Finding out what’s in it v 1,467, or “Not this crap again.”
ObamaCare was sold as a health insurance reducer. Instead, in a few years many Americans will see their health insurance costs rise to $20,000 per year. Some premiums will rise by as much as 85%.
ObamaCare was sold as being good for your bottom line. Instead, it may drive the price of pizza through the roof.
And now, it may also force price hikes at your local supermarket.
The proposed regulation would require store owners to label prepared, unpackaged foods found in salad bars and food bars, soups and bakery items. Erik Lieberman, regulatory counsel at the Food Marketing Institute, said testing foods for nutritional data will require either expensive software or even more costly off-site laboratory assessments.
Lieberman said failure to get it right comes with stiff penalties: ”If you get it wrong, it’s a federal crime, and you could face jail time and thousands of dollars worth of fines.”
Supermarket managers could go to jail if they accidentally mislabel a rotisserie chicken or a salad or a sandwich.
The regulation stems from an ObamaCare mandate on posting food nutrition information. It wasn’t part of the public debate on the law, mainly because the FDA extended the rule to include supermarket food after the law was passed. The FDA thinks it’s a supercongress, able to conjure laws and impose them with little comment from the American public and no regard for the economic impact. What input it does get from the public, it ignores. The FDA is supposed to show how this rule benefits Americans, but it couldn’t, yet is proceeding ahead with it anyway. Because it can.
An Executive Order issued by President Obama in 2011 says agencies are supposed to calculate a cost-benefit analysis for each new regulation and attempt to use the least burdensome regulatory methods possible. Critics of the FDA’s food labeling proposal say the agency didn’t comply.
“They are required to do it, and they didn’t,” Lieberman said. “They simply said, ‘We can’t quantify a benefit from this rule,’ and that’s because they really can’t.”
The American citizen’s relationship to the ObamaCare law has become an abusive one.





The will of all dictatorships: So let it be said, so let it be done.
i suspect that these things won’t cost more, they just won’t be offered for sale.
Yup. No more salad bars, no more fresh deli sandwiches. But hey, abortions with no co-pay, so I don’t know why anyone would complain about not being able to get that other stuff. O_O
As if anybody can afford to eat out any more.
A lot of these eateries will go out of business.
We even shop around to find the dollar store that has the best sale on ramen noodles. I am not kidding you. This is true.
People who point out how bad and expensive Obamacare really is are just haters.
…haters of nanny state wannabes and of intrusive government.
So I guess you just love paying the government boatloads more of your salary to throw away on bureaucracy? I know, you are one of the freeloaders. You don’t have a salary, you get a govt check. You liberals just don’t like facts. You were told before this monstrosity was ever enacted that cost would go up and they have. Do you not understand the difference between “less expensive” and “more expensive?”
I think your sarcasm-meter needs calibration.
Given the average Leftard there isn’t a meter sensitive enough. They’re usually deadly serious with their idiocy.
I just noticed in your comment that you are actually agreeing that it is bad and expensive.
Yea, I am a Hater. I HATE STUPID PEOPLE!!!!!
Dave:
The elderly on fixed incomes are urged incessantly to have “supplementary” health care insurance in addition to their Medicare. I know people of limited incomes who are paying MORE THAN HALF of their net income on this extra health insurance — and that’s before the projected skyrocketing premiums. What are these folks going to do?
We “haters” (what a despiccable, juvenile term that is) know how much misery and upheaval the “Affordable” Care Act is likely to cause.
This type of tag (hater) is typical of the communist liberal. After all they are nothing more than spiteful,hateful children! They will let their god(obama) take all of their rights away without objection just to prove that they are’nt racist!! The govt. knows this and that they are easily manipulated and can use them forever as useful idiots!
And RACICSTS! Don’t forget RACISTS!
No, no, no! It’s RAAACIST! with 3 “A”s (minimum).
BTW, I second “ucfengr” comment. Just because “Dave in Houston” didn’t have “/sarc” at the end of his comment doesn’t he’s at all serious. I think calling Obamacare “bad and expensive” would be a dead giveaway… I guess not.
You know someone complaining about Obamacare’s critics is serious when they use its actual (frighteningly Orwellian) name: Affordable Care Act.
Chill, I believe Dave is being sarcastic.
Oh good, another federal crime. Because you can never have enough.
Every department in the executive branch thinks it’s “a supercongress” (as well as much of the judiciary). Our lives are (mis)managed by bureaucrats and regulators. And Congress seems to think nothing of shirking its responsibilities, evading its duties and ceding its enumerated powers.
