| A week or two ago I read of how Obamacare requires employers with more than 50 full time employees to offer health care coverage to the employees. It was a fascinating story as it uncovered a couple elements of Obamacare that we apparantly needed to vote for before we could find out it was in there.
The first thing that surprised me was that Obamacare requires the company to offer health insurance if there are 50 or more full time employees in the company. (full time as defined by 30 hours per week or more) But, and this is the important part, it need not offer that coverage to the family of the employee! In other words, my wife's employer doesn't need to offer coverage for me or my children - only my wife! Gee, how great is that. In case you haven't noticed there is a huge price difference between the cost of family coverage and single coverage. In fact, it may be a thousand dollars per month or more.
This is becoming newsworthy as elements of Obamacare are sorted through and implemented going forward.
By denying coverage to spouses, employers not only save the annual premiums, but also the new fees that went into effect as part of the Affordable Care Act. This year, companies have to pay $1 or $2 "per life" covered on their plans, a sum that jumps to $65 in 2014. And health law guidelines proposed recently mandate coverage of employees' dependent children (up to age 26), but husbands and wives are optional. "The question about whether it's obligatory to cover the family of the employee is being thought through more than ever before," says Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health.
So what is the trend? The trend is now that a larger number and percentage of companies are no longer offering family coverage for employees. The net effect will be that more children will be without health insurance going forward thus leaving more to enroll on the public program at taxpayer expense.
The second element I found interesting is that Obamacare required employees to be responsible for no more than approximately $3,600 per year for their insurance. Under Obamacare the coverage for a family is estimated at nearly $20,000 per year. Do the math ndt it quickly becomes apparant that the employer is on the hook for the other $16,400 per year. That is an amount that will either force massive layoffs, or as is detailed in the paragraph above, force employers do drop the spouse and children's coverage.
Enter the penalty phase of Obamacare. Without health insurance the citizen pays a federal tax penalty. The penalty is capped at 2.5% of the families taxable income. This will result in a huge number of families that will be willing to avoid coverage and pay the penalty, only to get Obamacare coverage when the need is presented. This was supposed to be solved under Obamacare, but nobody ever read the bill before signing it into law.
Failure to purchase insurance will result in a tax penalty "capped at either the annual average Bronze premium, 2.5 percent of taxable income, or $2,085.00 per family in 2016," according to CNSNews.com.
Buried in the examples of how to calculate the penalty under different scenarios is this revelation: "The annual national average bronze plan premium for a family of 5 (2 adults, 3 children) is $20,000." (The IRS also assumes this is the cost for a family of four.)
The median household income in the United States at the end of 2011 was $50,054 and falling. For a family of five with that income, the cheapest health insurance available under ObamaCare will consume 40 percent of their earnings. The penalty for not having insurance will be far lower, giving these families a major incentive not to buy insurance until they need it - one of the things ObamaCare was supposed to prevent.
Obama promised to fundamentally change this country. He has done so. He is going to bankrupt the entire economic system with overspending, and forcing Americans to buy a product they can no longer afford and allowing companies to dump employee coverage in order to comply. Nobody bothered to read the bill before it was passsed into law. This monster will be Obama's legacy. |
