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Post by ShivaTD on Aug 8, 2013 13:54:18 GMT
"Obamacare" is not going away in spite of Republican proposals to repeal it. We need to get used to that fact. It does have numerous problems though and each of those needs to be addressed and fixed. I believe the best way to address this is identifying each problem, one at a time, and proposing what can be done to correct it. A distinguished fellow member, JP5, has identified one problem with Obamacare that certainly warrants being addressed. Obamacare imposes a requirement for employers with more than 50 employees to provide health insurance for their full time employees. I'm not sure if the "50 employees" refers to all being full time employees or not but that isn't really important. We could also go into another problem which is "mandated coverage" in excess of what should really be covered by "insurance" but I will refrain from addressing that here. Instead I'll make some "assumptions" that excessive coverage will be addressed and will assign an "assumed finiancal obligation" by the employer that would be reasonable related to what an employer should be "obligated" to provide. JP5 has pointed out that some employers are avoiding providing health insurance by relying on part time employees as opposed to full time employees and that is problematic. First and foremost we need to understand that the "employer mandate" will not, over time, change the cost of labor for the employer. It is a part of the "employee compensation package" which has always been more than the cost of wages alone. During implementation it will add a "cost" to employee compensation but as time goes by it will just become an inherent cost on top of wages. In my "assumption" I'm going to state that the coverage costs would be $2,080/yr for the employer, or one dollar per hour for "one man-year" of employment (i.e. a 40-hr week for one year). Basically it means that one-doller per hour in compensation is dedicate towards the health insurance of the employee as opposed to being paid in wages. Yes, I might be low in my assumption but even if we double the "cost" it only results on two-dollars per hour of compensation being dedicated to health insurance as opposed to being paid in wages. The current "average" hourly rate in the United States as of July 2013 is roughly $24/hr but, as noted, that isn't the actual "cost of labor" for an employer which is considerably higher. Payroll taxes alone add 7.625% to that plus the adminstrative costs to the employer. Having owned my own business as well as doing cost estimates for proposals while working at major corporations the "cost of labor" is typically figured at twice the hourly wage, or on a national average it would put the total cost of labor for the "average employer" at about $50/hr (using round numbers). Typically in providing cost projections for employment it's typical to estimate the employer cost at $100,000/yr but this is a "ball park average" and, as noted, the employee does not receive this in direct compensation but it is what an employer will typically use as the "total cost of labor" for their business plan. For the average "employer" being able to accommodate the $2,080 cost of insurance annually is not really a problem so they are not the primary concern. Where the problem originates is with low paid employees because they're substantially below this "cost of labor" for employers. If we address the "federal minimum wage" employee they only receive $7.25/hr ($15,080/yr) currently so using the same calculations the "total cost of labor" to the employer is about $30,000/yr. Admittedly there are very few people per capita that actually work for federal minimum wage and that is only in those states that don't have higher minimum wage laws. For the "average" employer, over time, the health insurance mandate will simply result in a slight lowering of the "wages" paid equal to but not more than $1/hr because the "total cost of labor" can also accomodate part of that $1/hr in health insurance cost. Of course for the few employers that only pay federal minimum wage, which it can be noted they don't pay for all employees but only some employees, they will have to adjust wages predominately for their higher paid employees and adjust the "total cost of labor" to accomodate the cost of the insurance for all employees which doesn't vary based upon wages paid. In short, regardless of the employee wages the insurance mandate costs can be absorbed by the employer without changing their "total cost of labor" related to employment wiht simple adjustments to the "books" of the employer. As a small business owner I know this to be a fact. It merely requires adjusting what "buckets" the total cost of labor are divided into because the costs of the insurance are really rather small when considering all of the costs involved for the enterprise. As a last resort even the "cost" of the service/product could be adjusted but at most it's only by a couple of percent. Do any of us really care if a Big Mack costs ten cents more? Not really. With all of this "total cost of labor" being established then what we're left with is the simply fact that