Obama Care Unitended Consequences

[Mani]

How many times has Ron Paul said the bills/laws/regulations congress puts in place, they have unitended consequences that are much worse then the problem they are trying to fix!?!

Well it didn't take long for ObamaCare to bring about this very problem! The most irritating thing, is to hear about the committee that demanded to know what the big corporations were doing, but then when they found out WHY, they became all HUSH HUSH.

UGH!

http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/05/news/companies/dropping_benefits.fortune/index.htm?cnn=yes&hpt=C2

[Theocrat]

And why didn't these big employers drop employee coverage a long time ago? The Congressional Budget Office, in its crucial cost estimates of the bill, projected that company plans will cover more employees ten years from now than today. The reason the bill doesn't add to the deficit, the CBO states, is that fewer than 25 million Americans will be collecting the subsidies the bill mandates in 2020.

Those subsidies are indeed big: families of four earning between $22,000 and $88,000 would pay between 2% and 9.5% of their incomes on premiums; the federal government would pay the rest. So policies for a family making $66,000 would cost them just $5,300 a year with the government picking up the difference: more than $10,000 by most estimates.

As bean counters know, that's not a bad deal for a company's rank-and-file, and it's a great deal for the companies themselves. In a competitive labor market, the employers that shed their plans will need to give their employees a big raise, and those raises could be higher, even after taxes, than the premiums the employees will pay in the exchanges.

What does it mean for health care reform if the employer-sponsored regime collapses? By Fortune's reckoning, each person who's dropped would cost the government an average of around $2,100 after deducting the extra taxes collected on their additional pay. So if 50% of people covered by company plans get dumped, federal health care costs will rise by $160 billion a year in 2016, in addition to the $93 billion in subsidies already forecast by the CBO. Of course, as we've seen throughout the health care reform process, it's impossible to know for certain what the unintended consequences of these actions will be.

Can anyone say "blowback"?

[Brian Defferding]

I'm sure the Obamacare supporters will say that it's a price worth paying that they drop their plans to be put under a federally-managed health care system. Even though the reform was meant to, you know, lower the cost of health care while increase the amount of insured citizens.

[Brian Defferding]

Just posted this article on my Facebook. Already have one guy responding that the only way to resolve this is single payer.