Coyote Blog

From CBS

Obamacare forces them to drop many of their plans that don't meet the law's 10 minimum standards, including maternity care, emergency visits, mental health treatment and even pediatric dental care.

For those of you who are on corporate health plans and do not participate in the individual market, here is something that those of us who do so participate learn early:  Unless you are really, really, really adverse to the smallest unpredictability in expenses, don't buy dental coverage.

The reason is that for the vast, vast majority of people, dental costs are entirely predictable.  Let's say for the average person they are X per year.  For most people, the costs don't vary very far from X.   While certain dental procedures can be expensive (and remember, dental plans do not cover orthodonture), they are seldom if ever catastrophically expensive.  Few people have been bankrupted by an insurable dental problem.  This is particularly true in kids with pediatric dental care.

So for most people, dental insurance is just pre-paid care.  All it does is add cost.  There is no free lunch.  The insurance company knows your costs are likely to be X.  So they are going to charge you X + a markup.  Actually, it is worse than this.  Because I pay cash, I get a lower price from the dentist.  So in fact with dental insurance you are paying X + dentist insurance markup + insurance company markup.  All this does is add costs.  I have happily paid my kids' dental costs out of pocket their entire life and have saved a fortune over what 18 years of pediatric dental care would have cost.

But now, courtesy of Obamacare, we are forced by law to buy this unnecessarily expensive product.

Here is my health insurance cancellation letter, cancelling the insurance I was very happy with.  Click on any of the below to enlarge

Here was roughly what I was paying for a family of four (this is from the renewal 18 months ago but it is about the same now).  We had a couple of minor pre-existing conditions so this was rated up from the lowest possible price of $525.85, or about a 6.6% increase.

Here are the features of this plan.  It has a high deductible, but once the deductible is met, it covers 100% in network, and the network is very good.   The deductible amounts may be high to some.  I asked myself, "what level of unexpected medical cost could I handle in a year." and set the limits there.  It is NOT pre-paid medical care, which I do not believe in.

To the question of "was Obama lying or was he ignorant", I cannot get inside his head but I can say that many people, including me, who were not involved in the process saw this coming even in 2009 in his draft legislation.  It is hard to believe that if random folks like myself understand this, that the person actually sponsoring the legislation did not.

Many folks are arguing it has to have been an out-and-out lie.

None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date -- the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example -- the policy would not be grandfathered. 

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.” 

That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.

Enter the lies:

Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”

“This says that when they made the promise, they knew half the people in this market outright couldn’t keep what they had and then they wrote the rules so that others couldn’t make it either,” said  Robert Laszewski, of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, a consultant who works for health industry firms. Laszewski estimates that 80 percent of those in the individual market will not be able to keep their current policies and will have to buy insurance that meets requirements of the new law, which generally requires a richer package of benefits than most policies today.

Next step for me, I get to experience the exchange.  I recognized a bunch of business losses last year, so my income was less than zero (I have a s-corp which passes earnings through to my individual tax statement).  It will be interesting to see if I get offered a subsidy.  Heck, they may offer to enroll me in Medicare.

1.  The first Obama Administration response to people (like myself) who have had their health insurance cancelled because of Obamacare and who are facing much higher future premiums is that many of can expect a subsidy.  Do you realize how awful this is?  Basically they are acknowledging that millions of people who paid for their own health care in the past will now be getting taxpayer money.  Essentially, a huge and unnecessary increase in government dependency.

2.  The other equally awful Obama Administration answer is that our new health coverage will be more expensive because it will be "better".  First, there is no evidence of this -- early returns are that people are paying more for less.  Second, though, this is horribly arrogant.  A $200,000 Maserati sedan is likely "better" than my car I am driving, but given its price I would consider myself worse off if forced to buy a Maserati.  In the same sense, forcing me to by expensive insurance options I don't want is not "better", even if I am making choices Obama's advisers would not make for themselves.  I spent a lot of time shopping for health insurance and running numbers on various cases and picking the best plan for me, and am insulted that Obama does not respect my decision.