some employers will choosed to use more part time labor as oppose to full time labor to avoid the financial obligation imposed by the Employer Mandate for health insurance which is the problem that JP5 addressed. The solution is simple IMHO. If an employer requires 2080 hours of labor per year (i.e. one man-year of employment) then impose a $1/hr "tax" for "part time" employees that will go into a subsidy fund to help pay for the "private mandate" for health insurance imposed on the worker. In short if a person works 1,040 hours in a part time job then the employer pays $1,040 to the federal government and that person, in purchasing private health insurance, would receive this funding to help pay for their private health insurance. If that person works two jobs for a total of 2,080 hours then they would have a $2,080 subsidy paid for by their employers to pay for their private insurance mandate. In short, remove the incentive for the employer to avoid paying for health insurance for their employees by employing part time labor as opposed to full time labor. They can either pay the cost of the insurance directly by covering the full time worker or they can pay the prorated cost of the health insurance for their part time employees but either way the cost is the same for the employer. Average wage in the US: ycharts.com/indicators/average_hourly_earnings |
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Post by JP5 on Aug 9, 2013 23:48:32 GMT
That's just more punitive treatment of small business owners and builds up even more resentment. So, you're going to hit them with a punitive tax coming....and going, eh? This whole idea of requiring by law that employers MUST provide health insurance coverage to their employees is what's wrong with Obamacare in the first place! You know.....decades ago, corporations began doing this voluntarily (offering healthcare partially paid for by them) as a benefit to come to work for them. The idea being, they'd attract the best of the best. But of course not every employer offered this as part of their benefits package.....and that suited them AND the employees that voluntarily took a job with them. Now, comes Obamacare: government MANDATED healthcare. More rules and regulations on businesses. More involvement in American's daily lives. Just as the federal gov't should have stayed out of the mortgage business and royally screwed that up.........they should also stay out of the healthcare business. When you've got the Congress and their Staff getting carved out of this piece of legislation.....that ought to clue you in that it ain't all it's cracked up to be. IF it was so wonderful......then the Congress, Pelosi and her office who wrote it, and even the president would want himself and his own family on it. The answer is.......it's because it's not so wonderful. Unions also want to be left out of it......even though they helped the president sell it during the campaigns.
Again, I'm tired of this "one plan for the peons and another wonderful plan for ourselves." I don't know if the Republicans can get enough Democrats onboard to turn this massive train wreck around.....but at a minimum, it should be cut down extensively. They may not even have to do a thing, however. It looks like it may implode on its own weight. We'll see.
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Post by cenydd on Aug 10, 2013 0:16:00 GMT
This whole idea of requiring by law that employers MUST provide health insurance coverage to their employees is what's wrong with Obamacare in the first place!
It might surprise you, but I agree with that! Probably not quite for the same reasons as you, though, I'm guessing!  What is wrong with Obamacare is that it uses the private health insurance system at all, and simple gives an already massively powerful cartel another huge boost of power, and a huge boost to their potential profits if they continue to manipulate the whole system to suit themselves, to the detriment of consumers, as they always have done (and they will, of course, because nobody can stop them). The alternative of a proper Universal Health Care Service bypasses that problem entirely, by simple providing a very good range of healthcare to everyone, paid for out of a 'National Insurance' scheme that everyone (employees and employers) is involved with. It prevents insurance companies from employing armies to try to find loopholes to avoid paying out, prevents them ramping up costs and premiums in order to ramp up profits, and prevents hospitals and drug manufacturers from also ramping up costs and trying to find extra unnecessary things to effectively 'sell' to fully insured patients so that they make the money when the insurance company do pay out (all of which further raises premiums, of course). Cutting out that middle man of the insurance company should actually be a considerably more efficient system, and it is a system that works extremely well for many other countries. |
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Post by JP5 on Aug 10, 2013 1:29:55 GMT
This whole idea of requiring by law that employers MUST provide health insurance coverage to their employees is what's wrong with Obamacare in the first place!
