High-End Health Plans Scale Back to Avoid ‘Cadillac Tax’

[Stephanie]

I guess the UNIONS should of read the bill before getting in our faces and standing with Obama to PUSH this off on us eh?..this train wreck called (Obamacare) is here and rolling over people..

SNIP:



By REED ABELSON

Published: May 27, 2013


Say goodbye to that $500 deductible insurance plan and the $20 co-payment for a doctor’s office visit. They are likely to become luxuries of the past.

Get ready to enroll in a program to manage your diabetes. Or prepare for a health screening to determine your odds of developing a costly health condition.

Expect to have your blood pressure checked or a prescription filled at a clinic at your office, rather than by your private doctor.

Then blame — or credit — the so-called Cadillac tax, which penalizes companies that offer high-end health care plans to their employees.

While most of the attention on the Obama administration’s health care law has been on providing coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans by 2014, workers with employer-paid health insurance are also beginning to feel the effects. Companies hoping to avoid the tax are beginning to scale back the more generous health benefits they have traditionally offered and to look harder for ways to bring down the overall cost of care.

In a way, the changes are right in line with the administration’s plan: To encourage employers to move away from plans that insulate workers from the cost of care and often lead to excessive procedures and tests, and galvanize employers to try to control ever-increasing medical costs. But the tax remains one of the law’s most controversial provisions.

Bradley Herring, a health economist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, suggested the result would be more widely felt than many people realize. “The reality is it is going to hit more and more people over time, at least as currently written in law, ” he said. Mr. Herring estimated that as many as 75 percent of plans could be affected by the tax over the next decade — unless employers manage to significantly rein in their costs.

The changes can be significant for employees. The hospital where Abbey Bruce, a nursing assistant in Olympia, Wash., worked, for example, stopped offering the traditional plan that she and her husband, Casey, who has cystic fibrosis, had chosen.

Starting this year, they have a combined deductible of $2,300, compared with just $500 before. And while she was eligible for a $1,400 hospital contribution to a savings account linked to the plan, the couple is now responsible for $6,600 a year in medical expenses, in contrast to a $3,000 limit on medical bills and $2,000 limit on pharmacy costs last year. She has had to drop out of school and take on additional jobs to pay for her husband’s medicine.

“My husband didn’t choose to be born this way,” Ms. Bruce said. The union representing her, a chapter of the Service Employees International Union, has objected to the changes. Her employer, Providence Health & Services, says it designed the plans to avoid having employees shoulder too much in medical bills and has reduced how much workers pay in premiums.

all of it here from the slimes of all places
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/business/cadillac-tax-health-insurance.html?partner=yahoofinance

 

[Granny]

I'd like to see the damned thing repealed myself. Any semblance to legislative intelligence stopped when Nancy Pelosi mewled, "We have to PASS the Bill so we can SEE what's in it," and everyone went along with the suggestion.

 

[Stephanie]

more wonderful news...but we only get smears from the ObamaCare pusher on this board about the Tea party..

SNIP:

The Obamacare Insurance Exchange Train Is Already Coming Off The Rails




Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) raised eyebrows across the country last month when he publicly fretted about an Obamacare “train wreck” as the Administration rushes to implement the many provisions of the law that take effect in 2014.

President Obama has attempted to assuage Sen. Baucus’s concerns, saying that his staff was “pushing very hard to make sure that we’re hitting all the deadlines.”



U.S. Companies Engage In Financial Jiu-Jitsu To Get Around Obamacare Sally PipesSally Pipes Contributor

Big Pharma Accomplishes Big Things, Yet Obama Is Suffocating The Industry Sally PipesSally Pipes Contributor

Obamacare To Slash Hundreds Of Billions From Medicare Advantage Over Next 10 Years Sally PipesSally Pipes Contributor

Fed Up With Obamacare, Doctors Increasingly Prefer Cash For Care Sally PipesSally Pipes Contributor

But an Obamacare train wreck isn’t a distant possibility. It’s actively happening. Delays, wasteful spending, and cost overruns have already popped up. And it’s becoming increasingly likely that the exchanges won’t be ready by October 1, when they’re supposed to open for enrollment. Mass confusion and excessive costs will result.

The federal government is set to operate exchanges in 27 states and to jointly run them with state officials in another seven. Seventeen states will create and administer exchanges on their own.

At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. Gary Cohen, who’s in charge of the implementation of Obamacare’s exchanges, said in March that the federal government will likely end up running some of the exchanges in the 17 states that elected to set them up on their own because they won’t be ready in time.

Even the states the administration has paraded around as “pioneers” are having trouble creating government-run insurance marketplaces out of whole cloth. Connecticut, the first state approved to set up an exchange, is now struggling to get it up and running. Colorado is “stripping its opening-day goals to a minimum.”

Federal officials have struggled to come up with a comprehensible application form. Their first effort reached 15 pages. After a round of criticism, they came back with a form that’s three pages for individuals — and seven pages for families.

Henry Chao, a senior federal official working on the information technology that will run the exchanges, said in March that he was “pretty nervous” about meeting the October 1 deadline and was reduced to hoping that the exchanges don’t end up being “a Third World experience.”

And it’s not as if the feds and the states have been short on money. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will have spent $4.4 billion on state exchange grants by the end of this year. That’s more than double what the Department said would be necessary just last year, despite the fact that fewer states than the feds anticipated agreed to establish their own exchanges.

all of it here
The Obamacare Insurance Exchange Train Is Already Coming Off The Rails - Forbes

 

[Katzndogz]

Skinny insurance will be the default.

Skinny Insurance Offers Way To Avoid ObamaCare Fines - Yahoo! Finance

Those defending the individual mandate before the Supreme Court argued that it was not only constitutional but critical to the law's success. Yet it turns out that, thanks to ObamaCare's own rules, the mandate is escapable for workers with the most skimpy employer coverage.

Consider that the cost of this new "skinny" coverage might be about $50 a month, less than the annual individual mandate fine of $695 or 2.5% of wages. (The tax penalty will ramp up to that level by 2016, from $95 or 1% of income in 2014 and $325 or 2% of income in 2015.) Such coverage, skimpy as it is, would be preferable to paying a fine. Emerging skinny plans would help defray the cost of up to six visits to the doctor, x-rays, generic drugs and preventative care, the Wall Street Journal reported.


The bad news is that many workers won't have real insurance in an emergency. Also, employers of modest-wage workers will have a reason not to hire older and less-healthy workers who are more likely to embrace ObamaCare's subsidies.

The good news is that skinny plans may mean employers cut fewer workers to part time — another way of minimizing ObamaCare fines. Retailers have been cutting the hours of nonsupervisory workers at the sharpest rate in more than three decades, Labor Department data show.