Obamacare and the end of employer provided health insurance
Obama acted as a defender of these plans when he was first running for president in 2008.
Here’s another item for the growing list of things we weren’t told about Obamacare before it was passed.
It seems the Affordable Care Act presents a direct threat to employer provided health insurance plans and could force up to 150 million people out of their current plans.
Jim Angle of FOX News did a recent in-depth report on the subject:
Will ObamaCare mean the end of employer-provided insurance?
President Obama’s famous promise that “you can keep your plan and your doctor, no matter what” was not the only misleading argument he made for his health care plan. There is yet another controversy, with even bigger consequences, brewing for Americans who already have health care.
Analysts predict that as ObamaCare takes hold, it will mean the end of employer-provided insurance, with former Obama adviser Zeke Emanuel predicting that80 percent of such plans will disappear within ten years.
“It’s going to actually be better for people,” Emanuel argued. “They’ll have more choice. Most people who work for an employer and get their coverage through an employer do not have choice.”
The Wall Street research firm S&P IQ went even further, predicting 90 percent of such plans will disappear.
Angle notes that Obama acted as a defender of these plans when he was first running for president in 2008:
In his second debate with Republican nominee John McCain in 2008, Obama said, “This would lead to the unraveling of the employer-based health care system. That, I don’t think, is the kind of change that we need.”
He was referring to a proposal from McCain in 2008 offering every American a $5,000 tax credit instead of tax-free insurance only for those who get coverage at work.
In the same debate, Obama said, “Now, Senator McCain has a different kind of approach. He says that he’s going to give you a $5,000 tax credit. What he doesn’t tell you is that he is going to tax your employer-based health care benefits for the first time ever.”
But now, analysts predict ObamaCare will go even further and actually eliminate those plans altogether.
Here’s the video from Special Report with Bret Baier:
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Comments
As far as this administration is concerned, this is a feature, not a bug. And if any of them were ever honest about it, they would have admitted that the best plans would go away.
Of course this is a feature. This is largely how they planned to get to “single payer.”
1.) Require through regulation that insurance plans must pay out a certain percentage of what they receive every year in COVERAGE (not including overhead). Basically a form of “price control.” This prevents any type of “banking” prior year profits to cover any higher years. Makes Health Insurance Companies a much less attractive investment. Why invest where you can only make 5%, when you can invest where you can make 20% or more.
2.) Destroy the individual marketplace by increasing the required “coverage” of plans purchased. That way, only the large employer plans would be able to survive. Feeds into #1, making Health Insurance Companies a less desirable investment.
3.) Make paying for medical services in cash or without insurance illegal. Regulate the doctors from receiving said payments, because you can’t regulate the public directly. Call it “medical fraud prevention.”
4.) Regulate the employer market so that if you are above a certain size, you MUST by health insurance for your employees or pay a fine. The small insurers have gotten out due to the regulation in #2, and the big guys are going to charge you an arm and a leg. BUT, set the fine so small that many small businesses choose to drop coverage rather than pay up ($2,000 fine per employee, vs. $10,000 cost of EMPLOYER section of health care coverage cost).
5.) Use “public outcry” that insurance is so expensive to have people demand that they can buy “Medicaid” policies at the government’s “at cost” rate.
6.) When a significant portion of the population chooses the “Medicaid” route, claim that the “strain on the system is more than expected” and that taxes have to be raised “on the rich” to pay “just a little bit more” in order for the people to have the “right” to good and decent health care. Those that object will be tarred and feathered as miserly in wanting poor grandma to hurry up and die already.
The “at cost” medicaid plan drives out the few remaining insurance companies, who can no longer compete with a business that is effectively a “non-profit” company, and they cancel their remaining plans.
Leaving: Single Payer through the Government as the only way to receive or pay for medical services legally.
Right now, we’re just coming up on #5, and this is likely the LAST chance to stop it before it becomes enshrined.
Ok Chuck this is down right scary. You have given a very plausible path to single payer. I thought that the insurance companies would be smart enough to stop it, but this squeezes them right out. WOW!
What I would like to know is WHEN is obamadeath going to negatively impact all those federal employees and congressional members who exempted themselves from this scam. The federal government is an employer, too.
Well, duh. Wasn’t this the point all along? I mean, how unfair is it that people with jobs have employer-provided insurance while those without don’t? Gotta take it away from the haves to level the playing field for everyone else….
Let’s combine that thought with the fact that obamullah has destroyed the economy and business climate (investment, venture capital, etc.) through its many tentacles of the IRS, EPA, HHS, etc., and doubled true unemployment numbers.
I don’t really see what the big deal is. There aren’t that many people employed anymore, so it can’t affect very many people, and that number will be much smaller by 2016.
to quote that great philosopher, Ray Wiley Hubbard, the trouble with irony is that not everyone gets it.
hence the down ding someone gave you for this bit of wit. 😉
Well, they’re just following the same blueprint as that used to make Social Security another entitlement, right? I mean, that’s what they said they were going to do all along.
