Affordable Care Act and Ramifications Discussion

Parent Cafe
1401

<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>Or maybe my company just wanted to be on the leading edge of slashing benefits, and many other companies (including yours) will follow. I doubt that it’s just that they’re so smart…if it costs them money, they will pass it on to you. Or perhaps the customer.</p>

1402

<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>

<p>No, not at all, they just gave us a specific cost (over 50 million). I was just trying to use a round number as an example. I have no idea how many employees they are counting, and how many family members. I was just trying to show that it could add up easily.</p>

<p>And I still am racking my brain to remember my original point!</p>

1403

<p>I meant 450k insured employees but I can’t find the story. It sounds like the cost was 4k per annum for a family plan but I am sure that went since 2009.</p>

<p>[Federal</a> Employees’ Health Benefits Explained : NPR](<a href=“http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112880933]Federal”>Federal Employees' Health Benefits Explained : NPR)</p>

1404

<p>How about we exercise a little healthcare by grabbing a glass of red wine, then all just go to sleep for the evening? :)</p>

1405

<p>Oh, I got it now, Texas. </p>

<p>Good idea Hayden. I’m drinking Sangria. Night all.</p>

1406

<p>Great idea, hayden, but I’ve already had three and I’m already going to be feeling bad in the morning! This malbec is incredibly tasty, and probably good for one’s health, no doubt, but so good I drank way too much. You enjoy your glass of wine!</p>

1407

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<p>Ok, so you are saying that you work for a company that can easily afford to pay for employees to have a “Cadillac” plan (which are disfavored because of their high costs… but it’s too burdensome to pay an annual $64 per person surcharge? </p>

<p>You’re not going to win anyone over with that line of reasoning. </p>

<p>Among other things, the ACA creates new taxes, including an excise tax on companies that sell health insurance. All of the rest of us will pay for that tax indirectly through our insurance premiums. If your company self-insures, that’s fine – but that doesn’t mean that they should somehow be excused from paying taxes when everyone else has to pay.</p>

1408

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<p>CF, I think you’re onto something because my uncapped, lower than ACA deductible, pooled plan also went up 20 percent…I like to think of it as a “panic tax.” :slight_smile: However, the brokers are just the messengers. It’s the insurers who are just trying to ensure they’ll cover their nut.</p>

<p>I am already in pooled care because my son has a brain cyst that insurers like to call a pre-existing condition, which indeed it is, although it was a “coincidental finding” on an MRI that has not calcified now for ten years (touch wood). While there’s a one-in-a-million chance it will burst, rehab if it did would exceed most caps…eg 5 million or more. </p>

<p>Given that the whole complicated mess of private insurance was foreign to me, I started to noodle through the fine print of available plans when we moved here in '03. And I concluded that 90% of them didn’t actually reliably cover medical catastrophes, which to my mind was the point. (At the time, I’d called around to get estimates on costs, which was also an eye opener.)</p>

<p>Through a broker over a long process I attempted to change our company’s coverage to something that seemed humane from my vantage, which left two plans in play, both pooled, and both considerably more expensive…I had to ratchet one down to not be hit with the Cadillac tax, which was kinda funny to me because I was only trying to equal universal coverage from another country…and couldn’t do it!</p>

<p>I think its possible than until the scrutiny caused by ACA many people were unaware of what they were actually buying in the event of catastrophic medical events. I, on the contrary, was forced to view it from this vantage because of my son’s condition.</p>

<p>So to my mind, there are two positive outcomes of ACA at the moment despite the pandora s box of uncertainty:</p>

<p>1) it is lending some degree of transparency to facts formerly obscured that could prove harmful if not devastating to families faced with a medical catastrophe
2) young people like my son who have “pre-existing” conditions identified through thorough healthcare (vs those with unidentified latent conditions) have equal access to coverage in general</p>

1409

<p>"Ok, so you are saying that you work for a company that can easily afford to pay for employees to have a “Cadillac” plan (which are disfavored because of their high costs… but it’s too burdensome to pay an annual $64 per person surcharge?</p>

<p>You’re not going to win anyone over with that line of reasoning."</p>

<p>No, that wasn’t my point. I remember it now. It was that everybody pays taxes and fees due to the ACA, not just the small group and individuals that were pointed at. And that companies will pass on their additional costs to their employees and customers.</p>

<p>“Among other things, the ACA creates new taxes, including an excise tax on companies that sell health insurance. All of the rest of us will pay for that tax indirectly through our insurance premiums.”</p>

<p>Yes. You made my point more eloquently than I did.</p>

1410

<p>Wow, kmcmom, is that cyst something that your son could have laser surgery for? Or is the risk of an operation more of a danger than the remote possibility that it could calcify? I’ve never heard of that.</p>

<p>The whole cadillac tax thing is just weird to me, as illustrated by your situation. Just limit the amount that companies can deduct via health insurance taxes (if that’s really the issue), but don’t tell people they aren’t allowed to get good insurance or they will be fined.</p>

