Another Broken Promise about the President’s Health Care Law

Click here to watch the speech.

President Obama has always promised Americans that under his health care law, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”

Employers across the country have made it clear that the new law is too expensive and threatens their ability to provide good coverage to their employees.  According to a recent report from McKinsey and Company, “at least 30% of employers are likely to stop offering health insurance once provisions of the U.S. health care reform law kick in, in 2014.”
Today, Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) discussed the details of this report and how it will affect Americans on the floor of the U.S. Senate.  Excerpts of his remarks are below:

“So what this report says is that it is a shift away from employer-provided health insurance will be vastly greater than expected and will make sense for many companies and lower-income workers alike.

“When you work your way through the report, what you see is that more and more private companies that today provide health insurance for their employees will be much less likely to be willing to provide that insurance in the future.

“But why? Because it’s going to be a lot more expensive to provide the insurance.  The mandates, the quality and the high level of expense involved with providing that insurance, that’s going to be a significant burden to those companies.

“This report says that they have—they did a survey of 1,300 employers across the country, different industries, different geographies, different employer sizes, and the results really ought to be a huge wake-up call for all workers and all families across the country. 

“Because what this group has seen from this study is that overall 30% of all employers will either definitely or probably stop offering employer-sponsored health coverage in the years after 2014.

“Among employers with a high awareness of how the program actually works for health care reform, who have actually studied what the law says, well, in that group, those who are most well informed, they are saying more than 50% and upwards to 60% will pursue other options, likely to stop offering their employees health coverage.

“Well, at least 30% of the employers would gain economically from dropping coverage even if they completely compensated the employees for the change of losing their insurance.  This is very alarming for our country.”

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