<p>“Cutting insurance benefits for spouses who can get insurance through their own employers seems to me to be less bad than cutting insurance benefits for employees and their dependent children”</p>
<p>That’s true. It would be very bad for PR if they started throwing employees children off their health insurance policies. That would be ugly.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>But won’t cutting benefits for spouses who can get insurance through their own employers create incentives at the margins for some spouses not to work full-time, so as to avoid being trapped in crappier health insurance? My DW has been working various part-time and freelance jobs, none with health insurance, which has been fine because she’s covered under my employer’s excellent health insurance. Now that our youngest is off to college, she’s been thinking about looking for a full-time job, and she has some unique skills and good contacts at various non-profits where she wouldn’t mind working. But she wouldn’t take a full-time job if it got her booted off my health insurance and onto a crappier policy with her employer. (I don’t work for UPS, mind you, and my employer isn’t likely to adopt such a policy, but just sayin’, as a hypothetical). I imagine there are lots of couples similarly situated. And perhaps others where the spouse working for the company with the worse health coverage would quit or go part-time so as to avoid having to settle for crappier health insurance </p>
<p>Also notice that this doesn’t necessarily open up a full-time job for someone else, as the employer might decide it can get by on two part-timers and pay neither’s health insurance. This, too, has been raised as a possible adverse consequence of the ACA, and I don’t think I’ve heard a fully satisfactory response to it.</p>
<p>One of the reasons companies are doing this is just because they can. The employment picture is such that many, if not most, people are not in positions to shop around for better benefits by switching jobs. That’s the way it used to be. I recall as a headhunter in the past that candidates with multiple offers went over benefits packages with a fine toothed comb and used them as bargaining chips. Of course, that was back when pregnancy was a pre-existing condition so many things have changed. I’d like to think companies will one day have to offer better benefits in order to be competitive for attracting and retaining employees. Right now, they’re in the cat bird’s seat and they’re running with it.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It will, in some cases. Do you think this will be a significant problem?</p>
<p>Employer-supplied insurance distorted the market before Obamacare too: people who wanted to quit their jobs, and would have been happy to buy health insurance, were unable to do so because insurance was simply not available to them. But in the Obamacare world, fewer people are stuck in fulltime jobs they don’t want, just to get insurance. These people now can quit those jobs and start their own companies, or just retire and leave the jobs to younger people who want them, secure in the knowledge that they can still buy health insurance for themselves and their children, even if they have expensive pre-existing conditions.</p>
<p>" But in the Obamacare world, fewer people are stuck in fulltime jobs they don’t want, just to get insurance. These people now can quit those jobs and start their own companies, or just retire and leave the jobs to younger people who want them, secure in the knowledge that they can still buy health insurance for themselves and their children, even if they have expensive pre-existing conditions."</p>
<p>In the perfect world, losing or leaving your job because it doesn’t provide enough would mean that now you can retire and live out your dreams, or start that company that you always wanted. In reality, it just might mean that you are now unemployed, with all the struggles that go with it. If this is due to Obamacare, this is a problem. Even if it’s not due to Obamacare, this is a problem. This alarms me:</p>
<p>“Gallup is showing a sizable 30 day jump in the unemployment rate, from 7.7% on July 21 to 8.9% today.”</p>
<p>I wonder if at some point enough very qualified people will choose to quit jobs that don’t offer (good enough) insurance, that companies will start to offer better insurance to lure the best employees, thereby starting employer-based-health-insurance-as-a-perk again, rather than having employers cut back on insurance.</p>
<p>It’s sad to me that there are so many people who know so little about Obamacare, and it makes it quite easy for companies to say Obamacare is the reason for almost any HR change they want to make these days. </p>
<p>I attended my Congressman’s townhall this week. One of the attendees went into a rant about Obamacare’s death panels deciding not to allow a 10 year old girl to receive a lung transplant. No one corrected the attendee to let him know that Obamacare had absolutely nothing to do with the rules which govern transplants.</p>
