Posted on 05/06/2010 9:45:46 AM PDT by radioone
Well, well, well. Remember when Barack Obama said that under ObamaCare, people would keep their existing health plans and doctors? Remember when any suggestion that companies would find it a lot less expensive to dump employer-based health care and pay the penalties instead were cast as “myths” and “scare tactics,” even though the math was extremely easy to see? Welcome to Hope and Change:
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
bttt
exccept that this time the consequences were fully intended. Single Payer Universal Health Care here we come.
Either way, health care costs would still rise because their true causes remain unaddressed. But at least it would not be as farcical as what we have now: a law designed to be both ineffective and unenforceable so that Denocrats in Congress can later do what they've wanted to do all along: nationalize health care.
The unintended consequence of wage controls and increased taxes on income (WWII era, IIRC).
and WHO is shocked??
I’m aware of that, and I should have been more clear. The bozos in Congress (with specific focus on Democrats) should know better.
But perhaps that is not worth saying, since for Democrats it is all about expanding the state, and creating a political machine by buying votes of those on the government dole.
It’s no secret that some major corporations would like to be free of the burden of health insurance, and regard employee sponsored health insurance costs as one of their major international competitive disadvantages - the CEO of FedEx, for example, has been speaking publicly about this for years.
But for the moment at least I think this is more a bean-counters fantasy than a practical choice, as the same corporations are well aware that it’s only the threat of losing health insurance that prevents many of their most valuable employees from jumping ship.
This will be happening, big time.
Companies with older workers produce insurance expense that is was higher than the penalty, for example in the 50 years + bracket insurance can be $2,000 per month with employees normally only paying around 10-20 percent. Employees will be dumped into the government plan.
We are so screwed.
But perhaps that is not worth saying, since for Democrats it is all about expanding the state, and creating a political machine by buying votes of those on the government dole.
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Exactly. The Obama Plan A.
Well, considering my companies CEO sent an email out to all employees stating that our company would do this if Obamacare did not get repealed in some way, I would think it is more than a bean counters fantasy.
Also, the increased cost of premiums because of Obamacare will make most corporations UNPROFITABLE if they do not drop health insirance coverage.
Our CEO laid it all out in black and white in his letter. he showed how much insurance was per employee, what it was expacted to rise too (estimates right now are 20-50% hikes in premiums), and how much the company would save if they dropped insurance and paid the fine (it was over 10K a year per employee)
he then flat out stated that the choice was this: Continue to provide insurance and go bankrupt, or cut insurance and everyone keeps their jobs.
So, don't even begin to think this is a bean counters fantasy - it is a REALITY!
My company is thinking of doing the same thing.
Let me start by saying I’m not trying to defend Obamacare, but a lot of such complaints by employers are pretty disingenuous.
1) In the broader scheme of things, Obamacare is not a major contributor to the cost structure of private insurance - even if you take the worst-case estimates as regards private insurance costs it just pushed the crisis 18 or 24 months down the road - your employer’s health care costs were increasing dramatically before Obamacare, and they would’ve continued to increase dramatically without Obama care.
2) Your employer had the opportunity to “save” that $10,000 last year, and the year before that, and the year before that - all they had to do was to eliminate company-sponsored healthcare plans for employees - in fact your employer would’ve come out even further ahead on a pure cost basis because they would’ve had to pay a fine had they done so.
3) Of course, they wouldn’t actually have “saved” that $10,000, because they would have had to pass it on in higher wages to employees to obtain individual coverage, or they would have hemorrhaged staff. (In fact, it probably would have cost them more than $10,000, because your employer’s provision of health insurance more heavily subsidized by the tax code then they purchase similar insurance by individuals.
So while blaming that evil ol’ Obamacare may seem superficially plausible, the real problem is the underlying cost structure of American medicine, which is of course the reality that all politicians, on both the left and right, just don’t want to confront.
In this regard you might want to take a look at these comments by Joe Flower:
http://www.imaginewhatif.com/2010/03/health-care-reform-round-2.html
Flower is a health care analyst and a leading speaker at industry gatherings, so if you want to know what the industry is actually hearing from people are paying to tell them what’s going to happen rather than pander to voters or talk-show audiences, his comments are a good place to start.
Further, on a more personal level, private medical insurance is a lot more efficient and friendly than government-run “care.” I have a choice on who I see and when, and with government “care,” I lose that choice and the government interferes in my relationship with my doctors. Now, if I don't like my doctor for whatever reason, I can fire him. Under government “care,” you have no choice.
For someone able to afford to pay for their own medical care out of pocket, that’s the case.
But for most people, who obtain health insurance through an employer, there are lots of restrictions on what care is available and who provides it - for example we currently have insurance through my wife’s policy, which is provided by a large corporation. We have a expensive “Premium PPO” (one of those “Cadillac” insurance plans, actually) which provides us with a lot more choice and flexibility than the standard PPO and various HMO plans, but but there are still substantial restrictions, including much higher co-pays and deductibles if we go “out of network” to obtain care, and there are some things for which the plan will decline to pay.
So at the moment, many Americans have “employer controlled health care” - which is one of the reasons why some of the concrete provisions of the recently passed bill for (for example the prohibition of arbitrary rescissions) poll at 70% approval and above.
