On Cutting Employees and Other Nefarious Behavior

Being the civic-minded do-gooder that I am by nature, I felt impelled to brief both of my readers (in a not-so-brief fashion) on the latest health-law mandate update. I know that in the past I have gone to great lengths (meaning I have trouble with succinctness as a general rule) to reassure potential readers that my blogs have absolutely no resemblance to anything educational, helpful, beneficial, valuable, worthwhile, or instructive--and rarely to anything based in Reality.  However, I have decided that the following article fits those guidelines quite nicely, and may in fact severely impede brain function in the reader, or readers. What I lack in originality and clarity, I make up for in plagiarism.

On Monday the Treasury Department, in regulations outlining the Affordable Health Care Act, said many things which do not make any sense whatsoever. However, in an attempt at Appeasement Though Mathematics, they did say that companies with more workers than the companies with fewer could avoid some of the penalties in 2015 if they showed they were offering 70% of the coverage that 70% of the full-time employees, who were not employed by the companies with fewer than 70% of the uncovered insur-ees, would or should have been enrolled in if and when they understand, or understood this sentence, its grammar, its syntax, or its punctuation?

This carefully worded, not to say poetic, move came after employers pressured the Obama administration to peel back the law’s insurance requirements which, under the original 2010 law, stated mathematically, if not scientifically, that employers with the “equivalent of at least 50 full-time workers” had to either offer coverage to the equivalent person or persons or pay a penalty starting at $2,000 per worker, whether or not they were considered a person or simply the equivalent thereof, and ending somewhere after the completion of this sentence or the equivalent thereof.

To understand the economic and bureaucratic impact, it behooves us to list and/or enumerate more numbers, numerals, figures, and integers.  To put it simply, if not gnomically (which may or may not even make sense in this context), the new rules for companies with 50 to 99 workers would cover about 2% of all U.S. businesses, which include 28% of workers (although what 28% of a worker looks like, I shudder to imagine), or 7.9 million people according to 2011 Census figures and numerals, and companies with 100 or more workers representing a further 2% of businesses, which employ more than 74 million people, adding up to a whopping 81.9 million, which one then divides by 2% and then a further 2%, unless the rule of multiplicative inverse applies, in which case, many employers would begin trimming employees to the equivalent of 30%.

I believe that Neal Troutwinner, a vice president and lobbyist for the National Retail Foundation, expressed it best when he said, “I’m pretty....”

Finally it is noteworthy to note that Unidentified Senior Treasury Officials from the Department of Capitalized Titles stated emphatically that all firms should “consider the number of hours their employees worked, and whether they should be cutting them”! I would like to go on record as stating vigorously and vehemently that neither math nor politics nor poor grammar is no reason to injure persons, even if they are uninsured. 

If you care to join my rant, I invite you to do so, but only if you promise to have almost no idea what you are talking about, nor how to express what little you do with anything but unfeigned verbosity.