Forbes
The first statistics are coming in and, to the surprise of a great many, Obamacare might just be working to bring health care to working Americans precisely as promised.
The major health insurance companies around the country are reporting a significant increase in small businesses offering health care benefits to their employees.
Why?
Because the tax cut created in the new health care reform law providing small businesses with an incentive to give health benefits to employees is working.
Found by Mr. Justin.
I hope you understand this..
Under the AUGMENTED BILL, after it was changed 1000 times..That the EMPLOYEE is paying for about 1/2 of the bill from wages.
The last paragraph says: “If you’re all about beating up on President Obama, you can conveniently forget this bit of data as if it never really happened.”
But it seems the author conveniently forgot to mention the hundreds of large unions and companies the White House has already given exemptions to so that they can avoid the program’s bite.
You mean the republicans lied about something? Wow.
Impressive.
Wow, this is going to kill small business because that’s where all the jobs are created due to the Bush tax cuts.
lol
“1984” characters couldn’t be prouder of this language: “Because the tax cut created in the new health care reform law providing small businesses with an incentive to give health benefits to employees is working.”
There is NO incentive. There IS punishment if you do not provide health-care. While some will get health care, others will be fired to adjust business fiscal balance. Nothing about that in the article.
And as #2 mentions – big players who are friends of administration are being exempt from punishment. Corruption on a grand scale.
#6–dusanmal==I couldn’t agree with you more. When will people understand that the entire reason businesses exist is to provide JOBS to people? The gubment forcing our FREEEEdom loving entrepreneurs to pay a living wage and to provide healthcare cuts into the number of people who can be “given” a job. What madness is this? Can’t the liberal loons understand that whenever some safety issue is forced on small business freedompeneurs that someone loses a job?
Silly the government doesn’t understand such a basic equation. Every time taxes have been cut, business hires more employees because that is what a business is: a job providing enterprise, but only if they have their money left alone by the government. How can a business hire someone if they have to pay a 15% surcharge to the government for some tax scheme?
No wonder America is going down the drain: too many taxes, not enough jobs.
So bobbo, how about answering some of dusanmal’s points?
A) Is there a punishment if a business does not provide health care?
B) How many people were fired/not hired so the business could afford this healthcare?
C) Why are there so many businesses exempted?
D) When does the tax break expire?
E) What will happen to employment once this tax break expires and the additional cost is passed along to consumers?
And try to answer the questions honestly. Don’t answer a question with a question. No blather.
dusanmal, it depends on what you define as small business. Organizations or companies under 50 people are not penalized.
The 2014 state plans will do little to deal with health care costs which are far higher per capita in the US than anywhere else I can think of.
A) yes as there should be. As long as healhcare is foolishy tied to employment, then employers should have to provide.
Attempts to separate healthcare/insurance from the employers responsibility would be / have been derided as “unprecedented power grab” “communism” etc, etc, FUD ad infinitum.
So bobbo, how about answering some of dusanmal’s points?
A) Is there a punishment if a business does not provide health care? /// Punishment/Reward==these are partisan words. I thought the “word” was every business person would “opt” for the “penalty” because it would be cheaper than providing healthcare to employees? Business will do what it needs to do to compete in the marketplace under whatever rules apply. Why would you take this freedom of choice away from anyone, including business people? If healthcare is seen as a service that is to be paid by businesses, rather than by the government, then what is the alternative except for business to provide the service? You really aren’t making any sense at all when you discuss “options” without the givens that created the options to begin with.
B) How many people were fired/not hired so the business could afford this healthcare? /// I expect NONE. Stupid business people go out of business when they don’t compete well against SMART business people. Smart business people provide goods and services as the market demands. How many people are employed/not employed/hired/fired is not a measurement of business success: its a measure of societal success. Silly how many people confuse the two. Its all part of corrupting the language, to corrupt the political discourse, to corrupt the underpinnings of society, to benefit our Corporate Masters, so they can pay our corrupt elected officials, who then tell us what a great job they are doing pursuant to our demands. Corruption: a perfect Republican tautology.
C) Why are there so many businesses exempted? /// Heh, heh. See corruption.
D) When does the tax break expire? /// Don’ know.
E) What will happen to employment once this tax break expires and the additional cost is passed along to consumers? /// Prices go up.
And try to answer the questions honestly. Don’t answer a question with a question. No blather. /// Damn! Wish I had read down to this so I could have used all questions?????? Ha, ha.
