Obamacare Employer Mandate Delayed Until After Congressional Elections 600
theodp writes "If you hoped your employer would finally provide health insurance in 2014, take two aspirin and call your doctor in the morning — the morning of January 1st, 2015. The Obama administration will delay a crucial provision of its signature health-care law until 2015, giving businesses an extra year to comply with a requirement that they provide their workers with insurance. The government will postpone enforcement of the so-called employer mandate until 2015, after the congressional elections, the administration said Tuesday. Under the provision, companies with 50 or more workers face a fine of as much as $3,000 per employee if they don't offer affordable insurance."
Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure where the uncertainty is. Says right there - January 1, 2015.
Not that having the elections matter about implementation. Obama isn't going to let a veto go through, and even if the Senate flips, there's going to be no way that there's enough votes to override a veto. Obamacare is here, get used to it.
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure where the uncertainty is. Says right there - January 1, 2015.
Right. Just like it said the deadline was this year, before...
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fucking politicians... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're only now thinking that Obama is just as bad?
The rest of us were telling you that bad during the first election. And guess what? The next guy isn't going to be much better -- regardless of whether he's Mr. Red State or Mr. Blue State. Might even be worse. Unfortunately, these rah-rah Reddit teenagers that get little baby chubbies in their pants as soon as they're old enough to vote, because "if we just vote Obama/Romney/Whoever this time, we will finally make a change to the world because this will totally be different than the past 230 years!" keep coming in thinking shit is just on the verge of turning around. Naive idiots.
Re:Fucking politicians... (Score:4, Insightful)
No the "rest of you" were telling us that he was a secret muslim terrorist hiding his birth cirtificate because it would show how he was planning to round up all the whiteys into FEMA camps and handing out their stolen wealth to the blacks and latinos while sucking the balls of Yemen, Crotkovia, and the Taliban.
Those of us that were paying attention noticed that as a senator during the race he voted to give the telecom companies retroactive immunity in the warrantless wiretapping fiasco. That put a big damper on my enthusiasm for him, but he was still LEAPS AND BOUNDS better than McCain and his psycho-crazy-VP choice from hell. It was also pretty indicative of his future policy.
And all that aside, he is WAY better than Bush. In some ways. And those ways are MASSIVLEY important. Now, Obama might be toeing the line to his corporate overlords and erroding civil rights just as much as Bush did, but he didn't unilaterally launch a pointless war costing trillions of dollars, thousands of US lives, and HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of civilian deaths. I just can't quite state how collosal of a fuckup invading Iraq was. Seriously. For all the spying that's happening under Obama's watch, he didn't launch any wars. This makes him vastly different and better.
Re:Fucking politicians... (Score:5, Insightful)
But time and time again there are places that always elect the incumbent who has become too entrenched to do anything good, or pants on head crazy people who can't be reasoned with.
We still try to do our best...
Re:Fucking politicians... (Score:4, Informative)
Uhh, ok dude.
Re:Fucking politicians... (Score:5, Informative)
its the most wonderful 'business men'. you know, the 'job creators'. all hail the job creators
I'm not sure why you mock. It is precisely unemployment fears that have driven this decision. Job creation is something that human employers do, and that's the only source of jobs. There is no job fairy.
Small businesses usually have employee compensation as their dominant cost. "Making payroll" is by far the chief worry of small business owners. If you raise the cost per employee, the number of employees per small business must fall. In a robust and growing economy you can get away with that - heck if things have been good for a while even small employers likely have some slack to pay workers a bit more. But when the economy has sucked for the past 5 years, there's just no slack to work with.
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No, consumer demand does not magically create jobs. It does create the need for jobs, but actually starting a business to meet that need is hard work, requiring special skills.
We seem to have done a bunch of pointless "stimulating" on both sides with little result except massive debt over the past few years. Maybe less government involvement is worth trying, for once?
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Never, have I heard a CEO claim
I was talking about small business owners. It's a different crowd. They routinely take serious personal financial risks to make payroll. You'd be surprised.
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the Dems/Admin want to keep obamacare implementation out of the news by doing this, so as to not risk their congress critters that may be coming up for election.
The law had some good parts to it...the sections pertaining to pre-existing conditions is good, and I suppose that letting kids stay on their parents insurance till in their 20's "may" be good, although I think most normal "kids" should be well out on their own and supporting themselves by the time they are 20-21.
