freeman3 wrote:A couple of things are evident. One is that, as predicted, Americans would like the law more after it was implemented than before it was implemented. Secondly, the moral strength of the law, that millions and millions would get health care that did not have it before, is having its effect.

Target just announced it was ending coverage for some employees. The hits will just keep coming.

As a consequence of these actions, the percentage of all employers offering health insurance to their employees during the last six years has dropped from 69 percent to fewer than 60 percent

.. With medical inflation far outpacing inflation in general, employers have taken various steps to defray rising benefit costs.[27] One strategy has been to require employees to participate in greater cost-sharing by mandating higher premiums and larger deductibles and co-pays. But not all firms have been willing to share in the burden of rising health care premiums. Some have engaged in cost-shifting (i.e. they have cut wages in order to offset rising health care expenditures), and others have simply decided to eliminate health care from the benefit package.[28] As a consequence of these actions, the percentage of all employers offering health insurance to their employees during the last six years has dropped from 69 percent to fewer than 60 percent.[29]
But this “thinning out” of coverage has extended beyond the working population. Among those hardest hit are the dependents of covered workers who continue to lose employer-based insurance as firms increasingly choose to cover only their own employees. Indeed, children accounted for the largest share of the roughly 3.7 million people who lost employer-provided health insurance between 2000 and 2004. And while public programs have taken up some of the slack,[30] medical inflation and state budget constraints are making it difficult for programs like Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to continue to absorb the growing number of uninsured Americans.
Another group that has suffered a sharp decline in employer-based coverage rates is America’s retirees. Retirees began losing access to employer-based coverage in the early 1990s, following a 1990 ruling by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). The ruling mandated that, beginning in 1992, businesses that offered health benefits to their retirees would have to include their future retiree health care expenses in their current financial reports. The implementation of this rule had the immediate effect of reducing the valuation of these firms on Wall Street. As a result, the proportion of mid-sized and large firms that offered health care to their retirees fell by almost 50 percent between 1980 and 2000. Retirees are now one of the least likely groups to have employer-sponsored insurance.[31]
But the most alarming statistic, in a system that ties access to health insurance to participation in the labor market, is the drop in employer-based coverage for prime-age working adults. In fact, members of this group were 26.7% more likely to be uninsured in 2004 than in 2000. And while there are still government programs to help prevent children[32], elderly and disabled people from becoming uninsured, there is little support for prime-age working adults when they lose coverage through an employer.

rickyp wrote:df

Target just announced it was ending coverage for some employees. The hits will just keep coming.

With Targets profit problems they are cutting everything...
Cuts to health care coverage hardly a new phenomenon in the US.
From a white paper on health care written in 2007

As a consequence of these actions, the percentage of all employers offering health insurance to their employees during the last six years has dropped from 69 percent to fewer than 60 percent

There was no Obama care to blame back then, but reduction in the medical insurance coverage for employees was constant and pervasive..

.. With medical inflation far outpacing inflation in general, employers have taken various steps to defray rising benefit costs.[27] One strategy has been to require employees to participate in greater cost-sharing by mandating higher premiums and larger deductibles and co-pays. But not all firms have been willing to share in the burden of rising health care premiums. Some have engaged in cost-shifting (i.e. they have cut wages in order to offset rising health care expenditures), and others have simply decided to eliminate health care from the benefit package.[28] As a consequence of these actions, the percentage of all employers offering health insurance to their employees during the last six years has dropped from 69 percent to fewer than 60 percent.[29]
But this “thinning out” of coverage has extended beyond the working population. Among those hardest hit are the dependents of covered workers who continue to lose employer-based insurance as firms increasingly choose to cover only their own employees. Indeed, children accounted for the largest share of the roughly 3.7 million people who lost employer-provided health insurance between 2000 and 2004. And while public programs have taken up some of the slack,[30] medical inflation and state budget constraints are making it difficult for programs like Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to continue to absorb the growing number of uninsured Americans.
Another group that has suffered a sharp decline in employer-based coverage rates is America’s retirees. Retirees began losing access to employer-based coverage in the early 1990s, following a 1990 ruling by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). The ruling mandated that, beginning in 1992, businesses that offered health benefits to their retirees would have to include their future retiree health care expenses in their current financial reports. The implementation of this rule had the immediate effect of reducing the valuation of these firms on Wall Street. As a result, the proportion of mid-sized and large firms that offered health care to their retirees fell by almost 50 percent between 1980 and 2000. Retirees are now one of the least likely groups to have employer-sponsored insurance.[31]
But the most alarming statistic, in a system that ties access to health insurance to participation in the labor market, is the drop in employer-based coverage for prime-age working adults. In fact, members of this group were 26.7% more likely to be uninsured in 2004 than in 2000. And while there are still government programs to help prevent children[32], elderly and disabled people from becoming uninsured, there is little support for prime-age working adults when they lose coverage through an employer.

