HUFFINGTON POST: … An Obamacare provision that goes into effect next year requires businesses with 50 or more full-time workers to provide health care coverage for employees. For businesses that don’t, there is a $2,000 penalty for each full-time worker above the 30-employee threshold. (Full-time workers are defined as anyone who works more than 30 hours a week in a given month.)
Rick Levi, owner of Consolidated Management, a Des Moines, Iowa-based company that runs cafeterias at schools, offices and jails in 10 states, told the Journal the penalty is all he can afford. He employs 102 workers and will be required to offer coverage to many under the new law, at a cost of more than $500,000 per year if every employee takes the insurance plan. The penalty will cost him around $144,000…
Overall, the cost of implementing the Affordable Care Act may be less than many companies claim. In study published in October by the Urban Institute, a non-partisan think tank, Obamacare would have increased employers’ total health spending by 2.2 percent last year if it had been in effect… (more)
EDITOR: As we have maintained since its introduction, the only thing worse than the Obamacare approach to health insurance is continuing along the current path. Tragically, then and now, health care in this country is hostage to special interests.
Whether we use France, Switzerland, Japan, Germany or Canada as models, we need to break the grip of special interests and move to eliminate our current method for funding health care. We pay half again as much as others as a share of Gross Domestic Product , often twice as much per capita, and achieve mediocre results for the bulk of our population. Instead of employers supplying insurance coverage that costs around $3 per hour worked, those funds should be paid to workers. In its place, health care should be paid for by a Value Added Tax on goods and services as is the case in other nations. This will also serve to make US goods more competitive for export.
