University Sues Student For Graduating Early

"A student who attended a private German economics and business university is being sued by the school because he finished his degree too quickly. Marcel Pohl finished 60 exams in 20 months, completing 11 semesters worth of work in only 3. The school says it is due an extra €3,000 for lost income because, "its fees are the total price for the studies, independent of how long the studies last." "When I got the lawsuit, I thought it couldn't be true. Performance is supposed to be worth something," Pohl said.

Comments

Re:A bit late methinks

[Archangel Michael]

You mean ... like ... Obamacare???

Event Horizon of the Affordable Care Act

[datavirtue]

The impact of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is still a mystery. Some provisions of the law are straight-forward, such as the pre-existing conditions clause. We know that people will be able to secure insurance despite their pre-existing medical conditions, which is the way it should be, but what remains to be seen is the overall impact after consumers and insurance companies both seek their greatest advantage by exploiting the letter of the law and that which is not laid out in the actual wording.

It is impossible to craft legislation of this scope to cover every caveat and cost. Big, technical projects often require an incremental approach to tweak the system to near perfection. A big contention and worry is the impact this will have on small businesses. The ACA exempts businesses with less than 50 employees from most penalties, but there are a lot of companies that technically have more than 50 employees across all of their marginally profitable business units.

Restaurants quickly come to mind but there are other businesses in the same position as well. Small restaurant chains are often organized under a single corporation with less than 50 employees at each location, amounting to hundreds of employees spread over the entire organization. In our current economic climate these companies have been struggling to make any profit with a majority of their affluent customers cutting back on unnecessary expenses (eating out). Under the letter of the law these companies will have to pay a penalty on each employee in the corporation who does not have insurance. Most of the employees at a restaurant do not have insurance and a large swath of food service employees are on Medicaid. The ACA also levies a penalty on employers who’s employees are covered by Medicaid.

We might see a couple of things happen. Often, people predict doom and gloom by saying that businesses will just close their doors. This is far from the truth as owners typically do not want to close down a business if there is a chance of making a profit. Instead they will change their business to comply with the letter of the law. First, many will change the status of their employees to avoid insurance penalties, meaning many will be scaled back to part-time status if it results in savings. This already happens quite a bit, SSCC has 384 part-time (39 hours) employees and 93 full-time—it’s cheaper to cycle two employees through a schedule instead of having one full time. Others will reduce the number of employees and perhaps try to use “contractors” for more services and saddle the remaining employees with more work. If I owned a restaurant chain I might try to find a way to reorganize so that each location was its own business unit (corporation), each with less than 50 employees.

Another possibility is that employers would require employees to carry and pay for company sponsored insurance. In a restaurant, this would probably consume two weeks of pay from each employee that had to do that. This is not a solution, but it could very well be forced. There may be a lot of cases brought forth that will test and ultimately tweak the new health care law in this regard.

Besides these scenarios that I mention, the health care law is a very attractive and progressive measure that should have been adopted long ago. One provision that looks good on paper is the 80/20 requirement. Health insurance companies have to spend at least 80% of revenue on premiums. Were they already doing this anyway, I don’t know. Its affect yet remains to be seen. Another striking provision of the ACA lets people buy insurance across state lines, rather it lets insurance companies sell across state lines. I didn’t know this wasn’t possible before, but this should level the playing field of the market and stir up a bit more competition—always a good thing.

Another thing that is very popular is a provision letting “children” stay on a parent’s health