But obamacare when it comes into full swing, is going to raise the $$$ of healthcare quite a bit on the young and healthy. It penalizes people that previously had really good benefits at work, making them too $$ for the employers to continue to offer.
This is what comes from "we have to pass the law first to see what's in it...".
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the people wanted socialized medicine and we got an insurance scam. Of course the correct name for this is Romneycare since it closely resembles what Romney implemented in Ma., but that wouldn't have made for a good fight betreen the R's and the D's.
The real problem is that healthcare costs too much in the first place. You can't just insurance that away. What we really need is for the federal government to tell the whole crooked industry, "Just one more $2 ahh stick or $8 tylenol and we nationalize the whole damned thing!".
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Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:4, Insightful)
People were being sold socialized medicine... but many didn't want it.
I would much prefer transparency in medicine, insurance, and allow insurance to be purchased across state lines.
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Except that everywhere in the first world that has been done has cheaper and more effective healthcare than the U.S.
So empirical evidence suggests it *IS* a recipe for success.
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:4, Insightful)
This. I can't stress enough that this is the ringing bell of truth.
Our healthcare system has to change. That's for sure. Obama promised a lot. But by the time the econopocalypse creeped back from doomsday levels, what he proposed was not healthcare reform, but health insurance reform.
(Which, hey, is also desperately needed. This bullshit with pre-existing conditions and the ways that health insurance companies absolutely screw people over and kill them has to stop. There are some really good measures in the bill that would fix some of the more glaring issues. )
But it doesn't address the root of the problem. Tack on "medical" to anything and the price jumps a factor of 10x to 100x. And all the places that buy medial equipment, or hire medical staff, or hand out sterilized medical two by fours for therapeutic beatings are spending "other people's money". There's absolutely no consideration about the cost of this stuff. Indeed, the worry that they'd be sued for using the $2 syringe instead of the $25 syringe makes them prefer the expensive option. And the fact that they earn a percentage of the total cost of the transaction doesn't hurt.
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Everywhere in the 1st world that has either nationalized healthcare or health insurance has done much better than the U.S. with costs typically around half and quality meeting or exceeding our standards.
It works. The evidence is sitting right there.
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I'm not blaming Romney. I'm pointing out how funny it is to watch republicans scream in horror about implementing a plan their fellow Republican created and likewise how spineless the Democrats are for implementing a Republican's plan as their own.
Had Romney been elected, we'd likely have gotten the same bad plan, but with Republicans cheering for it and Democrats rending their garments.
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Do you ever spend time here on planet Earth? Just asking. Because the laws and policies we get have little to nothing to do with what the public actually wants. Like how the Public Option had 80% support from the public with next to no support from either party, but the PO went nowhere. Whereas policies like telecom immunity, bank bailouts and health insurance mandates sail right on throu
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:4, Insightful)
yes, game the system. As in convincing non-medicare insurers to pay a bit more.
Perhaps you should push back on those costs a bit harder. For example by not letting doctors write $500 prescriptions when a $4 one will do the job, not allowing every test in the book when a stethoscope will yield the answer, etc. Don't allow $100 dollar lab tests that any high schooler could perform in 10 minutes with $2 in supplies. Make doctors wash their hands for God's sake (a real problem sadly enough). If people didn't hear so much about deaths from hospital acquired infections they might be less concerned with the bright and shiny (which they mistake for evidence of cleanliness).
I have no doubt people who can pay their bills don't. They see an OTC painkiller going for $8/pill and feel ripped off. People tend not to pay when they feel ripped off.
The fact that every other country manages to cost half as much as here (including indigent care) demonstrates that it can be done. If you're not the problem, point out the part that is and let's fix it. But be very sure you're not the problem first. People actually ARE dying over it.
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason it's a steaming pile of shit is because you Americans are so afraid of the word "socialism" that you will implement the most ghastly, awkard and expensive medical systems simply because you're afraid that Jesus will puke in his cornflakes if you simply go to a universal system.
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Simply go to a universal system" would mean higher cost for worse coverage, just like in UK. NHS costs about $5K a year per taxpayer.
Here [wikipedia.org] is a better way of looking at it. Annual costs: US = $8233 per citizen (84% coverage), UK = $3433 per citizen (total coverage). Your "higher cost for worse coverage" is completely wrong and quoting cost per taxpayer is not an informative way to look at it.
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Interesting)
The NHS is a wreck for a lot of reasons. And really, it's a hybrid system, still allowing private health care in a limited form. Look to Germany, which has a universal system and manages it very well.
