Health Care Reform - The Big Fraud

I was recently at a Staffing Association conference and one of the speakers was giving us an overview of how this law will impact businesses, insurers and citizens of our country. To say I was mortified would be a gross understatement. Because the original bill was over 2000 pages long, it is obvious that this space does not allow a great amount of detail regarding all the provisions of the law. However, here are just a few disturbing facts:

Employers will face two choices: offer health care coverage to their employees or not. If they offer coverage, but some of the employees are eligible for certain tax credits, employers will be required to pay a penalty of $3000 for every employee that is eligible for such tax credit (how employers will know that is yet unknown). If an employer with 50 or more employees does not offer health care coverage, the company will be required to pay a penalty of $2000 for every employee, minus the first 30 employees.
The manner at which these penalties will be derived is dependent upon the number of "full time equivalents (FTE's)" an employer has. This calculation will require employers to continually add the cumulative hours worked by all employees, divided by 1560, which reveals how many FTE's are employed, then pay $167 per month for each FTE to the government.
Group health premiums will be tax deductible to the employer. On the other hand, the employer penalties will be considered an excise tax, and will NOT be tax deductible, and will come directly off the bottom line. Therefore, employers will be forced into a "hobson's choice" of either paying for health care and getting certain tax benefits; or not offering any coverage, pay the penalties instead, and forgo the opportunity to deduct such expenses on their tax returns.
Employers offering coverage and paying a portion of the premium on behalf of the employee, will be required to provide "free choice vouchers" to qualified employees to be used to purchase coverage in the state-run health exchanges. To be eligible for these vouchers, the employees' contribution to their employers plan would have to be between 8-9.8 percent of income, and the employees household income would be at or below 400 percent of the federal poverty level. How employers will obtain information about the employees household income is yet to be determined (as is the constitutionality of having to reveal household income to your employer).
Individuals who do not obtain coverage will be penalized less than $100 the first year, up to a maximum of approximately $800 in the 4th year. Health premiums are currently about $3000 - $4000 per year for single coverage. Do the math. Pay a $100 penalty (and still receive care if necessary) or pay for a $3000 health plan. How many will buy a health plan? Not many. And there goes the argument that we will now have tens of millions more Americans who will be insured to help pay for health care. It won't happen.

The above snippets of the health care reform act are just a fraction of what burdens will fall on employers. Couple that with the mandates that will: remove lifetime limits; remove caps on annual limits; require plans to provide preventative care but not allow co-pays or deductibles for those services; require plans to include coverage for dependents up to 26 years of age; require the elimination pre-existing condition exclusions; and disallow waiting periods of more than 90 days, and you can easily see that these requirements will do nothing but drive health care costs sky high, NOT lower. Recently, Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services said: “As the economy stabilizes and we put people back to work, we’ll see the numbers of people with employer-based health benefits rise, but some of the important new protections that will be in place, and certainly the new marketplace in 2014, will create a framework where affordable coverage will be available,” (Sept. 20, 2010, National Journal event in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Society for Human Resource Management). Nothing could be further from the truth! She seems to have no clue how premiums are determined.When you remove from insurers the ability to control risk, rates MUST rise to cover potential losses While most insurers and actuaries are saying these mandates will increase premiums by an average of 9% annually, the Obama administration is saying increases should not exceed 1-2%, and are threatening legal action if premiums are "unreasonably increased". Sebelius put insurers on notice that there will be consequences if they do not accurately (in her view) determine rates based on trend lines. “We will issue a regulation that will require state or federal review of all potentially unreasonable rate increases filed by health insurers, with the justification for increases posted publicly for consumers and employers. We will also keep track of insurers with a record of unjustified rate increases. Those plans may be excluded from health insurance exchanges in 2014,” she wrote. In other words, if your rate increases are not in line with what we sold America regarding health care costs, you will be banned from participating in government-run health exchanges.The details are beginning to emerge. The cost of health care will rise substantially, while the Obama administration foists the Big Fraud on America telling us health care will be more affordable. Employers will begin to shed group plans for their employees, or, if they decide to keep their group plan in place, employees will pay a much larger share of steadily rising health care costs. This law will eventually drive private insurers out of the market so that the government-run health exchanges will be the only options. And as you can see, the government is totally intent on controlling all aspects of the heath care system, and is prepared to punish those that do not play by their rules. In my opinion, the enactment of this law, and the manner in which it was passed, is nothing short of criminal. If you were to ask, "will some American benefit from this new law?", the answer is definitely "yes". If the question is; "does this law justify the fact that a majority of Americans will be saddled with rising health care costs, bloated government bureaucracies, excessive employer mandates and increased taxes?", the answer is a resounding "NO"

Health Care Reform - The Big Fraud

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