Employee Questions Can Be Interesting

Just got the email below from a client and noted my reply below which made them laugh.

Client-I have an employee who wants to know if she is able to add her son onto her BCBS medical coverage. Her son just got out of jail and is now living with her. Does this count as a qualifying event?

TheGroupGuy-Getting out of jail may be an important day but it is not a qualifying event in the eyes of the IRS.

For The Record

Here was one participant at a Texas Tea Party Yesterday

The Price of Unfunded Mandates to Texas of Obamacare

From the Speaker of The Texas House of Representatives Joe Straus in todays Houston Comical Opinion;

Many Texans may not realize how dramatically the new law expands the state's Medicaid program, which currently provides health care coverage for the very poor, as well as low-income children, aged and disabled persons. It mandates that every legal resident of Texas must purchase private health insurance or be enrolled in the Medicaid program, resulting in a projected increase of more than two million Texas Medicaid recipients.

Our State Health and Human Services Commission estimates the new mandates will cost the Texas state budget $27 billion over the 10-year period from 2014-2024, or an average of more than $5 billion for every two-year Texas budget cycle. That dramatic increase in health care costs will significantly limit legislative discretion in virtually every other area of state spending. Historically, the Texas Legislature has made education our top funding priority. Today, more than 60 percent of our state's general revenue goes to public and higher education. Health and human service spending is the second largest expenditure, at 30 percent, with all other costs a much smaller piece of the total pie. As the new federal law forces Texas to spend multiple billions more each biennium on health care, that will continually shrink our state's ability to spend discretionary dollars elsewhere, including our top priority of education.

Get ready for increased property taxes, a state income tax and higher sales taxes.

Stormclouds Over Massachusetts

MASSACHUSETTS' SHORT-TERM CUSTOMERS BOOSTING HEALTH COSTS




Will consumers game Obamacare the way they have in Massachusetts?...



BOSTON GLOBE



THE MASSACHUSETTS INSURANCE BLACKOUT



Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick (D) has made the health insurance business so painful the government actually has to order private companies to sell their products (albeit at sub-market costs), say observers...

Pelosium Discovered

A major research institution has just announced the discovery of the densest element yet known to science. The new element has been named Pelosium.

Pelosium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 311. These particles are held together by dark forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. The symbol of Pelosium is PU. Pelosium's mass actually increases over time, as morons randomly interact with various elements in the atmosphere and become assistant deputy neutrons within the Pelosium molecule, leading to the formation of isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to believe that Pelosium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as Critical Morass. When catalyzed with money, Pelosium activates CNNadnausium, an element that radiates orders of magnitude more energy, albeit as incoherent noise, since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons as Pelosium.