And as to standards of care, well the problem in the US is that the standard of care is directly proportional to the kind of insurance you can afford. If you don't have good health insurance, or even health insurance at all, and you have a major medical crisis, you're in real trouble.
I'm a Canadian, and while our system has its flaws, my experience with it has been very good. In 2006, my wife was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, had to have two surgeries, the lost one being a total thyroidectomy. My income was limited, we had two kids in grade school, and by the time of her second surgery the business I worked for had went under. We were able to keep our house (though finances were very stretched as I was on unemployment) and our credit rating and thus within a year or two, with a new job, we were able to deal with remaining debts incurred. In other words, a disease that may very well have proven ruinous in the United States was, in the Canadian universal system, not only survivable from a health point of view, but also a financial point of view.
I make a lot more money now than I did seven years ago, and I suppose on a purely short-sighted selfish level I can grump about the amount of my taxes on top of premiums that I pay for health coverage, but having come out of a major medical crisis with my finances intact and without being saddled with a vast mortgage just to pay the bills, I can safely say even if the system cost me twice as much a month as it does now, I'd stick with the universal system any day of the week.
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Simply go to a universal system" would mean higher cost for worse coverage, just like in UK. NHS costs about $5K a year per taxpayer.
You are either completely unaware of how much the USA spends on healthcare or you're using some really inventive mathematics, because $5k/year is substantially less than what the USA spends.
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Interesting)
Hawaii has a better method, which I believe is also unique among the states.
Employers have to provide an insurance plan to their employees. The employer doesn't have to pay for it, just be a member of a group plan.
I think the minimum employee number that requires this is 15. So if you want guaranteed coverage, get a job at any medium sized business.
The part of the law that makes sense is that there is no 'individual mandate' provision.
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:4, Insightful)
The part of the law that makes sense is that there is no 'individual mandate' provision.
This is the part of the affordiable care plan that makes it "affordable".
The idea behind insurance, it is pooled risk (not a right although it might be argued that access to healthcare is a right). The notion that insurance is the only thing that can assure access to healthcare is the root of the complication. Insurance is merely a financial responsiblility you have to yourself and your family. As with most responsiblities, the more we distort it into a right or a requirement, it loses the ablity to function the way it was intended.
Insurance premiums go in to a pool and claims are paid out (okay, there is generally an investment component, but let's ignore that for now). For an insurance to be viable, the claims and premiums must balance over time that's why the pools have to be large to average out variation. By definition, on average, people must pay in as much as the average expected claim value. The whole social engineering part of this is that not everyone can afford to pay for their expected claim value. The attempt to "socialize" this is to require folks that have a negative expected net value for insurance enter the pool to subsidize the folks that cannot afford their expected claim value. Otherwize it will not be affordable to folks that expect to have more claims than the premiums they pay.
Sadly, most folks expect they should be able to have more claims than the premiums they pay or they won't play. Or more perniciously, they attempt to overclaim to get the value that the "deserve". This desire basically ignores reality and destroys the model.
My opinion is that we probably really need a hybrid system. With the current environment, a small (but growing) set of doctors are going back to "cash-patients". The overhead of insurance processing, and the low-reimbursment rates of medicare really signal that we are pretty far off the market level. Perhaps decoupling catastrophic health insurance from more common preventative health insurance will help. Maybe it should be formulated like flood or earthquake insurance into too-big-to-fail, but still optional pools. All other preventative health insurance should be "market", with subsidies for those that cannot afford it. Trying to combine all this stuff into one policy ignores the unknown catastrophic risk profiles that exist, but still should be socialized.
Sadly, the Affordable care act makes subsidized high-deductable insurance plans non-conforming (both employee and employer need to pay a fine to the irs as if you didn't have any insurance). This was intended to force young healthy folks to subsidize the insurance pools. Unfortunatly, it seems that this is a highly regressive policy, yet one tailored to garner the maximum amount of support rather than to actually attempt to solve a problem. Of course the reason was done this way was to promote certain social agendas (requiring coverage for certain procedures and medical services). That is the mess you get when you put too much in the same pot.
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Insightful)
Having been tested in reality it has a lot better shot than some ideologically or "reason" based idea that somebody pulled out of their ass.
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Informative)
5 painful health-care lessons from Massachusetts [cnn.com] - June 16, 2010
Massachusetts struggles to rein in health care costs [patriotledger.com] - Apr 30, 2011
It’s a serious problem: Massachusetts boasts that 98 percent of its residents have health insurance, but the state is stricken by the highest health care costs in the country.