It might surprise you, but I agree with that! Probably not quite for the same reasons as you, though, I'm guessing! What is wrong with Obamacare is that it uses the private health insurance system at all, and simple gives an already massively powerful cartel another huge boost of power, and a huge boost to their potential profits if they continue to manipulate the whole system to suit themselves, to the detriment of consumers, as they always have done (and they will, of course, because nobody can stop them). The alternative of a proper Universal Health Care Service bypasses that problem entirely, by simple providing a very good range of healthcare to everyone, paid for out of a 'National Insurance' scheme that everyone (employees and employers) is involved with. It prevents insurance companies from employing armies to try to find loopholes to avoid paying out, prevents them ramping up costs and premiums in order to ramp up profits, and prevents hospitals and drug manufacturers from also ramping up costs and trying to find extra unnecessary things to effectively 'sell' to fully insured patients so that they make the money when the insurance company do pay out (all of which further raises premiums, of course). Cutting out that middle man of the insurance company should actually be a considerably more efficient system, and it is a system that works extremely well for many other countries. But that is exactly what Obama and Pelosi and the Dems want to happen eventually. It was, IMHO, the plan all along. They know full well this will collapse the entire system on the weight of Obamacare....and they hope that results in a single payer system.....their goal all along. I disagree that big gov't running healthcare is a good idea. I sit next to women each year in the doctor's waiting room who tell me they've come from overseas to the U.S. for their check-ups. One told me once that for sure if she ever had anything serious she'd come here. These are American women who work over there with their companies. One told me she had a friend who fell and hit her head and has waited a year to have it x-rayed and examined......and is having headaches. The U.S. has always been so proud of our healthcare. Leaders come here for serious surgeries and treatments. I suspect some of this will change with Obamacare......as many doctors are dropping out, retiring, or setting up unique services for the well-to-do who can afford to pay them for it. Obamacare will not make anything better; only worse. PLUS, there is the downside that the federal gov't has our health records. Obamacare was sold as a ruse. I know someone who knew someone inside Nancy Pelosi's office where the bill was written. He said it was set up as a "trojan horse,"......meaning the bad news comes out later. Remember.....we were told here we had to pass it before we could find out what was in it. Well, people and businesses are now finding out slowly but surely. And they don't like it. It's why Unions are demanding a carve out....and why Congress (inluding those who wrote it) are also insisting on a carve out from it. If it was so great----they'd want to be in it. But they don't. And that is because it's anything BUT great. The system we had was good and needed only some tweaks here and there. But they've thrown out the baby with the bath water so to speak. And I feel for our future generations who will never know what "used to be." |
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diuretic
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Posts: 49 
Politics: Centre Left
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Post by diuretic on Aug 10, 2013 5:59:29 GMT
People come to the US for healthcare because they can afford it. People in the US who can afford to pay for healthcare in the US will get excellent healthcare. Those who can't afford to pay for it will not get excellent healthcare and that is the issue here. If something is our of your reach because you can't afford it then to that individual it is useless. Fair enough if we're talking about commodities such as motor vehicles, but healthcare is a basic human right. If it is not available to some or many because they are too poor for it then that is an untenable situation.
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Post by cenydd on Aug 10, 2013 8:53:20 GMT
Obamacare was sold as a ruse. I'm not so sure that 'ruse' is the right word for it. More like a desperate attempt to get something positive done in the teeth of tremendous opposition, especially from the insurance/drug corporations (who also have great political and media (and therefore public) influence, of course). One of the things that has characterised the entire debate from the my viewpoint is the incredible (and frustrating) level of misinformation being sold to the US public about UHC systems elsewhere and how they work. In particular, there seems to be a constant stream of supposed 'horror story' cases that don't give anything like a true picture of them. People genuinely seem to believe that the NHS, for example, is a third world service where people wait for months to see a doctor, and have to fill in a mountain of bureaucratic forms, and when they do they are sent to crumbling and ill-equipped hospitals where they can't get decent treatment anyway. That simply isn't true. I can see the doctor any day that I need to, and at any time of the day or night - no forms, no questions (other than 'how can I help you?' and 'what is the trouble?' from the doctor, of course!), no decisions other than clinical ones. If I am in an accident or have a sudden serious illness or whatever an ambulance will come and take me to the nearest or hospital (or most suitable one - my nearest hospital is small and doesn't have a specialist burns unit, for example, but the one just down the road does) - no forms, no questions, no decisions other than clinical ones. It really does work extremely well. Nobody claims the NHS system is perfect - it isn't. There are flaws in the way it has been run, mainly at local levels (because most of the NHS is not run directly by 'central government' at all, but by individual local 'NHS Trusts'). That doesn't however, change the fact that it is a system that works extremely well for the vast majority of people for the vast majority of the time, and regardless of their income or pre-existing conditions. There is also a very good private healthcare and health insurance industry running alongside it for those who want to, and I believe it is considerably cheaper than US health insurance, partly because it has such strong competition that isn't involved in a cartel situation, and partly because it doesn't normally deal with 'emergency' care at all. The general