With the Medicare chief actuary predicting that ObamaCare would cause overall health-care costs to rise, with an Obama administration study predicting that perhaps a majority of private employers would be forced to change and/or drop their health plans, and with the CBO estimating that ObamaCare would cost $115 billion more than previously predicted, even government sources seem to be confirming that Congress did indeed “have to pass the bill” for the fog to lift so that Americans could “find out what was in it.”
From the reality sinking in that there would be a strong financial incentive under ObamaCare for businesses to stop providing health insurance, to the administration’s own estimate that recently drawn-up draft regulations could cause over 100 million Americans to lose their coverage, it is becoming obvious to more and more Americans that ObamaCare is nothing like its Democratic proponents promised it would be.
When drafting ObamaCare, Congress left the decision of how to manage the transition for current plans to meet the new Washington-approved health care mandates up to the Administration. The Department of Health and Human Services has issued new rules, which will require many firms to drop their current coverage to comply. “Although President Obama and many Democrats promised during the health care reform debate that ‘if you like your health plan, you can keep it,’ the health insurance plans that are now offered by small businesses probably will not survive the transition to a regulated marketplace.
A one-page chart examining all of the different ways ObamaCare’s employer mandate (free rider provision) will negatively affect hiring decisions of businesses at the margins.
AT&T is reporting that it will take a $1 billion accounting charge as a result of an ObamaCare provision that changes the way in which Medicare prescription drug subsidies are taxed – and the company says the overhaul may cause it to cut current and retired workers’ health-care benefits.
Despite President Obama’s continual insistence that if you like your plan, you can keep it, his own administration’s preliminary analysis indicates that, for about half of all Americans, this might not be so. According to the analysis’s “midrange estimate,” 45 percent of large employer plans and 66 percent of small employer plans would lose their grandfathered status by the end of 2013.
In three years a majority of workers will be forced to change their current health insurance plans, according to draft regulations being written by the Obama Administration. Despite promises that current plans will be “grandfathered” and allowed to continue once ObamaCare is fully implemented, minor changes will qualify plans as “new” and be forced to make broad, new changes to comply with the new law. To avoid ObamaCare’s new regulations, employers might drop their employer-provided insurance altogether.
The Administration has been using taxpayer funds to have the IRS promote ObamaCare under the guise of informing the public about the effects of the new law. But if the Administration is really just trying to inform and not to propagandize, why isn’t the IRS advertising the new tax on indoor tanning services, set to start July 1st?
A former CBO Director says that ObamaCare would likely raise deficits by $600,000,000,000 more than the CBO projects, could result in 40 million more Americans being shifted from employer-provided to government-provided insurance than the CBO projects, and would impose such high effective marginal tax-rates on those who are shifted onto government-provided insurance that it would be very hard for them to pursue the American Dream of making a better life.
As a so-called improvement to the insurance market, ObamaCare outlaws many inexpensive, more affordable types of insurance to force people into Washington-approved, comprehensive plans that are more expensive which “could strip more than 1 million people of their insurance coverage, violating a key goal of President Barack Obama’s reforms.”