I’m disappointed with Avik Roy’s sloppy diction in his article at Forbes fisking the president’s apology for lying (and however the president dresses it, he lied) about people in the individual healthcare insurance market keeping their insurance. Mr. Roy writes:
It’s for these reasons that Delta Air Lines has said that it will spend $100 million more on health insurance on 2014 than it did in 2013, and why labor unions have complained that Obamacare “will drive the costs of collectively bargained, union administered plans, and other plans that cover unionized workers to unsupportable levels.â€
Mr. Roy knows very well that Delta Airlines has been “self-insuring” its employees’ healthcare since 1997. He reported on it here:
It turns out, however, that even America’s largest companies face higher costs due to the health law. A recently-leaked letter from Delta Air Lines to the Obama administration states that the “cost of providing health care to our employees will increase by nearly $100,000,000 next year,†much of it due to Obamacare.
Note the distinction: Delta is claiming they’ll pay more for healthcare not for insurance. Delta doesn’t carry insurance and they don’t pay premiums. They pay claims. It’s possible that Delta also pays an insurance company to process the claims; I don’t honestly know. Since most processing charges are based on claims paid, Delta’s processing charges are likely to rise but those aren’t insurance costs. They’re processing costs.
More than half of all companies that subsidize the healthcare of their employees as part of the employment package self-insure and I presume it’s 100% among large companies. I strongly suspect we’ll hear increasingly loud squeals of complaint from them as they pay the higher costs that meeting the standards required by the PPACA will demand of them.
Other than precision in language, I’m not sure the distinction here matters much. The ACA is not increasing healthcare per se, its eliminating cost-control devices used by self-insurers. Last year, our insurance (employer provided self-insurance) provided contraceptive benefits with various deductibles and co-pays depending on the particular plan and whether the drug was generic, value or premium. This year, because of the ACA, the drug classifications are eliminated and there are no deductions or co-pays for contraception. The effect isn’t to increase healthcare (assuming contraception is always “healthcare”), but to eliminate the means by which the self-insurer kept its costs of healthcare lower by encouraging less expensive options for those that were fine with generics. These strike me as “insurance” aspects of the benefit, not the healthcare aspects, and its the flexibility self-insurers had with the “insurance” aspects that are being undermined by the ACA.
IMO the confusion between healthcare and insurance is one of the key problems with the PPACA and continuing to promote the confusion doesn’t help matters.
You could ensure that 100% of the people had the best healthcare insurance in the world and as long as care itself was bottlenecked people would continue to go without.
We’re seeing what a DISASTER Abominablecare is–and this is just with the INDIVIDUAL mandate. The EMPLOYER mandate has been postponed a year! Some of us are already getting screwed, but the screwing galore is still to come.
BTW, I also suspect that our employer contribution is GOING to be taxed as income–otherwise, why not the amount on our W2? If it was really just a matter of verifying that we had employer covered insurance, a check box would be sufficient.
Wait for it–pretty soon, we’ll hear the sound of the other shoe dropping.
You could ensure that 100% of the people had the best healthcare insurance in the world and as long as care itself was bottlenecked people would continue to go without.
Government is forcing people to buy insurance that may not fit their lifestyle. If things get bottled up, in the messy process, then they will have to apply that force somewhere else — maybe forcing doctors to accept medicaid/medicare patients. This seems to be where we are going in this social progressive social engineering experiment — force and intimidation being the government levers applied when people don’t want to cooperate.