costs issue is an important one - the NHS does have to be much more efficient, because it can't simply push its prices up and up and to hell with those who can't afford it anymore. That does mean sometimes that you don't get some referrals as quickly as would happen in the US (for those who can afford it, of course), but with a decent system of prioritising (which the NHS generally has) that doesn't matter. I had to wait a few weeks to get a barium meal test earlier in the year - my case was non-urgent, so it didn't make any difference. Had it been urgent I would have been prioritised over such non-urgent cases and seen more immediately, but the fact was that I was already under the care of the doctor for the condition, and the date of the test didn't make any difference at all in that kind of time scale (and I could always have chosen to 'go private' and have it done immediately anyway). Of course, that isn't always perfect, but when it really fails it's down to clinical error, and clinical error rates were (I don't know the up to date figures, but certainly until recently) actually considerably higher in the US anyway. What I'm saying is that the media in the US are constantly mischaracterising UHC systems and their general effectiveness, and it's giving a massively false impression to the people of the US about healthcare elsewhere, ans it has prejudiced the entire debate about how to get decent healthcare provision for the poulation. Some people seemed aghast about the NHS being included in the opening ceremony of the Olympics last year as something that the UK people are mightily proud of, but that is the case, even though it still isn't perfect - how can we be proud of such a 'third world system'? Because it really isn't a 'third world system' at all! Things can and do go wrong, of course, and when they do they are investigated and publicised in a way that I strongly suspect the private healthcare industry try very hard to avoid in the US, because it has commercial implications for them (are the population fully aware that healthcare in the US has one of the worst records for clinical errors, for example? How prominently does that issue feature in the debate?). It is this level of misinformation and scaremongering that has created the problems in the 'Obamacare' system, because people have been led to believe that private healthcare and private health insurance is the only way that a good system of healthcare can possibly operate. That isn't true, but it has forced them to go down a 'halfway house' line that doesn't really satisfy anybody, has only partially solved the initial problem, and has created significant problems of its own. |
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Post by JP5 on Aug 10, 2013 21:47:39 GMT
By "ruse" I mean that it was sold as something that would NOT lead to a single payer system. That was a ruse. In fact, in the last couple of days, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid even admitted it publically. IOW's, they never intended Obamacare to work long term. They knew it would implode on its own weight and have no alternative then.....after they've destroyed the entire system we have......but to install a Single Payer national system.
It's so unpopular here.....especially now that the public is starting to find out what's in it and how it will effect them.......that even Democrats who supported it or doing a 180. This administration refused to tell us before....and no one could read those thousands of pages and KNOW what was in it. Also, the details of it had not even been written when they passed it.
The fact that the Congress (remember the bill was written in then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's office) has opted themselves out of this "oh so wonderful" piece of legislation ought to tell you something. Also, the liberal Unions who were instrumental in getting Obama elected both time and claimed, at the time, to support Obamacare for the nation, also want to be exempted from it. Sorry. But Americans resent the fact BIG TIME that these people are creating one system for us peons, while leaving their own wonderful health plans in place.
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diuretic
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Posts: 49
Politics: Centre Left
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Post by diuretic on Aug 11, 2013 23:19:32 GMT
Sounds like the Dems in Congress are a clueless bunch and probably lacking a bit of guts. The ACA sounds like a compromise and not a very good one, but I suppose in Congress that's the order of the day. A single payer system run by government is a far better idea, but as Cenydd has pointed out, it has been poisoned by vested interests in the US so as to make it "unpopular" regardless of its true merits. And "unpopular" won't be touched by populist politicians who think that leadership is about following public opinion. Where's Edmund Burke when you need him?
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Post by ShivaTD on Aug 12, 2013 11:24:39 GMT
That's just more punitive treatment of small business owners and builds up even more resentment. So, you're going to hit them with a punitive tax coming....and going, eh? This whole idea of requiring by law that employers MUST provide health insurance coverage to their employees is what's wrong with Obamacare in the first place!
Of course there is another course we could take. Don't mandate the employers to cover health care costs for their employees but then we will have those that will not be able to afford health care services. We can't leave them on the street corner to die and so logically we'd have to cover them with Medicaid, which was created in the mid-1960's to provide health care for those that can't afford it, which means more taxation. Basically we end up with society subsidizing the business owner that won't provide enough compensation for the worker to have health insurance.
I oppose government tax and spend programs to subsidize enterprise.
So make a choice.
1) Expand Medicaid which increases taxation across the board for everyone to fund Medicaid for everyone that requires heath care but can't afford it
2) Require an employer to cover the cost of health insurance for their employees as a part of the total employment compensation package.
As a small business owner I'd choose Option 2 because I can easily include the cost of health insurance for full and part time employees as a part of the total cost of employing them and I oppose more taxation for Medicaid which might be reduced because of the "employer" and "individual" mandates.
Leaving people on the corner that require health care but can't afford it is not an option.
