Posted on 05/01/2014 12:36:30 PM PDT by Old Yeller
Get ready for a trip back to the 1950s. Back then, fast-growing companies began to offer health insurance as a fringe benefit to help recruit workers. It helped that the government had passed a few tax breaks making it affordable for corporations. So it was basically by accident that employer-provided health insurance became the norm in the United States, even though the government came to oversee healthcare in most other developed nations.
We may soon go back to a model in which employers provide healthcare more as a perk than as a routine benefit, requiring workers to get insurance from other sources. That could save big companies up to $700 billion by 2025, according to a new report from S&P Capital IQ. It’s hard to think of any other single change that could save companies that much money, indicating how powerful the Affordable Care Act (ACA) could become once it has fully impacted the U.S. healthcare system. S&P predicts that companies will do the math and find it irresistible to move more and more of their workers off company-run plans and into the exchanges established under Obamacare, as the ACA is known. Companies with more than 50 workers will have to pay a penalty if they don’t offer insurance, but it could still be cheaper when factoring in the savings on healthcare; that’s because insurance costs have skyrocketed during the last 20 years, making healthcare one of the costs companies find most difficult to control.
The rising and unpredictable nature of healthcare costs led AOL CEO Tim Armstrong to make his unfortunate comment about "distressed babies" earlier this year. Armstrong took a lot of heat and later apologized, but many CEOs expresss similar frustrations (usually privately).
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
This may be the launching pad to structure a good reform bill to dismantle Obamacare. Give voters the same tax benefit as businesses get but give them MORE choice to pick their own plan. It will be a great consumer driven basis. Then free all the restraints set in Obamacare the reduced choice.
Obama DIDN'T say "If you like your company's health insurance plan, you can keep it.", now did he?
So it was just a fluke that companies provided health insurance in the first place, therefore you're not really losing anything if you never legitimately had it in the first place.
Some people just don’t get it. This is exactly what the Progressives want. It clears the way for their Single Payer System.
We have a winner.
there is a fear factor......
scare the crap out of employees and they will desert and vote against the Rats to keep their insurance
Health care was a lot cheaper back then. If you got seriously sick, you died. Most did not survive cancer. If they did it was after butchery. Breast cancer surgery took the breast, underlying muscle, lymph nodes in the upper arms. Most people did not survive heart attacks. Now we have clotting inhibitors. Today we have MRI, CAT, ultrasound. Medications that were not dreamed of. A lot has changed.
Thanks goodness we have Obama in charge, someone who cares about us, he really does, I know....
We need he and Liz Warren to *fight* for us.
Like on minimum wage.
String up some employers in public to send the rest of them a warning.
Off with their heads.
Long live Obama, our King.
This has actually been the plan all along.
Every politician who opposes Obamacare should be frequently reminding their constituents that the greatest negative impact of Obamacare was put off by one of Obama’s many cowardly moves to avoid the full impact becoming known before the November midterm elections.
But I don’t hear the postponed employer mandate mentioned very often.
Just wait til the real anguish begins, after the election when the employer mandate kicks in, and people see benefits and insurance cancellations like never before. But the important thing is, all the Democrat incumbents who voted for Obamacare will have won re-election by then /s
Thanks to Obama, this has been pushed back (illegally) until after the mid-term elections.
If only there was some way we could have seen this coming...
/s
Yes. Yes it does.
The main difference hasn't anything to do with insurance. What made the difference was, we had a free market in healthcare back then.
Consequently, things were much cheaper in real terms, and you got better service and more accountability. A night in the hospital was less than $20, which adjusted for inflation would be less than $200 in today's dollars. Compare that to 3- to 5,000 today.
It's gov't involvement which is the prime factor for today's healthcare disaster, and it's been eating away for decades (thanks LBJ and the Great Society). Just like with college tuition.
“... companies began to offer health insurance
as a fringe benefit to help recruit workers...
... it was basically by accident that
employer-provided health insurance became the norm ...”
-
No, it was government control that started it.
During WWII the federal government froze wages,
and since business could not attract good employees
by offering higher wages, they developed a work-around
and began to offer non-wage benefits like health care,
paid vacations, retirement plans, etc.
Government stated the whole thing by poking their nose
into the free market in the first place.
“It’s hard to think of any other single change that could save companies that much money”
The money (no pun) quote. Hence why the chamber of commerce through their shills the RINOs are not fighting against the ACA.
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