NEWSMAX: …Employees including bankers at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and college professors at Harvard University are seeing a range of moves to shift more costs to workers. Companies are introducing higher deductibles and co-payments, rising premiums and the imposition of wellness programs that carry penalties for people who don’t comply.
Requiring employees to shoulder more of the cost burden may undermine public support for Obamacare just as Congress, now firmly under Republican control, considers new ways to gut the law.
The tax takes effect in 2018, and employers are already laying the groundwork to make sure they don’t have to pay the 40 percent surcharge on health-insurance spending that exceeds $27,500 for a family or $10,200 for an individual. Once envisioned as a tool to slow the nation’s growing health-care tab, the tax has in practice meant higher out-of-pocket health- care costs for workers… (more)
EDITOR: Because of very low deductibles and co-pays, coverage under ‘Cadillac’ plans leads to misuse and abuse of the health system and provide incentives for redundant investment by hospitals and others to attract this highly profitable niche of business. Those now covered by such plans are highly paid or already wealthy individuals who can well afford a higher deductible and co-pay.
Moreover, those receiving such generouos coverage are receiving benefits that are not subject to taxation. It is the poor subsidizing the well to do.
We can only hope this law will apply to the gold standard of benefit-gorging employees – PA state workers, politicians, and school teachers!