The problem is that we have a Constitution which sets up checks & balances on the basis of three branches of government – executive, judicial & legislative – when we have developed a fourth branch – administrative – which is unchecked and unbalanced.
What we need is for Congress or the States to call for a Constitutional Convention to address this omission. The reason they won’t is for fear of what happened in 1787-89 – we got a whole new government. But there’s no reason that someone can’t propose a new Article, via the amendment process, addressing the powers of and restraints on the Administrative Branch. Except that it won’t pass, because the leftists don’t really believe we need any Constitution at all, and they control enough states to prevent it from passing.
So now we are stuck with a massive government bureaucracy which Congress can only control in a gross way via the budget (if any) and which the President can control only to the extent that the bureaucracy agrees with him – otherwise, the bureaucrats hunker down & wait for the next administration.
I will add to this that the Administrative Branch is now effectively in control of the leftists, so they will strenuously resist any attempt to circumscribe its power.
Exactly. Congress has ceded too much of its authority to unaccountable bureaucracies. The reason we have an Imperial presidency is because the Congress has made it so. Too many Senators think they might be President some day, I guess.
85%? I wish: mine premium went up 50% a few months after Obamacare passed and is now almost 100% more than it was prior to it with my health improving. Word floating around now is that premiums might go up another 20% to 100% this year as more fees and freebies are added to policies. Then there is the lovely 40% Cadillac tax on policies coming into effect in a few years.
Also, the local grocery here already puts labels on prepared foods. It doesn’t do that with raw fruits and vegetables since it would be hard to put a label on an apple or head of lettuce. But then logic never stood in the way of bureaucratic powermongering, so stores will likely have to find a way.
“An individual label per serving” is easy. Some enterprising company will simply offer to shrinkwrap each and every apple, peach or pear for you. They will lovingly wrap each grape, however small, in it’s very own biological habitat bearing its own dietary breakdown. Mind you, at a cost but, hey, you knew that already.
I am not particularly troubled by the PRICE we pay for healthcare in the form of premiums going up. They are actually beginning to reflect the true costs to provide services as they are burdened by all sorts of regulations, cost shifting, etc.
Until people pay for healthcare services they way they pay for other services the market will continue to be a mess and the prices have no place to go but up. If you want what you pay for healthcare services the cost to provide them will have to allowed to go down. This is not really that hard to do if the government would just get out of the way. And we do something about the lawyers.
The people of this country want more healthcare services then they are willing to pay for. What could go wrong.
I would hate to pay that much more for my healthcare, but what you say makes sense. Right now, health insurance – government and private – seems like a “false economy.”
Maybe some things are too good to be true.
Soviet centrally controlled economy: “We can make the values of labor and goods, wages and prices, be any amount we want!”
Southern slave economy: “We have an endless supply of free labor!”
Government-guaranteed loans: “We can get a home/education/business loan even if we can’t afford to pay it back!”
Health insurance: “We can get all the medical care and drugs we want without ever paying full price!”
Much of the cost you are talking about is government imposed. Medicair and Medicaid only pay between 60% and 80% of the cost of services. That means costs get run up on those who can pay via private insurance. Government also forces private insurance to offer coverage to everyone that might only be needed by a few people or for political ends such as free contraception. Free is a misnomer of course since policyholders will have to pay for it but the Democrats who want such things are too dumb to understand nothing is really free, but hey, it buys votes at no cost to government.
Without these things and rapacious lawyers, healthcare would be much cheaper that it is now.
When everything is a crime prosecutors will have the discretion to persecute whomever they please for as long as they like, and, remember, prosecutors are either politically elected, or appointed; there is nothing whatsoever objective about the position. The world of Jean Valjean is right around the corner, and it will be the making of liberals who go to see Les Miserables and come out crying and thinking much of themselves and their moral sensitivities who are constructing this hell, brick by brick.
“I always feel less miserable when I wear my Jean Val-Jeans™.”
—clothing ad coming soon to a billboard near you
See “Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2203713
by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com
If we all can leave comments at blog sites, we can leave comments on the Executive Branch agencies rules and proposed rules. I suggest you keep your eye on the Federal Register a bit each day. The first site below is Federal Register 2.0, which is more interactive and Internet friendly than the actual Federal Register, but the data is culled from the true FR and an easy link to comment online for those documents accepting comments is there. The second link is the official Federal Register:
https://www.federalregister.gov/
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/the-federal-register/
Flood them with your comments.