Danger ahead? Massachusetts health costs are rising – fast. [washingtonpost.com] - February 9, 2013
Massachusetts health care costs out of control as ObamaCare provision hits small business [bizjournals.com] - Mar 4, 2013
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:4, Informative)
It's a good thing that no other country has tried anything similar with their health care. The costs would be astronomical.
Right?
No other country has tried to do something similar to Obamacare. Obamacare does not address any of the actual causes of the ever rising health care costs in the US, it just adds more people to the existing bloated system. It also increases regulations that will probably get rid of many low cost individual health plans, thus increasing costs even more (although quality of care will also increase).
The things that help other countries keep their costs down, such as better malpractice laws, lower salaries for doctors and nurses, subsidized research paid for by US healthcare consumers, etc. are not addressed in any meaningful way.
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I'm glad for your state. Unfortunately, one size does not fit all.
Thank you for throwing spaghetti against the wall. Can you actually give some reasonable idea why you think it won't work in other states?
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Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure where the uncertainty is. Says right there - January 1, 2015.
Well what was it a week ago?
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:4)
Not sure where the uncertainty is. Says right there - January 1, 2015.
Not that having the elections matter about implementation. Obama isn't going to let a veto go through, and even if the Senate flips, there's going to be no way that there's enough votes to override a veto. Obamacare is here, get used to it.
I'm not so sure about that. The policymakers knew upfront the ruinous act would cost them elections, so they put off the effects two years. Now they still don't want to do the damage they knew the bill would cause, because they care about this election's results as well. So as long as the elections are contested, they might keep putting off full implementation of Obamacare, rather than pay the price at the polls. They like their seats more than they want full implementation of the Affordable (snicker) Care Act. This happens to align with the interests of the nation.
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And yesterday it said January 1, 2014. Who knows what it'll say tomorrow?
Re:Only Hillary can save Obamacare (Score:4, Informative)
The silver lining of the Supreme Court ruling, is that Obamacare is legally a tax. Mitch McConnell realized that taxes can be altered, or eliminated, in the budget reconciliation process. If the Republicans can get total control, even by slim majorities, Obamacare will die. Hillary Clinton is the best hope of keeping Obamacare alive.
More likely they will get rid of the employer mandate while retaining the individual mandate. The wealthy already have health care they can afford, so the individual mandate has little or no negative impact on them.
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe they did realize that during this tough economic time (that will probably go on forever since we only consume and don't actually produce anything) it might be a bad thing to force businesses to offer health insurance that is rapidly rising..
Our company only employees 22 people and we provide health insurance that costs us somewhere in the neighborhood of 75k/year.. Having gone up about 20% since obama care passed.
$3400 a person for health care is pretty f'ing cheap. Most employers spend 8,000 to 10,000 per employee (not including what the employee contributes out of their salary).
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as an older worker and one who is a contractor (so I'm 'conveniently' left out of the group discounts and plans) I'm paying close to $1k each month out of pocket!
all I ask for is to be part of a group discount plan were we have power and safety in numbers. when you apply for individual plans, they ask a million very personal questions and you can still get a very high rate if you were unlucky enough to have a health problem.
otoh, when part of a group plan, you don't have to do the questionairre. and you b
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Maybe they did realize that during this tough economic time ... it might be a bad thing to force businesses to offer health insurance that is rapidly rising
I am not necessarily arguing which one is better, but are you saying that keeping individual employees responsible for health insurance expenses during tough economic time is fine and dandy?
It's not like Obamacare is a new expense that did not exist before -- someone is paying the health insurance cost (or is living without health insurance) at all times. Some of the costs may not have a $ sign attached to them (people waiting for health to deteriorate to emergency room status), but these costs are still t
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Informative)
Having gone up about 20% since obama care passed.
And how much did it go up in the years before obamacare was passed?
Sounds like we were seeing double-digit inflation in health care insurance costs most years in the decade prior to obamacare's passage.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2009-09-15-insurance-costs_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip [usatoday.com]
Seems like the rate of inflation in health care insurance is slowing to a historically low level of 4.5%:
http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2013/07/02/5-easy-ways-to-reduce-your-health-care-costs/ [foxbusiness.com]
YMMV, but nationwide the trend is getting better not worse.
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How is that relevant? Healthcare costs are (and have always been) the pressing issue in this country. If the bill failed to address said escalating costs in any positive way, I'd still call it a failure (i.e. lack of change is equivalent to failure).
