Over the course of the campaign, President Obama repeatedly promised: “If you like your current insurance, you can keep your current insurance”—despite any reforms his Administration would implement. This claim is far from true, as Amy B. Monahan and Daniel Schwarcz illustrate in their 2011 study “Will Employers Undermine Health Care Reform by Dumping Sick Employees?” published in the Virginia Law Review. Schwarcz presented the study on Capitol Hill last week. Obamacare mandates that employers provide health insurance for their employees or pay a fine. With the increasing cost of …
Proponents of the health care reform bills currently under consideration in Congress claim that the cost of insuring the uninsured will be paid for by taxes on the rich, and by employers, who will be required to shoulder “responsibility” for their employee’s health insurance. The reality is that these provisions will act as an extremely regressive tax on the working poor, substantially reducing their take-home pay and in some cases eliminating their jobs altogether. All the House and Senate drafts of health care reform include so-called “employer mandates” or “pay …
Recent press reports, including a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal, have the news that Wal-Mart has signed a letter to President Obama endorsing the idea of an “employer mandate” – a requirement that employers offer health insurance to their employees. Why would Wal-Mart – the nation’s largest employer – endorse such an idea? Simple: It would cripple many of their competitors. Much ink has been spilled on the effect Wal-Mart has on small retailers. Wal-Mart’s large size enables them to extract low prices from manufacturers, and that – …
Stunned by the $1.6 trillion price tag for their health care plan, the Senate Finance Committee is weighing a ‘pay or play’ employer health mandate. Staffers are still negotiating which businesses will fall under the mandate, and how they are to be punished if they fail to offer “affordable” health care to their employers, but the ultimate details matter little: employer mandates are terrible public policy. 1. Employer Mandates Are A Regressive Tax. An employer mandate would be a regressive tax on business that would be directly shifted to employees …
