Benemax

Two months ago, when the first Republicans began talking about trying to “repeal the Health Care Reform bill”, the idea sounded a bit crazy. After all, the bill had just passed Congress with a comfortable margin in the Senate and the sitting President was the bill’s #1 proponent. How could it possibly ever be repealed?

Repeal still seems like a longshot, but not quite as crazy as it did 2 months ago. The latest Rassmussen poll, for example, shows that Americans now favor repeal by an astonishing 2 to 1 margin (63% to 32%).

When Health Care Reform first passed, President Obama confidently predicted a surge in public support as folks learned more about the contents of the legislation. Instead of a surge, he got a bubble and the bubble only lasted a week or two. Since then, as people have begun to digest the bill’s “little noticed” provisions, opposition to the bill has broadened, deepened and hardened.

To paraphrase Speaker Pelosi’s famous quip, “We had to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.” And apparently, Americans are not liking what they’re finding.

In a recent analysis of the new Health Care Reform law, Tower Watson conclued that by 2018, 60% of all employers will be force to pay the so-called “Cadillac Tax”.

This excise tax levies a 40% nondeductible tax on the annual value of health plan costs for employees that exceed $10,200 for single coverage or $27,500 for family coverage. The tax kicks in in 2018.

Towers Watson data reveal that the average 2010 cost of medical coverage for active single and family plans is $5,184 and $14,988, respectively. When these figures are projected out to 2018 using a reasonable estimate of future health care inflation (under 9%), the excise tax is triggered.

Example: a plan with a 2018 single coverage cost of $11,200 and family coverage cost of $32,400 would exceed the limit by $1,000/single, $4,900/family. The tax assessed would be $400/single, $1,960/family. An employer with 50 singles and 50 families would pay a tax of $118,000. An employer with 500 singles and 500 families would be hit with a $1,180,000 tax bill. 

Note: In the case of fully insured plans, the tax is actually paid by the insurance carrieer, not the employer, but of course, that cost would be passed through to the employer in the form of even higher premiums. 

Of course, as always, this bill will ultimately be paid by consumers and employees in the form of higher higher prices, higher health benefit contributions, higher out-of-pocket health care costs (due to benefit reductions), and/or lower wages (due to increased employer cost).

As predicted here, the passage of Health Care Reform legislation in March marked the beginning, not the end, of the health care debate in The United States.

Twenty-one states have now filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the law, and legislation has been introduced or is about to be introduced in 41 states that seeks to exempt those states and their residents from various provisions of the new law.

States’ efforts go back to 2006, when Dr. Eric Novack, an orthopedic surgeon based in Phoenix, realized that some form of national healthcare legislation was a possibility.

Novack worked with conservative groups to craft what is now called the Healthcare Freedom Act.

“The idea is that healthcare decision-making ultimately should be made by patients and families, not from someplace else,” Novack tells Newsmax.

The act provides that, if a healthcare service is legal, “You should always be able to spend your own money to get access to it,” Novack says. “No bureaucrat, public or private, should be able to take that right away from you.”

To whatever extent Health Care Reform infinges on this right, it would seem to run smack up against the “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” promise made in the Declaration of Independence.
In addition, “You should always have the choice not to participate in any healthcare system or plan without a penalty,” says Novack, who heads Arizonans for Healthcare Freedom. “In other words, no mandates of any kind…”

Already, Utah, Idaho, and Virginia have passed some aspect of legislation undercutting the national healthcare law and a constitutional amendment is on the ballot in Arizona this November.