<p>I doubt that each employee covers 3 lives. I’d say 1.5 is a better guess; a lot of people are single. So, $64/life, 1.5 lives/employee, you’d pay $50 million a year if your company had half a million employees with health insurance. Are there any companies like that in the US?</p>
<p>I don’t buy the idea of aggregating fees over three years. That’s just a way to make numbers look bigger than they are. We report insurance prices by yearly rate, so we should report fees the same way.</p>
<p>^Okay, then 18 million a year for three years sounds better?</p>
<p>I don’t think my company is lying about their costs. I may be off on the number of family members covered, but there are not a lot of young single people at my company. The vast amount of people I run into are married and/or have kids. Some have many kids, so I actually think 3 people covered per employee may be low. They employ over 100k people, but not close to half a million, I don’t think.</p>
<p>It’s not really worth quibbling about anyways, they said over 50 million, and I don’t think they would lie. It sounds reasonable to me.</p>
<p>CF - Unless busdriver’s company will write an all employee letter that is dishonest, her company seems to average 3 people per insured family. </p>
<p>It is not uncommon for most single people not to be even on the plan if they are young. 2010 stats had federal govt had 10% ofemployees not accepting insurance, predominantly under 30.</p>
<p>I understand that if you add up the small tax among a large number of employees & families for a huge company, then it comes to millions – but I think it’s disingenuous to argue as if that is some huge burden being imposed. I mean, that amount ($63) is roughly the same as the amount of the rebate I received from my insurance company because of ACA mandates – so I could as easily multiply my rebate by the total of all the people receiving rebates, to show you how much money we folks who don’t happen to work for humongous companies have gotten. (FWIW, I think that comes to about $500 million). </p>
<p>The point is, that is a trivial amount compared to all of the other per-employee expenses that company is paying, and one which the company can easily shoulder. It’s simply a very small tax on a service the company provides which happens to be earmarked for a specific purpose. </p>
<p>I don’t doubt that the company is choosing to make a big fuss over it in its communications to employees – but it sounds like this is really a drop in the bucket.</p>
<p>texaspg, the 3 people per insured employee number came from busdriver, not busdriver’s company.</p>
<p>“CF - Unless busdriver’s company will write an all employee letter that is dishonest, her company seems to average 3 people per insured family.”</p>
<p>It does seem to me that they realize that everything they put out there is going to be scrutinized like crazy. They are very careful about what they say. And actually, it is very rare that I run into anyone at work who is single. Many people who are divorced or unmarried still have kids. It would be far more common that I run into someone that has six kids then someone who is single and has none. Maybe it’s just the demographic.</p>
<p>But yes, my company didn’t say how many people were in each family. They just said the cost. I was purely giving an example. I’m actually not sure how many people at the company are insured, and how many don’t work enough hours to be insured. It does seem reasonable that the average family would be 3 people, but who knows for sure.</p>
<p>I read it more as her recollection of the letter from the company but if the company said 54 million for 3 years, and we know it is 64 dollars per head, where do we get 300k heads in a 100k company?</p>
<p>FWIW, I have been receiving similar letters for the past 10 years from my very large 300k people company where they explain each year how much the insurance tab has gone up, what percentage has been picked up by the company and why there is lot less left to give a raise!</p>
<p>“It is not uncommon for most single people not to be even on the plan if they are young. 2010 stats had federal govt had 10% ofemployees not accepting insurance, predominantly under 30.”</p>
<p>This just boggles my mind. I am on NYS gov’t employee plan and if it was just my H the cost would be something like $50 a month! It’s peanuts. It’s being on a family plan adds so much more to the cost. Even then, gov’t ins. is a bargain, imo. We only pay $240 a month.</p>
<p>I did a quick google of Boeing, which I chose in your honor because it’s aviation, busdriver. As of 7/31/2013, Boeing had 171,000 employees across the corporation. I’m compromising and using 2 covered lives.</p>