Right idea, maybe the wrong target. I have a feeling that comments on the Federal Register website never get any farther than the webmaster, who probably just archives them when the database starts getting too big.
Maybe read the FR and then flood your Congressional representatives’ inboxes…
One by one big gubmint destroys our personal freedoms, and like the frog in in the pot far too many of us paddle around blissfully unaware. Ask your most liberal friends questions about current affairs, and you will find even the most fair-minded and well educated among them are woefully uninformed. I have a far left brother-in-law and uncle by marriage who are probably over 130 in IQ, have good college educations, and are conservative in the way they live their lives. Sadly, when it comes to politics and history they both have drunk way too much left wing Kool-Aid, and are totally bewitched.
“The American citizen’s relationship to the ObamaCare law has become an abusive one.”
Become?
Fine, let it burn! Perhaps when the salad bars at Whole Foods double in price, or go bye-bye altogether, maybe the dipshits who gleefully voted for this lunacy will finally get a big fat taste their own Big Gubmint medicine.
The salad bars at Whole Foods will not be significantly affected. Whole Foods is already big enough, and prosperous enough, to afford to send their products to be laboratory tested, or to build their own lab. testing facilities next to their test kitchens, and they will sell enough items per recipe tested, that it will not significantly raise the price of each individual sale.
Smaller, one person or family “Mom & Pop” stores will initially have to spend a much larger portion of their capital to Lab. test their proposed new recipes, and will not have the same volume of production and sales per new product offered, that Whole Foods will have.
Whole Foods can bring out a new salad, or pizza, and sell thousands of servings, easily reducing the cost of the lab work to fractions of a penny per serving within a year or two. An individual label per serving sold will cost more, but these printing costs are also subject to economies of scale.
The widowed lady who supplements her retirement income by opening a corner bakery, that specializes in new flavor combos of muffins (banana-cranberry today; kiwi-pineapple tomorrow), will be prevented from developing new products by the cost of testing, and if she does bring out a new muffin, the cost of the Lab. testing and individual labeling will not db spread out over thousands of daily sales, but only dozens of daily sales.
Thus, it will run her something like 35 to 50 cents per muffin, which many people will not pay. So, big companies, as always will benefit from more regulation, because it will clear millions of small players out of the market, and secure to them an unofficial near-monopoly of every local market.
Not so fast. Whole Foods, like many others, will also be having to pay more in other ObamaCare costs for employees. It’ll all add up, drop by drop. I know what you mean, though. This stupid crap from Obama will kill off all or most small business and only the bigs survive and will be so in the pocket of big government, like a mafia protection racket, that we essentially have fascism–quasi-state-run industry across the commercial spectrum. But Whole Foods’ CEO is no fan of ObamaCare, I believe. We’ll see.
That’s right. The collective gasp from the left was almost audible when their favorite grocery store’s CEO expounded on the benefits of HSAs and high-deductible insurance. Along with a little personal responsibility for one’s health.
See! Obama was right! That widowed old unemployed former corner bakery lady is EXACTLY the sort of person Obamacare was designed to help! /sarc
“Supermarket managers could go to jail if they accidentally mislabel a rotisserie chicken or a salad or a sandwich.”
In the 1800s the British aristocracy transported riffraff to Australia for misdemeanor theft.
Severe punishments for trivial crimes are markers of power inequality. When you see these viscous laws, you know you’re looking as a system where a power-class is imposing itself on an under-class. Free people don’t do this to themselves.
“Viscous” laws…thick and sticky.
Theft isn’t really a small crime. Most thieves are doing something else that they just haven’t been caught for. The UK’s policy of expelling miscreants made it the greatest country in the world at one time.
You are immoral.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57561293/righting-the-wrongs-of-three-strikes-life-sentences/
Healthcare reform: less freedom, higher costs, worse healthcare– thanks, Democrats!
“It wasn’t part of the public debate on the law, mainly because the FDA extended the rule to include supermarket food after the law was passed.”
Oh, joy, another autocratic “ruling” from some unaccountable gov’t agency… gee, I though Congress had to pass a bill and the President had to sign it (you know, legislative due process) for it to be law. Silly me, obeying the Constitution is just “racist” and bigotted, I guess.
My insurance covers less already.
The sum of the $ increase in everyone’s premiums is/will be less than the $ sum of medical care provided now that was not available before.
its not Occam’s razor anymore its Occam’s baseball bat. the simple conclusion is the sheep are getting sheered again because its all they are good for.
“When in the Course of human Events…..”
I read your partial quote and I realized that it’s going to take more than a declaration to overcome this hideous weight that is bearing down on us.
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
It will occur long after I’m gone, I’m afraid, but at some point it will be easier to take up arms against this oppression than to continue to bear this weight.
I was born in 1950 and came to this country in 1954. Over the last 59 years America has undergone a tremendous change. Economically, socially, culturally. Literally every facet of our lives has been modified or restricted, redefined far beyond what I knew as a boy. Sure, some of these changes have been due to technology that we dreamed about and wanted. But a lot of these changes have the stamp of the government’s boot heel using that very same technology. Just today, I’ve read that some government agency (I can’t remember which one) promises not to fly armed drones here in the US. “Armed Drones”? Really?
Is this what we’ve become that the government, OUR GOVERNMENT!, thinks we’re no better than Fallujah, Iraq or Kandahar Afghanistan? Why in the hell do we need drones (armed or not) flying around. That is, of course, unless that very same government anticipates the road we’re heading down and sees a lot of potential potholes.
They see where we’re headed and they are preparing. Drones, half a billion rounds of ammunition purchased by Homeland Security, Gun (weapons) restrictions. The complete loss of privacy (electronic or otherwise).
In some ways we are no better off than we were in 1770. We’re being taxed to the hilt. Our freedoms are being abrogated and the representation we have in Washington is no better than the perfumed courtiers of King George’s court.
The little guy (you and me, my friends) that would prefer being left to his own devices and his own life has been relegated to being nothing more than a spigot of cash to fulfill THEIR dreams, their futures, to assure the futures of THEIR children.
To go any further I can only refer you the wonderful writing of Victor Davis Hansen. He is much more eloquent than I am and a lot smarter.
All I can say is that it’s going to take more than a declaration…
Wait until the first few family markets get hit with 20k fines and put out of business. Unintended Consequences (john ross) are coming soon, to a grocer near you.
Good heavens.
It seems that a time is coming, if not already here, when technically, no one could be considered to be “law abiding”.
I don’t know how they do their cost benefit analysis, but apparently they’ve concluded that banning free plastic shopping bags in grocery stores is an effective offset for all those free condoms trickling into the pristine environment from those EPA parties in Los Vegas.
Actually, the data from San Francisco regarding reusable shopping bags is pretty alarming. From a public health perspective, it’s actually a dangerous law- the number of deaths from food poisoning has really gone up in that city. As it turns out, reusable shopping bags are nothing but E coli factories.
Any city that bans reusable shopping bags at this point really ought to be held liable for negligence and public endangerment.
It wasn’t part of the public debate on the law
There was public debate on O-care???? Define “public.” Cuz there sure a shit was no congressional debate. NONE.
Deli departments be racist.
” It wasn’t part of the public debate on the law”
Actually there was no public debate on the law. At least not one that mattered. The Democrats tried to sell it to the people, the people overwhelmingly rejected it, and the Democrats went ahead and passed it anyway so we could “find out what is in it”. I don’t think a single one of them even read the 2000+ page monstrosity they imposed on us. They wanted to seize control of healthcare so badly for so many decades that they would’ve voted for anything, no matter how much the people hated it. It was a purely ideology driven kamikaze run for many house Dems, not the sort of thing where the public “debate” has any relevance.
I’m going to play the devil’s advocate here and point out that this labeling isn’t really a bad idea, it’s the heavy-handed enforcement I disagree with. Labeling does alter people’s behavior, that’s why they’re doing it.
I would be perfectly happy if this entire monstrosity of a law were undone, and the government got out of the health-care business entirely. However, as it stands, the taxpayer is paying for more of it now than we ever have before. And actually, we always have, but the money was going to an insurance company and they didn’t really give a damn what people did since they could just raise premiums.
Anyway, like it or not, we have become our brother’s keepers. Speaking for myself, it was a shock to see the calorie content of the fast food I regularly consume posted right up there next to my Angus Burger. I decided I could live just fine with a Grillburger Classic.
Now, I have no idea if the cost-benefit calculation of all costs of enforcement vs. improved nutrition will work out. Evidently they didn’t even try to find out, which is a mistake. But seriously, something has got to be done- we are an alarmingly overweight and unhealthy population. The boomers are significantly less healthy than their predecessors and there are millions more of them whose healthcare must be funded.
So even without Obamacare, we’re on the hook for so much healthcare spending, if this can help then I think it’s worth a try. Although, again, the Gestapo enforcement is really overdone and quite unnecessary.
Anytime Democrats use the word “reform” what they really mean is “put the government completely in charge and thereby ruin”.