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Post by cenydd on Aug 12, 2013 11:43:12 GMT
So make a choice. 1) Expand Medicaid which increases taxation across the board for everyone to fund Medicaid for everyone that requires heath care but can't afford it 2) Require an employer to cover the cost of health insurance for their employees as a part of the total employment compensation package. Or there's option 3 - not 'Medicaid for everyone that requires heath care but can't afford it', but universal healthcare for EVERYONE, and funded by everyone (apart from those who can't afford to contribute at that time), which those who want to and can afford to can choose to supplement with additional private healthcare. This is the point that often seems to be missing in the US healthcare debate - that UHC is not 'everyone funding healthcare for the poor', but everyone funding healthcare for themselves and everybody else (including for those who can't contribute for a period due to their personal circumstances). Everyone benefits from it. Everyone uses it. Basic health and emergency healthcare provision is provided for the whole population, from the poorest to the riches, and that is what everyone uses for basic healthcare and emergency treatment. It's not 'robbing the rich to pay the poor' stuff at all, it's the whole society coming together to look after themselves. For further care (routine operations, post-op care, etc.), the better off can and do use private healthcare provisions, which then in turn frees up resources for those who can't afford it. It's a much better system in so many ways (which is why most of the world has adopted it in some way), but the debate in the US is being heavily skewed by unrepresentative horror stories and irrational screams of 'Communism!' (from a media with corporate connections to healthcare, insurance and drug companies, strangely enough!). |
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Post by ShivaTD on Aug 12, 2013 11:50:31 GMT
Sounds like the Dems in Congress are a clueless bunch and probably lacking a bit of guts. The ACA sounds like a compromise and not a very good one, but I suppose in Congress that's the order of the day. A single payer system run by government is a far better idea, but as Cenydd has pointed out, it has been poisoned by vested interests in the US so as to make it "unpopular" regardless of its true merits. And "unpopular" won't be touched by populist politicians who think that leadership is about following public opinion. Where's Edmund Burke when you need him?
www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/08/10/sen-harry-reid-obamacare-absolutely-a-step-toward-a-single-payer-system/
So here's the problem. We have Republicans revelling in the fact that Obamacare has problems that could lead to it's failure but if it fails then Democrats will be dedicated to promoting a "single-payer" system because the ACA is based upon private health insurance exchanged that "failed" under the ACA. The only way to avoid an eventual single-payer system is to fix the problems with the ACA (Obamacare) because if it fails we're going to end up stuck with a single-payer system.
In addressing employers providing for health insurance or Medicaid I gave people a choice and I will do that here.
1. Fix the problems Obamacare so that it works.
2. Don't fix the problems with Obamacare so that it fails and is replaced by a single-payer system.
There isn't a third option because, as previously noted, allowing people to sit on the street corner because they can't afford health care (the Republican proposal) is unacceptable.
As a Libertarian I wish that people would take personal responsibility for their own health care need but I'm not stupid and know that given the choice most won't act responsibly. If there isn't a mandate then it won't happen. We can either address personal irresponsibility with tax and spend welfare programs or with mandates. And we can either have private insurance providing the necessary health insurance or a single-payer system.
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Post by ShivaTD on Aug 12, 2013 12:05:08 GMT
So make a choice. 1) Expand Medicaid which increases taxation across the board for everyone to fund Medicaid for everyone that requires heath care but can't afford it 2) Require an employer to cover the cost of health insurance for their employees as a part of the total employment compensation package. Or there's option 3 - not 'Medicaid for everyone that requires heath care but can't afford it', but universal healthcare for EVERYONE, and funded by everyone (apart from those who can't afford to contribute at that time), which those who want to and can afford to can choose to supplement with additional private healthcare.
That is why I argue that Republicans should be working to fix the problems with Obamacare as opposed to trying to repeal it or let it fail. Republicans only represent about 1/3rd of the voters and if Obamacare fails then a single-payer system is what we'll end up with which is something Republicans oppose more than Obamacare. |
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Post by sfjeff on Aug 12, 2013 20:54:47 GMT
Hi everyone.
I agree that Obamacare has problems. I also agree there is lots of opposition to Obamacare now.
But there are several things I see being lost in this debate.
First of all- when Obama was voted into office- there was huge support for healthcare reform along the lines of universal coverage- the Republicans weren't as concerned with public opinion then as they are now.
