Friday, July 05, 2013

THE DEMOCRATS' WAR ON WOMEN: Obamacare Kicking Wives Off Husbands' Health Insurance Plans

Guest post by Investors Business Daily


Dumped: An unintended consequence of the abomination that is called ObamaCare is the dropping of wives from husbands' employer-provided health care insurance. It's a de facto war on women.

ObamaCare is filled with grinding mandates. One of them requires that children remain covered by their parents' health care plans until they're 26 when their parents' insurance "provides dependent coverage of children."


The government calls this "protecting young adults." But insuring children long past the day they are dependent on their parents exposes companies, which will bear the added costs of paying the inevitable higher premiums. And in some cases, the extra expense could be significant.

So at many companies, something has to go. Quite often, the rational response to rising health insurance costs is to drop spouses, more specifically wives, from insurance plans. Sometimes it's the husbands who must go. But benefits experts have confirmed to MarketWatch that those who are kicked out of plans "tend to be women."

Employers also have a strong incentive to drop spouses because of a "per life" fee that ObamaCare requires from companies that insure their workers. That fee is now $1 or $2 per life. But it will be substantially more — $65 — in 2014.

The trend of dumping spouses will only accelerate when the federal health exchanges are open next year, health care experts told MarketWatch.

Employers are reluctant to leave spouses without coverage, and the exchanges will give the suddenly uninsured a place to land.

But it's unlikely the place they'll want to be after having become accustomed to the superior coverage from their spouses' plans.

Again, so much for President Obama's promise that under the Democrats' overhaul, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan."

The Democrats' "reform" has a malign knack for decoupling people from the health care arrangements they've worked so hard for so many years to achieve, and spouses aren't the only ones affected.

Many employees will lose their coverage when employers figure out that it's more cost-effective for them to stop insuring their workers and just let them fall into the exchanges.

How many? More than a few. The business journal McKinsey Quarterly surveyed 1,300 employers and found that "Overall, 30% of employers will definitely or probably stop offering ESI (Employer Sponsored Insurance) in the years after 2014." But it's likely that a larger portion will actually make that choice as companies learn more about ObamaCare.

"Among employers with a high awareness of reform, this proportion increases to more than 50%, and upward of 60% will pursue some alternative to traditional ESI," the McKinsey Quarterly says.

Not all spouses will be jettisoned from employer coverage due to the dependent coverage mandate. Some companies will simply require their employees to pay a spousal surcharge rather than drop them from the insurance rolls. Expect those surcharges to be $500 to $1,000 a year, says Forbes.

Sure, the spouses will be able to keep their plans. But the higher-cost insurance will be a much worse deal than in the days before ObamaCare.

It's unlikely that the Democrats intended to wage a war on women when they decided to include the dependent care mandate in ObamaCare. Yet that's the unintended consequence of their actions.

And no one should be surprised.

The nearly 1,000 pages of the bill that became the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act were rammed through Congress before they could be read. It was bound to have traps and gaps, to confuse and confound.

But that's what happens when law is made in haste so that the public won't know until much later just how harmful it is.


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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Obamacare is like an evil, pratical joke.

Everyday, some new information comes out about it. And it's never good info, it's always bad.

These are just small problems compared to what is going to show up once this thing really goes into effect.

if anyone, in DC had a brain, they would cut bait and run as far away from this, as possible

Anonymous said...

Many small business owners (men) piggyback on their wives health insurance, and why not? The economy this Indonesian refugee has imposed on us will not allow these people to take on additional thousands of dollars each year without finding new customers. That will not happen until Barry is deposed and the economy begins to recover, so if this is true it is buh bye to even more small businesses. And for those men who are declining in health - go dig your own graves, your government wants you dead.

Anonymous said...

Yet I'm guessing that husbands won't be getting kicked off of their husband's health insurance plan, and wives off of their wife's plan --- that would be unconstitutional, according to Justice Kennedy et al.

Anonymous said...

I hate everything about Obama...everything about his plans...and administration...except for two things...the first is more detailed nutritional labels...the second is this...this is equality. Most will agree that it is the man who gets the rough end of the stick in all things legal...but this time there is equality...read more studies on this topic...this is yet another case of femminists bending the numbers to fit their agenda. Women should have equality...ok...well that means getting your own job and insurance and man and wife sharing everything. I'm not okay with Obama care but at least it doesn't give preferential treatment on the basis of sex. War on women my foot.