Barasso: Health Care Law forces Americans into Government run Health Care Exchanges
New Report Shows Law Incentivizes Employers to Drop Coverage
by U.S. Senator John Barrasso media release
July 27, 2011
This week, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) released a new report that shows the President’s health care law encourages employers to drop health insurance coverage.
The NFIB surveyed 750 small businesses. Of those businesses, more than 57% indicated they would consider dropping health insurance coverage – effectively "dumping" their employees into the new government run exchanges.
Today, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) spoke on the Senate floor about how the President’s health care law is designed to ultimately end employer provided coverage altogether – and encourage Americans to join government run exchanges.
Excerpts include:
"Under this law, businesses are permitted to drop out of paying for employer-provided coverage as long as they pay a fine. And the fine is about $2,000 per employee.
"This number is far smaller than what it would actually cost the business to provide family health benefits to their employees.
"What happens to small businesses? Well they’re going to face an even clearer incentive to drop coverage for the people that they employ.
"Now they they’re not required to pay this fine for the first 50 workers who lose coverage. And the question is where are these people supposed to go?
"Where do they go for their insurance? The President promised if they like what they have, they can keep it.
"Yet the incentives built into the health care law seem to be encouraging them to drop their employees.
Health Care Exchanges
"The new health care law has set up what are called health care ‘exchanges’ for these people to enter.
"These ‘exchanges’ are shorthand for insurance markets where as much as 80 percent of the cost of a family’s insurance could be actually borne by taxpayers.
"This may be very bad news for the patient and is really bad news for taxpayers. Experts predict that the annual cost to provide government insurance subsidies could cost up to nine times more than what the White House originally claimed.
"Now, if that isn't proof enough that the health care law is the wrong prescription to help America’s job creators continue to offer coverage to their workers, let's take a look at some of the things that have come out in the last week.
"Just this past week, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) released an astonishing new report.
"The NFIB have surveyed 750 small businesses. These are small businesses less than 50 employees. The survey asked these small businesses if they planned to drop health insurance coverage.
"More than a quarter of the small business who offer coverage today said that they were very likely to drop coverage. Another 31% said they're somewhat likely to drop coverage.
"When you add the ones who are likely and somewhat likely to drop coverage, you are looking at over half the small businesses in this country considering dropping insurance coverage, effectively dumping their employees into the government-run exchanges.
Insurance Exchange Regulation
"The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released yet another proposed regulation mandate the by the health care law. It is called ‘the insurance exchange regulation’.
"So what the rules do is they give the states the specific framework that they must use to set up a program or an exchange with this Washington-approved and mandated insurance.
"So here we go again. Another example of where this administration takes roughly 30 pages of the health care law and then turns it into 340 pages of rules and regulations.
"Well, after examining all the rules, ‘musts’ and ‘requires’, one thing is very clear: This administration is paying lip service to state flexibility while their policy is promoting a Washington-mandated, Washington-dictated, Washington-enforced approach."
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