My first question is: WHERE IS THE MONEY GOING TO COME FROM? Many companies are having to completely redesign their healthcare policies and believe me, there is no simple solution. In fact, the employer mandate portion of this law was actually postponed one year to January 1st, 2015 because companies didn't have a clue of how to implement it.
Let me explain. They will have to provide healthcare to all employees, which they may not have been doing up until now, and this creates an IMMENSE administrative burden. The money has to come from somewhere, and I don't know if the insurance providers will be of much help. Here are a couple scenarios:
1) Employers will reduce each employee's paycheck by a couple bucks in order to provide them all with healthcare benefits. In it's report last week, nonpartisan Congressional Budge Office predicted that the workforce's compensation will decrease by 1% because of the ACA. Thats $70 billion per year!
2) Employers will trim a couple (not really just a couple) "unnecessary" jobs in order to pay for the healthcare benefits.
3) For small businesses, they will just
trim jobs until they only have 50 employees and then they do not have to take
part in this mandate at all! The Motley Fool explains
it nicely:
For
example, a small business with 54 full-time workers could decide that
eliminating five jobs makes more economic sense than paying significantly more
for health coverage or penalties. Another alternative that businesses could
take is to keep employees but reduce their hours to less than 30 per week so
that the workers won't be counted as full-time.
Either way, some people will remain unhappy. Some healthier individuals who treat their body as temples may prefer to be paid a higher salary rather than be given health insurance. Employers may be unhappy with the fact they have to provide healthcare to workers they don't even intend on keeping for too long. For example, many companies utilize the services of temps or temporary contractors. They need the contractors to work on certain projects that mostly always have a start and end date. Large corporations who need these types of workers usually have contracts with staffing firms -- they source and pay the temp workers so that they large corporation doesn't need to. However, these temps still need to be provided with healthcare, according to the ACA. Now it just gets even more confusing.
Staffing firms may have to up the margin for their contracts with large corporations or even pay the temps less. One major consequence is that it will offset the market value of job positions, especially in the tech world where it is very easy to acquire talent overseas in India. Wait a second...isn't this something our government does not want to support? Oh well, I sincerely hope there are better alternatives that will turn up in the course of the next year. I wish all employers good luck... they're gonna need it.
I was just doing some research on ObamaCare and on one of the "Benefits of ObamaCase" sites, there was a segment that said that everyone benefits from ObamaCare. How could that be possible if jobs are lost, salaries are decreased, and work could potentially be outsourced to other countries.
ReplyDeleteI just don't understand how this is beneficial for the country as a whole. Those would could not initial afford health insurance should not have to ability to make the wealthier folks suffer in order for them to have better insurance. Maybe I am just biased because I have been fortunate enough to have really good medical insurance, but I just do not think that ObamaCare is in the best interest of our nation as a whole
First off, that picture of Barack and Michelle Obama is hilarious. Secondly, my family was promised they would be able to keep their health insurance. We were told that even though Obamacare was coming, that we would be fine because we already had insurance (good insurance I might add). Then this past December, our plan was cancelled, and the only options available to my family of four were hundreds of dollars more per month than we were previously paying. This comment is not meant to simply be a personal complaint, but it is just meant to show that this plan really is not making healthcare affordable for everyone at all. The problem is that for the people with no money to be taken care of, those with some money have to pay for it. I am all for helping people get health insurance and be covered, but I just find it really unfair that this is the solution that we are forced to work with. All the issues you mentioned above are extremely problematic, and not to mention, the website itself has so many issues that I wonder just how effective this whole policy will end up being in the long run.
ReplyDeleteIt's a shame that Obamacare is so poorly thought out and implemented. Universal healthcare based on pooled insurance makes fundamental economic sense, and yet, we will probably have to endure this and a dozen more unsound policies until someone makes one that simply works.
ReplyDeleteLike thesinowatcher said, it's unfortunate that Obamacare has just become an example of the adage that the road to hell is paved with good intention.
ReplyDeletePerhaps another way to tackle this problem is to take a more preventative approach to the rising cost of healthcare. A lot of physicians in America overmedicate their patients or immediately jump to the worst-case scenario in order to protect themselves from malpractice lawsuits. This just creates a nation of hypochondriacs and makes the cost of healthcare skyrocket. Maybe the system could be restructured to allow doctors to take a more cost-effective and practical approach to healthcare and to give them legal protection to exercise this right, the cost of healthcare could be lowered and the quality of healthcare could be raised simultaneously.