Many big companies are pushing to cut spending on employee benefits—from pensions to health insurance—and could face labor strikes as a result.
In all, major employers have about 400,000 union workers whose contracts are up for negotiation this year. They include the Detroit auto makers, whose workforces have a combined 140,000 members of the United Auto Workers; a group of railroad operators including CSX Corp., with 142,000 union employees; and telecom companies like Verizon Communications Inc., which is in talks with about 40,000 wireline workers.
President Obama is taking his Medicaid expansion pitch to Tennessee this week to urge Republican officials to expand the low-income insurance program through the Affordable Care Act.
Expect more of that. After the law survived its latest potentially devastating legal challenge, Medicaid expansion will be a legacy-defining issue for the president during his last 18 months, one that will determine whether Obamacare achieves its full, desired impact.
Premium growth in the Affordable Care Act’s Health Insurance Marketplaces has been an area of significant interest, as this is one of the most tangible and measurable indicators of whether the ACA is working to keep health insurance affordable. The ACA’s rate review provision requires premium increases over ten percent to be made public. As a number of individual market insurers are requesting 2016 increases well above 10 percent, concern has been raised over the affordability of premiums in the coming year. However, these increases are not necessarily representative of the range of products from which consumers will be able to choose, and similar data is not widely available for the plans with moderate increases or decreases.
State regulators typically use their power to review health insurance premiums to limit rate hikes. But in Oregon, officials are ordering insurers to raise premiums — in many cases by double digits.
The regulators pointed out that insurers spent over $100 million more than they took in last year. Any more money-losing years like that, and some carriers would surely go bankrupt.
An obscure IRS rule takes effect on Wednesday under which small businesses that get caught helping their workers buy insurance or pay medical bills can be fined 18 times more than larger employers that don’t provide coverage at all, warned the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) today.
Before we hold a going-out-of-business sale for the rule of law, following Thursday’s King v. Burwell ruling at the Supreme Court, let’s review some between-the-lines highlights. The Scalia dissent already took care of the fundamental analysis of how the Court veered so far off course.
Many opponents of the health law are putting away their legal wrecking balls and reaching for chisels.
Thomas Miller, one of the strategists behind the Supreme Court case that aimed to strike down subsidies on the federal exchange, said he thought he would be celebrating now. But after Thursday’s decision upholding the subsidies, he is setting up meetings to discuss narrower attacks on the Affordable Care Act.
The next bit of scrutiny on SCOTUScare — to borrow a new name for the federal health reform act coined by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia — in health care is all about the workplace now that health insurance tax credits are securely in place.
The jeopardy of tax credits overshadowed that employers have big changes ahead under the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court affirmed in King vs. Burwell Thursday the federal government’s position that tax credits, which help many people afford monthly insurance premiums, are available on both federally and state-run exchanges.
Emergency room usage has spiked sharply in recent years. That’s the depressing finding from a new survey by the American College of Emergency Physicians – and it’s putting those who need emergency care at grave risk. The survey concluded that three in four emergency room doctors have experienced a surge of new patients since the Affordable Care Act became law.
That isn’t a coincidence.
If you thought the legal fight over the health care overhaul was finally over, think again. At least four issues related to the Affordable Care Act still are being sorted out in the courts, although none seems to pose the same threat to the law as the challenge to nationwide subsidies that the court rejected on Thursday, or the constitutional case that the justices decided in favor of the law in 2012.