http://www.cfeps.org/health/chapters/html/ch1.htm

1. The ACA has not negatively impacted people's insurance policies. They were getting cancelled before and they're getting cancelled now

2. The ACA is benefitting an unparalleled number of people. The law gets more and more popular over time

3. Republicans are running scared of the ACA. Some are even starting to support it.

1) Obamacare Will Destroy 2.5 Million Jobs By 2024

2) In 2024, There Will Still Be 31 Million People In The U.S. Without Health Insurance

3) Surprise! Millions Of People Who Liked Their Health Plan Will Lose Their Health Plan

4) Obamacare Reduces The Incentive To Find And Keep A Job

5) Your Paycheck Will Be Smaller Thanks To Obamacare

bbauska wrote:Another delay of the mandate to businesses.

Let's hurry up and see how this is going to work. One way or the other, the American people need to see and either get behind the law or get it gone and start on something new.

You would think cowardice is rampant the way the Dems are acting. They don't want to have Obama campaign for them, they don't want to acknowledge their support of the ACA.

You made the vote... Stand behind it. Let the people decide.

Let's hurry up and see how this is going to work. One way or the other, the American people need to see and either get behind the law or get it gone and start on something new

You would think cowardice is rampant the way the Dems are acting.

or get it gone and start on something new

danivon wrote:

bbauska wrote:Another delay of the mandate to businesses.

Let's hurry up and see how this is going to work. One way or the other, the American people need to see and either get behind the law or get it gone and start on something new.

You would think cowardice is rampant the way the Dems are acting. They don't want to have Obama campaign for them, they don't want to acknowledge their support of the ACA.

You made the vote... Stand behind it. Let the people decide.

How dare they let companies take more time to adapt to the changes. How very dare they ![/self-righteous indignation]

For the second time in a year, certain businesses were given more time before being forced to offer health insurance to most of their full-time workers. Employers with 50 to 99 workers were given until 2016 to comply, two years longer than required by law. During a yearlong grace period, larger companies will be required to insure fewer employees than spelled out in the law.

Not coincidentally, the delays punt implementation beyond congressional elections in November, which raises the first problem with defending Obamacare: The White House has politicized its signature policy.

Advocates for a strong executive branch, including me, have given the White House a pass on its rule-making authority, because implementing such a complicated law requires flexibility. But the law may be getting stretched to the point of breaking. Think of the ACA as a game of Jenga: Adjust one piece and the rest are affected; adjust too many and it falls.

If not illegal, the changes are fueling suspicion among Obama-loathing conservatives, and confusion among the rest of us. Even the law's most fervent supporters are frustrated.

Ron Pollack, executive director of the consumer lobby Families USA and an ally of the White House, told The Washington Post he was "very surprised" by the latest delays. For workers at large companies that don't provide coverage, he said, "It's very unfortunate … that they don't have a guarantee it will be extended to them for quite some time."

Put me in the frustrated category. I want the ACA to work because I want health insurance provided to the millions without it, for both the moral and economic benefits. I want the ACA to work because, as Charles Lane wrote for The Washington Post, the link between work and insurance needs to be broken. I want the ACA to work because the GOP has not offered a serious alternative that can pass Congress.

