Fortune: Big companies seriously considering dropping plans

[jsmithsen]

http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/05/news/companies/dropping_benefits.fortune/

Fortune) -- The great mystery surrounding the historic health care bill is how the corporations that provide coverage for most Americans -- coverage they know and prize -- will react to the new law's radically different regime of subsidies, penalties, and taxes. Now, we're getting a remarkable inside look at the options AT&T, Deere, and other big companies are weighing to deal with the new legislation.

Internal documents recently reviewed by Fortune, originally requested by Congress, show what the bill's critics predicted, and what its champions dreaded: many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the health care coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government...

What does it mean for health care reform if the employer-sponsored regime collapses? By Fortune's reckoning, each person who's dropped would cost the government an average of around $2,100 after deducting the extra taxes collected on their additional pay. So if 50% of people covered by company plans get dumped, federal health care costs will rise by $160 billion a year in 2016, in addition to the $93 billion in subsidies already forecast by the CBO. Of course, as we've seen throughout the health care reform process, it's impossible to know for certain what the unintended consequences of these actions will be.

[Xipe Totec]

1. All the more reason to push for the public option

This thing about companies deciding what kind of health insurance you can have is absolutely absurd.

Why should they decide?

[dkf]

15. So you think it's a good thing companies are doing this?

Maybe this was the goal all along huh? Personally I had it pretty good so I'm going to be really pissed if this is the result. All I needed was options when I retire but maybe I'll just join the ranks of the truly screwed.

Thanks Obama!

[Xipe Totec]

17. I got news for you

You've been paying for your own health care all along.

The only difference is that your company has been taking the money out of your paycheck and deciding what health insurance to buy for you.

And since it's your employer that's been sigining the contract, you have had no say so with the insurance company.

And because it's your employer that paying the insurance, if you really got sick and couldn't work, you'd not only be out of a job, but out of health insurance as well.

[Scuba]

16. Nailed it.

[Writer]

2. Is this vengefulness?

I think this is hideous, regardless of the politics.

[izquierdista]

8. No

Corporations cannot be vengeful; all they can (and by law must) do is to maximize shareholder value.

[jody]

3. Not to worry, White House plans to reduce health care costs will pay for everything. n/t

[Walk away]

4. Hopefully it will mean that the employee based system will quickly disappear....

and Medicare for all will come sooner than later.

If you are saying that the present employer based system will collapse if it is regulated so that all Americans are covered with health insurance that can't be cancelled if they get sick, then it needs to collapse and single payer should take over.

This seems like good news to me.

[OHdem10]

5. Single Payer???

[Warren Stupidity]

6. Hmmm... I declare this to be bullshit.

1) 'the corporations' have been dropping reducing and otherwise nickel and diming to death employer based health care for the last 30 years. Blaming the continuing effort to shift all costs onto workers on health insurance reform legislation that hasn't taken effect for the most part and won't in its entirety for several years, is hogwash.

2) "the new law's radically different regime of subsidies, penalties, and taxes" - total hogwash. There is nothing radical here. In particular current employer based programs are hardly affected.

The source is dubious, the claims are unfounded, and we have an example of a very similar program, RomneyCare in Massachusetts, where nothing of the sort has happened at all.

[MindandSoul]

7. This would be the perfect opening for . . .the public option!

[iamtechus]

9. Employers' health insurance will follow jobs overseas.

As US social conditions, along with the economy, sink to third-world status, companies will no longer feel compelled to offer health insurance and other perks to attract employees. Labor has become a buyers' market with many more sellers (workers) than buyers (employers) need. In other words, with long lines at the hiring offices you can treat people like shit and they've nowhere else to go.

I'd really like to thank all of you motherfuckers who refuse to sign union cards. :sarcasm:

[SocialistLez]

12. +1 I LOL'd at the union part. NT

[TheMadMonk]

14. Unions in some places did a lot of the damage to themselves.

There were times here in Australia where no construction site in a state moved without a bribe paid to the Union. When a union worksite was one that had zero non-union labour. Where even a boss's kid joined the union if he wanted to do vacation work onsite.

Our dockworkers (who for some reason or another associated with painters to become the Painters and Dockers union) borrowed from the painters, and decreed that 3 spots of rain on a sheet of writing paper, (as opposed to the cigarette paper used elsewhere in the world) as a reason to stop work.

And I do believe Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters weren't exactly model citizens.

Extreme examples I know, but the ones that make it into the public eye, and the ones that gave the bosses all they needed to undermine the influence of ALL unions.


Don't get me wrong, I am all in favour of what unions represent. However, I am very much against what they can become.

[truedelphi]

10. This reminds me of Obama's strongest statement about the Health Care Reform Efforts and

It went something like: "Single Payer Universal HC would be the best and most logical way to bring about reform, if we were starting from scratch. but since we already have a system in place, we must devise a reform effort that plans and builds on what we have."

Of course, unfortunately, Obama didn't seem to grasp the notion that we never really had Jack Shit - we only had some major companies that were willing to provide for some of their workers (Certainly not for workers who were too part time, or were just hired, or were independent contractors.) And nothing forces them to even do that - at any point in the game, they can decide to fire their workers, and then use people in Bangladesh, Singapore, or elsewhere. Or they can drop the HC coverage altogether.

[SocialistLez]

11. They could have done this long before the health care bill

and faced no penalties.

They're just playing politics with people's lives.

If you hated the health care bill so much, why didn't you put your corporate dollars behind the single-payer movement you dumbfu**s?

[Crunchy Frog]

13. Do they have penalties for dumping coverage now?

If not, then why would they have an incentive to dump coverage when there will be penalties?

Not that I would be sorry to see the employer bases system go.