More and more employers, as they try to determine their responsibilities under Obamacare, are discovering serious problems with the implementation of the new law. Of course, if anyone other than the proponents of the law were involved in its drafting, many of these glitches could have been resolved before the law passed.
As you know, employers with more than 50 employees must provide health insurance to each full-time employee, and said insurance must be “affordable”, or, the employer must pay a penalty. Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? Well, not exactly.
In the real world, a full time employee is one who works 40 hours or more each week, but, not in the world of Obamacare. In that world, a full time employee is one who works 30 hours or more each week.
Retailers, restaurants, and other companies that rely on seasonal, temporary and other workers with flexible schedules, say it”s hard to figure out who is a full-time worker. That could cause the employer to enroll and drop them from coverage, potentially churning them through new state-run insurance exchanges or the Medicaid federal-state program for the poor, as their hours fluctuated.
Employers are also struggling with the “affordable” portion of the law. Forgetting for the moment that no insurance will be affordable once the Department of Health and Human Services finishes defining the mandates of what coverage must be in a plan, there is a bigger problem.
To be “affordable” the plan that is offered must be roughly 9.5% of an employee’s household income. But, there is no way an employer can determine household income because asking an employee to provide information concerning the income of the employee’s spouse and dependents would be a privacy violation. And, were that not enough, how could an employer verify the information given by the employee, or monitor it as spouses/dependents change or lose their jobs?
Remember, if anything is incorrect in any of the above calculations, the employer will face a $2000 per year, per employee penalty.
“You can keep your insurance if you like it”. I think not. Employers will simply drop coverage entirely, dump their employees into the exchanges, and pay the penalty.
Does anyone wonder if that was the plan all along?
Loading ...
Of course, you are correct as always, and Obamacare should be called Absurdacare. I know many owners of small businesses who are/were planning on paying the penalty. No fancy bookkeeping, no privacy violations, and frankly the penalty was cheaper than the cost of insurance for employees at my husband’s business. Yes, I did use the past tense. Everything in Absurdacare is being done to go to a single payer system. A government run health care system.
I like the “absurdacare” moniker but it let’s Obummer off the hook. How about “Obama’s Absurdacare”?
Thanks, correction noted and accepted.
What part of totalitarianism has the Obama administration not instigated?
Liberals always are preaching about safe sex, but they certainly aren’t practicing it with the implementation of Obama4care and what’s it’s doing and will do to business and individuals.
You think we would get dinner and a kiss first!
Oh Dims, I’ve missed your comments. You and Tim should do a roadshow. I’ll take the dinner (if it’s pizza or linguine with white clam sauce) but you get the kiss.
Tim, precisely
Will $2,000 a head pay the deficit? Us Sciencetologists are exempt.I hope.
Please don’t forget all the little “goodies” put into the Obamacare bill, i.e., the 3% tax everyone who sells a house will have to pay. What’s that got to do with health care. Please, someone start talking about all of these things that are snuck in. They’re just as much an outrage. It’s not just about health insurance. They just want to take as much of your money as they can.
Old Obama had a scheme, e-i-e-i-o
Our health insurance is provided through the huge, international corporation my husband works for. I suspect that we will not be keeping that insurance as O promised. Any business being run by individuals with brains in their heads will simply pay the $2000/employee penalty and call it a day.
The more I know what’s in this crappy law, the less I wish I knew. Just another big shakedown that doesn’t come close to fixing the problem—all those people who didn’t have insurance that were the whole reason for obamacare in the first place will now be joined by those of us who had & paid for our insurance thru employers. It’s a travesty.
Meanwhile, up in MA (the program Obamacare was modelled after), Baystate Medical is elliminating about 300 positions at 3 of their facilities. This includes the program that teaches people CPR. The reasoning: Apparently the state isn’t paying enough for Medicare patients.
If the US had followed the Canadian example (admired for “fiscal” responsibility on another post) on health care/insurance, we would not have these problems.
THEY know what is in Ohzer0Care. It is perfect as far as they are concerned. It has one purpose: do drive a single payer system. Codified by ‘law’, the only ‘choice’ left (no pun intended) will of course be Government Healthcare.
What a mess. What a disaster and what a Coup for the dems. I fear they have won.