Zombie Obamacare Schadenfreude

Like a zombie from the "Walking Dead" Obamacare Schadenfreude keeps losing body parts, but keeps on walking, and infecting people.

How ObamaCare will kill job-based plans

Americans aren’t all that optimistic about ObamaCare, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll: Fifty-seven percent say the law isn’t working as planned.

That number will shoot even higher if employer health insurance vanishes, as an S&P Capital IQ report predicts. The financial-research firm forecasts that 90 percent of Americans who now have employer-sponsored coverage will lose it by 2020 — and have to turn to government exchanges for policies.

The Obama administration has long denied that its health-reform law would cause companies to stop providing insurance. But thanks to an ObamaCare-fueled increase in health costs, employer-sponsored coverage may soon become a thing of the past.

The S&P report comes three years after the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. suggested that 30 percent of employers would dump workers into exchanges to save money.

Democrats weren’t convinced. The White House attacked the McKinsey report as “flawed”; Senate Finance Committee then-Chairman Max Baucus blasted its “faulty analysis and misguided conclusions.”
. . .
The IRS may not want employers to dump their workers into the exchanges. But the law’s architects seem to want them to.

Former Obama health adviser Ezekiel Emanuel predicts that within the next three years, “a few big, blue-chip companies will announce their intention to stop providing health insurance. . . Then the floodgates will open.”

By 2025, he estimates, fewer than one in five Americans will get insurance through work.

As I've pointed out before the US's employee based health care system is a unique outgrowth of FDR's wage and price controls in WWII, which allowed companies to add health benefits when they could not raise wages to attract workers in short supply.  The system at least has the virtue of being sort of market based, although the fact that people often don't pay directly pay for most of what they receive does add a strong element of disincentives to use health care wisely.  However, Obamacare replaces the employer with the government, and subsidizes many, which further damages the incentives relationships.   Why worry about using something when someone else is paying for it?

By way of Stacy McCain: Good-Bye, Employer Mandate?

An interesting article at Politico:

Robert Gibbs’ prediction that Obamacare’s employer mandate would — and perhaps should — be jettisoned shocked Democrats back in April.
By July, the former aide and longtime confidant of President Barack Obama had a lot more company. More and more liberal activists and policy experts who help shape Democratic thinking on health care have concluded that penalizing businesses if they don’t offer health insurance is an unnecessary element of the Affordable Care Act that may do more harm than good. Among them are experts at the Urban Institute and the Commonwealth Fund and prominent academics like legal scholar Tim Jost. . . .
Leading Democrats in Congress aren’t bolting from the employer mandate, at least not before the November election. But the White House has delayed it twice in the past year, dubbed it “not critical” and said it will be phased in more slowly when its begins next year.
The rule that businesses with more than 50 full-time workers offer them affordable health insurance has been a political headache from the start. . . .

You can read the whole thing. Describing the mandate as a “political headache” is a way to avoid calling it a policy disaster. And without the employer mandate, exactly what would remain of ObamaCare, except Medicare expansion and state “exchanges”?

Zombie ObamaCare: It’s Dead, but It Can Never Be Killed.

Except with a chain saw, a cross bow, a katana or a bullet in the head.  And like zombies of the Romero class, if the rotten, shambling thing succeeds in biting you, you're doomed to a similar fate.

Wombat-socho has the father of all Rule 5 posts "Rule 5 Sunday: On The Beach" up at The Other McCain.