Mid Hudson News - Healthcare and Finance Continue to Plague US Economy, Says Hayworth

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Rep. Nan Hayworth told business leaders that the costs of healthcare and finance continue to afflict the US government.

Speaking at a breakfast session of the Orange County Chamber of Commerce in Central Valley on Tuesday, the freshman lawmaker was critical of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory law passed in July of last year, saying it has had an adverse effect on financial services.

"There is a distinct air of uncertainty, and it is uncertainty tinged with pessimism that in fact the 880 page law, which is to be followed by thousands of pages of new regulations, will disproportionately affect small business," she said to the room of a hundred or so. According to Hayworth, this law -- which has enacted the biggest change to financial regulation in the U.S. since the Great Depression -- is "driving working capital out of the Unites States" and will be roughly 30 percent more costly for small businesses to comply with.

The former ophthalmologist lauded the efforts of the House of Representatives -- to which her Republican Party currently holds the majority -- in easing the burdens and regulations of the taxpayer. According to Hayworth; however, the Senate has been obstructive in those aims.

"Therein lies the story of 2011 thus far. We have sent dozens of bills to the Senate covering a whole range of issues from lifting regulatory burdens, cutting wasteful spending programs, endeavoring to cut the federal budget in general down to 2008 levels at least and they've rejected almost all of them," said Hayworth.

The lone victory, she said, was the repeal of the 1099 requirement of the Affordable Healthcare Act, which required every business to file a miscellaneous form for every vendor with whom they dealt which provided more than $600 worth of goods.

"That would run to days of work for a lot of our small business and would have been a terrible burden," she said.

Hayworth claimed that the federal government is estimated to overspend by $1.4 trillion this year, a trend that "will not stop any time soon" because of the 60 percent the budget owes to entitlement claims such as Social Security and Medicare, the latter to which the trust fund is expiring.

"Medicare will spend at least three times more on every beneficiary than that beneficiary has contributed in his or her lifetime in payroll taxes, unfortunately, and the same is pretty much true in social security," said Hayworth, declaring it an unsustainable model.

She mentioned a premium support mechanism in the House's proposed budget to ameliorate the concern, and added that the Senate had yet to pass a budget.

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