Slowing or relocating?
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Our 11 person firm had our policy cancelled due to ACA and we were forced to choose a different one for 30% more per year. Does anyone in Washington know who really creates jobs in this country? HINT: its not companies with more than 50 employees.
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Maybe they did realize that during this tough economic time (that will probably go on forever since we only consume and don't actually produce anything) it might be a bad thing to force businesses to offer health insurance that is rapidly rising..
Our company only employees 22 people and we provide health insurance that costs us somewhere in the neighborhood of 75k/year.. Having gone up about 20% since obama care passed.
So you're implying (although we all know its incorrect) that the rate of increase was less the two years prior to "Obama care"?
If you want to be accurate and not cherry pick numbers to support an obvious political bias, you should provide accurate numbers to provide contect:
What was the rate of increase the years prior to "Obamacare"?
What is your total payroll cost per employee?
If your average salary is $50k, then your all-up costs per employee are probably around $70k with payroll and unemployment taxes, c
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not what /. needs. I like ragging on the guberment any chance i get, but wtf does this story have to do with technology (other than using a computer to write it maybe).
The chief reason cited for the delay is that the information infrastructure is not ready to handle the new processes and products yet. It is basically an IT project running 12 months behind (at 18 months out) and probably a few billion over budget, and we can all relate to that amiright?
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Insightful)
The real chief reason is the democrats don't want to lose their asses in the next election when people finally figure out what a cluster fuck the health care bill is and how for many of the current people who HAVE health care already it will mean more money out of their pockets for worse coverage.
Re:Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:4, Insightful)
I respectfully disagree that it is just an IT delay. Problem will still be here in 2015 and people will still not want to sign up, plus the insurance cost raises will continue in at least double digits, so this is ALL ABOUT reelecting Demos in 2014 midterms.
Obama, on the other hand, wants a broken system where everyone bitches, because he fully intends as he has said on camera before becoming President, that he wants to go to a single payer system (100% Gov't run healthcare), but just can't get there all at once.
And in the end that means the Federal government and its enforcement arm, the IRS, will take whatever they need from you and me to support the care they give to everyone, whether we like it or not.
This is a quick review of what tyranny looks like; Pay what the Gov't says or you are a criminal as there is no other option but to leave the country. New Zealand, Australia, Chile; they are all looking better.
Re: Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:3)
Re: Oh, look! Just what the economy needs! (Score:5, Interesting)
So far, obamacare sounds a lot like the usual healthcares we enjoy in EU countries
And Canada, Japan, Australia, etc.
Unfortunately it's not. It's structured as a big giveaway to for-profit insurance companies and big pharma. Hopefully that will get fixed before it banrupts us. I've been a big proponent of UHC for decade, but Obamacare is about the worse plan to implement it I've ever seen.
well well well (Score:3, Insightful)
And political expediency wins again
The question to ask is why would they want to delay implementation until after mid terms?
pay the fine (Score:3, Insightful)
How many employers will just pay the fine. 3k per year per employee is less than a heathcare plan
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Parent should be modded up. The way the story summary was written you would think that health care is without cost to the employee if it is provided by the employer. It is not. That is money lost from a paycheck. That is additional cost which can make a company less competitive (and result in layoffs).
There is no such thing as free healthcare. Somebody pays - either through lower wages, fewer jobs or higher taxes. Funny how the more government has tried to "fix" healthcare the more expensive it has be
Re:pay the fine (Score:4, Insightful)
I pay about $65/wk ($3380/yr) into my employer healthcare. They pay about 3 times that ($10140/yr). Multiply that by the roughly 450 employees on the plan and it's the single greatest expense they have after employee salaries and taxes.
Personally, I'd much rather take that $13500 (my cost plus theirs) in my paycheck so I could shop around for my own insurance. The employer offered plan includes tons of crap for women and children that don't apply to me, while omitting many things that would be a huge help to me such as hearing aids.
Re:pay the fine (Score:5, Insightful)
I pay about $65/wk ($3380/yr) into my employer healthcare. They pay about 3 times that ($10140/yr). Multiply that by the roughly 450 employees on the plan and it's the single greatest expense they have after employee salaries and taxes.
Personally, I'd much rather take that $13500 (my cost plus theirs) in my paycheck so I could shop around for my own insurance. The employer offered plan includes tons of crap for women and children that don't apply to me, while omitting many things that would be a huge help to me such as hearing aids.