Unfortunately, the president and his team are making their good intentions almost indefensible.

Eleven of the 13 alterations to the Affordable Care Act in the past 12 months have given individuals or businesses more time. The burden of compliance is palpable. And so the White House has had to again and again smooth out the transition, in a law it crafted exclusively with Democrats.

“Our goal here is not to punish folks,” Obama said, unwittingly admitting that compliance with his own law amounts to economic and administrative sanction. “Our goal is to make sure that we’ve got people who can count on the financial security that health insurance provides.”

Of course, those employees who work for companies that just happen to have 50 to 99 employees and were hoping, possibly expecting, to receive health coverage next year— well, they cannot count on Obamacare. Or Obama, who helpfully explained why:

“Where we’ve got companies that want to do the right thing and are trying to work with us, we want to make sure that we’re working with them as well.” Translation: If you want to provide coverage but not right now and in compliance with the law as written, and you complain loud enough and weaken the political footing of Senate Democrats, you don’t have to eat your Obamacare spinach— or cover your employees.

In the same breath, Obama made clear that this process of photo-shopping, rewriting, and reimagining will continue apace, depending on the hassle that is Obamacare compliance and the political terrain.

“That’s going to be our attitude about the law generally: How do we make it work for the American people and for their employers in an optimal sort of way?”

Optimal.

How would you like to work for a company (more than 115,000 of them in 2012) that you thought would have to provide health care coverage for you next year but now won’t? And how would you like to be one of the employees who works for a big company (more than 94,000 of them in 2012) but falls just on the other side of the 70 percent coverage threshold in 2015? Your health falls on the other side of Obama’s arbitrary coverage line, and you don’t have coverage.

I’m willing to bet “optimal” is not the word that will come readily to mind.

But none of that excuses President Obama’s increasingly cavalier approach to picking and choosing how to enforce this law. Imagine how Democrats would respond if a President Rand Paul, say, moved into the White House in 2017 and announced he was going to put off provisions of Obamacare he thought might be too onerous to administer.

The Treasury Department released rules Monday for medium and large employers, which under the ACA are supposed to chip in for their employees’ health care. The law says they were supposed to have provided health coverage to full-time employees by Jan. 1 or pay fines to help defray the government’s costs of covering them. Last summer, in response to business concerns that the rules weren’t ready, Treasury delayed these requirements for a year.

That was already a stretch of governmental discretion, but it was defensible given the law’s complexity and the relatively small consequences of delaying this particular mandate. This week, Treasury changed the rules again: medium-size businesses will get another year before they must comply, and large businesses will have a softer coverage target to meet next year. This delays any bad press or bad feelings engendered by the mandate beyond the 2014 election.

. . .

If there’s a less disruptive way to raise that money, Congress should repeal the employer mandate. Until then, the president should implement the law.

freeman3 wrote:Here is a breakdown of us companies with at least 50 employees that offer health insurance to their employees--95.9%http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/firms-offering-coverage-by-size/
So,yes, there are some people will be adversely affected, the 4 percent not covered and some others perhaps whose insurance is not that great, but it doesn't look like a lot of people. As for legality, the courts are still open last time I checked...

1st: Prudent implementation could have happened within the time since the law was enacted. To keep postponing brings to thought ulterior motive in play.

2nd: The cowardice is by those who do not want the President to campaign with them (McCaskill?) and not wanting "tout" this great accomplishment of the ACA. ALL the Dems signed on. Own it.

In 2010, nearly 16 percent of Missourians reported they were unable to see a doctor when necessary due to cost. The cost of health insurance for Missouri families increased 38 percent between 2003 and 2009, with average annual premiums reaching $12,353. This amount represents nearly 26 percent of the median household income in Missouri. Single policyholders saw their premiums increase by 33 percent over this same period. [1] Of the Missouri residents who do have health insurance, 50 percent are covered through their employment. Public programs such as Medicare and Medicaid insure 29 percent of the population, and six percent of residents purchase individual private plans. This leaves 14 percent of Missourians uninsured