ObamaCare’s mandates will cost many low-income workers their employer-based insurance coverage. The Administration promises to waive the regulations, but that merely further politicizes health care decisions and centralizes more power in Washington. “Any such criticism now triggers an autonomic reflex among administration spokesmen where they regurgitate the lines, ‘Americans have seen what happens when insurance companies have free rein. The Affordable Care Act ends insurance companies’ worst abuses.’ As if giving bureaucrats free rein to engage in abusive government practices is an improvement.”
“McDonald’s Corp. has warned federal regulators that it could drop its health insurance plan for nearly 30,000 hourly restaurant workers unless regulators waive a new requirement of the U.S. health overhaul. The move is one of the clearest indications that new rules may disrupt workers’ health plans as the law ripples through the real world.”
Businesses are unable to plan for ObamaCare’s new mandates and taxes, because of the regulatory complexity. “But at this point, the answer is just not knowable, since regulators still have to write so many regulations, including what health services employers will be required to cover under mandatory insurance.”
A new ObamaCare calculator from The Heritage Foundation lets you analyze how the costs of the bill would change if certain assumptions used by the Congressional Budget Office are incorrect.
Research shows that firms are paying more to insure their employees because of ObamaCare. Despite presidential promises to lower premiums for businesses and families, premiums will jump 8.8% in 2011. “While health care reform cannot be blamed entirely for employers’ increasing cost, the incremental expense of complying with the new law adds fuel to the fire, at least for the short term.”
When the Congressional Budget Office develops budget estimates, they use a static analysis that only measures direct revenues and expenditures. A dynamic analysis looks at the amount of lost productivity from ObamaCare’s huge tax increases to determine that the economy will produce $706 billion less than it would otherwise. This lost value means the actual debt will be $753 billion higher after 10 years because of ObamaCare.
Tax credits for small businesses in ObamaCare were supposed to help them cover the costs of expanding coverage, but the cuts are so small and restrictive they’ll likely do very little. “Though small firms eligible for some level of the tax credit employ approximately 16.6 million employees, the report estimates that businesses that might actually take advantage of the credit employ only 3.4 million workers. Moreover, a large portion of those 3.4 million already receive health insurance through their job.”
With new medical-loss ratio regulations and an expansion of government involvement in the insurance purchasing process, insurance brokers are likely to cease to exist as an industry. “Insurance agents and brokers and small insurance companies are among those who may have to scramble to stay afloat over the next few years. This is partly by design and partly an unintended consequence of a new law that is so sweeping, it will affect nearly every corner of an industry that accounts for one-sixth of the U.S. economy.”
Insurance agents are looking at the government’s plans to create insurance exchanges and are worried that they’ll be made obsolete and driven out of business. They are assuming that the fee insurance companies pay to brokers will be considered an administrative cost by new “medical-loss ratio” regulations and that insurance companies will be forced to lower those costs to comply with ObamaCare.
“Fewer than 2 million of the nation’s 6 million companies with employees qualify
for the small-business tax credits included in the new health insurance reform
law, says the National Federation of Independent Business. The law’s supporters
had projected that twice as many small businesses would qualify for the tax
credit.”