But you should see all the people that think it is so cool that they can get a better deal through the exchange! While I don’t believe our health insurance should be linked to our employment, either, I am not satisfied that private companies are now allowed to break their contracts with employees and dump them on the public fisc. The single payer folks are rubbing their hands with glee and I am weeping for our future generations.
Obamacare was NEVER meant to succeed. Single payer was the goal from the get go.
If employers had given employees contracts guaranteeing health insurance, that would be the case.
The vast majority of employees, however, are employees at will.
As TJ’s points out here, they are not actually cutting the practical net compensation to their employees.
The real answer is to repeal not only Obamacare, but the tax deduction for employer-provided insurance as well.
What contracts ?? Every company does a new health plan offering every year, based on expense. Since the Feds have insisted on making employer-provided insurance significantly more expensive, Trader Joe’s (and other companies) are making rational business decisions. . .
The exchanges are analogous to a gov't run concentration camp.
I don’t have a contract with my employer.
There are so many factors in play here that it is hard to isolate the damage done just by one. You almost have to add up all the different examples of the negative impacts.
The cost basis of Obamacare was based on incorrect assumptions of a static number of uninsured, and a penalty/tax structure to pay for the bill. The revenue components were cuts to Medicare, taxes on the "rich", taxes on everybody, and penalties to employers. The only one of those that can really increase as people get shoved out of employer based coverage is the penalty to the employer. That penalty is a fraction of the cost the government will incur in subsidies for a lower middle class employee.
In the Trader Joe's example there is no penalty to the employer because these are all part time employees. They are people that used to have coverage subsidized through to private means and will now be subsidized by us.
The scarier example by far would be a large company that offered family coverage and cuts that to employee only coverage. In that example the company will pay no penalty, and the family isn't eligible for a subsidy. The financial burden to the family will be for the entire cost of insuring the rest of the family. Many people that cheered the passing of ACA are going to find the only coverage offered to them will come with a hefty price tag they cannot afford. This void in the ACA bill will make people forget the "doughnut hole" from Medicare Part D.