“You can keep your plan…”
…for as long as your health care plan exists, anyway. Which, for retirees of the 3M corporation, it no longer will. It seems that the passage of Obamacare has prompted 3M to join the rush for the door in terms of providing health care coverage.
As we’ve noted repeatedly here, the claims that you could keep your health care plan and physician could not possibly be true, as the “reform” package set up perverse incentives. What we are seeing is precisely what we predicted. Corporations and insurers are responding to Obamacare’s incentives by getting out of the health insurance business. Because that’s what the law’s incentives urge them to do.
It really is one of the most basic principles of economics: people respond to incentives.
Obamacare is working exactly as designed.
Now we’re going to start hearing about how corporate greed is causing seniors and retirees to die by the busload and how we should have a single payer system so this will never happen.
Bingo.
It does make you wonder- if the new health care legislation was going to bend the cost curve downwards, while allowing you to keep your existing coverage and providing the same level of quality, that means that the only difference is that costs would go down. Right? So why would companies be preparing to drop coverages and plans? Heck, wouldn’t the government be able to threaten businesses with truly draconian fines, so that their choices would be to save money while providing the same health insurance or pay more not to?
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This “new math” does not add up…
Instead of switching them to an HRA, 3M should switch to LyfeBank accounts which allow the retirees to pool the funds with family members or part time jobs to buy health insurance and pay for medical expenses, all with pretax dollars. A brief visit to LyfeBank.com will explain this process.