Citizen Burden: Employer Dumping

All over you can search for the latest ruling from the IRS regarding EMPLOYER DUMPING, the accurate description of large employers that are required under Obamacare to offer health insurance that try to avoid that obligation by providing money that employees can use to purchase health insurance on an exchange or in the private market.

Employers required under the PPACA to provide health insurance plans hoped to avoid the liability of paying fines for not providing health insurance plans by instead providing money so that employees could go out and purchase their own plans on an exchange or in the marketplace.

For the exact language, you can visit, http://www.irs.gov/uac/Newsroom/Employer-Health-Care-Arrangements. The brief notice describes EMPLOYER PAYMENT PLANS, are those where employers don’t provide health insurance but instead reimburse employees for premiums paid for outside plans, whether those plans are through the exchange or not.

The IRS stated that these group payment plans ARE group health plans which means that they MUST comply with the PPACA (with essential health benefits, preventive care services and prohibitions on annual limits) and that contributions to employees who then find their own variety of individual insurance plans don’t satisfy the requirements of Obamacare and therefore may leave employers liable for penalties under the PPACA.

The IRS reasoning seems to be that merely providing money to employees who can take that money and use it towards purchasing health insurance cannot satisfy Obamacare because the individual policies people purchase in the marketplace or privately are just that, individual policies and therefore cannot qualify as employer-provided health insurance provided as required by Obamacare.

As consumers, however, the IRS ruling is beneficial on its face to us. Since its enactment we’ve seen insurance companies and employers playing cat-and-mouse with the provisions of Obamacare, successfully implementing Gotchya moves in the form of all loopholes they’ve been able to find to reduce health insurance and health services coverage to preserve or grow their own profits.

As far as Obamacare, it’s more evidence of the poor craftsmanship of a law that ultimately was designed to provide employers and insurance companies with what they wanted, less cost, and less cost and more profit respectively, while pursuing its own governmental objective of promoting federal savings by reducing coverage of needed medical care and treatment and increasing the amount of money obtained from individuals and employers through cost-sharing, penalties, and new taxes, all the while reassuring consumers that this will benefit them through the strained logic that health insurance (regardless of quality) is somehow equivalent to healthcare.

So, why support the IRS ruling? Because employer dumping is another get-around way of avoiding or minimizing the costs of providing health insurance to employees.

However, the bigger question is, “Since when did the ultimate payers for every healthcare industry job, eg patient consumers, and the backbone of American society eg the workers, become so burdensome that we’re the hot potato passed from employers to government to health insurance companies to healthcare workers who don’t want to do anything except seemingly collect our money whether it’s in the form of taxes, penalties, premiums or copayments for the provision of overpriced and only the most basic health services eg preventive?

It is the contempt for the very people who support this system, the consumers, that is evident not only in Obamacare’s efforts to reduce the federal outlay of money for citizen health but in insurance company, pharma, provider and insurance company efforts to increase their bottom lines by charging us the same or more than we’ve ever been charged before and in providing less.

We’re not stupid and we know we’re getting less for more. The other stakeholders know it too, that’s why we see more coercion involved in our healthcare system from doctors advising on whether your life is worth a certain treatment to whether you’ll be taxed for failing to pay for a product that is frequently inadequate when you need it (insurance).

The problem isn’t the game of cat-and-mouse where employers and insurers and providers try to get around the requirements of Obamacare, or the game of hot potato where the government and other stakeholders try to maximize what we pay and minimize what we receive, the problem is the attitude towards citizen health, that it and we are a burden to be avoided when we need medical services and treatment on a system that could not exist but for us.

The message to the marketplace is clear, consumers are the customers, not the burden for stakeholders in the healthcare industry.