One of the (no doubt many) economic time bombs in the bill could force employers to extend COBRA for decades. What’s the problem?
The HR departments for large employers are looking at this provision with great alarm, as indicated in this policy brief. PricewaterhouseCoopers produced an analysis which pegs the ten-year cost of this provision at $39 billion to $65 billion just for those current COBRA-eligible workers age 55 to 64. The estimated costs would be even higher if the analysis assumed, as is reasonable, that many more workers would elect early retirement if they were assured of access to group-rated insurance.
What would employers do if faced with the costs of implementing this provision? It’s fairly predictable. They would hire fewer workers, and pay their current employees less. Not exactly “stimulus.”
Indeed, this is exactly the kind of complex provision which should be considered by Congress only after careful study and a hearing or two to avoid unintended consequences. Certainly it has no business on a bill purportedly aimed at promoting short-term job growth. Unfortunately, logic and reason may not be enough to prevail in the current mad-dash rush to “pass something.”
I suspect that most of the bill is like that. This is madness. The Founders would be appalled at what has happened to the Republic.
I truly weep for my children and grand children. I bet Michelle is real proud today.
I kinda hope it happens.
Under ERISA, currently, a group health carrier cannot exclude or non-renew coverage for a group for any reason. They can, however, raise rates on a group up to sixty-seven percent per policy period.
If fired or laid off employees keep their group health under COBRA indefinitely, then carriers will certainly raise rates the legal maximum every year. This will make it unaffordable to employers and effectively end group health forever.
Afterwards, maybe we will have an authentic competitive market for health care services.
Jardinero1,
A Democratic Congress just passed a TRILLION dollar porkfest AFTER expanding S-CHIP. On what planet do you think increased health premiums won’t result in national health care? Because it isn’t this one.
A closer look at the “stimulus” bill reveals provisions for data-sharing between health-care providers, with explicitly-written provisions for standardizing care and treatment across them (under direction of this new bureaucracy – they actually have the gall to claim it’ll reduce the cost of health care by reducing the number of new, “expensive” treatments!). We already get national health care – Stealth Health, if you will – from that. Given all that, I wouldn’t be surprised to find references to Lastday in this sandwich by this time tomorrow.
Those O’Neil cylinders cannot arrive fast enough.
Did you hear Limbaugh’s claim Mon afternoon? Viz: that there’s a provision in the ‘stimulus bill’ by which doctors could be prosecuted for treating patients who don’t meet ‘standards’ set by a heath tsar’s panel. The standards being, we don’t give you expensive treatments, or new ones, or experimental ones if you’re considered old enough that you should just ‘die and bear it.’ And the Tsar would have other sweeping powers to ration health care as well. All this apparently is directly out of a book that Daschle wrote a couple of years ago.
Welcome to Soviet style health care. Bring on the heath care of the ’20’s…the 1920’s, that is. And let’s throw in some leaches as well, looking further into the glorious future (I mean ‘past’).
Obama is the ultimate demonstration of the truth of the old saw that that there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual would fall for them. Being a Neo-Marxist, in this case and many others
The ‘stimulus’ bill is a total lie – it’s just railroading us into socialist dogma in action.
I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that Rand doesn’t listen to talk radio.