It’s almost time for Stage Two of the great ObamaCare dump, as the truly breathtaking depths of Barack Obama’s Big Lie are exposed… and America is shoved closer to the howling abyss of single-payer health care, the transformation nobody voted for.
Kaiser Health News explains something that ObamaCare critics predicted, with typical accuracy, years ago: employers have strong incentives to chuck their employees into those hideous ObamaCare exchanges, rather than continuing to provide the sort of health insurance we’re all accustomed to. For the cost of a modest trans-Constitutional tax/penalty, the corporate world can wash its hands of health insurance entirely:
Can corporations shift workers with high medical costs from the company health plan into online insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act? Some employers are considering it, say benefits consultants.
“It’s all over the marketplace,” said Todd Yates, a managing partner at Hill, Chesson & Woody, a North Carolina benefits consulting firm. “Employers are inquiring about it and brokers and consultants are advocating for it.”
Patients with preexisting medical conditions like diabetes drive health spending. But those who undergo expensive procedures such as organ transplants are a burden to the company as well. Since most big corporations are self-insured, shifting even one high-cost member out of the company plan could save the employer hundreds of thousands of dollars a year–while increasing the cost of claims absorbed by the marketplace policy by a similar amount.
And the health law might not prohibit it, opening a door to potential erosion of employer-based coverage.
“Such an employer-dumping strategy can promote the interests of both employers and employees by shifting health care expenses on to the public at large,” wrote two University of Minnesota law professors in a 2011 paper that basically predicted the present interest.
Awww, isn’t that sweet? Employers and employees can both promote their interests by having the former dump the latter into heavily subsidized public programs that offer low-quality, high-cost insurance with restricted provider networks! Guess whose interests don’t seem to matter to any of these geniuses? Taxpayers, i.e. the people who have to shoulder the burden of all these subsidies.
This apocalyptic round of employer-dumping is the reason Obama violated the Constitution to illegally push all those ObamaCare deadlines back – he didn’t want it happening right before the 2014 election, which would have gone from being a Democrat massacre to a mass funeral for their entire party. Now that the worst of it has been safely delayed until after November, get ready for some future round of chripy press releases from the Administration touting the really huge number of people using those ObamaCare exchanges. Think it was annoying for these con artists to boast of 7 million “enrollments” in April, when 6 million of them were people who were stripped of their insurance coverage by ObamaCare? Multiply that by a factor of ten.
The other problem that will be created by employer-dumping is the utter collapse of ObamaCare’s finances, but they’ll fix that by printing up some more magic pixie-dust deficit money, denouncing everyone who objects to the debt surge as a heartless ghoul who wants poor people to die. Later, they’ll jack up your taxes to cover that deficit spending, and if you object, people like Barack Obama will compare you to a deadbeat diner trying to skip out on your tab at Denny’s. Insurance premiums will rise steadily during that fiscal shell game, and if you object to that, you’ll be told ObamaCare is the “settled law of the land,” nothing can be done about it now, and remembering the good old days of affordable high-quality insurance is a thoughtcrime.
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