{"id":183450,"date":"2013-02-25T22:46:00","date_gmt":"2013-02-26T03:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/02\/25\/obamacare-fail\/"},"modified":"2013-02-25T22:46:00","modified_gmt":"2013-02-26T03:46:00","slug":"obamacare-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/02\/25\/obamacare-fail\/","title":{"rendered":"Obamacare Fail"},"content":{"rendered":"

Employers are required to cover children, but not spouses, and they are looking at canceling coverage on spouses to save money<\/a>:<\/p>\n

By denying coverage to spouses, employers not only save the annual premiums, but also the new fees that went into effect as part of the Affordable Care Act. This year, companies have to pay $1 or $2 \u201cper life\u201d covered on their plans, a sum that jumps to $65 in 2014. And health law guidelines proposed recently mandate coverage of employees\u2019 dependent children (up to age 26), but husbands and wives are optional. \u201cThe question about whether it\u2019s obligatory to cover the family of the employee is being thought through more than ever before,\u201d says Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health. <\/span>

<\/span>While surcharges for spousal coverage are more common, last year, 6% of large employers excluded spouses, up from 5% in 2010, as did 4% of huge companies with at least 20,000 employees, twice as many as in 2010, according to human resources firm Mercer. These \u201cspousal carve-outs,\u201d or \u201cworking spouse provisions,\u201d generally prohibit only people who could get coverage through their own job from enrolling in their spouse\u2019s plan.<\/span>

<\/span>Such exclusions barely existed three years ago, but experts expect an increasing number of employers to adopt them: \u201cThat\u2019s the next step,\u201d Darling says. HMS, a company that audits plans for employers, estimates that nearly a third of companies might have such policies now. Holdouts say they feel under pressure to follow suit. \u201cWe\u2019re the last domino,\u201d says Duke Bennett, mayor of Terre Haute, Ind., which is instituting a spousal carve-out for the city\u2019s health plan, effective July 2013, after nearly all major employers in the area dropped spouses.<\/span>

<\/span>But when employers drop spouses, they often lose more than just the one individual, when couples choose instead to seek coverage together under the other partner\u2019s employer. Terre Haute, which pays $6 million annually to insure nearly 1,200 people including employees and their family members, received more than 20 new plan members when a local university, bank and county government stopped insuring spouses, according to Bennett. \u201cWe have a great plan, so they want to be on ours. All we\u2019re trying to do is level the playing field here,\u201d he says. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s a race to the bottom. Whee!<\/p>\n

This was foreseeable.   <\/p>\n

Adverse selection\/the race to the bottom are the most salient feature of our current healthcare clusterf%$#.  To assume that insurance providers would not avail themselves of every opportunity to benefit from this is policy malpractice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Employers are required to cover children, but not spouses, and they are looking at canceling coverage on spouses to save money: By denying coverage to spouses, employers not only save the annual premiums, but also the new fees that went into effect as part of the Affordable Care Act. This year, companies have to pay …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,1045,985,982],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-insurance","category-regulation","category-stupid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183450"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}