By the way, I will remind you of what I said way back in 2007 about government health care proposals

Americans are unbelievably charitable people, to the extent that they will put up with a lot of taxation and even losses of freedoms through government coercion to help people out.

However, in nearly every other case of government-coerced charity, the main effect is "just" an increase in taxes.  Lyndon Johnson wants to embark on a futile attempt to try to provide public housing to the poor?  Our taxes go up, a lot of really bad housing is built, but at least my housing did not get any worse.  Ditto food programs -- the poor might get some moldy cheese from a warehouse, but my food did not get worse.  Ditto welfare.  Ditto social security, unemployment insurance,and work programs.

But health care is different.... what is different about many of the health care proposals on the table is that everyone, not just the poor will get this same crappy level of treatment.  It would be like a public housing program where everyone's house is torn down and every single person must move into public housing.  That is universal state-run health care.  Ten percent of America gets pulled up, 90% of America gets pulled down, possibly way down.

Yesterday, it was problems with Obamacare exchanges.  Today, it is spying on world leaders.

11,500 Google results and growing

I am not sure why everyone thinks it would be a punishment to fire Sebelius at this point.  Three days after she is fired, she will have a handful of million dollar a year job offers from health care companies and lobbyists who want to tap her influence into this administration.  The Administration and Congress is actively picking winners and losers in 1/7 of the economy, so there are billions at stake.  Sebelius can name her price.

Instead I would love to see her stay in office three long years and answer every press question and Congressional inquiry about Obamacare, over and over and over.

Using ads from the Colorado health exchange.

This may be an elaborate hoax (the ads are that goofy) but these appear to be actual ads from the Colorado health insurance exchange.  The potential for Photoshop fund is incredible.  I took a quick shot at a couple.  Here is the original.

Update:  more here

On September 26 of this year, President Obama said this of the new Obamacare exchanges:

“If you’ve ever tried to buy insurance on your own,” he said, “I promise you this is a lot easier.”

Well, let's see.  Here are some notes on my previous health insurance buying decision

• I was able to price shop policies online without creating an account, without giving up my social security number.  The websites to do so worked and operated quickly

• A broker who had decades of experience in health care (rather than being a former Obama campaign worker with a few hours of training) walked me through the options and how they worked.

• Once we chose a policy, the application process online was quick and easy

Here is one thing that was likely worse

• I had to provide medical history information, which probably is not required under Obamacare because of community rating (though I am not sure)

And here is one thing that was better for me but I guess must be worse for the Left since they complain about it so much

• There was a lot more choice.  If the process was "harder" in any way before, it was because there were far more choices.  It was harder in the same way that it is generally harder to shop in the US than, say, in the old Soviet Union.  Obamacare circumscribes policies such that a large package of benefits are mandated, not optional (I have to pay for mental health coverage and probably aromatherapy) and the size of one's deductible is capped.

It is also this latter difference that will make my next policy substantially more expensive.  In standardizing options, the Congress standardized on the most expensive options (broadest possible benefits, smallest possible deductible).

By the way, this is not proven yet but there is probably one other way my Obamacare policy will be worse than my last one:  the doctor network in my policy will very likely be a LOT smaller.  We could almost be sure this would happen precisely because Obama promised it wouldn't  (his promises on health care are pretty good "tells" that the opposite will happen).

My health insurance broker wrote me this in response to our telling him we got a letter from Blue Cross (BC) terminating our policy

Did  your BC letter say your policy ended 12/31/13 or 12/31/14.  If it ends in 2014 I strongly suggest you stay where you are until you are forced into Obamacare which will probably raise your rates substantially.