Silly to argue about the details of a program that by design won’t work. Only single payer will work thereby taking the burden of healthcare off the backs of business thereby in a single stroke making MADE IN AMERICA more competitive in the world wide market. why my fellow conservatives don’t “get this” is beyond me. Course, most of them are too stupid to release any change can be for the better or for the worse. Imagine: Big corrupt corporations afraid to confront their Big corrupt unions. Its hela bad.
EVERYONE arguing against what is in their own best long term interest: business and labor lock step in a program of demonstrated failure. You’d think this was the war on drugs or something. FOOLISH.
Yea, veerily.
“No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.”
Aneurin Bevan
Another example of Obamacare is what’s going on here in CA. Summer of 2010 gave me a 30% increase in premiums via BlueShield. This week BlueShield just dropped an additional 59% increase in premiums on us.
Meanwhile a few doors down from my apartment are a couple of what some call illegal immigrants, or ‘undocumented workers’. Problem with that is they don’t work. They get a nice fat check from the state every month for each child they pump out, 5 so far. Their apartment rent is fully paid for by the state and their healthcare is fully paid for by the state.
I guess all these workers are out of health care if repeal passes. I think Obama should run on this for reelection. Vote for me and you keep your health care, including those of you who lost your health care which I said wouldn’t happen.
Yea. It’s working SWELL. Blue Cross in raising it’s rates FIFTY NINE FUCKING PER FUCKING CENT.
Explain that away, tools.
Under PPACA (“ObamaCare”), the percentage of GDP we devote to healthcare spending, at >17% already by far the highest in the world, will go up by around 2-3%. “Small business” may get an accounting break, but in the aggregate, PPACA will drive healthcare-related taxes, premiums, deductibles, and copays up. Compare this to Expanded and Improved Medicare For All (HR 676), which would provide permanent, comprehensive, prenatal-to-grave coverage for *everyone*, with no deductibles or copays and free choice of providers (*every* doctor and hospital in the US would be “in-network”). Our aggregate healthcare costs would start out at roughly the same as they are now and would likely go *down* in the relatively near term, thanks to elimination of administrative waste (30% of current spending), monopsonistic bargaining on prices, timely preventive and maintenance care, and rational and humane cost-effectiveness guidelines. At a bare minimum, the rate of increase in healthcare spending would be brought under control (in contrast to Massachusetts’s RomneyCare, the template for ObamaCare). These economic predictions are borne out by decades of real-world experience in countries that have adopted true or functional single-payer insurance systems (e.g., France, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Canada) — and by being more generous (like France) in our per-capita spending, we can avoid the lurid rationing anecdotes that come out of the penny-pinching systems (like the UK and Quebec.) (Even though every First World country with a national health system gets better overall health outcomes than we do, anecdotal horror stories seem to carry more weight with Americans.)
So, yeah, under ObamaCare, more people will have at least *some* coverage, and fewer people will get *royally* screwed (e.g. by pre-existing conditions, rescission, and coverage limits). But *all* of us are going to get taken for even more money, one way or another, than we already were. We have by far the most expensive, most parasitic, worst-performing healthcare system in the First World. Instead of scrapping it and replacing it with a proven performer like universal single-payer insurance, Congress made it mandatory and forced us to subsidize it. When we revisit healthcare reform, we’ll have another chance to do it smart and do it right by adopting Improved Medicare For All.
Faxon: Blue Cross is simply going for its increase before anyone else notices.
Medical costs have been rising long before Obama was elected, incidentally.
PC Martin–well done, nice touchstone.
Yes, we the people, the media, have lost touch with the “fact” that our healthcare system is out of control and bankrupting the USA. Even if our system is seen as the best in the world, we can’t afford it and the costs are only going up. Blame Obama? = Retarded.
Yes–argue as you have done about “how” to take the best from the socialized systems and have the best healthcare FOR ALL system in America, not the best system for those who can pay for it like we have now.
This compromised healthcare system we have now like slowly changing from driving on the right side of the road to the left side. Lots of carnage. Either switch or not would make so much more sense==but PUKES profit off the carnage even more than they profit off the business based benefit program that forms the basic problem in our system.
We aren’t rational. Like rabid dogs the Puke voters bite the hand that tries to feed and protect them. Better off shot.
Tax breaks for health care make health care more affordable for those receiving the breaks, so I don’t see this story as particularly shocking, except perhaps that the article mentions numbers well less than 1% of the population having gained coverage. I’m happy these few people now have insurance, but forgive me if I don’t consider it a major victory considering the ever-increasing cost of my own insurance, not to mention the subsidy I now pay for others’.
PS Why are health care expenditures taxed in the first place???
