Hoping for irrationality

The New Yorker has a great piece by John Cassidy about how the fantasy figures used to sell Obamacare depend on corporations to ignore basic math when considering health care insurance benefits for employees:

In a situation like this [a hypothetical business], the firm has a strong financial incentive to junk its group coverage and dump its workers onto the taxpayer-subsidized plan. Under the new law, firms with more than fifty workers that don’t offer coverage would have to pay an annual fine of $2,000 for every worker they employ, excepting the first thirty. In this case, the security firm would incur a fine of $140,000 (seventy times two), but it would save $610,000 a year on health-care costs. If you owned this firm, what would you do? Unless you are unusually public spirited, you would take advantage of the free money that the government is giving out. Since your employees would see their own health-care contributions fall by more than $1,100 a year, or almost half, they would be unlikely to complain. And even if they did, you would be saving so much money you afford to buy their agreement with a pay raise of, say, $2,000 a year, and still come out well ahead.

Sure, it's a win-win for everybody as long as the government picks up the balance of medical expenses. Who will pay for that? Somebody else, as usual.

Related - Opinion Journal: "Obamacare vs. small business."