholders and so that they can, you know, remain financially feasible and not go out of business. That concept is foreign to the current crop of Democrats. Profits are evil! Instead, they believe that corporations are beholden to The State ™ and those beliefs led him to this:

But Waxman didn’t simply request documents related to the write down issue. He wanted every document the companies created that discussed what the bill would do to their most uncontrollable expense: healthcare costs.

The request yielded 1,100 pages of documents from four major employers: AT&T, Verizon, Caterpillar and Deere (DE, Fortune 500). No sooner did the Democrats on the Energy Committee read them than they abruptly cancelled the hearings. On April 14, the Committee’s majority staff issued a memo stating that the write downs were “proper and in accordance with SEC rules.” The committee also stated that the memos took a generally sunny view of the new legislation. The documents, said the Democrats’ memo, show that “the overall impact of health reform on large employers could be beneficial.”

Nowhere in the five-page report did the majority staff mention that not one, but all four companies, were weighing the costs and benefits of dropping their coverage.