I hope everyone else realizes that they will be paying more for theirs. I think everyone should know that these plans offer limited coverage and they are not comprehensive.
I don’t want health insurance to have comprehensive coverage, if that means it covers every little expense. Health insurance should be just that, insurance, against a tragedy. Let them take care of the big expenses.
Now insurance companies big goal is to not make payouts. Guess what, that’s the customer’s goal too, not having major health problems. Having the insurers in charge of the big expenses, while you handle the little ones, makes them more likely to pay for preventive care.
The current system is primarily built around insurance companies selling to businesses and offering the lowest premiums in a group plan.
Wouldn’t it be great if housing was paid like that, where every year, your employer makes you move to a different place of his choosing?
Well of course it is increasing the offerings of insurance. The bill was intended to enrich insurance companies. It did exactly as intended. What’s the next news story to illuminate us? Condoms make sex safer and less satisfying?
“Because the tax cut created in the new health care reform law providing small businesses with an incentive to give health benefits to employees is working.”
Wait a second – a tax cut, used as an incentive is resulting in something happening that the government wants? But, but, that’s impossible — we all know that tax cuts are only for the rich, and only designed to let the rich buy more yachts and mansions.
Chucky, the evil doll==well, I see two major logical errors even while trying to avoid all such things for the “meat” of what you have on offer. I hate asparagus.
1. What makes you think businesses are motivated to give health benefits because of a tax break? What evidence do you have of this except you were told to parrot this? As a brain dead PUKE I know you are conditioned to parrot, but I thought you avoided demoncratic parroting? No? Must be lots of mindless chatter in your world.
2. Amusing you define in whatever demented way you do that employers rich enough to have have plans for employees are not “rich.” Hah, hah. Indeed, rich only means them with the yatches? Those be the “Super Rich” you idiot and yes, they have rigged the system so that the poor like you and me, and the rich like the small businessmen will continue to “think” their rape is an exercise in personal freedom.
What a dope. Think much?
It breaks my heart what we have done to our country. How the government has been bought and sold by the insurance industry.
If we are going to compete with China in future, we need to leverage our strengths. We need to sell TO China. We have advantages that China does not. We have the creativity and the ability to take risks with capital that they just don’t have… yet.
If we had universal health care, it would allow Americans to take the risks to build the next Apple, Google. Microsoft, Boeing. You could work where you wanted to using your abilities to their fullest. You could take a chance on a new idea, knowing that you wife and kids are still covered despite taking a chance with a small startup with a good idea.
For the amount of money we spend on health care, insurance included, there should be no one without coverage.
We need to have universal health care, and enforce out labor and immigration laws so that we don’t end up also insuring all of Latin America. People worry that universal health care means that illegals get free care. So what do we get? We get unenforced labor and immigration AND no health care. The worst of both words. WTF?
Poop.
“…first statistics… Obamacare MIGHT just be working…”
Let’s wait for more definitive information.
This news is going to cheese off a number of new representatives.
#27
It isn’t hopeless. First off, the cost increases are unsustainable. Something will have to be done.
Second, the insurance companies screw EVERYBODY they deal with. They have tons of lobbyists in the statehouses, but no friends.
A gov’t alternative not explicitly designed to suck will eventually be tried. Once that happens the jig is up.
Toss in the fact whatever President gets the job done immediately vaults to the top tier of consequential Presidents, all time.
It was decades before anybody could tag the tobacco companies, but it happened eventually. Nobody is perfect.
# 29 Buzz Mega “This news is going to cheese off a number of new representatives.”
Why? It can work a charm – still going to bankrupt the country. With no real penalty for not buying ($2000 fine vs $15000 premiums?) the insurance pool is likely to be too small which means more and more government involvement.
The UK government-owned health care system is the LARGEST employer in Europe. 7 or 8% of all jobs in the US are GOVERNMENT jobs – NOW.
All government in the US accounts for about 12 million jobs. Healthcare in the US already accounts for over 14 million jobs. Can you imagine when the government expands to employ almost 20% of all jobs?
They’re going to be needing a lot more than those planned 16,000 new IRS agents! By the way, I forget – how many new shotguns did the IRS order a couple of months ago?
There is an excellent book that came out a few years ago called “Crisis of Abundance” that suggests a major reason why healthcare costs in the US are so much higher than in other countries is because we overconsume captial-heavy premium care that has little real effect on the outcome, partly because we have expectations that are too high and partly because our “insurance” system insulates consumers from costs.
As has been pointed out many times before, the chief failing of the “Obamacare” law is that it just makes our overly expensive healthcare available to everybody without dealing with the fact that it is too expensive.