<p>I agree that a jump in unemployment would be alarming. Normally, I look to the BLS statistics to get accurate numbers. Moreover, historically the initial numbers are inaccurate, and one has to wait a couple of months to get reliable numbers. Does Gallup have an accurate track record in this area? </p>
<p>As to this thread, however, the more germane question is why you would attribute a jump in unemployment last month, if indeed one occurred, to Obamacare.</p>
<p>Ranting about imaginary Obamacare “death panels” allegedly denying a lung transplant is particularly farcical. Did no one there point out that lung transplants are zero-sum? If a kid is denied a transplant (which I suppose would be because with a heavy heart the transplant committee decided she was too sick), somebody else gets those lungs. It’s not like the surgeons toss them in the trash.</p>
<p>I met an otherwise well-educated woman yesterday who said she didn’t believe that there are any working people who can’t afford health insurance. And she thought all the unemployed were automatically on Medicaid. </p>
<p>She was under the impression that due to ACA, everyone would have free health insurance.</p>
<p>She was shocked when I told her I know many young women who’ve never been to an OBGYN or haven’t had a Pap because they don’t have insurance. She said “but it only costs $185”. She had NO concept that $185 is her share AFTER her insurance pays their portion, she thought that was the actual cost of her visit. Then I asked her, if her only source of income was Social Security, and her only insurance was Medicare, how would she pay $185 for a doctor visit. She said “from my savings, of course”. All I could do was shake my head.</p>
<p>Looks like UVa has joined UPS. </p>
<p>[University</a> Employees Will See Significant Changes to Health Plan This Year | UVA Today](<a href=“http://news.virginia.edu/content/university-employees-will-see-significant-changes-health-plan-year]University”>University Employees Will See Significant Changes to Health Plan This Year | UVA Today)</p>
<p>“I agree that a jump in unemployment would be alarming. Normally, I look to the BLS statistics to get accurate numbers. Moreover, historically the initial numbers are inaccurate, and one has to wait a couple of months to get reliable numbers. Does Gallup have an accurate track record in this area?”</p>
<p>I got the information from another thread. Here is the entire quote. I have no idea of the accuracy as it stands, but if this is true, I’m worried:</p>
<p>“Outside of the federal government’s Bureau of Labor statistics, the Gallup polling organization also tracks the nation’s unemployment rate. While the BLS and Gallup findings might not always perfectly align, the trends almost always do and the small statistical differences just haven’t been worthy of note. But now Gallup is showing a sizable 30 day jump in the unemployment rate, from 7.7% on July 21 to 8.9% today.”</p>
<p>“As to this thread, however, the more germane question is why you would attribute a jump in unemployment last month, if indeed one occurred, to Obamacare.”</p>
<p>If companies have increased costs due to Obamacare, and if they hire over a certain number they must provide health insurance, and health insurance that is up to a specific standard, I can see that being a cause of laying people off. Companies are in business to make a profit, they aren’t there for the purpose of keeping people employed and providing benefits. If there are increased costs, unless their business is very profitable and rapidly expanding, it is very logical that they would cut back.</p>
<p>Whatever the reason, it’s making me feel like 2008 again.</p>
<p>Let’s say Gallup is correct. What does that have to do with Obamacare, except for the good news that newly unemployed people now will be able to go the exchanges to buy insurance, possibly subsidized now that they have no income?</p>
<p>Busdriver, are you telling me that employers are suddenly laying off people in July-August of 2013, for an employer mandate that starts in 2015?</p>
<p>I have no idea, CF, none whatsoever. I hope the numbers are wrong. I don’t understand why there would be such a sudden jump.</p>
<p>Though the mandate was to start next year. They only recently delayed it.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If UPS had told the truth – “We see this as a one-time opportunity to take advantage of massive public confusion. We’re going to offload a big expense while blaming it on Obamacare, even though our move has nothing whatsoever to do with ACA” – then it wouldn’t be craven. But they didn’t, so it is.</p>
<p>^^Or maybe the truth is, that profits are down, and they see the softening in the economy. Perhaps this is another opportunity to make just one cut where they can.</p>
<p>What I take from these changes is that employers do not want to be in the business of providing health care or for paying any of costs associated with any system that provides it.</p>
<p>Busdriver, you haven’t even tried to give any evidence that this jump in unemployment that may or may not be real (Gallup does not have an unblemished polling record) would, if it were real, have one single thing to do with Obamacare. It looks like spamming bad news because you dislike the ACA.</p>