OmniSpeak

Employers have found another way, to help soften the blow to Obamacare – offer offering “skinny” insurance plans that provide employees with minimum coverage such as preventive care but little else, including benefits to help cover hospitals stays.

Under the Affordable Healthcare Act, minimum coverage qualifies as acceptable under the new healthcare-reform law, so benefit advisers and insurance brokers are pitching minimum plans nationally.  Employers have discovered they can avoid a $2,000-per-worker penalty by providing such policies, even though the plans often don’t cover basics such as surgery, X-rays, or prenatal care, let alone hospitalization.

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So another example of Chicago politics, as Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to start reducing health insurance coverage next year for more than 30,000 retired city workers and begin shifting them to President Barack Obama’s new federal system.  the move is aimed at saving the city money and comes as the Emanuel administration has been trying to wrangle significant pension cost concessions from employee unions.

Retirees will soon be receiving a letter explaining the change.

But those getting health insurance will be police, and firefighters who retired between the ages of 55 and 64 and are not yet eligible for Medicare but whose coverage is guaranteed under union contracts, as well as workers who retired before August 1989 and are protected by a legal settlement.

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This year in February, news broke that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew received an exit package worth over $1 million from Citigroup shortly before joining the Obama administration in 2009.  In fact, according to Lew’s contract with the company, the size of his bonus depended on whether or not he was able to secure a high level position with the government.

And when the critics got wind of the story, they were astounded at the bounty paid by Citigroup to burrow their executives deep within government.  But the Lew bonus isn’t the only one out there.  The fact is that in both the Democrat and Republican parties, lawmakers have received six-figure bonuses and other incentive pay from corporate firms shortly before taking jobs in Congress.

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The battle for more gun control has headed now to the states.  And already there are groups supporting more gun restrictions have been active on the local level. And now for the first time in almost two decades, the National Rifle Association is attempting to coordinate the recall of a top state legislator for having successfully passed further gun restrictions in his state according to CNN.

The NRA campaign is focused on Colorado State Senate President John Morse. He is facing a petition drive to initiate an election to recall him because of  legislation passed earlier this year requiring “universal” background checks on sales of all firearms in the state, as well as a ban on the sale of ammunition magazines greater than 15 rounds.

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Younger senior citizens, in a new study, could be caught short in old age because they’re spending their retirement funds at a rapid pace.  According to Bloomberg Businessweek, findings from the nonprofit Employee Benefit Research Institute show that 48 percent of people age 61 to 70 in the bottom half of incomes withdrew up to 17 percent from their IRA retirement accounts during each year between 2002 and 2010.

And 29% of those in the top quarter of incomes drew out as much as 12 percent each year.

The institute study found that older seniors, aged 71 and up, tended to be more frugal, often withdrawing the minimum amount required by the Internal Revenue Service. Thirty-two percent of the older seniors put their withdrawals into other forms of savings.

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