<p>Boeing then would have 171,000 x 2 covered lives, for a total of 342,000. For each covered life, Boeing would pay $1 for the Patient Centered Outcome fee, plus $64 for the transportation fee. That’s (342,000 * $64) + 342,000 = $22.2 million annually. </p>
<p>However, remember the law says the fee is tax deductible. Therefore, on an after tax basis, that’s a maximum of $11 million. </p>
<p>The annual revenues of Boeing are in the range of $60 billion. Its pure annual profit is over $4 billion. Therefore, the Obamacare after-tax fee is .002 or .2% of Boeing’s annual pure profit.</p>
<p>By the way, looking at personal cost, we already saved a bunch of money because of Obamacare. I was always very nervous of the lifetime caps, so my husband bought family coverage from his employer, and I bought family coverage from my employer. That way, we doubled the lifetime cap. </p>
<p>As soon as the law eliminated the lifetime cap, we cut out paying for my insurance, which saved us a couple of thousand dollars.</p>
<p>Just a tiny correction, so we don’t have creeping numbers: It’s $63 for the reinsurance, plus $1 for the Patient Centered Outcome fee, for a total of $64. Not that it makes any difference in the back-of-the-envelope calculations we’re doing here.</p>
<p>Sorry to not be clear, Texas, I was just using a generic example of 100K employees and how it could add up.</p>
<p>Apparently Federal employee premiums were much higher than 50$ a month with bad coverage. I could only find this story but back in 2010, I have seen a number of 450k with an employee base of 5 million but I can’t locate those stories at the moment. 250k seems to be the what this estimate says circa 2009.</p>
<p>[2009</a> Conference Issue Papers | AFGE](<a href=“http://www.afge.org/index.cfm?page=2009ConferenceIssuePapers&Fuse=Content&ContentID=1742]2009”>http://www.afge.org/index.cfm?page=2009ConferenceIssuePapers&Fuse=Content&ContentID=1742)</p>
<p>Busdriver, my large corporation didn’t send out a letter about the cost and we’re self-insured for everything. </p>
<p>I think it’s because I work for a financial institution, and the first thing everyone would do is run the numbers and see how tiny a percentage of pure profit the additional cost really is !!</p>
<p>“It’s $63 for the reinsurance, plus $1 for the Patient Centered Outcome fee, for a total of $64”</p>
<p>It is still per insured person correct? So if a company insures one it is 64, per 100 6,400, per million, 64 million?</p>
<p>Well thank you for using Boeing in my honor in your example, Hayden, though my parents (30+ years Boeing engineers) might say many people there were too miserable to reproduce, so your family estimate could be high.</p>
<p>You might instead use the last company I worked for, American Airlines, that lost about 190 million last year. But I don’t know if they are self insured. If they were, well, I guess multi million dollar fees would just add to the loss.</p>
<p>Texaspg, I hope you mean $450 not 450K! </p>
<p>I;m too tired to read all that now. I’ll ask my niece whose husband works for INS. </p>
<p>In NYS we have the option of about 10 different plans - some are PPO’s, some HMO’s some regular 80/20 plans. I have PPO with the option to go 80/20 out of network and it also includes dental and vision. I’m sure our rates will go up - though I haven’t heard anything yet, but a lot of what is covered under ACA was already covered under my plan. We’ve been getting away so cheaply all these years I can’t complain.</p>
<p>Busdriver11, I wish there was an extra digit mistake. Apparently the company put all retirees (old folks) into a different group in order to keep rates lower for the current employees. As of now, out of the $1700 actual premium for a family of four, our share is $230. It would be affordable if we could just switch to COBRA. </p>
<p>Cardinal fang, H’s pension will be around 400% of the poverty level. We were hoping to pay around $2000 but not the $4236. Based on the State of Ca web site calculator, we would pay around 800/month for a plan with decent coverage. Also, the premiums would be lower if we insure the kids separately.</p>
<p>“It is still per insured person correct? So if a company insures one it is 64, per 100 6,400, per million, 64 million?”</p>
<p>That’s how I read it. And they charge that for three years. May be not a big deal to a large company earning massive profits, but to others, no small change.</p>
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<p>LOL, busdriver! </p>
<p>I want to thank you, by the way, for bringing this tax to my atention, since I wasn’t aware of it. Now that I’ve looked into it, it appears it’s a tax that sunsets at the end of 3 years. In 2014, the tax is $63 per covered life; in 2015 it goes down to $42; then in 2016 it goes down to $26.</p>
<p>Did your employer actually say 3 years X $63? If so, that does not appear to be correct, at least according to what I’ve read now.</p>