Cheapest Obama care to cost $20,000 per IRS

[BigRedBuster]

OK. I wasn't comfortable pointing this out earlier because I had only heard it from one source. Now I have had it explained to me by 4 separate people in the insurance industry so here it is.

 

We are what I would call a medium sized company with employees between 50-100. We have always had a very strong health care plan for our employees. We pay 100% of the premiums for the employee and they pay a large percentage of it if they want the family coverage.

 

We have had several employees with major health issues the last few years. Our premiums have gone through the roof because of it so we were forced to increase our deductible up to $5000. Still paying 100% for the employee.

We then told the employees that if they can find a better plan that they want, we will pay them $XXX per month to help pay the premiums on the other plan.

 

Bottom line, we want our employees to have health insurance but we had to do what we did to be able to afford it. If someone who is 25 and single can go out and find really good coverage cheap, then we wanted to help them do that.

 

Soooo......now comes this great health care bill.

We are now being told that we will be forced to reduce our deductible and that "probably" the government will fine us if we are reimbursing our employees the added money if they find another program they want to be on.

 

Wow.....I absolutely love this government.

 

And...no use asking me specifically what paragraph in what part of the bill all of this is coming from. I'm not an expert on it. This is what I'm being told by insurance companies and we will continue to look into this further. They did tell me that we don't need to worry about it till next year.

[JJ Husker]

BRB- I think the part that would disqualify your plan would be the $5K deductible. Technically that is considered a high deductible health plan and therefore is not creditable or "good enough" coverage to satisfy the requirements of the ACA. I had a plan like that the last couple of years. The good thing about it was that the premiums were cheaper and it qualified you to have a health savings account which would let you put about $5K per year, tax free into the HSA, and then use it towards any qualified medical expense. It is better than a flex spending plan that many employers offer because it was not use it or lose it. Those funds remain yours forever and only need to be used on qualified med expenses. I know for a fact that the ACA changed HSA's. They significantly reduced the amount you can put in them tax free. So, the ACA took a free market plan that could help people manage their own healthcare expenses and that had some tax benefits and ruined it. Anybody who thinks the ACA was about helping the average consumer is fooling themselves. It is all about government gaining control of a huge industry with no concern for reigning in runaway costs. Sure, they don't present it that way and it may not have even been on purpose but, read the bill (unlike our d******d representatives) and see what you see. I've read most of it, it's not good news unless you didn't have any coverage or can't afford coverage. Those people will be on easy street for awhile, at least until the rest of us can't afford to subsidize or be taxed or be fined to help pay for their coverage in addition to our own.

[BigRedBuster]

JJ...

 

Yep, that's what they are telling us. The deductible is too high. We also encouraged all employees to do the HSA. We were in a situation where, I can honestly say, we either had to have this type of program, drop health care all together or if we signed up for our old program we would be out of business because the economy was in the tank and our premiums were exploding. We had several employees that were costing us a huge amount.

 

Now, we could have figured out some how to force those employees out of the company and leave them in the cold but they were long term good employees and we refused to do that.

 

What absolutely boggles my mind is the part that we probably will have to stop helping employees not on our program by subsidizing their premiums.

[The Dude]

Thanks for the butt reaming Obama.