Emily Corwin reported on economics for the StateImpact New Hampshire blog until the project merged with the New Hampshire Public Radio site in July 2013. She is now NHPR’s Seacoast Reporter. You can follow her on Twitter at @emilycorwin, and find her stories on NHPR.org.
The Affordable Care Act requires businesses with more than 50 employees to provide health insurance, or pay penalties. Meanwhile, smaller businesses can receive a tax credit to offset the cost.
In Manchester at Dyn – an internet infrastructure company with about 150 employees – Vice President Gray Chynoweth says he doesn’t expect the ruling will affect his company right away. He says Dyn already provides generous health benefits. Continue Reading →
Tomorrow, the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act will likely be handed down by the Supreme Court. There are two main pieces under consideration: the individual mandate, and Medicaid expansion.
Bernard Pollack
According to John Stephen, New Hampshire’s former Health and Human Services Commissioner, Medicaid expansion will cost the state an additional $1 billion over ten years. Currently, Medicaid costs the state $1.4 billion annually, so this brings the cost up about 7 percent per year. To Stephen, this is a “huge amount of dollars.” To Deb Fournier of the liberal-leaning New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute, this would be a “healthcare bargain” — although as she understands it, Medicaid expansion may bring about no new costs at all.
In New Hampshire, the Affordable Care Act is most certainly in the eye of the beholder. Continue Reading →
The internet is abuzz with talk of the Affordable Care Act. Two Mondays in a row, eager newsmakers have been gearing up to pounce on a Supreme Court decision only to find it won’t be announced… just yet. With a complicated piece of legislation facing a confusing series of legal challenges, trying to understand the situation can lead to some serious eye crossing.
I used two charts describing the possible outcomes of the Supreme Court ruling on Thursday — one is from the Brookings Institute, another from Kaiser Health News — to make my own, slightly less confusing, chart:
Amanda Loder has been touring the state gathering the stories about how Granite Staters are making it work in this economy. We’re calling the series “Getting By, Getting Ahead.” The first blog-post debuts this coming Monday.
Keep your eyes peeled for that, and Loder’s radio feature the following Tuesday. A different region will be spotlighted each week this summer, with an interactive web-gadget on the way, too.
Today I’m heading to Bedford to get to know what’s on the minds of women business-owners. It’s a one-day conference called Women Inspiring Women. If everything goes according to plan, you’ll be reading some of their stories right here.
And in the meantime, we’re also gearing up to dive deep with the amendment banning the personal income tax. Texas is the only state with such a constitutional amendment*, so we’ll be looking at exactly what went down in 1993, when that amendment became law.
*Correction: in researching we discovered that Nevada, also, has a state amendment prohibiting a personal income tax, and that Texas’ amendment isn’t technically a ban. More to come!
Taxing campgrounds is a divisive issue. In July 2009 the New Hampshire legislature extended the meals and rooms tax to campgrounds — but then repealed that tax nine months later. It had been met with too much opposition, and had failed to produce the expected revenue.
But that doesn’t mean campers are in the clear. Yesterday, the Concord Monitor ran a story we highly recommend about seasonal tenants returning to campgrounds to find a new tax — a property tax, this time — awaiting some, but not all, campers. Reporter Tricia Nadolny writes that as tenants returned to Deering’s Oxbrow Campground, which straddles the Hillsborough-Deering town line, “an odd arrival split the campsite in two: those who got property tax bills and those who didn’t.” Continue Reading →
New Hampshire Public Radio Intern Tina Forbes Reports:
Did you vote on your favorite local restaurant this year? Winners of the New Hampshire Magazine’s ‘Best of New Hampshire’ contest will be gathering on Thursday night to celebrate and share some contest-winning morsels at the Verizon Center in Manchester. The public may attend.
Rick Broussard, editor of New Hampshire Magazine explained that the event has two goals.
One is to draw the whole state together like a big block party to celebrate food and culture and to provide people with some enlightenment about the great restaurants and talent that exist in our cities and small towns. The second goal is to raise funds and awareness for the important work of the NH Food Bank.
In his “state of the state” address in Nashua yesterday, Gov. John Lynch announced a renewed push for commuter rail service and education funding. The Nashua Telegraph has the story, but New Hampshire Public Radio intern Tina Forbes has pulled these points to whet your palate:
Lynch criticized the state Executive Council for turning down $3.6 million of federal aid to complete studies on a commuter rail service from Boston to Nashua.
The governor emphasized the $50 million in cuts to state universities and colleges, passed last year, force schools to accept more out-of-state students to balance their budgets.
The effects of the cuts are evident, as Lynch noted 61 percent of the incoming freshmen class at the University of New Hampshire are out-of-state students.
Tonight, the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation celebrates its 50th year in operation. NHCF has staff in each region of the state, and raises funds from individuals, organizations and corporations, making approximately $30 million in nonprofit grants and scholarships annually.
But the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation may have to work a little harder than other state-wide foundations across the country. New Hampshire has been ranked least-charitable state in the country for many years. That’s according to the Catalogue for Philanthropy’s “generosity index” which uses IRS data summarizing personal income tax returns. Continue Reading →
Correction: In the last paragraph, the author initially referred to Alabama, rather than Louisiana, as a state that has not created a state-run health insurance exchange.
Remember back in 2009 and 2010 when President Obama would talk about that “one-stop shop” piece of his health care bill, in which health insurance customers could go to a single place to view a comparison of health insurance plans’ costs and benefits? Should that piece of the Affordable Care Act remain intact after the Supreme Court hands down its decision on the ACA’s constitutionality this month, New Hampshire will be forced to implement a federally-run health insurance exchange, in accordance with the federal legislation. That’s as of this morning, when Governor Lynch signed HB 1297 into law.
HB 1297 prohibits the state of New Hampshire from setting up a state-run health insurance exchange. New Hampshire is one of only three states to pass such legislation — already 16 other states have established or plan to establish state-run health insurance exchanges.
According to an article by New Hampshire Watchdog’s Grant Bosse, “Rep. Andrew Manuse (R-Derry), the lead sponsor of HB 1297, says the bill would make it more likely ObamaCare would be repealed or replaced, because Congress will be forced to reevaluate the law if enough states opt against setting up their own exchanges.”
Some opponents of HB 1297 wished to create a state-run health insurance exchange in order to attain a more transparent and affordable insurance market for New Hampshire businesses and individuals. Others found the alternative — a New Hampshire health insurance exchange run by the federal government — a greater threat to the state’s autonomy than a federally mandated but state-run exchange.
The Kaiser Family Foundation created the following map of the each state’s health exchange status. Only two other states, Arkansas and Louisiana, have decided not to create a state-run exchange.
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