Saturday, December 01, 2012

The nation's largest employer makes the move

Huffington Post (h/t Gateway Pundit) has the latest "find out" on Obamacare: "Walmart's new health care policy shifts burden to Medicaid, Obamacare."
Labor and health care experts portrayed Walmart’s decision to exclude workers from its medical plans as an attempt to limit costs while taking advantage of the national health care reform known as Obamacare. Among the key features of Obamacare is an expansion of Medicaid, the taxpayer-financed health insurance program for poor people. Many of the Walmart workers who might be dropped from the company’s health care plans earn so little that they would qualify for the expanded Medicaid program, these experts said.
“Walmart is effectively shifting the costs of paying for its employees onto the federal government with this new plan, which is one of the problems with the way the law is structured,” said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.

1 comment:

Bram said...

Employer supplemented health insurance was always a bad idea. It grew out of the FDR era outrageous tax rates - where people and employers were looking for untaxed ways to attract and reward employees. Lots of regulations made it an institution.

Real free-market reform would involve de-coupling health insurance from employment, deregulating (on the state and federal level) health insurance - and letting people buy on the open market.

Instead, Obamacare is working exactly as planned. It's breaking employer supplemented insurance and replacing it with government.