Making health insurance/care portable would go a LONG way to making the entire system more competitive and the customers a lot happier, but the system (legally, financially, and historically) is basically set up to make sure that the cash flow for the insurance companies remains reliable (and growing). Do you expect an industry with a grip on about 1.5 trillion dollars of spending annually to just give it up? Hah.
Re:pay the fine (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I'd much rather take that $13500 (my cost plus theirs) in my paycheck so I could shop around for my own insurance.
You might prefer that, but what about your coworkers with health problems? Who is going to sell them insurance at a price they can afford if you're not helping with the cost?
The employer offered plan includes tons of crap for women and children that don't apply to me
Right, and if you don't help pay for the things that don't apply to you, the burden is entirely on those who need them. That defeats the entire purpose of insurance, spreading risk by sharing costs.
Re:pay the fine (Score:5, Insightful)
No one has approached or even mentioned the real reason for healthcare cost increases over the last 30 years. There is a little law that goes by the acronym EMTALA. Go read about it and apply a little economics to the equation.
Simply stated, our masters have no desire to reduce the cost of healthcare because there is too much money to be made from a completely captive audience. Whether you take the capitalist point of view or the socialist point of view, the end result is the same - we the people get screwed out of our earnings and don't have a choice in the matter. The status quo is maintained.
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Whether you take the capitalist point of view or the socialist point of view, the end result is the same - we the people get screwed out of our earnings and don't have a choice in the matter. The status quo is maintained.
This is why we must record these things. So that after the next revolution, we know what laws to prohibit in the new Constitution.
Hopefully, it will all be settled within the next decade.
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No, it isn't. First of all, the fine for offering no health care whatsoever is $2000. If the employer offers crappy healthcare and employees instead elect for their own plan from the new exchanges, then the employer is fined $3000 per employee who opts for the exchange plan. You can get weak coverage for around $600/worker that would satisfy the $2000 fine. If a bunch of your workers start to opt for exchange plans, then you might need to consider upping your plan to avoid the $3000 penalty.
Employers already know the loophole (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't have to pay the fine, or provide insurance. They just make their employees part timers.
I've seen some anecdotal evidence of this (from waitstaff at a couple different restaurants, security guards at my parking deck, blog posts). Unskilled labor positions (i.e. the people that were targeted to receive this benefit) are just having their hours cut to 30 hours/week because part time employees are not subject to the insurance requirement. With current employment trends, it's easy to hire some extra part timers to fill the gap. It's a non-issue for skilled laborers, because most already receive employer provided insurance.
The real problem here is this law was intended to require a benefit (i.e. minimum compensation) for people who do not generally receive it already. So now, not only will they not get insurance, but they're also facing a 25% cut in income.
Chicago style politics at it's worst... (Score:5, Insightful)
Conveniently after the mid-term elections, where frustration with this trainwreck might reflect badly on those in power... One Turkish professor said "He talks like the president of the ACLU, and governs like Dick Cheney."
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Dare to Hope, Prepare to be Disappointed
Re:Chicago style politics at it's worst... (Score:4, Insightful)
"5 Year Plans" are nothing new, where the hard choices are put off until after the next election, where they probably won't happen anyway. Or pushed into the next guy's term, same thing.
That's why I laughed at all these deficit reduction "negotiations". Let's increase taxes now. In exchange, we agree to cut spending in 3 years.
Which. Won't. Happen.
It's a lie for domestic consumption. It's been going on for a hundred years.
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So, is this delay legal? (Score:5, Interesting)
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It not a matter of Obama holding up his end... It is more about the republican governors who would rather derail the affordable health care act by stonewalling the creation of insurance exchanges in their state despite the federal government's willingness to pay for it. The irony being that the exchange idea was the republicans' idea to introduce a free market element to universal health care. Like most things involving republicans it is either filibustered, procedural traps, sabotaging legislation with bad
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You forgot the third choice that was created with the SCOTUS ruling over the constitutionality of ACA (NFIB v Medicaid) that gave the states the right to refuse to expand Medicaid. This allows the states to continue to deny health insurance to the poor and most republican governors have taken that option.
It's one of many of those details I was talking about...
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Senator John Chafee wrote it in 1993. He was a Republican.
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- Article II, Section 1.
He's usurping the Constitution by illegally spying on US citizens, and by failing to perform his primary duty - to execute the law as required.
- Article II, Section 3.
Re:So, is this delay legal? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's called dereliction of duty.
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George Will's been bitching about the Imperial Presidency for 30 years now, as Congress rolls over, ever more supine to presidents declaring this or that.
