Obamacare Will Leave Many Uninsured Repost from (Insider Report from Newsmax.com)

Something to think about.  Once again our government acts before they think about the consequences.  This is what happens if you pass a law without reading it first.  This is why JE Health Care Solutions was formed because we saw this coming.

A little-known provision of President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will likely have several unforeseen — and unpleasant — consequences, according to a troubling new report.

The provision would raise the cost of healthcare insurance for many low- or middle-income families and even make it completely unaffordable for them.

Under Obamacare, companies with more than 49 employees must offer “affordable” health insurance to full-time workers or pay a penalty of up to $3,000 per employee. But affordable coverage can be for the employee only, not family members.

The Act requires employees to accept this insurance. And if a family member has this coverage, the rest of the family will not be eligible for a federal subsidy of the premium it must pay for a policy, according to Diana Furchtgott-Roth, contributing editor of RealClearMarkets.

She points to a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper from researchers at Cornell University and Indiana University showing that in 2014, when Obamacare will take full effect, 13 million low-income Americans may be unable to get subsidized health insurance through new state healthcare exchanges because one family member has employee-provided coverage.

And those Americans who can therefore not afford coverage would remain uninsured and receive their care from emergency rooms and community centers, as they often do today.

The provision, then, “has a number of consequences, none of them foreseen by the architects of the Act,” Furchtgott-Roth writes.

Employees with dependents will prefer to work for companies that do not provide health insurance so that they can qualify for coverage through the healthcare exchange. For a four-person family at 133 percent of the poverty line earning $28,000 a year, premiums will be capped at 2 percent of income.

That same family would have to pay 43 percent of its income for coverage without government subsidies, which makes coverage clearly unaffordable.

One more consequence: The provision would discourage marriage. If one partner receives affordable healthcare insurance from an employer, the spouse would not be eligible for subsidized coverage. The couple could therefore remain unwed to avoid that problem.

“Congress needs to address this problem,” the author concludes. “Even if the Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of the individual mandate, the healthcare law will remain costly, inefficient, and in need of reform.”