Estimated Loss of Health Coverage Under Obamacare

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by Alison Meyer, Heritage Foundation: President Obama has  reassured Americans that if they like their current health insurance, they can keep it.

“If you’ve got health insurance through your employer, you can keep your health insurance, keep your choice of doctor, keep your plan,” Obama insisted on Oct. 15, 2008.
But two years after signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law, Obama gave many Americans a false sense of security that Obamacare won’t change the status quo.

Four reputable research institutions have run the numbers and found that not only is Obama’s claim false, but employees will be dropped from their current coverage by the millions. This week’s chart outlines each of the four studies.
As Obamacare is implemented, employers will find it increasingly hard to comply. The authors of “Why Obamacare is Wrong for America” explain:

Behind the scenes, the White House needed to keep employers in the game so they would continue to finance the great majority of private health insurance. But after the law was enacted, the Obama administration invented new rules for his ‘grandfathering’ protection so that it was much harder for employers to comply. To be protected from a barrage of costly new mandates, an employer has to fit into a straitjacket, limiting the changes it can make to its existing plans.

Because the mandates on employers are so restrictive, they are not incentivized to hold coverage on employees. The result: Many employers will be better off financially if they drop coverage for employees, pay the penalty, and increase their workers’ wages as an offset, according to former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who currently heads the American Action Forum.

Speaking at Friday’s YG Network Summit event on health care, Dan Elling, staff director for the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, put it this way:

Eight out of 10 small employer health insurance plans are going to have to change the benefits packages available. That’s not being able to keep the plan you have.
There’s a small business owner with 58 employees from Missouri who runs a property casualty insurance business. He would be able to save $300,000 in 2014 alone by dumping his health insurance, and paying a $2,000 penalty under the employee mandate, and ship all this cost to the taxpayer.

So the backward incentives that are set up under the current law for employers to dump health insurance is the exact opposite message that we should try to be sending, which is first you got health insurance, great, lets try to make it better for you. We’re not going to make it more expensive.

View Obamacare’s far-reaching negative effects on Americans in our newly released “Obamacare in Pictures: Visualizing the Effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”

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Tags: Chart of the Week, congressional budget office, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, health coverage, health insurance, Obamacare, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, small business, Heritage Foundation To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. Thanks!