Re:Why Wages Aren’t Growing
by prostoalex on Friday September 22, 2017 @12:50PM
(#15313784)
> Removing health insurance from employers is key, this will also help being able to change jobs more frequently and not contribute to ageism so much.
Agree. Unfortunately, there's zero political will to do this. Republicans seem to be hell-bent on destroying Obamacare as a concept, no matter the consequences, and view decreased number of sign-ups and decreased number of insurance sellers, as positive developments and proof that the system "doesn't work".
Democrats would surely welcome decoupling of employment and health insurance, right? Except ACA mandates employers with headcount 50+ offer health insurance, which robs the exchanges of a fairly healthy portion of the population that's fit enough to be in the workforce (prior to ACA mandatory health coverage applied to employers with 100+ headcount).
Some employers have run the numbers and figured out that if they paid the ACA fines and transferred the employee health coverage to a public exchange, their balance sheet would still be better off. Double win for a federal government - not only there's extra revenue in terms of fines (the money that previously went to a private insurer), the exchange gets bolstered with a significant number of new participants, which dilutes the risk pool and hopefully make everyone's coverage cheaper. Not so fast, said Obama administration, and slapped an extra fine to discourage such behavior https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/26/us/irs-bars-employers-fro...
Agree. Unfortunately, there's zero political will to do this. Republicans seem to be hell-bent on destroying Obamacare as a concept, no matter the consequences, and view decreased number of sign-ups and decreased number of insurance sellers, as positive developments and proof that the system "doesn't work".
Democrats would surely welcome decoupling of employment and health insurance, right? Except ACA mandates employers with headcount 50+ offer health insurance, which robs the exchanges of a fairly healthy portion of the population that's fit enough to be in the workforce (prior to ACA mandatory health coverage applied to employers with 100+ headcount).
Some employers have run the numbers and figured out that if they paid the ACA fines and transferred the employee health coverage to a public exchange, their balance sheet would still be better off. Double win for a federal government - not only there's extra revenue in terms of fines (the money that previously went to a private insurer), the exchange gets bolstered with a significant number of new participants, which dilutes the risk pool and hopefully make everyone's coverage cheaper. Not so fast, said Obama administration, and slapped an extra fine to discourage such behavior https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/26/us/irs-bars-employers-fro...