Given that I run a small business with fluctuating earnings, my last two years tax returns show zero net income.  If I had not honor, I probably could go into the exchange (if and when I could actually get into the exchange) and qualify for a large subsidy.  I could also probably go uncovered, and just sign up when I get sick, and pay the penalty, which is trivial if you are showing no income on your taxes.

Does anyone know if the exchanges do a net worth or asset check?  I don't see how.  If they only look at taxes, I will appear dirt poor.

The #1 trouble with polls is that the questions can be easily manipulated to shift the results quite a bit by small changes in wording.

But another problem in interpretation is that "opposition" to certain public policy goals is not well parsed.  Kevin Drum gives an example where "opposition" to Obamacare includes a lot of people who don't like it because they wanted it to be even more radical, believing the government should have gone even further or stopped short of the full policy prescription required.  But these numbers are typically just lumped in as "opposed" and the conclusion is frequently that all opposed thought the law went too far or should not have been passed.

My gut feel is that this is a non-partisan issue.  Just as easily folks could be opposed to, say, tax cuts or the government shutdown because they did not think it went far enough.

As far as Obamacare goes, it will be interesting to see what those numbers look like in 2 months.

I generally take the Republican side in budget battles.  I have no problem shutting down the government as part of a fight to reduce the size of government.

But the Republicans are lost and without a goal of any sort.  I follow the budget battle closely and even I can't tell you what the Republicans are trying to get any more.  They never got their messaging in place, and have leaped almost at random from issue to issue trying to get something out of the shutdown.  First it was defunding Obamacare, which was never going to fly, and then it was an Obamacare delay, and then it was.... whatever it is now.  I have no idea.

The Republicans are just hanging on trying to save face.  Time to cut bait and move on.  In fact it was time to do this last week.  Take your lumps, let the Left and the media count coup and dance on your grave for a few days, and move the hell on.  Gear up to start highlighting the failures in Obamacare.   These are so bad they could have people forgetting the budget fight within days.

Brad DeLong writes

What are they thinking?

I mean, some employers are going to drop hours below 30 a week once the employer pay-or-play hits. But we won't see that until the February 2015 employment report, and there is no reason for employers to start that eighteen months in advance. It isn't there in the data. And nothing would lead anybody to expect that it would be visible in the data right now.

So why are they claiming that it is?

I am amazed at how even prominent pundits don't bother to educate themselves on even the most basic aspects of the policy issues they discuss.

Let's go back before the 1-year delay in the employer mandate, which was scheduled to take effect on Jan 1, 2014.  In the implementation rules, employees would be classified as part-time or full-time on Jan 1, 2014 based on a 3-12 month look back at actual hours worked in 2013.  That means that for many companies, such as ours, to have employees classified as part-time on day 1 of Obamacare, we had to have them working part time in January of 2013.  By the time the Obamacare employee mandate was delayed, we had already made changes in our operations, so we are not going back and will just maintain them until 2015.

So for our company, and likely for many others, the change to part-time showed up in the first quarter of 2013.

So why is DeLong claiming otherwise?

If you signed up for Obamacare, and then suddenly had a ton of spam in your email box trying to sell you stuff tailored to your pre-existing health conditions and other private health information, you would be pissed, right?

In the last two months my email box has been overrun with spam from people try to "help" me re-register for the government contractor data base, like this one:

I am registered merely because I have one tiny contract to clean bathrooms in California and I cannot get paid unless I am in the system.  I checked my settings in the various government systems to confirm that yes, indeed, I had set it to not display my information publicly. But that does not seem to do a bit of good.  Everyone on the planet seems to have my email, my name, and my account expiration dates and CAGE code.  Wonderful.

I am just floored at the political incompetence of the Republicans in Congress.  Conservatives are arguing that it is all about how the media unfairly  makes Republicans the bad guys in all budget fights, and I think there is some truth in that.  But this was something that was known in advance, and which could be planned for.  I am not a political expert, but if the press really creates a messaging headwind for Republicans, then that means that they need to begin early and push often on a consistent message.

