Employers are increasingly recognizing they may be able to avoid certain penalties under the federal health law by offering very limited plans that can lack key benefits such as hospital coverage.
Benefits advisers and insurance brokers—bucking a commonly held expectation that the law would broadly enrich benefits—are pitching these low-benefit plans around the country. They cover minimal requirements such as preventive services, but often little more. Some of the plans wouldn’t cover surgery, X-rays or prenatal care at all. Others will be paired with limited packages to cover additional services, for instance, $100 a day for a hospital visit.
Like I said
Gosh, who could have foreseen this turn of events? Oh, that’s right . . .everyone.
Shouldn’t someone mention the ongoing criminal enterprise that is the Apple Corporation? Shell companies, tax evasion, money laundering, it all sounds so Mafia-like.
This is really criminal. ObamaCare will be killing us off in record numbers. And don’t tell me that wasn’t the plan all along. There’s only so much oil and water and food – so we have to be gotten rid of. If they can’t do it with drones (oh, but yes they can and are right now, my dear), they’ll do it with no medical care. Kill us off! That’s the plan.
I don’t believe that. It was always expected that such a complex piece of legislation would need constant amending. It’s that the Republicans refuse to cooperate with anything constructive.
It didn’t need to be a complex piece of legislation. That sounds like a giant rationalization of a giant clusterf**k to me. I impute no good motives to any of them. The grand distinctions between Dems and Repubs are just not there anymore. (How about the morning after pill?) The truth is horrible, but hiding from the truth only makes any chance at fixing things worse. There was no need for any of this. And the suffering continues unabated.
This passage from the article seems instructive:
“…Administration officials confirmed in interviews that the skinny plans, in concept, would be sufficient to avoid the across-the-workforce penalty. Several expressed surprise that employers would consider the approach.
“We wouldn’t have anticipated that there’d be demand for these types of band-aid plans in 2014,” said Robert Kocher, a former White House health adviser who helped shepherd the law. “Our expectation was that employers would offer high quality insurance.” …”
“We wouldn’t have anticipated” that the generous, warm-hearted, and always fair-minded owners of American business would possibly skimp on offering a decent health insurance plan to their valued employees.
Just like we never could have anticipated that planes might have been flown into buildings.
You just knew that when the public option disappeared, the only thing that might have offered any “competition”, the thing was fixed.
Obama did bring in former officials of private for profit health insurance companies to write his great Health Insurance Profit Protection Plan.
Along with Wall St realizing they could not afford a Hillary administration, the Big Health Industry Players (BHIP) knew they were facing an almost insurmountable wave forcing change in how they could make their big money. They also knew they were pricing their products out of the reach of many of their potential prey.
So having a Corporatist president was all to their benefit, and he came through for them with flying colors. No public option (as undefined as it was for him, it did have supporters who could defind what one was), no single payer, no strong competition to the for-profits, no real transparency.
The for-profits now have millions of people who must buy their products, with little guarantee of the products actually providing health CARE. And the IRS will serve as the enforcer for the for-profits.
How much closer can big corporations and government get? Well, they do run the back rooms and the regulatory agencies, so there’s that as well….
Barack the 1st’s health insurance plan could have consisted of one sentence.
“The phrase ‘over 65’ is hereby removed from the 1965 Medicare authorization bill.”