Remember all the feigned outrage over Bush's innumerable "signing statements"? Same symptom. Hell, even the losening of constraints on warrntless spying is handing over still more power to the executive branch.
But the rest of us are still screwed (Score:2)
Sure, business gets a reprieve but the rest of us still get the shaft by having to pay for our neighbor's healthcare despite them smoking a pack a week.
Nothing like having to spend money on something useless because the government tells us we have to do so.
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It has been pretty well established that your smoking neighbor has lower lifetime healthcare costs than someone who is healthy. They tend not to live long enough to get the really expensive things to treat.
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business gets a reprieve but the rest of us still get the shaft by having to pay for our neighbor's healthcare despite them smoking a pack a week
A pack a week? That's so little that the effect will be negligible. You're better off if your neighbor smokes a pack or two per day, as the lifetime medical costs of smokers is lower. In fact a good way to reduce overall healthcare costs would be to hand out free cigarettes. If you want to burden the system, live to be a 100.
Nothing like having to spend money on something useless because the government tells us we have to do so.
So you're never going to get seriously ill or have an accident? And if you do, and don't have insurance, do you pinky swear not to accept any medical care that you can't pay for out-of-
Great (Score:2)
Are people's illnesses also going to be delayed until January 1, 2015 if their employer has fewer than 50 employees? The mandate that people have to buy insurance is the bad part of the law. Having employers provide insurance was the upside.
The Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot with this illegal delay in implementation of this part of the law.
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Wait, you thought that they care about people? They care about what keeps them in Washington, evidenced by delaying the massive political meltdown that was 6 months away, 9 months before the next midterm election.
This is the worst kind of politics - shoving through a bad law that people increasingly don't like; and then delaying the enforcement of the law until the political backlash won't matter, leaving the people that the law would have helped twisting in the wind.
So go ahead and re-elect those Senators
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The Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot with this illegal delay in implementation of this part of the law.
Only if you believe the implementation of the law isn't going to tank the economy.
Which is what the Democrats are afraid will happen.
And yet the individual mandate still stands! (Score:5, Insightful)
More complicated (Score:4, Insightful)
Under the new law, companies with more than 50 employees must provide their workers with health insurance.* Those companies that do not comply are levied a per-employee tax penalty. Employees that do not receive coverage through their employer can purchase insurance on the open market, and low- and middle-income workers can avail themselves to government subsidies to purchase coverage. In other words, the government is attempting, through the tax code, to recoup the employee's health care subsidy from the employer.
In order to carry out the employer mandate, the Treasury Department needs to know which companies are opting out and also which employees are subsequently utilizing government subsidies for healthcare. This is a technical challenge that the IRS (the Tax Man) has determined they won't have ready in time for the Jan 1, 2014 deadline. Businesses, too, have complained that their duty and mechanism for reporting who they are covering with insurance is difficult and onerous. So the decision has been made to push back the deadline.
Because the whole mechanism is linked to taxes, it is difficult to push the deadline back by, say, six months, because it would be tough to figure out how to pro-rate both the subsidy and the penalty. Most health insurance contracts (employer-provided or otherwise) run from Jan 1 to Dec 31, anyway. So, they pushed the effective date back to the next tax / health insurance / calendar year.
Yes, the new deadline occurs after the 2014 elections. But considering there are national elections every two years in the United States, pushing any deadline back by one year yields a 50/50 chance of passing over an election year. Would pushing it back just six months be any better, how about two years?
* For those, both outside and inside the U.S., who are wondering why health insurance is a benefit attached to a person's job, rather than a social benefit from the government (like in most other countries) or something each person seeks on the open market (like automobile insurance), the answer is: "it's complicated." It isn't the result of any particular plan, that's for damn sure; but rather the long meandering course of history. Those who are curious should read Paul Starr's [wikipedia.org] book The Social Transformation of American Medicine [google.com]. The Affordable Care Act follows the path of having health insurance as a workplace benefit mostly because that is how most people in the U.S. already get it.
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This is a technical challenge that the IRS (the Tax Man) has determined they won't have ready in time for the Jan 1, 2014 deadline. Businesses, too, have complained that their duty and mechanism for reporting who they are covering with insurance is difficult and onerous. So the decision has been made to push back the deadline.