I thought the attempt to roll back Obamacare altogether was an absurd overreach that was merely attempted to help Congressmen head off primary challenges from the Right.  But even so, the GOP only settled on this approach to the budget battle at the absolute last minute.  What they really needed to do was pick a realistic item they were going to fight for, all agree to it 3-4 weeks ago, and then press like hell at every opportunity on the message for that one thing.

Now even political insiders can't name what is in the mish mash bill the House sent yesterday to the Senate.  I know it has a one year individual mandate delay (just in time to bail the Administration out of dire implementation issues) and a few other random things.  Of COURSE Republicans are going to lose the messaging war when they have not even bothered to message at all, even to those of us who could be convinced to start cutting government almost anywhere.

From our favorite politically-blinkered economist who used to be smart:

Chait stresses the youth aspect:

Fortunately for Obama, this field of battle favors his side. To pass the law, he needed to win over skeptical senators. To defend it in court, he needed conservative jurists. But identifying and persuading young people is a battle Obama does not expect to lose to Republicans, and in place of the federal outreach funds, the administration is deploying a campaignlike array of weapons: microtargeting, including door-to-door outreach, and all forms of media. (A few weeks ago, Katy Perry tweeted out a link informing her 42 million followers that health care was available beginning October 1.)

Yep, when it comes to reaching hipsters, or young people in general — I know, Katy Perry — Dems have big advantages; all that coastal cultural elite hatred suddenly turns into a big disadvantage for the right.

A couple of thoughts:

• Katy Perry is part of the cultural elite?  We have sure dumbed down that concept.
• As to Ms. Perry, whose music is actually a guilty pleasure of mine, health care has been available to your twitter followers all their lives, not just beginning October 1.  A better way to put this is that, as of October 1 you will be forced to buy some amount of health care whether you want it or not.  
• The whole campaign aimed at young people is simply obscene.  I understand that folks like Ms. Perry honestly believe that young people are getting a better deal, and that she is doing them a service.  Fine, millionaires can be low information voters too.  But people in the Administration have a much more cynical purpose, which explains the magnitude of the campaign described by Chait:  For Obamacare to work and not be a fiscal disaster, it depends on young people overpaying for health insurance.  The Administration knows that young people are overpaying -- the whole system depends on it -- and yet they are telling them it is in their interest to sign up.   A private company that did this would be in jail.
• I think this whole campaign is going to fail due to a basic fallacy of Progressive thinking.  Progressives are convinced that consumers are helpless dupes of advertising.  They in fact criticized health care advertising expenses in the private world for years for this reason, making this whole campaign incredibly ironic.  Obama and company are convinced that with enough advertising, average consumers will buy anything, even if it is a bad deal, because they are convinced that this is how consumer capitalism works (it got him elected, didn't it?)  I think they are going to be disappointed.

I find Republican strategy in the recent Obamacare and budget fight to have been insanely aggravating, and that is coming from someone who hates Obamacare.

Yes, I understand why things are happening as they are.  From a re-election strategy, their approach makes total sense.  A lot of these House guys come from majority Republic districts where their biggest re-election fear comes from a primary challenge to the right of them.  I live in one of these districts, so I see what perhaps coastal media does not.  In everyday conversation Republicans are always criticizing their Congressmen for not rolling back Obamacare.  Republicans need to be able to say in a primary, "I voted to defund Obamacare".  Otherwise I guarantee every one of them will be facing a primary opponent who will hammer them every day.

But from the perspective of someone who just wants the worst aspects of this thing to go away, this was a terrible approach.  Defunding Obamacare entirely was never, ever, ever going to succeed.  Obama and Democrats would be happy to have a shutdown last months before they would roll back his one and only signature piece of legislation.  They may have caved in the past on other issues but he is not going to cave on this one (and needs to be seen not caving given his recent foreign policy mis-steps that has him perceived as weak even in his own party).  And, because all the focus is on Obamacare, we are going to end up with a budget deal that makes no further progress on containing other spending.

