Big Corporations Will Drop Health Care Coverage

It's gonna happen, and that's not a surprise to anyone who has been following Obamacare from the beginning:

The great mystery surrounding the historic health care bill is how the corporations that provide coverage for most Americans -- coverage they know and prize -- will react to the new law's radically different regime of subsidies, penalties, and taxes. Now, we're getting a remarkable inside look at the options AT&T, Deere, and other big companies are weighing to deal with the new legislation.

Internal documents recently reviewed by Fortune, originally requested by Congress, show what the bill's critics predicted, and what its champions dreaded: many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the health care coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government.

That would dismantle the employer-based system that has reigned since World War II. It would also seem to contradict President Obama's statements that Americans who like their current plans could keep them. And as we'll see, it would hugely magnify the projected costs for the bill, which controls deficits only by assuming that America's employers would remain the backbone of the nation's health care system.

Hence, health-care reform risks becoming a victim of unintended consequences. Amazingly, the corporate documents that prove this point became public because of a different set of unintended consequences: they told a story far different than the one the politicians who demanded them expected.

The article refers to "unintended consequences", but I assure you that corporations dropping health care coverage in exchange for less expensive penalties was very much intended by the authors of this legislation. The ultimate goal is single-payer government run health care, and that can't be accomplished until the private insurance industry is dead.

That's why the penalties proscribed for failure to provide insurance for employees are far smaller than the cost of providing private insurance.  Business owners aren't dummies and their companies don't exist only for the purpose of providing employee health care coverage.  They exist to make a buck, and if they can make more bucks by dumping health plans and sticking their employees into a government plan, that's what they'll do.  It's human nature and good business.

If you like your company health plan, too bad.  You won't get to keep it no matter what Obama told you.