We don’t have to purchase health insurance, and we can’t be penalized for not carrying it. The only recourse the government has is to take their “penalty” out of people’s income tax REFUND – if you know how to keep from getting a refund, you can dodge the penalty altogether.
Seeing as the IRS still doesn’t have the mechanisms in place to handle deducting money from refunds, I figure this is going to take more than 10 years to resolve itself.
This whole thing is garbage all the way down…
Yes, but it does give the ma wonderful tool for jailing anyone they fee like for tax fraud or evasion.
You can’t rule a country of honest men, now can you?
Civil rights prosecutions against employers for not providing health insurance for employees. I can see it coming.
In my opinion this has been the only upside of this whole thing. Splitting your work from your health insurance would make the labor market more flexible and give people a better idea of overall cost. It’s lovely having someone else pay, but it is a major driver of costs.
What the employer pays is money that could go to the employee. Since it costs the employer to employ me without me getting any of it (in my healthy years), that is money that came out of my paycheck.
So, it’s about as much “someone else pays” as it is money extorted from me and invested against my will that I’m finally able to tap into.
When Obama Care gets rolling, I’m dead meat. Cancer.
Removing healthcare from employee benefits in lieu of pay has long been recommended by conservative experts along with with larger insurance pools unrestricted by state lines.
The difference, of course, is the reasoning behind these changes. Conservatives want lower insurance prices, and a return to medical procedure billings that are not influenced by insurance provider biases and contracts.
Provider billings and Medicare payments, for example, are not in the same universe. I had minor back surgery which resulted in $39K of billing and the government paid $6 grand.
Without insurance, I would be on the hook for $39,000. Instead the medical providers simply wrote off their unpaid and excluded billings. To a lesser degree, the same thing happens with employer-sponsored plans. Everyone should be billed the same reasonable rate for each procedure, adjusted only for the risk factor created by personal medical history, age and previous claims.
Gee, the wanton destruction of the private insurance market. Who’da thunk?
Oh what a tangled web we weave when we first learn to tie health insurance to employment to begin with ~
– TRIGGER WARNING –
The following comment could be offensive to many people.
Stop reading now.
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Obamacare is a giant dildo covered wit thorns and abrasive sand.
The progressive crowd lead by Barack Obama and Nancy “You’ve got to pass it to find out what’s in it” Pelosi are sodomizing the American middle class with it.
And we never gave consent!!
Can we call it rape?
Hello. The employer-provided health insurance regime, set up I think in the 1940’s – 50’s, amounts to a $250 billion-a-year+ tax benefit for corporations in the form of reduced employment costs, enhancing workers’ salaries asymmetrically, the benefit bacon increasing in greasiness as it stair-steps up to the more confiscatory/extortive tax-brackets. The perverse results of employer-provided medicine (and assorted ancillary or just any old costs labeled “health” expenses like the all-important female access to this-and-that) include: the illusion of an all-you-can-eat free buffet lunch for middle class workers; incentivization of over-treatment and hypochondria – enriching doctors and hospitals and pharmaceutical concerns, with placebo-like or even deleterious health results (wasteful on a colossal scale, but even so, merely a sort of triple-A warm-up for the nimiety bigs – of Medicare where superfluousness is taken to soaring heights capped only by beneficiaries’ demises and the sad hastenings of those passings that excessive medico-pharma intervention often bring); stagnation of take home pay due to the above non-transparency and waste (and a resulting parade of insufferable writers opining that the antecedent of wage stasis is capitalism, Wall St, exorbitant CEO salaries, greedy banks, corporate America, high taxes, low taxes, global warming, Jews such as the Bilda-Bergs and their group, Roth’s child, and you-know-who the —- brothers – any old thing but the little increase in health care from 2% of GDP to 17% since the implemention of the employer linked system but it could be a coincidence I suppose or a —- brothers’ trick); a little problem for those who lose their jobs: they have to come up with an extra 10-20k/year to self-insure at what is for most an inopportune time financially. So I wouldn’t cry big tears simply at the loss of the employer insurance link.
But the new redistributive scheme institutionalizing the worst of both the fraud-laden bad-quality Medicaid and the free-buffet Cadillac-plan employee health-insurance worlds makes one nostalgic for the good old days of the merely pretty bad. And even that pales in egregiousness to the unknown that commenters here have articulately spotlighted the – the fresh new lows of breathtaking dishonesty of the left that riddle Obamacare could make a robot wear a tin-foil cap – single payer could be the plan – it may have been all along – who knows?
The default of the “progressive” is to fib – misstate, exaggerate, prevaricate, embroider, gloss over or out-and-out lie – all for the glory of the great Utopian plan, which people will have to pay for, which they won’t like, so we have to lie, right? So the left will always blow themselves up and normal people will be there to bring back common sense. Enjoy the show.
to BamBam and the rest of his fascist friends, this is a feature of the law, not a bug.
until everyone is dependent of the government from conception to death, they won’t be happy.