The Republicans should have taken the opportunity to seek targeted changes that would more likely have been accepted.  The most obvious one is to trade a continuing resolution for an elimination of the IPAB, one of the most undemocratic bits of legislation since the National Industrial Recovery Act.  Another strategy would have been to trade a CR for a 1-year delay in the individual mandate, a riskier strategy but one the Administration might leap at given that implementation problems in exchanges are giving them a black eye.  Finally, an even riskier strategy would have been to tie a CR to a legislative acknowledgement that the PPACA does not allow subsidies in Federally-run exchanges.  This latter might not have been achievable (and they might get it in the courts some day anyway) but if one argues that any of these is unrealistic, then certainly defunding Obamacare as a whole was unrealistic.

I think as a minimum they could have killed the IPAB, but now they will get nothing.

Update:  This line from All the President's Men seems relevant:

You've done worse than let Haldeman slip away: you've got people feeling sorry for him. I didn't think that was possible. In a conspiracy like this, you build from the outer edges and go step by step. If you shoot too high and miss, everybody feels more secure. You've put the investigation back months.

I am not going to add to the confusion on this.  For a lot of people who already have health insurance, the answer will be "maybe".  Older folks and folks with health problems may see less expensive policies, and younger people will likely pay more.

I do, however, want to add two observations that are often lost in this discussion:

• For the millions of people who have chosen not to buy health insurance and now will be forced to do so by law, they will certainly be paying more.  Anything is more than the "zero" which has been these peoples' preference to date.
• A more interesting question is:  what will happen to premiums in the second year.  Right now, insurance companies are pricing as if all these young people who have not been buying policies will be forced to do so by the law (a key, maybe the key, funding source for Obamacare is forcing young healthy people to buy overpriced policies to subsidize older people).  What if they refuse?  After all, the penalties in the first several years are not very severe, and Obamacare removes any risk from not being covered, because if one gets sick he can just run and sign up then, like getting home insurance once your house is on fire.  The prices on the exchanges in 2014 will be very interesting.

As I linked in an earlier article, Kevin Drum and his commenters are justifying the Obamacare tax on tanning salons based in part on the fact that tanning (via skin cancers) adds to future health care costs, which now (via Obamacare and Medicare) will likely have to be born by taxpayers.

Frequent readers will know that I have opposed government paying for health care for years in part due to the incentive it gives the government to micromanage individual behaviors to reduce its costs (I call this the health care Trojan Horse).

But here is the simple question for today.  If individual choices and behaviors should be taxed if they add to health care costs (a proposition Drum sees as so self-evident that Republicans are Neanderthals for opposing the idea), then why isn't anyone suggesting a tax on sex?   I can't think of any discretionary behavior that has more implications for health care costs than sex.  There's contraception, abortion, STD's, pre-natal care, birth, and at least 18 years of juvenile health care with no taxes being paid.  Not to mention a new future Medicare recipient who, by current law, will pay in far less to the system than he or she will take out.

Last year I predicted that the biggest economic story of 2013 would be the end of full-time work (due to Obamacare) in the retail service industry.  I seldom make predictions, but wrote that at the time because I was amazed that this shift to part time work was all we were talking about in the small business world, since for technical reasons in the law we had to have these changes in place in 2013, well before the 2014 start of the employer mandate.

The media world is finally catching up, particularly after recent jobs reports where the totality of net new job creation (and more) was in part time jobs.  Here is yet another story from the media finally noticing a business conversation that has been going on for almost a year:

Employers around the country, from fast-food franchises to colleges, have told NBC News that they will be cutting workers’ hours below 30 a week because they can’t afford to offer the health insurance mandated by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

“To tell somebody that you’ve got to decrease their hours because of a law passed in Washington is very frustrating to me,” said Loren Goodridge, who owns 21 Subway franchises, including a restaurant in Kennebunk. “I know the impact I’m having on some of my employees.”

