Leaks in its cost-shifting, cost-sharing approach to getting everyone insured rather than focusing on improving citizen access to affordable and quality health care, the Obama administration has little to offer families priced out of insurance coverage from their employers because premium limits only apply to the employee, not their families. Those families are ineligible for coverage under insurance strategies designed to get poorer families insured. The response so far, those people will be exempt from the tax being imposed on individuals who are not covered.
The issue revolves around affordability definitions that require employers to offer their employees insurance that does not exceed a certain percentage of income in premium costs, but in the spirit of cost-shifting and cost-sharing,family member premiums face no such constraints.
Is anyone surprised that cost-shifting doesn't work? The President's eagerness to have something passed without a thorough examination of funding for sustainability and without a revolutionary change in approach, eg. either real cost caps on the expenses of healthcare or a public option, makes the Obamacare legislation a cost shifting means of getting more people insured based on an assumption that the healthcare "crisis" will be solved by getting more people insured.
But, here we are and working within the system, it's likely that families like those priced out of employer insurance will end up waiting for some lesser-quality insurance coverage available on health benefits exchanges next year.
The vitriolic and hostile accusations promoted by ratings-hungry media in response to anyone who doesn't praise Obamacare as the best thing since the Bible has contributed to the failure to provide information to people about strengths, and corresponding weaknesses of the new law.
The endless warning that without change X things will be worse has got to be dumped in favor of real improvement for individuals. Don't look to the President for help. He's onto his next piece of rushed legislation, immigration reform, gun reform, a checklist of issues he'll check off as "solved" and that American citizen will have to cope with. Less apparent is any impact on either the size or spending on civil servant employees of the Federal government.
The President's government has transformed itself into something being done to the people rather than by the people. Half-truth and rushed action and misquoted facts have been used to skew public opinion.
If there is any lesson in the "glitch" and all the other glitches that we have and have yet to experience it's that this rush to check off a problem as "solved" might very well leave us in a worse position than we were before.
