Freya's Day Obamacare Schadenfreude

Warm and misty here this morning. Kind of quite.

Just because you survived the first wave of Obamacare without serious harm doesn't mean you're safe yet.   Get ready for the second wave of the Obamacare tsunami. In the first year, only the individual market was in question, as the feds and states set up their health care exchanges.  Next year, however, the business mandate kicks in, and the number of people affected will rise exponentially.

Big companies are flirting with dumping high-cost employees off their private health plans onto Obamacare—legally.

Can corporations shift workers with high medical costs from the company health plan into online insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act? Some employers are considering it, say benefits consultants.

“It’s all over the marketplace,” said Todd Yates, a managing partner at Hill, Chesson & Woody, a North Carolina benefits consulting firm. “Employers are inquiring about it and brokers and consultants are advocating for it.”

Patients with preexisting medical conditions like diabetes drive health spending. But those who undergo expensive procedures such as organ transplants are a burden to the company as well. Since most big corporations are self-insured, shifting even one high-cost member out of the company plan could save the employer hundreds of thousands of dollars a year—while increasing the cost of claims absorbed by the marketplace policy by a similar amount.
 . . .
The scenario is simple:

The employer shrinks the hospital and doctor network to make the company plan unattractive to those with chronic illness. Or, the employer raises co-payments for drugs needed by the chronically ill, also rendering the plan unattractive and perhaps nudging high-cost workers to examine other options.

At the same time, the employer offers to buy the targeted worker a high-benefit “platinum” plan in the marketplaces. The plan could cost $6,000 or more a year for an individual. But that’s still far less than the $300,000 a year that, say, a hemophilia patient might cost the company. The employer might also give the worker a raise to buy the policy directly.

The employer saves money. The employee gets better coverage. And the health law’s marketplace plan—required to accept all applicants at a fixed price during open enrollment periods—takes on the cost.

And the prepares for  "death spiral" takes another spin. From HotAir:

By the way, we should start seeing this phenomenon in just a few months. Even though the White House pushed the open-enrollment date for 2015 to mid-November to avoid having an ObamaCare shock just before the election, these businesses have to decide on whether to keep coverage as part of their budgeting process for the next year — and that will take place long before November 15th. Employees will start noticing that their employers aren’t holding their usual private-sector open enrollments on October 1st, even if employers wait to give them the bad news until November. That will not motivate voters to rush out and support Democrats, to say the least.

And from the Chamber of Commerce: Obamacare's Health Insurance Tax Could Cost Up to 286,000 Jobs.

. . . small businesses should brace for big health plan premium increases. Some are already seeing this happen. Rod Winter, a Wisconsin business owner told the Wall Street Journal:

Our 440-employee business just received its initial premium from United Healthcare for our July 1 renewal. The renewal premium represents a 29% increase over the current premium. UHC indicated that our premiums are going up 11% to bring our deductibles and out of pocket maximums in line with the provisions of the ACA. In other words, without the ACA, our premiums would be going up approximately 18%, not 29%.

New research finds that the added costs of one of Obamacare’s taxes will be brutal on employment.

The National Federation of Independent Business’ Research Foundation estimates that the Health Insurance Tax (HIT) will result in a reduction in private sector employment of 152,000 to 286,000 jobs by 2023, with 57 percent of the job losses coming from small businesses.

This will amount to a reduction of U.S. real output (sales) by between $20 billion to $33 billion during the same time frame.

That'a 286,000 new government dependents, potential democratic voters.

Companies: Obamacare is hurting our profit!

Thirty companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500, including United Parcel Service, General Electric and retailer Dollar General, have mentioned the Affordable Care Act during their conference calls since March 1 and all through the first-quarter earnings season, says John Butters, analyst at financial data research firm FactSet. That’s a healthy cross section of companies if you consider that so far, 446 companies in the S&P 500 have reported first-quarter results.

Exactly half the companies that mentioned the Act are in the healthcare industry, where there’s a direct interaction with the new law. But in the other half, companies ranging from many industries discussed the fallout of the Affordable Care Act on their business.

Most of the companies talking about the law did so negatively, pointing out how it either hurts demand for their business or causes costs to increase. “There are legitimate complaints,” says Kip Piper, an independent consultant that advises companies on health-care plans. “The ACA does impose costs and obligations that cost money.”

Some companies are pointing to the Affordable Care Act for driving up insurance costs. And this comes as health-care spending rose at an annual rate of 9.9% last quarter, the Bureau of Economic Analysis says, the fastest rate of increase since 1980. But others are saying that the new law is affecting demand for its products.

It's just that the liberal democrats place no value on work and business.  If it's not government collecting taxes and spending or giving the money out, they just don't care: