Well, now we are finally able to read the massive health-care legislation passed by Congress. Unfortunately, there are many nasty surprises. Remember how you were going to be able to keep your current policy? There’s no law per se against your keeping it. It’s just that under the new system it might not exist.
Karl Rove explains in the Wall Street Journal that there may be “adverse incentives” that render your current policy inoperative. Rove explains:
This was brought home to me when I asked the CEO of a major restaurant chain about health reform’s effect on his company, which now spends $25 million a year on employee health insurance. That will jump to at least $90 million a year once the new law is phased in. It will be cheaper, he told me, for the company to dump its coverage and pay a fine-$2,000 for each full-time worker-and make sure that no part-time employee accidentally worked 31 hours and thereby incurred the fine.
This reality is settling in at businesses across America. A Midwestern contractor told me he pays $588,000 for health insurance for 70 employees, contributing up to $8,400 a year for a family’s coverage. If he stops providing health insurance, he’ll pay $2,000 per employee in fines, and the first 40 employees are exempt from fines altogether.
It’s also dawning on employees that they will lose their coverage. Some will blame management; many more will blame those who wrote this terrible legislation.
In other words, nobody outlawed your current policy. But it will very likely go away anyway.