Goodridge said he’s cutting the hours of 50 workers to no more than 29 a week so he won’t trigger the provision in the new health care law that requires employers to offer coverage to employees who work 30 hours or more per week. The provision takes effect in 16 months....

The White House dismisses such examples as "anecdotal." Jason Furman, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisors, said, “We are seeing no systematic evidence that the Affordable Care Act is having an adverse impact on job growth or the number of hours employees are working. … [S]ince the ACA became law, nearly 90 percent of the gain in employment has been in full-time positions.”

But the president of an influential union that supports Obamacare said the White House is wrong.

"It IS happening," insisted Joseph Hansen, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which has 1.2 million members.  "Wait a year. You'll see tremendous impact as workers have their hours reduced and their incomes reduced. The facts are already starting to show up. Their statistics, I think, are a little behind the time."

This has to be spin by the Obama Administration and not an honest belief.  There is no way they could have missed this:

In June, the household survey reported that part-time jobs soared by 360,000 to 28,059,000 – an all time record high. Full time jobs? Down 240,000.  And looking back at the entire year, so far in 2013, just 130K Full-Time Jobs have been added, offset by a whopping 557K Part-Time jobs.

I have written before that I think these changes are here to stay.  In some cases it is actually easier for businesses to stitch together full service coverage from part-time workers, as I discussed in this article at Forbes.

I checked out the government web site today that supposedly offers advice to small businesses on Obamacare compliance.  Of course, I found nothing on my main question, in part because the IRS cannot figure out what it wants to do (my question is on requirements and penalties vis a vis seasonal workers).

I was presented with a number of other government blog posts and articles, including "8 Ways Your Business Can Get Ready for the 2013 Tourist Season."  Curious what the government would counsel on this topic, I clicked through.  Obviously, there is a paragraph break and carriage return sequester.  I cannot get the energy to read this kind of unformatted text.  The advice is actually OK, and ironically one of the eight is that one should consider getting into the business I am in.

This story has pretty much shifted from "I predict" to "I told you so" to "duh."  But everyone from Karl Rove to the Teamsters now recognize that Obamacare is on a path to destroying full-time employment in the retail service sector.  Via the WSJ, in an editorial by Rove:

These union heads charged that unless Mr. Obama enacts "an equitable fix," the Affordable Care Act "will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40-hour work week."...

Union leaders are correct that ObamaCare "creates an incentive to keep employees' work hours below 30 hours a week." After all, employers can avoid a $2,000-per-worker fine if they don't provide insurance as long as employees work fewer than 30 hours a week. Union leaders have realized—too late—that ObamaCare will affect the livelihood of millions of workers who wait tables, wash dishes, clean hotels, man registers, stock shelves and perform other tasks that can be limited to shifts of less than 30 hours a week. The White House take on this concern? Press Secretary Jay Carney said it "is belied by the facts."

But the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that, in 2010, the year ObamaCare passed, full-time employment grew at an average monthly rate of 114,000 while part-time employment dropped an average of 6,000 a month. So far this year, as ObamaCare is being implemented, full-time employment has grown at an average monthly rate of 21,700 while part-time employment has increased an average of 93,000 a month.

Frequent readers will know that I have been predicting for over a year that the economic story of 2013 would be the end of full time work in the retail service sector due to the PPACA, or Obamacare (example).   QED, from the most recent economic report:

In June, the household survey reported that part-time jobs soared by 360,000 to 28,059,000 – an all time record high. Full time jobs? Down 240,000.  And looking back at the entire year, so far in 2013, just 130K Full-Time Jobs have been added, offset by a whopping 557K Part-Time jobs.

It is unclear how the 1-year delay in the employer mandate implementation will affect this.  Probably not a lot -- based on the way Obamacare was being implemented, companies needed to be switching workers to part-time now (really, early this year) so that they would qualify as part-time for next year  (a company needed 6-12 months of records from this year to prove the employee was part-time).  In other words, most companies have already switched, and having done so, will not likely switch back just for one year.