Second- Obamacare was a messy and ugly compromise between those who opposed single payer, the insurance companies and those who supported supported universal healthcare. I don't like the whole whole of Obamacare because it is not a single payer system and it feels like an ugly compromise that no one is happy with the entire sausage, but most people like some of the parts.
Americans still like insurance companies being required to cover their adult children, Americans still like insurance companies being required to cover those with pre-existing conditions, and still are happy that they won't get dropped from coverage because they get sick.
One of the problems with our system pre-Obamacare is exactly what we are discussing in this thread. As pointed out, American companies started providing coverage to employees after WW2 as an employee perq to lure employees in. In Europe counties opted for some version of universal healthcare instead.
Go ahead 50 years- auto makers in Detroit pay healthcare costs as part of their employment packages, but VW in Germany doesn't. In the U.S. we choose to let healthcare insurance to become the responsibility of employers- and its a broken system- companies hate it also- health care insurance is a huge administrative burden on employers. Meanwhile employees choose safety over mobility- especially if they have children or any health care issues.
I think that employers should be out of the equation entirely. I am not convinced that the Obamacare model works, but I liked the OP's proposal better than what is currently done. I would prefer even more- again assuming that there is the current model of private health insurance companies- a flat government stipend to each American that could be paid to the health insurer of their choice- and keep an open market.
If people can chose a cheaper health insurance alternative, let that money be investable in a health savings account that can only be used to pay for healthcare until the age of retirement, and then allow the money to be withdrawn on an actuarial basis
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Post by ShivaTD on Aug 12, 2013 22:30:26 GMT
I would prefer even more- again assuming that there is the current model of private health insurance companies- a flat government stipend to each American that could be paid to the health insurer of their choice- and keep an open market. If people can chose a cheaper health insurance alternative, let that money be investable in a health savings account that can only be used to pay for healthcare until the age of retirement, and then allow the money to be withdrawn on an actuarial basis
First of all there's no money to fund it. We've been running deficits since the Bush era tax cuts kicked in and our national debt is at about $17 trillion and going up. Neither Democrats or Republicans have made any proposals that would balance the budget and the budget needs to be balanced and the tax increases necessary to do that alone will come close the busting the back of Americans. Adding trillions of dollars in additional spending and the necessary taxation isn't viable.
Neither Republicans or Democrats would support it and they control the Congress. |
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Post by Professor Peabody on Aug 18, 2013 18:31:17 GMT
This whole idea of requiring by law that employers MUST provide health insurance coverage to their employees is what's wrong with Obamacare in the first place!
It might surprise you, but I agree with that! Probably not quite for the same reasons as you, though, I'm guessing! What is wrong with Obamacare is that it uses the private health insurance system at all, and simple gives an already massively powerful cartel another huge boost of power, and a huge boost to their potential profits if they continue to manipulate the whole system to suit themselves, to the detriment of consumers, as they always have done (and they will, of course, because nobody can stop them). The alternative of a proper Universal Health Care Service bypasses that problem entirely, by simple providing a very good range of healthcare to everyone, paid for out of a 'National Insurance' scheme that everyone (employees and employers) is involved with. It prevents insurance companies from employing armies to try to find loopholes to avoid paying out, prevents them ramping up costs and premiums in order to ramp up profits, and prevents hospitals and drug manufacturers from also ramping up costs and trying to find extra unnecessary things to effectively 'sell' to fully insured patients so that they make the money when the insurance company do pay out (all of which further raises premiums, of course). Cutting out that middle man of the insurance company should actually be a considerably more efficient system, and it is a system that works extremely well for many other countries. of working middle class with good company sponsored health care plans may be tossed into the crappy plans of the exchanges. My Ex works for Wally World, been there a long time. She pay $400 a month with a $20 co-pay for everything except for $50 for ER and $100 for Hospitalization and she's done. There isn't a plan in the exchanges that comes close even with the subsidies.  Even the Platinum Plan doesn't come close. According to the rate calculator at her income level approx $41,000 her estimated monthly premium would be $586 a month without subsidy for the SILVER PLAN. Now look up at the chart above at coverage for the silver plan. With the Government $260 subsidy it would be $326 a month. The coverages are no where near what she was getting through the huge group of her company sponsored plan. That's IF the Government doesn't start dropping the subsidy little by little, shifting more an more cost to her. There is no platinum plan rate calculator, only silver. How happy is she going to be when for $74 a month less she get that much less for the money? Now multiply her by up to 65 million others in her place and you can envision the "train wreck" Max Baucus (D) spoke of. I say let 'er rip. |
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