Sillysoft Forums

[Drifter]

Breaking--ObamaCare prompts top companies to consider dropping employee coverage

May 5, 9:56 PM Anthony G. Martin


In a stunning revelation Wednesday, several top U.S. corporations are seriously considering dropping employee health insurance coverage in light of what they see as the inevitable consequence of ObamaCare--skyrocketing costs.

The companies state that after their legal experts poured over the thousands of pages in the new law, it will cost them less to pay the fines for not providing healthcare coverage for employees than continuing to provide employer-paid health insurance benefits.

As a side-note to the announcement, the companies maintain that ObamaCare will result in a dramatic increase in expenses for providing employee coverage, with added costs skyrocketing to multi-billions of dollars.

According to Business Record:

"Additionally, the penalties to businesses for not offering coverage are less expensive than the cost of providing insurance, she said. "But for those that aren't providing coverage now, this is a huge burden to them. And for employers that have a lot of employees working 30 hours (the threshold to be considered full- ime), you may have a lot of businesses cutting them back to 29 hours."

Business Record maintains that despite this fact most companies will probably try to continue to provide coverage.

But a report issued today in Fortune Magazine and reported by CNN indicates that the dire warnings of ObamaCare critics concerning the consequences of approving the costly legislation are in fact well-founded.

The report points to internal documents from AT&T, Verizon, John Deere, and several other large corporations which show that executives are, in fact, looking at the option of dropping healthcare coverage for employees due to what they are sure will be unsustainable increases in costs. These costs will be so prohibitive that it would benefit the corporations to pay the government fines instead:

"Internal documents recently reviewed by Fortune, originally requested by Congress, show what the bill's critics predicted, and what its champions dreaded: many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the health care coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government.

That would dismantle the employer-based system that has reigned since World War II. It would also seem to contradict President Obama's statements that Americans who like their current plans could keep them. And as we'll see, it would hugely magnify the projected costs for the bill, which controls deficits only by assuming that America's employers would remain the backbone of the nation's health care system.

Hence, health-care reform risks becoming a victim of unintended consequences. Amazingly, the corporate documents that prove this point became public because of a different set of unintended consequences: they told a story far different than the one the politicians who demanded them expected."

This information will most certainly be added motivation for those who are intent on repealing ObamaCare following the November 2010 midterm elections, or at the very least refusing to fund the program which was passed by Congress as an appropriations measure.

Source

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Health care bill supporters can start their responses any time now...

[the tide]

Anthony G. Martin - another credible stalwart of objective journalism. His bio is amazing, you should check it out....

[Thetan]

You see? that article is yet another example of how stupid and non-sensical neoliberalism and free-market defenders are:

Those huge corporations first reaction to the obama care legislation was to get a bunch of people to study the law and assess wether they should drop the health-care for their employees since it is cheaper to pay the fines or not. And THOSE are the kind of people free market defenders want to let go un-regulated... pfft

[Nimrod7]

I think it shows the "stupidity" of those who wrote the legislation. People are going to do what's in their best interest. In the case of employers, if it's cheaper to pay a fine then to offer health insurance, a percentage of them are going to do so.

[Thetan]

[Drifter]

Changing Stance, Administration Now Defends Insurance Mandate as a Tax

By ROBERT PEAR
Published: July 16, 2010

WASHINGTON — When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”

And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.

Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.

The rest of the article...

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So much for that whole No Tax increase if you make under 250K...

[Shockandawe]

Continue discussion here please.

[jesterme]

Is the Income Tax also unconstitutional?

How about the Federal Reserve? How do you swallow that one?

The Constitution was a liberal document when it was signed. When did it get castrated?

[Drifter]

How about they reduce around 1700 some odd pages (just a round number, see my previous post that went unanswered) of the health care law that has absolutely nothing to do with health care and call it good?

Would that be a good start?

[jesterme]

It was a massively progressive move. It is what it is. We can discuss the merits much easier than we can argue about page 2013, 1094, 548, etc etc.

Is the concept good and proper or no?

[Drifter]

How many ways do I need to say NO (would feck no work, or do I need to break my self censorship?)?

A massively progressive move, yes.

Is what it is, no.

Russian roulette is what it is, and I'm not playing.

[jesterme]

I am not really a proponent. I am just saying it is the law now and I don't really see that changing. I posted in the other thread explaining how I don't think it is going away anytime soon.

http://sillysoft.net/forums/viewtopic.php?p=261066#261066

[Drifter]

CBO: Obamacare to cost $1.76 trillion over 10 yrs
byPhilip Klein Senior Editorial Writer
March 13, 2012

President Obama's national health care law will cost $1.76 trillion over a decade, according to a new projection released today by the Congressional Budget Office, rather than the $940 billion forecast when it was signed into law.

Democrats employed many accounting tricks when they were pushing through the national health care legislation, the most egregious of which was to delay full implementation of the law until 2014, so it would appear cheaper under the CBO's standard ten-year budget window and, at least on paper, meet Obama's pledge that the legislation would cost "around $900 billion over 10 years." When the final CBO score came out before passage, critics noted that the true 10 year cost would be far higher than advertised once projections accounted for full implementation.

Today, the CBO released new projections from 2013 extending through 2022, and the results are as critics expected: the ten-year cost of the law's core provisions to expand health insurance coverage has now ballooned to $1.76 trillion. That's because we now have estimates for Obamacare's first nine years of full implementation, rather than the mere six when it was signed into law. Only next year will we get a true ten-year cost estimate, if the law isn't overturned by the Supreme Court or repealed by then. Given that in 2022, the last year available, the gross cost of the coverage expansions are $265 billion, we're likely looking at about $2 trillion over the first decade, or more than double what Obama advertised.