(The employers, with some justice, will of course make the point that they in turn are the captives of rapidly increasing medical costs).
Under Obamacare the degree of “choice” available to most people remains about the same (or increases lot, if you are currently involuntarily uninsured); the policies are going to be provided by the same handful of large insurers, most of whom have oligarchical market dominance in the geographic locations within which they operate, and the policies will continue to include standard packages of services and limitations that pretty closely mirror the range now available across a spectrum of employers.
The big difference is that the government will now be providing a little less subsidy for the purchase of high-cost/high benefit insurance through employers (there awill be lower tax breaks for high-cost plans) and will be considerably increasing the subsidy for the purchase of relatively low-cost/low- benefit plans, most of which will be purchased by people who are now involuntarily uninsured. (Even a “public option” would have just been one more provider in the market, abet one which conceivably might have had a somewhat lower cost structure).
So what you’re ending up with is something that looks a lot more like the European systems (the Netherlands would serve as an example) where you have a single-payer contracting with multiple private insurers who are competing on the basis of cost and service to provide a standardized group of options, than something like a nationalized system along the lines of the UK.
In fact to consumers from a “choice” standpoint it’s going to look much the options provided by employers under the current system, only consumers will probably be in a better position to make rational choices - choices between insurance offered on the exchanges will be “apples to apples” comparisons, whereas now it’s virtually impossible to determine what will be covered, or how coverage decisions are made, as this information is buried in pages and pages of impenetrable legalese that makes it almost impossible to compare the benefits actually provided by various plans, even within the choices offered by giving employer.
The elephant in the room, of course, is “cost” - and we reaching the point where for everyone except those with unlimited personal resources “choices” are increasingly going to have to be made about what’s going to be covered and what extent copayment is going to be required, and those choices are going to be made by plan administrators, and the administrators’ imperatives are going to be pretty much the same whether they are administering on behalf of an employer or on behalf of state or federal government.
To some extent you can avoid consideration these issues via high deductible plans and medical savings accounts, but you can’t get around the problem that really matters: most people are going to find it difficult or impossible to pay for hospitalization or intensive outpatient care or extended chemotherapy out of pocket, so some sort of insurance is going to kick in, and whoever administers the insurance is going to be controlling many significant “choices” regarding care.
For a long time we’ve been avoiding candid discussion of this problem because our national culture simultaneously embraces two contradictory and mutually exclusive opinions: that everybody is entitled to virtually unlimited medical care when faced with a major illness, and that people ought to be individually responsible for bearing the cost.
The way we’ve solved the problem so far is to ignore the cost (both financial and to families) of pursuing both these beliefs in high medical costs environment, so we now find ourselves in a position where we pay 2 to 3 times what everyone else does for marginally better results. (For that kind of money, we ought to be getting dramatically better results, the unfortunate reality is that the current state of medical knowledge we derive rapidly decreasing returns on the marginal dollars invested).
And now it’s finally caught up with us: medical costs are rising much faster than inflation, and in fact have become the real “Death Tax” levied on American families - unless you are “lucky” enough to drop dead of heart attack or stroke or be carried off by rapidly progressing disease, there is a good chance that your entire net worth will be forfeit to the medical and long-term care industries.
So IMO, complaining about Obamacare on the grounds that it’s “government control of medicine” misses the point, the runaway costs of medical care are increasingly “controlling” the financial fate of American families irrespective of whether the plans are administered on behalf of a state government, the federal government, or a private employer - and we have reached the point where for the vast majority of Americans the already substantial limits on medical “choices” enforced by plan administrators are only going to increase, irrespective of whether these limites are imposed by administrators on behalf public or private entities.
And ultimately, this is your choice: do you want to have these limits set as a matter of public policy, by a process which has at least some transparency, by people you can vote out of office if they totally misbehave, knowing that a policy devised for the benefit of average citizens will fit few of them perfectly, or do you want to have them set by individual employers via a process with little transparency, by individuals assigned to your “case” by your employer, with your only real “choice” being to take a chance on an equally opaque process at another employer, knowing that a policy devised for the benefit of average employees would probably fit few of them perfectly?
Having spent a lifetime observing the deficiencies of both public and private policymakers, ultimately I would prefer to have the ability to vote the people making the life-and-death rules out.
The trick is how to achieve the right mix of setting overall public policy and administering it via private industry.
IMO what does not work however is trying to pretend that the current system - where the incentives that matter result in rapid and ultimately unsustainable cost increases - is viable, or can be rationalized purely by market mechanisms.
The facts stand in my original post. Govt care equals no choice. Period. With govt care there is no incentive foer corporations to use health care coverage as a recruiting/retention tool, i.e., a benefit.
With your paln you can choose who you see. Govt does not give you that ability, it takes it away from you.
Knock youself out, embrace the darkness, I want my coverage and detest the idea that some unaccountable govt drone, some GS-6, will hold sway over my medical care. Medical plans that provide poor service either go out of business or they lower prices. With govt, all that will happen is they will grown and cost more for less.
I earned my covergage and it is morally wrong for the govt to decide “they” know best and force me to live in their world. Just being born American should mean something other than be a slave to the state. Medical coverage is not a right-—it is earned and a choice.
I’ve lots of experience in the UK, too include medical “care,” and I shudder to think that is coming our way. Keep it an all the other socialist garbage out there.
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