I'm sorry if I'm not explaining this well. What I'm talking about is not hourly employees, but salaried employees. The executive I talked with is at the upper level of a large property management company. What they will be doing across the board is eliminate healthcare insurance as a benefit. What they will do is give everyone a stipend/bonus equal to the amount the company paid, minus the tax penalty, and let them buy their own insurance. I was told this a couple weeks ago.
Today the Wall Street Journal had an article about the same thing and the financial incentives to do this. It may start slowly, but it is going to happen. I suspect the GOP-e which represents mid to large business interests is not fighting harder than ever to repeal obamacare because business wants out of healthcare.
I got everything you said the first time, no need to repeat it. My opinion is the incentive is only there to do it for the lower-income employees, just like companies are not worried about cutting part-timers to under 30 hours. Because those employees don’t have many other options as to where else to go and they are not difficult to replace if they do leave. I believe middle-to-higher income level employees are not as easy to replace and will be incentivized to move to another company who is still offering group health care if their health care is cut off. Because since they make too much money to get subsidized health care, cutting their health care benefits would be a pay cut to them. Cutting pay is not something a company who doesn’t want to lose good employees will do.