Side effects of ACA on our health care
Published 7:30 pm Thursday, October 9, 2014
Whether a single-payer health insurance system was the original goal, it’s now more and more likely to be the outcome of the Affordable Care Act. When Walmart announced this week it would stop offering insurance plans to part-time workers, it was bowing to an economic reality.
“Walmart Stores Inc. is cutting health insurance for another 30,000 part-time workers and raising premiums for its other employees, as U.S. corporations push to contain costs in the wake of the federal health-care law,” the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
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The move was clearly prompted by the ACA, also known as Obamacare.
“For Walmart, that push from the individual mandate contributed to an influx of workers who signed up for coverage, jacking up costs,” the Journal explained. “Walmart, the country’s largest private employer, with about 1.4 million employees, forecasts that its health-care costs will rise by $500 million more than it had expected in the year ending Jan. 31, 2015.”
Walmart spokespersons pointed out that in many or most cases, part-timers signing up for health insurance through the ACA exchanges could find more affordable plans — the catch is that to be eligible for the exchanges, Walmart had to stop offering plans itself.
Through the exchanges, those part-timers could also get subsidies to help them pay for insurance.
“That financial help can be a big deal for those with lower incomes,” notes online Vox Media. “Think of the 36-year-old Walmart employee here in Washington, D.C. who works 29 hours per week at the company’s average wage of $12.73 per hour. She earns just about $19,000 annually if she works every week of the year. If Walmart doesn’t offer her insurance, the Kaiser Family Foundation’s subsidy calculator shows that she qualifies for a $1,751 subsidy from the federal government to help buy coverage on the exchange. With that financial help, she can buy insurance for as little as $7 per month.”
In other words, Walmart and other employers are doing their workers a favor by canceling their insurance.
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The federal government takes the hit, of course.
“Does this mean Walmart is dropping coverage for these workers merely out of the goodness of its own heart?” Vox asks. “Of course not: the company is going to save lots of money by not helping buy insurance for 26,000 workers. It’s shifting costs over to the government, which will now take on the financial burden of helping to pay for thousands’ of part-time workers’ medical bills.”
Where is this trend leading? Clearly, to single-payer health care in America — sometimes referred to as “Medicare for all.”
That’s what left-leaning Salon.com contends.
“The announcement [by Walmart] could actually be a boon to even more progressive health reform efforts,” Salon’s Luke Brinker writes. “A shift away from employer-provided coverage could help achieve a single-payer insurance model, a goal long sought by many progressives. … Walmart may not have had that in mind when the company made its announcement yesterday, but it may have helped nudge the country a little closer in that direction.”
Whether intended or not, that’s the result.
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