Bullshit. They knew this deadline was coming since 2010, they had plenty of time to implement the required software and chose to delay. They should all be hit with the full force of
Re:More complicated (Score:4, Funny)
^the above is a very long, circuitous way to say:
"We wanted it passed theoretically, so we voted for it; but we didn't really have a fucking clue about how it would actually be implemented and are only actually reading the bill now, and so need more time to study/figure out how to apply this catastrophic mess to the real world.
Signed,
Congress"
What surprises me is... (Score:4, Interesting)
How can any employer think that workers w/o health insurance work better than those who do? Most governments have figured out that the tax from cigarettes does not outweigh the cost to the economy of a sick worker, hence they are trying to get as many people to quit as possible. Health insurance is the same, the cost to keep workers healthy is worth it to have better workers. It also encourages the worker to stay with the company. The number of times I've heard of people moving job because where they were going had health insurance has to be some indication of it's worth to the employer.
The 50 employee limit (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a friend who has a company which has 53 full time employees.
He's been investigating how he can get rid of 5 of them, or at least convert them to part time, to escape this mandate.
Stair step functions have always been a problem when designing things like commission structures, and so on. If I make 6% commission on sales up to $10,000 a day, and 5% commission for sales of $20,000 a day or higher, then I get 6 cents on a dollar if I sell $10,000 or less and 5 cents on a dollar if I sell more. So if I sell $10,000, I get $600, but if I sell $10,001, I get $500.05; I don't break even until $12,000 in sales, where I make $600 again, and I don't start making money again until I start selling $12,001 ($600.05). You can be damn well sure that you aren't going to have any of your sales staff turning in total sales amounts between $10,001/day and $12,000/day, and if they are unable to get close to, but just under, the next point at which there's another stair, you can be damn sure there will be customers hearing "We're out of stock today, but we have a shipment coming in first thing tomorrow, I'll call you".
This whole "keep the insurance industry in business" welfare program for insurance companies this was a bad idea; if we are going to nationalize healthcare, we really should have gone single-payer and been done with it.
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What do you say to the families that depended on child labor to support the family?
They said they can't stay in business without putting the children to work. And the business feeds the children.
It's a bit of a strawman, but the parallels are there. It's bad for everyone in the long run to make put children to labor, it'd be a lot better for society to them to get some learning and not suffer the horrible abuse that historically came with child labor. Sure, your friend is employing 53 people. But in today's
Re:This'll take awhile for people to accept (Score:5, Interesting)
Yea, we'll get used to having beurecrats make decisions regarding our famililies heathcare. I mean, having the IRS target the businesses of political opponents is nothing compared to denying Grandma her hip replacement because you voted for the wrong candidate.
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Re:This'll take awhile for people to accept (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference is that in some areas decisions that were made by insurance companies are now made by publicly accountable government employees.
Which would be interesting if the "publicly accountable" part were even remotely true. Look at the political actions of managers and supervisors in the IRS, and the utter stonewalling by that agency and un-shocking lack of curiosity by their boss who heads the executive branch, the president, as to who to hold accountable for exactly the sort of capricious behavior that you're suggesting won't happen. The IRS is hiring tens of thousands of brand new, un-accountable, essentially un-fireable new employees explicitly to have them make judgement calls about whether individual people have been sufficiently in compliance with a gigantic, byzantine new law that nobody understands. They will decide whether those individuals ultimately may end up having wages garnished, businesses ruined, homes seized, or spend time in prison if they aren't doing it exactly right. That you see such new power and enforcement in the hands of the IRS as an improvement is unfortunate.
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As opposed to today, when... bureaucrats make decisions regarding my family's health care.
Here are the people who today control whether my treatment is covered: 1) the bureaucrats at the insurance company my employer chose; and 2) the bureaucrats at my employer who chose the insurance company.
Of course, if I'm rich, I can pay for anything I want out of pocket. That will be the same under PPACA, too. But if I'm not rich (and I'm not), it's bureaucrats deciding if I'm covered, yesterday and tomorrow.
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just guessing (Score:3)
I'm just guessing, but the op probably doesn't go to doctors either. I had neighboring family like that when I grew up. I don't remember what the religion was, but if they got sick, they slept a lot and drank water. I never thought to ask about broken bones. If they refuse to get medical help and just die, it probably lowers the overall cost of healthcare. Kind of like how smokers reduce costs.
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No, Obama has assumed dictator powers on many issues.
He no longer needs Congress to pass legislation, and submit it for his approval. He can do whatever he pleases.
I'm surprised it took so many people so long to realize this is what would happen.
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Why would you change what you are doing now? The penalty is currently 0.