Obamacare Facilitating Employer Dumping of Health Costs on Workers

A Kaiser Foundation national study just released finds that health insurance premiums in 2010 will cost workers nearly double (47% more) what they paid in 2005, although average wages have increased by just 18%. In the economic collapse, companies nationwide have dumped more of their employer healthplan costs onto their employees, and the Obamacare law will facilitate more of this.

Workers' expenses for health insurance policy costs rose four and a half times as fast as the costs themselves in the year to July, and in addition, more than a quarter of all covered employees now have deductibles of over $1,000. They pay, on average, $4,000/year now for family coverage which is nominally in "employer-provided" plans.

According to the New York Times Sept. 2 coverage of this Kaiser Foundation study, the Obamacare law will carry this process further, by encouraging the creation of state multi-employer pools. One business "expert" told the Times that as employers "get a better handle on the new legislation," they will move into a system of such pools in which the company provides only a fixed amount of health insurance coverage even as its cost rises. Utah has become the first state to create such a pool under Obamacare which has exactly that characteristic — "defined contributions" from employers, who have been doing the same thing to their pension plans for several years.

Obama healthcare advisor Nancy Ann DeParle, not surprisingly, jumped in to defend the companies in the Times coverage. Businesses may have "felt less need to protect their workers because the increase in the cost of premiums [in 2009] was modest," DeParle said. "It's the lowest increase in many years." 2010, as everyone painfully knows, has been a different story.