Tennessee’s former governor, Democrat Phil Bredesen, wrote in an October 2010 editorial for the Wall Street Journal assessing his party’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that “… our recent health reform has created a situation where there are strong economic incentives for employers to drop coverage altogether. The consequence will be to drive many more people than projected — and with them, much greater cost — into the reform’s federally subsidized system.”
What does that mean? Like your health care coverage you now have through your employer? You’d better hope the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare is repealed.
The sentiments of the opinion piece written a year and a half ago are echoed in a May 1 report prepared for the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee: “Broken Promise: Why ObamaCare Will Force Americans to Lose the Health Care Coverage They Have and Like.”
The mandate included in Obama’s signature legislation forces all businesses with 50 or more full-time employees to offer a government-approved health care plan or pay a $2,000 penalty per employee.
Seventy-one Fortune 100 companies responded to a survey demonstrating that, in 2011, they employed 5.9 million full- and part-time workers spending $30.8 billion on health insurance that covered 10.2 million lives. Of these 71 companies, 89 percent offered insurance to part-time employees.