On the road to single-payer (Gummint) health insurance (the one RoJo won't fight.)
...The mandate to
provide health insurance to employees kicks in for large employers on
January 1st and applies to smaller companies the following year.
Surprisingly, firms that are large enough to self-insure (and pay
employees’ medical expenses directly) can satisfy the mandate without
covering hospitalization. They can also avoid paying for mental health
care, the services of specialist doctors and even emergency room visits....
Bet you didn't know that!
But here's something we've mentioned before. (RoJo thinks this is just fine-and-dandy, I guess)
...Whether or not they are self-insured, all employers can charge the
employee a premium equal to 9.5 percent of annual wages for the
employee’s coverage and 100 percent of the cost of dependent coverage.
Employees earning $30,000 a year, for example, can be required to pay
$2,850 for their own coverage. If a family plan costs $15,000, the
employee can be asked to pay $12,150 in premiums (more than one-third of
the employee’s income).
Under the law, these plans are considered “affordable.” If the
employees turn down the offer, they and their families are ineligible
for subsidized insurance in the health insurance exchange....
It should be obvious, even to the deliberately obtuse, that ObozoCare, as written, will lead to a revolt. That's a feature, not a bug, because it can be "fixed" with single-payer.
That was always the plan (the one RoJo kinda likes now.)
You must have missed RoJo on Jay Weber this morning. The "repeal" PlaceboCare move, now that it is more-or-less implemented, is going to take a more-orderly approach (a wind-down, if you will) so that its repeal doesn't blow up in our faces. It is not, as National Journal twisted it, a "give up and go home" bit, at least from RoJo, even though the House RepublicRATs went full "give up and go home" well before the election.
ReplyDeleteSpecifically with respect to the mandates, the first step of the wind-down is a full stop on all the mandates. After all, the individual mandate is highly unpopular, and the employer mandate won't be in full force until 2016.
The question is, will the rest of the RepublicRATs reverse themselves again? Something (specifically, the post above this one) tells me no.
Vermont has codified that it will offer single payer in the next 2 years. There's just one problem that they're facing: the amount of money that's required to do that even in a small state with a mandatory balanced budget would kill the entire economy of the state. There was an obscure professor by the name of Gruber who hired by the state to try and figure out how to pass the laws that enabled single payer, but strangely enough he had to be fired after some tapes of him talking about his involvement with Obamacare went viral... :-)
ReplyDeleteThe lack of fiscal planning on Vermont's part is familiar, nerdbert. I wonder how many people remember "Healthy" (and Depopulated) Wisconsin, the Senate Rats' plan in 2007 that, despite getting every one of the 18 Senate Rats to put it in the budget, was the very first thing gone when Jim Doyle cut them out of the negotiations over said budget.
ReplyDelete