Besides, as I have written before, it is actually cheaper and easier for many retail establishments to stitch together full coverage of their business hours from part-time workers.   Making jobs full-time is a hassle, and was done by most of us mainly for competition reasons, ie to be able to attract the best employees.  Other laws like California's absurd lunch-break mandate (which has caused me to make working through lunch a firing offense at our company) just add to the cost of offering full-time work.   If everyone is only offering part-time, and the labor market is weak with plenty of workers available, there is no reason to go back to offering full time employment.

Well, it certainly comes as happy news to this correspondent that the Administration announced this week it will delay health insurance mandates on businesses.  Our company has spent a ton of time since last November trying to minimize the expected cost of the mandates -- the initial cost estimates of which for our business came in at three times our annual net income.  Our preparation has been hampered by the fact that the IRS still has not finalized rules for how these mandates will be applied to a seasonal work force.  Like many retail service businesses, we have studied a number of models for converting most of our work force to part time, thus making the mandates irrelevant for us.

I know this last statement has earned me a fair share of crap in the comments section as a heartless capitalist swine, but the vitriol is just absurd.   Many of the folks criticizing me can't or don't want to imagine themselves running a business, so let's say you have an annual salary of $40,000.  Now, on top of all your other expenses, the government just mandated that you have to pay an extra $120,000 a year for something.  That is the situation my business is in.  Are you just going to sit there and allow your savings to become a smoking hole in the ground, or are you going to do something to avoid it?  Unlike the government, I cannot run a permanent deficit and I cannot create new revenues by fiat.  Congress allowed business owners a legal way to avoid the health insurance mandate, and I am going to grab that option rather than be bankrupted.  So are every other service business I know of, which is why I have predicted that full-time jobs are on the verge of disappearing in the retail service sector.

Anyway, it appears that the IRS and the Administration could not get their act together fast enough to make this happen.  Not a surprise, I suppose.  You and I have both been in committee meetings, and have seen groups devolve into arguments aver useless minutia.  This is not a monopoly of the government, it happens in the private sector as well.  But in the private sector, in good companies, a leader steps in and says "I have heard enough, it is going to be done X way, now go do it."  In government, the incentives work against leaders cutting through the Gordian knot in this way, so the muddle can carry on forever.

There are at least two more shoes that are going to drop, one bad, one good:

1. On the bad side, while companies like mine complain about the cost of the PPACA, they are going to freak when they see the paperwork.  My sense is that we are going to be required to know in great detail what kind of health insurance policy every one of our employees have, even if it was not obtained through our company, and will have to report that regularly to the government.  In addition, there are gong to be new reporting requirements to new agencies for wages and hours.  It is going to be a big mess, and my uneducated guess is that someone in the last week or so looked at that mess and decided to hold off announcing it.

   But readers can expect a Coyote freak out whenever it is announced, because it is going to be bad.  Wal-mart will be fine, it has the money to build systems to do that stuff, but companies like mine with 500 employees but only 2 staff people are going to get slammed.  There is a reason government agencies, even government schools, have more staff than line personnel -- they live and breath and think in terms of complex reporting and paperwork.  They love it because for many it is their job security.  Swimming every day in that water, it is no surprise they impose it without thought on the private sector.  This makes it hard for companies like ours that try to have 99% of our employees actually serving customers rather than pushing paper.

2. The individual mandate is toast for next year.  No way it happens.  If the Administration cannot get the corporate piece done on time, there is no way in hell it is going to get the exchanges up and running.  And even if they do, some prominent states with political influence with this President, like Illinois and California, likely will not get their exchanges done in time and will beg for a delay.

A number of people pointed out that the posted Obamacare rates in California are about twice what individuals are paying today at low-cost sites.  This was in response to a deceptive California press release that claimed they were much lower, but got this result only by comparing apples to oranges.

