24. Winners and Losers

Obamacare requires all employers with more than 50 full-time employees to
offer health insurance or pay a penalty of $2000 per employee. All employers
with more than 200 employees are required to automatically enroll them in their
healthcare plan. Employers with fewer than 50 employees are expected to get
their insurance through the state healthcare exchanges. If an employer offers
a healthcare plan, but it is deemed not “affordable” by a series of complicated
calculations, the employee has the option of going directly to the state exchange
for insurance, where they may be eligible for a premium subsidy to help pay
for their policy. If this happens, the employer will be fined $3000 for that
employee. That’s more than what the employer would have to pay if he didn’t
offer insurance at all! Now consider that the cost of an average insurance policy
through the exchange was estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to
be about $19,200 for a family of four by at least 2016—that’s a lot of money.
Needless to say, a lot of employers can’t afford to offer an insurance plan that
expensive. As a result, many of them are planning to drop their health insurance
benefits altogether—that could actually increase the number of uninsured!

So the Obama administration decided to offer “waivers” for some employers.
They could continue to offer minimal health insurance policies to their
employees, so they could stay in business. Funny thing though—not everyone
who applied for a waiver was granted one. The Secretary of Health and Human
Services got to decide who did and didn’t get a waiver. And guess what—of the
waivers granted, a huge proportion were given to, get this, labor unions—yeah,
the same organizations that spent hundreds of millions of dollars to elect the
people that put Obamacare into law! What’s wrong with this picture?? The very
people who pushed this law onto America are the first ones in line to get out of
having to comply with it!

So we have an administration that passes a monstrous, heinous piece of
legislation, and then gets to say who has to abide by that law. When did this
become acceptable? Obama’s administration has become famous for their
practice of choosing “winners and losers”.

Unfortunately, America is the biggest loser in this game.

(Note: This commentary is by Dr. Jill Vecchio.)