1411

<p>busdriver, to put it another way, you are saying not only that you should have a Cadillac health plan (which I think no one here objects to) but also, the rest of us should continue to subsidize it. </p>

<p>I can understand why you like having the benefit of government subsidy. Anyone likes government subsidies. Free money, what’s not to like? But I, as a taxpayer, think that my tax dollars are better spent giving someone who has no health insurance access to health care, than giving someone who has excellent health insurance even better health insurance.</p>

<p>A conservative like yourself should be in favor of cutting wasteful government subsidies.</p>

1412

<p>^^I like that, CF, “to put it another way,” and say it in a completely different way, not what was said? </p>

<p>I am happy to have a good health plan, and the taxpayers will continue to subsidize it, even if my company pays a penalty…because they can only change it through negotiation, the benefits of being in a union. Right or wrong, that’s what it is. It is the non union employees, particularly those who have expensive health conditions that will be hit with higher costs in this case.</p>

<p>You may have missed that I think it would be better if there were no tax writeoffs for health care costs, for individuals or companies, and let the chips fall where they may. I wouldn’t mind getting rid of all tax breaks, and lowering the tax rates, to the dismay of tax attorneys and lobbyists.</p>

1413

<p>If you think there should be no tax writeoffs for health care costs, then you should be pleased that the ACA is moving in that direction by lowering the tax writeoff for your health insurance.</p>

1414

<p>I would like it if there were no writeoffs at all, across the board. Where people didn’t have to make decisions about things, based upon tax consequences, and there are entire industries built around avoiding taxes, and if you don’t participate, you are turning over way too much money in taxes.</p>

<p>I am not idealistic in principle enough to say that I’m pleased other employees at my company will get a worse health plan, due to the costs imposed by the ACA and an opportunistic move by the company.</p>

1415

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<p>Busdriver11, 2 opinions to date suggest the location in the brain makes it riskier to operate on than to leave it – UNLESS it calcifies…and even if it does, to not perform surgery unless it’s malignant. </p>

<p>We’ve kind of learned to live with that, though for years mcson walked around feeling like a bit of a time bomb. At the same time, he also wasn’t in love with the notion of brain surgery, particularly given the risks in his case.</p>

1416

<p>I’m so sorry you have to live with that worry, kmcmom.</p>

1417

<p>To take this discussion away from the posters here, and return it to more general talk about the ACA:</p>

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<p>This is the avowed intention of the ACA, and it’s no secret. During the ACA’s creation, the drafters of the legislation considered the taxpayer subsidy of employer-supplied health insurance. Because of the distortionary impact of the taxpayer subsidy, employers were able to offer very expensive health insurance as an employee benefit more cheaply than, for example, giving the employee reasonably priced insurance and just giving them the additional money as salary, even if employees would rather have the money.</p>

<p>This distortion was regarded as a bad thing: why should the tax code favor employer-supplied Cadillac insurance over a higher salary? As to “an opportunistic move by the company”: well, the company naturally wants to reduce costs. Again, the change is intentional. The framers of the legislation were trying to reduce compensation distortions caused by tax writeoffs.</p>

<p>And that brings us to the question of why the taxpayer subsidy of employer-supplied insurance wasn’t eliminated entirely, if it’s so distortionary. But that is a political discussion, for another venue. The short answer, though, is that eliminating the deduction entirely was regarded as politically impossible.</p>

1418

<p>It does not sound like Cadillac tax is having the intended consequences. Unions have negotiated the best healthcare possible and they seem to impacted most in their negotiations at the moment.</p>

<p>[Obamacare’s</a> ‘Cadillac tax’ causing union strife- MSN Money](<a href=“MSN”>MSN)</p>

<p>For the life of me, I can’t understand why municipalities or other Government type of entities are being forced to pay a tax to the federal government.</p>

1419

<p>Texas, Here are all the plans for non postal fed employees. There are a zillion (yes I am exaggerating) options at all different price points and level of benefits. None of which are excessively expensive (imo) </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.opm.gov/healthcare-insurance/healthcare/plan-information/nonpostal-ffs.pdf[/url]”>http://www.opm.gov/healthcare-insurance/healthcare/plan-information/nonpostal-ffs.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p><a href=“http://www.opm.gov/healthcare-insurance/healthcare/plan-information/nonpostal-hmo.pdf[/url]”>http://www.opm.gov/healthcare-insurance/healthcare/plan-information/nonpostal-hmo.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>This is very similar to what state employees in NY are offered. We have our choice of what health plan we want and the costs vary depending on what one chooses.</p>

1420

<p>Goodness, kmcmom. You’ve been through a lot. Hopefully, its something like a pineal cyst which are usually pretty benign, especially if they are small.</p>

<p>Side issue-- to busdriver–
Thought about you when I heard about the UPS airbus crash today. You and yours all ok?</p>