Here is a concise summary of how and why the “Obamacare” proponents’ claim that it wouldn’t undermine employer insurance looks more and more like the biggest bait-and-switch scheme in American history.
In short, corporate employers are starting to see that it will be cheaper to pay the per-worker fines and release employees to the nationalized (government) “insurance” than to continue supporting private group insurance as at present. Why? It’s about the bottom line, people. If you’re an employer, and it’s costlier to provide employer insurance than to pay $2G per worker to release them into the government-subsidized health system, then what’s stopping you? Nothing, that’s what. It’s just a “business expense.” Write it off.
And what do the workers get, ultimately? Well, I’ve been in plenty of public hospitals to tend to others’ care and visits during the last 10-15 years, including those in OKC and big cities like Dallas, Miami, and L.A./Long Beach, and the answer is clear: inferior, crowded, messy, long-wait, inevitably rationed, government-funded health care by those overworked, ragged doctors and nurses who somehow couldn’t or wouldn’t bail out to “Cadillac practice.”
Seeing the writing on the wall, one of my wife’s specialists already has backed out of public practice and no longer sees patients, and has told us why. And now employers are starting to drop insurance.
It’s the first leak in what is to become a firehose.
This will prove to be another classic example of how Big Labor (who supported Obama and this health law) doesn’t really give a damn about workers, but instead, about keeping their own corrupt bureaucratic fiefdoms intact.
Perhaps some regulations will be proposed and passed by Congress, and signed by the President, to address this problem. If so, what a waste, patching a breakage they never should have created in the first place, but rushed through anyway, through lack of foresight and blind zeal to push an agenda.
Or maybe these people are smarter than I’m giving them credit for. If so, the foresight was there, and this is part of the whole broader scheme to shove everyone onto socialized medicine in the end result decades from now. That card is starting to show already.
I’m not looking forward to dealing with the state of the health care system a few decades from now in my old age.