Rick Ungar has two responses, that seem to be the emerging talking points on the left:

1. He found some bad Internet reviews of the low-cost source that Conservatives and libertarians used as a better point of comparison for Obamacare rates
2. Some of the people had to pay up to 50% more than the published rates due to pre-existing conditions.

Avik Roy has a number of responses to Ungar (and Ezra Klein, who raises the same points as Ungar).  I would raise three points:

1. Neither he nor Klein address the issue of the fundamental deceptiveness of the California press release.  I don't think anyone can defend comparing individual rates to business group rates as anything but apples to oranges.  If the Obamacare story is so great, why was the deceptiveness necessary?
2. Everyone gets bad reviews on the Internet.  If one transaction out of a thousand goes bad, that one will write a negative review online and few of the satisfied will bother.  If sex were a product on Amazon.com, it would likely have some 1-star reviews.  That being said, it is amazing to me that government control is seen as the solution to customer service issues.  I could be wrong, but I would stack up the reviews of the worst health insurance company in America against the DMV and Post Office any day of the week.
3. The published rates online are for the healthiest class of people.  I have never once had someone sell me health insurance and not make this clear.  Calling them teaser rates is a misnomer, particularly since, as Avik Roy notes, about 75% of the people who apply get these rates.  One in four have to pay 50% more today, so we are going to make 4 in 4 pay 100% more under Obamacare, and that is better?!?

To that last point, I will quote something I said years and years ago, long before Obamacare was passed:

The looming federal government takeover of health care as proposed by most of the major presidential candidates will be far worse than anything we have seen yet from government programs.  Take this example:  In the 1960's, the federal government embarked on massive housing projects for the poor.  In the end, most of these projects became squalid failures.

With the government housing fiasco, only the poor had to live in these awful facilities.  The rest of us had to pay for them, but could continue to live in our own private homes.

Government health care will be different.  Under most of the plans being proposed, we all are going to be forced to participate.  Using the previous analogy, we all are going to have to give up our current homes and go live in government housing, or least the health care equivalent of these projects.

Postscript:  Citizen Kane has over 100 1-star reviews.  Some are about the packaging or this particular version but many are about the movie.   The novel Gone with the Wind has dozens.

Postscript #2:  A sample Yelp review of a local USPS office

This place is the pits.

There are no supplies in any of the racks unless you want to send something Express Mail. All of the Priority Mail stuff is constantly gone and they don't have any more. Not that there's anyone to stock the racks even if they did.

People used to leave reviews complaining that there were "only two" workers. Those days are long gone--there is now ONE counter person at all times. That means if you get behind someone that has questions, or can't understand a customs form, or wants to argue about mail being held, you are just stuck.

Why not use the automated machine, you ask? Because its printer has been broken for two weeks and you can't actually print the postage that you might buy. Not that there's a sign telling you this--you have to spend a few minutes going through the process only to be told at the end that the transaction can't be completed because the printer isn't working.

I know they are making cuts because they are out of money, but it's a vicious cycle they'll never get out of because they've now effectively made it impossible to patronize the postal service.

Stay far, far away.

I would not be at all surprised if California banned online reviews of health care exchanges.  One department of the CA state government threatened to revoke all my contracts unless I took down a blog post simply linking to negative Yelp reviews of one of the department's facilities.

Yes, more evidence that the PPACA is ending full-time work in the American retail service sector

Circle K Southeast joined a growing list of national companies shifting workers to part-time status this week, in order to avoid paying Obamacare’s mandatory benefits, CBS-WTOC reports.

The alternative is to pay a $2,000 fine per fulltime worker who is not covered, leading Circle K to become the latest in a long line of companies to slice employee hours to avoid increased costs.

Here was my article several weeks ago in Forbes, though I have been predicting this since last year (when my own company started planning for the same change).